The Disappointment Artist (9 page)

The moment I’m describing would come to a precipitous end. Karl and I were in intermediate school in Brooklyn together until the summer of 1977. Though our friendship was strained toward the end of that time, both by Karl’s physical maturation and by the increasing distance between his rebellious nonconformity with the adult world and my parent-identifying nonconformity with the teenage world, we certainly continued to sporadically buy and evaluate Marvel comics together until the end of eighth grade.

It was high school which severed our connection, for what would become years. I went off to Music and Art, in Manhattan, a place much populated by dreamy nerds like myself, and perfectly formulated to indulge my yearning to skip past teenagerhood straight to an adult life: many of my best friends in high school were my teachers. Karl was destined for Stuyvesant High, where he drifted into truancy. Then he’d land at one of our local public high schools, John Jay, where he’d be forced to continue battling a world of bullying I’d left behind.

Luke, meanwhile, was still safe in the preserve of private school, where his negotiation with the call of teenagerhood, and beyond, might be subject to the push and pull of peer pressure, but better isolated from the starkness of the bankrupt city around us. Our friendship, mine and Luke’s, was restored somewhat during those high-school years, though I suspect I sometimes eluded him. My public-school experiences had made me worldly in ways that Luke’s stubborn cognition, and the advantage of his older brother’s influence, couldn’t quite match. As for physical maturation, I now shot ahead, to catch up with Karl (though he wasn’t around for me to make the comparison), while Luke still lagged slightly. Now, I think, I was to Luke as Karl had been to me; I was his Karl. No rebel, I had nonetheless begun to smoke pot, which Luke still distrusted. No whiz with girls, I was at least comfortable with my puppyish interest, while Luke remained, for the time being, gnarled up regarding that subject.

Between me and Luke, Jack Kirby was still a tacit God, but only on the strength of his canonical sixties work. Luke and I, righteous in our reverence for origins, didn’t between us acknowledge Kirby’s continued existence. It would have been unseemly, like dwelling on the fact that Chuck Berry, rock ’n’ roll’s progenitor, had had a seventies novelty hit called “My Ding-a-Ling.”

Whether Karl continued to buy comics I couldn’t know. And what of the place where our argument about Kirby had been left, in the end? That was lost, along with much else, in the denial surrounding the state of our friendship, which had attenuated to an occasional “hello” on the streets of the neighborhood.

And there it would spiral forever, oblivious to contempt:

The last year of high school, before college changed everything, Luke and I still drifted together occasionally. Now it was he and I who drew comics—not innocently wishful superheroes, but what we imagined were stark satires, modeled on the work of R. Crumb and other heroes of the “underground.” Luke had by then begun dating girls too, and one of our last collaborative productions was a Kirby parody called “Girlfriends from the Earth’s Core.” A two-page strip, it reworked the material of a failed double date of a month before, when Luke and I had taken two girls, soon to be our first bitter exes, to a fleabag movie theater at the Fulton Mall. Luke “penciled” the pages, and I was the “inker”—I specialized in Kirbyesque polka dots of energy, which we showed rising from the volcanic bodies of the two primordial girlfriends.

I know them both, Luke and Karl. Luke and his wife live in a New England town. The oldest of their children is named Harpo, which strikes me now as more of the reverence for our parents’ culture that always drew us together. Luke works making animated films (as Kirby once attempted to, when his comics career was demoralized by the failed return to Marvel). His conversation still features Fantastic Four–derived phrases like “Aunt Petunia” and “It’s Clobberin’ Time.” Kirby is in Luke’s DNA; I see it flashing in his eyes. I know for him it is more real than it ever was for me, as real as an older brother who’d slipped out of the house and left Kirby as his placeholder.

Me, I’m a fake, my Kirby-love cobbled from Luke’s certainty, Karl’s resistance, and Stan Lee’s cheerleading. My version of an older brother was Karl, and Karl wasn’t reverent about Kirby. Karl was only curious— Kirby was merely on the menu of the possible, alongside Starlin and Gerber, alongside Ghost Rider and Warlock, alongside forgetting about comics and getting into girls or music or drugs instead. Karl never had that kind of crush on his own or other kids’ parents—a crush on the books on their shelves, on the records in their collections.

Karl, though, still lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood to which I’ve returned, and which he never left. He lives down the street, and we’re both only a few blocks from the once-treacherous precinct of our shared school. Last week I had him over, and we dug out a box of Marvel comic books. These were the same copies we’d cherished together in 1976 and 1977—for, in an act surely loaded with unexamined rage, I’d purchased Karl’s comic collection from him late in our high-school years, when his interest drifted, when our friendship was at its lowest ebb.

Karl isn’t urgent about contemplating our old comics, but he’s willing. This day, while we were browsing the Kirbys of the Return era, he corrected my memory in a few specifics. Most crucially, he raised the possibility that the argument about Kirby, which had seemed to me loaded with the direst intimations of the choices we were about to make, the failures of good faith with our childhood selves we were about to suffer, had mostly been conducted in my own head. It was when I put a stack of Kirby’s
2001
’s in his hands.

“I really got into some of these issues,” he said. I could see his features animate with recollection as he browsed Kirby’s panels, something impossible to fake even if you had a reason to do so. “I remember this comic book really blew my mind.”

“I thought you never liked Kirby,” I said feebly, still stuck on my thesis.

“No, I remember when he first came back I was a little slow to get it,” Karl told me, after I’d explained what I thought I remembered. “But you had me convinced pretty quickly. I remember thinking these were really trippy. I’d like to read them
again
, actually.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I just never liked the way he drew knees.”

You Don’t Know Dick

Not like I do, anyway. Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) is the only prolific author whose whole life’s work I can fairly claim to have read through
twice
, picayune exceptions notwithstanding—the fact that my eyes may have glazed over on a second pass at some of the lesser posthumous novels, or at the massive volumes of letters, is surely compensated by the fact that I’ve reread
Ubik
,
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
,
Martian
Time-Slip
,
A Scanner Darkly
, and a couple of other favorites three, four, even five times since my discovery of Dick, long ago, at age fifteen. He was my “favorite writer” ten years before the start of the publishing boom (Vintage Books is in the process of reissuing thirty-six of his books, good, bad, and lousy), and as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel. I find I need to spill this now, not (I hope) merely to establish provenance but to get on paper, before it is too late to recall, some glimpse of what the special condition known as “Dickheadedness” consisted of in the years after his death and before his current and ongoing canonization. As well, I need to warn you: Philip K. Dick’s shelf is growing ever-more strange and misleading as it makes contact with the outer reaches of his vast and woolly oeuvre. So I offer myself as a native guide.

The world doesn’t need another introduction to or apologia for Philip K. Dick. There’ve been plenty. I’ve committed a few myself already. Between his hipster canonization, the frequency of academic and newspaper pundit citation, and the endless flow of Hollywood adaptations of his novels and stories, nobody much needs persuasion that Dick is
some
kind of important figure. Anyone who’s taken the hint and cracked one of the books also knows he’s many kinds of problematic—foremost in the disastrous unevenness of his prose, even within the space of a given page. He’s that species of great writer, the uneven-prose species: Dickens, Dreiser, and Highsmith are others. Russians will tell you Dostoyevsky is too, and that we don’t know this because translators have been covering his ass. Dick’s ass, though, is uncoverable. His sentences routinely fall down and cry “ouch.” In the words of Bob Dylan, another prolific and variable artist whose oeuvre offers pitfalls for newcomers, “I’m in love with the ugliest girl in the world!”

I’d read maybe a dozen of Dick’s novels before I encountered the word
oeuvre
—maybe forty before I dared use it in a sentence. Dick visited France (“I had the interesting experience of being famous”) in 1974 and there possibly heard the word applied to his work. By that time his caustic and generous irony had mostly salved his raw sense of rejection by the literary establishment (“The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, who I met at a literary party in San Francisco”) and he might have enjoyed the use of the word, but likely wouldn’t have identified much. I’d like to propose an alternative usage,
irv
. We’ll speak of Dick’s irv.

Uncertain of the value of their holdings, Vintage has chosen to publish in bouquets. For instance, in May 2002,
Dr. Bloodmoney
,
Clans of the
Alphane Moon
,
Time Out of Joint
, and
The Simulacra,
which is not a bad batch, not bad at all. In particular,
Dr. Bloodmoney
is one of Dick’s most sympathetic and humane books of the early sixties (with
The Man in the
High Castle
and
Martian Time-Slip
), as well as one of the most capably (maybe I should say
least-badly
) written.
Time Out of Joint
is a dark-horse favorite, set in a Cheeveresque fifties suburb, and incorporating the flavor of Dick’s realist novels (unpublished during his lifetime) into a pataphysical–
Twilight Zone
framework, only marred by a piss-poor ending.
Clans
is a cruel and antic psychiatric farce, written as if cribbed from the DSMR-IV;
Simulacra
a murkily overpopulated Balzacian social panorama.
Bloodmoney
and
Time
are crucial books.
Clans
and
Simulacra
, if not exactly ideal entry points into the irv, don’t shame it.

Certainly none of this quartet risks turning off curious readers as do the previously republished
Game-Players of Titan
,
We Can Build You
, or the god-awful
World Jones Made
. Among the howlingly bad ones I’ll single out
Vulcan’s Hammer
for special shaming. When Dick potboiled the results were usually characteristically strange, but not so
Vulcan’s
Hammer
. Throw any fifteen out-of-print SF novels from 1954 into a blender—maybe you’d get
Vulcan’s Hammer
, maybe something better.

When I was fifteen and sixteen I scoured Brooklyn’s used bookstores and thrift shops for the hardest-to-find Dick titles, trying to complete a shelf of the thirty-seven-odd published works. This was 1979 and 1980, before Dick published his last three novels and died, and before the posthumous publication of a dozen or so manuscripts. Locating
Vulcan’s
Hammer
was a notable triumph. I’ll always remember dowsing it out of a crate of moldering paperbacks that had been pushed beneath a shelf, dusting its glorious, hideous cover (Dick’s biographer Lawrence Sutin describes it as occupying “deserved purgatory as half of a 1960 Ace Double”) and more or less pinching myself in disbelief:
Vulcan’s fucking
Hammer!
I’d found it! Of course, then I had to go and read the damn thing. The irony is that out-of-printness served the purposes of exploring the irv nicely: the easiest books to find, and therefore the first I’d happened to read, were mostly Dick’s masterpieces (
Castle
,
Ubik
,
Stigmata
,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
). This was because the better books had received comparatively many reprintings, whereas the dreck was always the rarest essence. The problem nowadays is that Vintage’s uniformly prestigious shelf of clean, authoritative editions disguises these natural hierarchies absolutely.

Would Dick have liked seeing
Vulcan’s Hammer
rescued, and seated like a homunculus among the angels? Impossible to know. Late in life Dick saw odd virtues in his rottenest early works, partly because he tended to see all his previous novels and stories as precognitive glimpses of a religious revelation which overtook him in 1974—everything in his own history seemed to prefigure his conversion experience. Dick was a strange and difficult man, if famously enchanting to meet, and as his posthumous career expanded through the eighties—as the work became enshrined in academic and literary culture—it was hard not to speculate how completely the man’s continued earthly existence might have screwed it up.

Of course, it’s easy to oversimplify, and imagine that Dick’s career splits cleanly into the disreputable past and the reputable present. In fact, the possibility that Dick was of dire and awesome literary significance haunts his reputation, such as it was, in the old SF ghetto. The back cover of the $1.50 1976 Ace Books reprint of Simulacra boasts: “The 21
^st
Century. It was a shifting, shadowy and extraordinary world . . . and very dangerous . . .” But it also bears a blurb which reads: “If there is such a thing as ‘black science fiction’, Philip K. Dick is its Pirandello, its Becket and its Pinter . . .” That’s Becket [
sic
].

The opposite applies: understanding of Dick’s stature is still muddled by the appeal to mysticism his late work provides. Curious readers attracted by the advocacy of scholars and fellow writers may still be put off by an air of conspiracy theory, persecution ecstasy, and religious charlatanism in Dick’s writing, or the woolly-eyed gullibility of some of his admirers. There surrounds Dick some stink of cultishness no number of Frederic Jameson citations can rub off.

If there ever was a cult, in 1984 I managed to sign up as its lieutenant. All through my high-school years I’d planned to visit California and plant myself at the feet of my hero, but before I managed it, he died. So I clipped obituaries and went to college instead. When one of the clippings announced the formation of a Philip K. Dick Society, dedicated to propagating his works and furthering his posthumous career, my flame of pilgrimage was relit. I dropped out and hitchhiked west, and in Berkeley I looked up Paul Williams—not the short blond songwriter, but the
Crawdaddy
-founding rock critic who’d written about Dick for
Rolling
Stone
and become the estate’s literary executor—he was wearing a Meat Puppets T-shirt the day I found him. Paul made immediate good use of me, mostly for licking stamps. I hosted the PKD Society’s envelopestuffing parties in my Berkeley apartment, two blocks from the tiny, wood-frame house where Dick had lived during the writing of his first ten or so novels. And, a great thrill, I later sold the Dick estate a few dozen of the hundreds of spare copies of paperbacks I’d assembled—my book hunting had become obsessive, and I by then owned three, four, and even five copies of most of the dozens of out-of-print titles. The estate didn’t. In order to “further his posthumous career,” Paul needed copies of the rarest books to send to prospective publishers like Vintage.
Vulcan’s
Hammer
, in other words, is sort of my fault.

In my role as Paul’s sidekick, I got a chance to sort through acres of letters, outlines for novels never written, and personal ephemera, like Dick’s lease for an apartment in Fullerton (“two neutered cats okay”), which for some reason I photocopied and have kept to this day. I once handled Dick’s personal copy of the
I Ching
(any reader of
The Man in
the High Castle
knows the talismanic importance of that text), its hard covers softened and swollen from use, like Ahab’s Bible retrieved from the Pequod. The book was full of paper slips in Dick’s handwriting, desperate inquiries into everyday subjects on which Dick had turned to the oracle for consultation:
Will (editor X) accept the new draft of Policeman?
Should I lend Y money for Seconal? Will Z sleep with me?
I also once owned a single gold earring made by Dick’s jeweler wife, another
Man in the
High Castle
–related fetish. The earring was stolen by an ex-girlfriend who didn’t understand its importance—who found my obsession with Dick embarrassing.

When Vintage completes the cycle, it will have made available all of the fifties and sixties SF novels—the ten or fifteen excellent books which originally made Dick’s underground reputation and the twenty-some weaker titles which always kept that reputation hobbled. In the mid-eighties, before the Vintage reissues, the only one of those books which was at all easy to find was the Del Rey Books
Blade Runner
tied-in reprint of
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
But for the collectors and cognoscenti (all six hundred of us) who were tuned into Paul’s PKD Society newsletters, the market was flooded with outré material just reaching first light in expensive small-press hardcovers—
Ubik: The
Screenplay
,
The Dark-Haired Girl
(essays),
Nick and the Glimmung
(a children’s book), five volumes of
Selected Letters
, and enough unpublished realist novels from his thwarted “mainstream” efforts of the fifties to make up another writer’s whole career:
Mary and the Giant
,
The
Broken Bubble
,
Gather Yourselves Together
,
In Milton Lumky Territory
,
The
Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
,
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
, and
Puttering About in a Small Land
. These were works never published during Dick’s lifetime, all made easily available—for a brief moment, anyway. Now the situation is exactly reversed: those titles have all slipped back into the mists, and that list I’ve just typed out might serve to fuel another fifteen-year-old’s obsessive quest. In a sense, the “lost” and the “found” Dick have swapped places, twice.

It’s hard to make a case for the realist novels. The implicit assertion of the Dick credibility-boom goes something like this:
There’s this writer
who works with the pop-culture iconography of science fiction but with such
mad originality and verve—and emotional intensity—that he created his
own personal genre, surrealistic and freewheeling, with enormous capacities
for humor, despair, and for making a sophisticated critique of capitalist culture (despite, ahem, infelicities in the prose). He deserves your serious attention as much as any realist writer.
This was a bunch to swallow in the first place. It’s asking a huge latitude of the guardians of our literary culture to then say:
Oh yeah, that same guy, the visionary pop-culture surrealist?
Well, he also wrote these eight puzzling and unforgettable novels in a dour,
lower-middle-class realist mode—something like Richard Yates meets
Charles Willeford. These too, deserve a look (despite, ahem, infelicities in the
prose).
That double reverse may simply be too much.

Nevertheless, even the very worst of those realist novels would better reward your time than
Vulcan’s Hammer
. Not to be a bully.

I can’t keep from comparisons to other artists whose sprawling fecundity makes any such essay as this the equivalent of providing the reader an umbrella before ushering him out the door into a hurricane. So—just to focus again for a moment, on that bouquet of titles I mentioned before—if Dick is Hitchcock, then
Dr. Bloodmoney
is his
The
Trouble with Harry
(perverse pastoral). If he’s Altman,
Simulacra
is
A
Wedding
(underrated but overcomplicated), and
The Clans of the
Alphane Moon
is
Beyond Therapy
(disturbed). If he’s Graham Greene,
Time Out of Joint
is
Brighton Rock
, but if he’s Dylan it’s
Another Side
. If he’s Picasso—oh, never mind.