He went at it eighteen to twenty hours a day by this schedule: Wake up at 10:00 A.M., write all day, down some quick "swill" at 5:00 P.M., and then back at it till 5:00 to 6:00 A. M. Stories took one or two days, novels ten days to two weeks. His concentration was intense-no noise allowed but for his own music. Phil would joke that he had to write fast, as his notes were so lousy he'd otherwise forget his plot. But Phil was great at making detailed notes he never followed. Fast was essential: The book took hold of him as it was written, flowing from his fingers. Phil avoided playing the piano, as he feared it might decrease his typing speed. Not that Phil would refuse to revise: under the guidance of Ballantine editor Judy-Lynn Del Rey, he undertook painstaking revisions to Scanner in 1975. He would bemoan the fact that his pulp past had trained him to churn it out to stay alive. But even when Phil could afford to take his time, that first draft had to come in a flash.
It didn't take long for problems to arise. When Phil wasn't writing, his intense demands made Doris feel that no privacy was left to her. Writing or not, Phil writhed when Doris spent time away from him with other friends-male or female. And there was the nasty image of "cohabitation." Phil canceled, in August, a planned visit by Isa (now nine years old) on the grounds that she shouldn't be exposed to such an arrangement. Then there were money hassles. Phil generously paid for their food and rent and gave Doris his old Dodge. But he was also prone to pointing out just how generous he was, making himself seem victimized (to his friends) and manipulative (to Doris). Doris recalls offering several times to pay half the expenses; Phil refused her money. In August, Doris decided to return to college in the fall, a necessity for her goal of Episcopal priesthood. Phil offered to pay two thousand dollars in tuition, then backed out at the last moment on grounds of financial necessity. Doris barely managed to make alternate arrangements-and she was furious.
In September, the apartment next door opened up, and Doris took it. She saw it as a move that would preserve the good times while giving her needed privacy. To Phil, it was a devastating confirmation that his "rescuer" role would backfire forever. In June he'd walked out on a marriage, and here it was September and he was living alone again. Gak. In late September Phil asked Powers to drive him to his analyst's office. The reason: Phil had recently gone the wrong way against traffic, turning into a gas station at the last minute to avoid a suicidal crash; now he didn't quite trust himself to drive. Thankfully, as his depression persisted, Phil checked into the mental ward of St. Joseph's Hospital in Orange on October 19. Powers's journal records: "Doris drove him to the hospital and she took delight in him telling everyone, `This is Doris-she drove me here.' He told her he loved her so much it made him crazy."
Two days after his admittance, Powers paid Phil a visit:
He was entirely cheerful (unlike the aftermath of the [February] suicide attempt), and he told me about a girl he'd met in the hospital, a Dylan fan and ex-doper; he had vague plans to look her up after he checked out. He told me he'd "flipped out" in Trader Joe's on Tuesday while buying kitty litter, but I think to some extent Phil used to buy therapy just to cheer himself up.
One of the doctors there had told Phil that he (Phil, not the doctor) picked remarkably unsuitable girls to fall in love with. Phil told me this and shrugged. "It's true, Powers," he admitted. "The way I get girls is to put two rocks in a sack and go out in the woods with a flashlight, then I bring the rocks together and close up the mouth of the sack after something's run into it."
The jest does no justice to Doris. Phil's fierce attachment to her endured even after he left the hospital and they made the adjustment to neighborly relations. And he grieved when, in December, Doris lost her remission. Ultimately, she would regain full health. But during a difficult first year of recovery, Phil bought Doris a bed, looked after her fondly, and endured the painful vomiting noises that came through their adjoining wall (the same is endured, to a humanizing end, by Herb Asher in The Divine Invasion). Phil also gave roughly $2,400 to fund Doris's social work job at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah. He'd help Doris and the poor at the same time: perfect. Except that the money wound up funding a higher-up bureaucratic committee. The diversion from immediate needs did not please Phil, who had long been skeptical of the Church as an institution. But his feeling for Episcopal teachings had run deep since the Palmer Eldritch days. And he followed doctrinal disputes sufficiently to take a position against female priests, because during the mass the priest becomes Christ-a man.
In late 1976, editor Hurst asked for minor revisions in the Valisystem A manuscript (which would ultimately be published, in the form in which Phil submitted it to Hurst, as Radio Free Albemuth in 1985). Unbeknown to Hurst, this set Phil to thinking of a completely new novel (as opposed to mere revisions) that would grapple with 2-3-74 more completely. After all, the Exegesis was yielding ever more startling ideas. In December 1976 came the "Zebra Principle." Back in the sixties, Phil had read The Mask of Medusa, a study of insect mimicry which suggested that humans could be as deceived by a hypothetical "high-order mimicry" as birds are by insect mimicry (or lions by zebras' stripes). Phil's Zebra Principle asks: What if the "high-order mimicry" were that of a higher, or even divine, intelligence? To Hurst, Phil explained:
Zebra, if it can be said to resemble the contents of any religion, resembles the Hindu concept of Brahman:
Creating a worthy new novel seemed to necessitate that Phil reread and analyze all of his past SF to determine what, in light of 2-3-74, he had already accomplished. (Crap Artist alone among the mainstream works receives attention in the Exegesis.) Here's one stab at a summation, from a 1977 entry:
So one dozen novels & too many stories to count narrate a message of one world obscuring or replacing another (real) one, spurious memories, & hallucinated (irreal) worlds. The message reads "Don't believe what you see; it's an enthralling-& destructive, evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear time axis. & your memories are faked to jibe with the fake world (inner & outer congruency).["]
In another 1977 entry, Phil underscored that kindness is the sole means we possess to ascertain the truth of this world:
If this [the influence of occluding satanic powers] be so, then my writing has been of value, beyond the obvious contribution of indicting the universe as a forgery (& our memories also) & present the most accurate and stringentrigorous-revised criteria to pull the truly real as set out of ground (Love, making exceptions, humor, determination, etc. The little virtues).
Exegesis ferment was one reason Phil could make a successful adjustment to living alone. Another was the peaceful and friendly relations he had established with Tessa, who came with Christopher for a visit two or three times a week, even as the divorce was finalized in February 1977. Though legal custody of Christopher had been given to Tessa, Phil could continue to be with his son.
Then too, Phil had the good fortune to live within walking distance of Powers, whose good humor, calm outlook, and broad reading made him an ideal confidant. Powers was hosting Thursday-night gatherings that solidified into a tradition. Informality was the rule, and the core group, aside from Phil, consisted of budding authors Powers, K. W. Jeter, and James Blaylock, who have since become three of the most prominent SF writers of their generation. Also often present were Steve Malk, who worked in a bookstore and supplied Phil with the latest in philosophy and religion; Roy Squires, a bibliophile and small-press publisher; and brothers Chris and Greg Arena, whose street smarts fascinated Phil. Thursday nights had a decided men's club feel: Women were excluded (Serena Powers became the exception after her marriage to Tim in 1980). Guidelines were established as necessity dictated: no firearms, no coming or going through the window of the second-floor apartment. As Powers was working at a tobacconist's, there were pipes and aromatic blends to sample, while others brought fine malt Scotches.
But Phil usually kept to snuff and Orange Crush. He was one of the guys and writing was what he did for a living. Says Power
s, in interview: "I think Phil's very emotional side that his girlfriends saw was not one he dragged out among his male friends. He looked at his sessions with his friends as a kind of relief from that." Phil's typical topics were health worries, car worries, the Bible and anything metaphysical, music, politics, and his big crushes on Victoria Principal, Kay Lenz, and, most of all, Linda Ronstadt. Blaylock recalls:
It wasn't his writing that made me admire him so much, it was his sheer depth of goodness. He had this idea that a person you didn't know would help you for no reason at all-and Phil was that person. And he was very funny. The laughter seldom stopped.
He would always be eager to discuss whatever idea in the Exegesis he was working on at the moment-he was fascinated with Fibonacci [the discoverer of the golden rectangle ratio] and the Gnostics. We would sit there gaping while Phil spun out big extravagant relationships between these seemingly random things in such a convincing way. By the end of the evening ... I won't swear I believed it, but I was scared shitless sometimes, or in awe other times.
K. W. Jeter, the third young writer of the triumvirate, was equally fascinated by Phil's speculations but always more skeptical than Blaylock or Powers. Phil and Jeter had first met in 1972 after Professor McNelly showed Phil the manuscript of a novel Jeter, then a student, had written. (The novel, Dr. Adder, was finally published in 1984, with an "Afterword" by Phil.) But Phil had been suspicious that Jeter might be a government agent and so resolved to break off personal contact. But they resumed their friendship in late 1976, after a three-year hiatus, and now Jeter played the gadfly role to perfection. A former antiwar activist in the Socialist Workers Party, Jeter was little drawn to the religious theories Phil fashioned from his 2-3-74 experiences. But Jeter knew how to stoke the theoretical fires, adding complexities on top of Phil's own. He called attention to the similarities between Phil's novels and those of William Burroughs-such as an invading alien virus occluding human faculties (for Burroughs, the virus is language). Deter and Phil even performed their own Burroughs-influenced "cut-up" writing experiment, scrambling texts from Roderick Thorp's The Detective, Melville's Moby Dick, and the New Testament Book of Acts.
Jeter held down a graveyard-shift watchman job at the Orange County Juvenile Hall, which allowed time for late-night phone calls from Phil, who would interrupt his Exegesis stints to test out the latest possibilities on his friend. To interviewer Andy Watson, Jeter emphasizes that, for all his theoretical enthusiasms, Phil retained a skeptical outlook: "[I]n his other hand, out of sight, is always kept what we would call [...] the minimum hypothesis. Which is that it [2-3-74] was nothing." In interview with the author, Jeter suggests that, even in his most fervent Exegesis passages, "Phil is getting inside a belief and walking around it and testing it out by the measure of absolute truth." Jeter also allows that, as Phil knew of Jeter's skepticism and would sometimes adapt to his listener's expectations, Phil's own skepticism may have played a larger role in their talks.
Friends to confide in and his work to take him through the night, an established career and a safe place to live-when last had Phil known such calm?
But there was something missing, and Phil knew what it was. "In February of 1977 I began to hallucinate (if that is the right word) during nocturnal states, hypnogogic, sleep, hypnopompic, etc., the presence of a woman, very close to me; in my arms, in fact, as close as could be. Once begun this sensation persisted."
The woman Phil was destined to meet was Joan Simpson, then thirty-two, a psychiatric social worker at Sonoma State Hospital in the Valley of the Moon. Through her book dealer friend Ray Torrence, Joan had discovered Phil's work and became a collector of the lovely, lurid Ace Doubles of the fifties. Personally and financially independent, Joan was sharp, funny, and sensual, with curly brown hair and large brown eyes. When Torrence once asked Joan to name the two people she most wanted to meet, Phil edged out rock promoter Bill Graham for first place. Unbeknown to Joan, Torrence wrote a letter of introduction on her behalf to Phil, who phoned to invite her to visit. Joan recalls her April 1977 arrival:
It's a twelve-hour drive. I got down there at nighttime and phoned-Phil said, "Come on over." You had to buzz the gate to get in. He lived upstairsand there around a corner of the staircase a head was poking out. Turns out it was Phil. He saw me, went, "Oh! Oh!" and ran away. Actually, he said, "Are you Joan Simpson?" I said, "Yes, are you Philip K. Dick?" and that's when he went, "Oh! Oh!" I went up after him, and when I got to his apartment he was on the phone to Jeter, saying, "She's a fox, she's a fox . .
I was so relieved. He certainly was not the severe or scary person I thought he might be. Crazy maybe, but also boyish and nonthreatening. That sort of describes many things about Phil-he was naturally very childlike and naive. That, coupled with a lot of craziness, physical and emotional trouble, and so much mental energy and genius, made him the most unusual person I'd ever met.
We talked a long time. He told me how relieved he was my knuckles weren't dragging along the ground. Wanted to know if I was married, had a boyfriend. At the same time, very gentlemanly, no hanky-panky. He was just awful at hustling-it really wasn't his style. He told me, "Here is your room, you can stay here, lock the door if you like." Yeah, I did stay there. For a week. That was the beginning of our relationship.
That very first night Phil talked about Zebra and things like that-he was a living actuality of his novels. It was amazing. I told him that when I first began reading his stuff I thought it wasn't fiction in the normal sense of the word. I still think that. There wasn't this person who had this inspirational idea for a story or novel and wrote it down. It was a person's experience.
During Joan's visit, Chez Phil was in typical disarray. The cats were depositing flea eggs over the two glass-topped coffee tables, and there was snuff everywhere-numberless little tins of Dean Swift, shipped in by the case each month from San Francisco, as well as brown coatings of snuff dust. Piles of books and records and Exegesis pages. Enough pill bottles to stock a pharmacy. Phil was taking several prescribed medications dailymuscle relaxers, blood-pressure controls, antidepressants. The food on hand was mainly frozen dinners and pot pies.
Their time together went wonderfully. Life was a P. M. shift, with lots of sleeping in late. Activity commenced in mid- to late afternoon. The daily pile of mail to contend with. Friends dropping by. And Phil wrote every day-letters and the Exegesis. Says Joan: " I wanted to be around him to learn from him. I never loved him in that young lover heartthrobbing way. I loved him like you would a great master. After three weeks I came back up to Sonoma, and he came with me-which was amazing!"
Indeed. Phil's willingness, on the spur of the moment, to leave behind his Orange County home (on which he kept up the rent) and return to the Bay Area-the scene of the break-in and so many other past sorrows and dangers-is the greatest possible testimony to the joy he took in the new relationship. Phil and Joan were extremely close, but they never became lovers in the strict sense. Phil, at this time, was not capable of sex; the reasons are unclear (one possible theory is that loss of interest in sex is a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy), and by the early eighties Phil was sexually active again. With Joan, it was hugs and warmth that mattered.
Together, in May, they rented a house on 550 Chase Street in Sonoma and established a circle of friends that included Ray Torrence and fellow book dealer Nit Sprague, Paul Williams, SF writer Richard Lupoff, and psychologists David and Joan May. Lupoff conducted an interview with Phil over Berkeley's KPFA FM; they also talked casually at the Chase Street house. One exchange recalled by Lupoff shows the humorous protective coloring Phil employed to ward off fruitless debates:
Phil and I were sitting on the floor and he was wearing a crucifix-a big hand-carved wooden one. And I asked him why he was wearing it and how seriously did he take it? He said, "Listen, I live in Santa Ana and Joan lives in Sonoma. That means I spend a lot of time on 1-5 in my car. And on occasion I get stopped by the highway patrol and they will come over to my car an
d lean in my window and say, 'Sir, do you realize you were exceeding the speed limit?' And I'll fondle my crucifix and say, 'Why, no, Officer, I didn't know that.' " Phil said he never got a ticket.
To begin with, Phil did not in fact commute regularly on 1-5. Once he moved up to Sonoma with Joan he stayed put there. More to the point, friends such as David May recall numerous spiritual talks with Phil. Writes May: " I am certain that his prime directives were to await faithfully the Grace he sought, and on a day to day basis, to do good deeds-acts of loving kindness toward his fellow humans."
However high his aspirations, Phil could not evade his bouts of severe depression. Joan recalls:
Whoever was with him at this time would have to be a full-time ... I was going to say nursemaid-but companion, housekeeper. And not expect the same from him. A lot of it was housekeeping, nursing care-Phil would really go into states of collapse where he would be nonfunctional. He'd be so depressed or physically ill that he'd have to take to bed, and God knows when he'd come out again.
Phil suffered from palpitations, sweats, high blood pressure, sometimes quite elusive things. He has been accused of malingering by everyone in the book. But psychological states of unease can manifest physical symptomsheadaches, ulcers; I think everyone agrees with that. Phil's depressions took on a multitude of forms.
I had to give him lots of TLC [tender loving care] and let him be. You couldn't, like, say, "Come on, get out of bed, you'll feel better." He didn't respond well to reality therapy. It was more like "I will take care of you, you don't have to do anything, don't worry."
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 36