The Search for Philip K. Dick (15 page)

In
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, Richard and Emily Hnatt make a lot of money selling her ceramic pots and decide to take the expensive Evolution Therapy (or E Therapy) from famous Dr. Denkmal in Germany. Richard evolves, his thinking becomes clearer, more subtle and creative, but Emily is one of the rare failures: she
devolves
, her features coarsen, she becomes rather simple, loses her creativity, and begins doing pot designs that she has already done before.

When I finally stopped taking those dreadful pills, I was very angry. I hadn’t been doing anything for months and I was rested and strong. But I shoved the anger down where I wouldn’t have to deal with it or even know about it. I wanted to put my life and my family back together, to restore it to a happy, normal condition. But in my brain, my whole past was a series of blurs: my grade-school friends; my favorite brother; the junior-high fudge club; my little dog, Spot. They all were like ruined frescoes in my mind, the colors gone, the outlines partly missing, the middles totally obliterated. I’d forgotten everything I learned in my favorite college courses about the Renaissance and invertebrate paleontology. I’d forgotten my children’s infancy. I’d forgotten most of the good times with Phil.

We both went together to see Dr. J. Once, during a visit to her office, she told Phil that his aim had been to control me—in a novel, in a hospital, or with drugs. She pointed out to Phil that he had a problem that may have existed in his family for generations.

Phil replied agreeably, meekly, “You’re probably right.”

I told Phil, “You want a submissive wife who is an interesting intellectual companion. It’s like wanting dry soup or warm ice. I can’t be submissive. It’s not my nature. My idea of a relationship is an equal partnership.” I reproached him about the whole hospital-Stelazine episode.

He replied emphatically, “The whole thing was a mistake.” But that didn’t change how I felt or what I had experienced. I wasn’t to forgive him for a very long time, maybe not ever.

At Dr. J’s, Phil blamed me for a decision he had made. Earlier in the year we had discussed where Hatte would go to high school. Should she go to local Tomales High or make the long commute to one of the large suburban high schools in southern Marin County? Phil had made the decision that she should go to Tomales High. This topic came up at a therapy session with Dr. J, and Phil was bitter at me about it. I told him, “You decided, Phil.”

He was startled and said, “Yes, I did, and that’s just typical of me to blame you.”

Dr J said, “Put away your rusty old weapons.” Phil really liked this image and puts this idea into the hilariously funny
The Zap Gun
. In this novel, Lars Powderdry, weapons fashion designer for Wes-bloc, designs such items as a sixty-stage guidance system that is “plowshared” into a cigar lighter that will compose new Mozart string quartets when lit. Lars’ Peep-East counterpart, Lilo Topchev, designs similar fake weapons. The political balance between the two superpowers depends on public belief that each side has military superiority, and that these phony designs are real. On his way to neutral Iceland to collaborate with Lila on real weapons to repel real invaders from space, Lars Powderdry, terrified of failure, buys a copy of the
Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan
comic book at the airport magazine stand and finds that all his “original” designs had already been printed there.

In the midst of some of the funniest writing Phil ever wrote, serious personal and theological tidbits and incredible political precognition surface. There is a Julian the Apostate satellite. Lars is almost killed by an overdose of drugs that Lilo gives him. Meanwhile, he is taking his own combination of Escalatium and Conjorizine in quantities that would kill an ordinary person but which only give him a post-nasal drip. Pete Freid, in this novel, is a dead ringer for Pete Stevens. In real life, Pete worked for Walter Landor. In the novel, Pete Freid works for Jack Lanferman. Walter Lanferman was a high school buddy of Phil’s.

Pete Freid is the one who makes the actual weapons that Lars designs. Surly G. Febbs, typical man-of-the-times, dreams up a real weapon, a needle-eye converter that will turn an enemy into a bearskin rug. A fascist type, he has made the first
real
weapon in years and is planning to take over the government but falls victim to the hypnotic man-in-the-maze game, the prototype of Phil’s famous empathy box. There are endless secret police in this novel. Phil probably finished this novel in 1965 while he was living in Oakland and added a lot of drug information that I don’t think he would have known about when living in West Marin. He also added aspects of his new housemate Nancy Hackett to the portrait of Lilo Topchev.

Almost simultaneously, Phil was writing a novel about a woman who was a drug addict. Kathy Sweetscent, in
Now Wait for Last Year
, is probably Phil’s most monstrous female character, a woman with malignant worms of the psyche. She is sadistic, self-destructive, and makes more money than her husband, dear, earnest Dr. Eric Sweetscent. She has whimsically addicted herself to a fatal hallucinogenic drug, an addiction that can’t be cured. She surreptitiously drops this drug into Sweetscent’s coffee. Good man that he is, he travels into the future and obtains a cure for both of them. In the future, he finds that she has deteriorated physically and mentally. In ten years, she will become unmanageable and violent and will have to be forcibly committed. Eric considers suicide, but in a touching conversation with an automatic taxi in Tijuana, decides to go back and care for her.

Phil didn’t show either of these two novels to me. I didn’t read them until after his death. The checks for these novels didn’t go into our joint bank account, either.

In the midst of all these unhappy events, a happy event occurred. Phil won the Hugo Award for
The Man in the High Castle
. The
Baywood Press
sent a photographer to take a picture of Laura holding the Hugo and displayed it prominently in its next issue. We cooked a special celebration dinner. But that fall, one terrible thing after another happened. Our blue merle collie died. We bought a white borzoi, a living sculpture. Phil named him “Ollie,” after
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
. I came to love this dignified, intelligent dog more than any other pet I had ever owned, but in retrospect, I don’t think it was the right dog for a proletarian writer.

Next, President Kennedy was shot. Phil literally fell on the floor when he heard the news over the radio. He followed the events of the next several days closely and was terribly emotional about the situation. He remained depressed all that fall.

Tumpey, Phil’s beloved tomcat, disappeared. Phil began muttering that the fates were out to get him. “We’ll get some kittens, Phil,” I said, “some darling Siamese kittens.” We drove to Tiburon and bought two Siamese kittens, a boy and a girl, twins.

Shortly after we got them home they developed cat distemper. They wouldn’t eat; they were dying. The vet came and said, “They probably can’t be saved.” But Phil was determined to save them, so the vet told him how to force-feed the kittens for a one-in-a-hundred chance of success. Phil stayed up all night and fed the kittens with an eyedropper for a couple of weeks. But they kept fading away. I told Phil I thought it would be more humane to put them to sleep. But he wouldn’t. He just kept trying to keep them alive. He was terribly depressed when they died. I should have realized something was terribly wrong when Phil didn’t want to get another cat.

Soon after this, we quarreled over some trivial matter, and Phil packed his suitcase and went to Berkeley to stay with his mother. I couldn’t believe it. He went to his mother’s! In my rule book, grown men did not run back to their mother’s house even if they did become angry with their wives and leave home for a respite. I drove to Berkeley with the girls to bring Phil back. Near his mother’s house, I saw him walking along the street. He got in the car with us.

“You mean you’d drive clear over here to bring me back to Point Reyes?” He was astonished.

“Of course, dummy,” I said.

Seeking a way to help our marriage and our whole state of being, I had the family begin attending St. Columba’s, the small High Episcopal church in Inverness. Tandy had been going to Sunday school, loved it, and had been trying to persuade us to come to church with her. The church was in a handsome old Craftsman-style summer mansion overlooking Tomales Bay that had been the vacation home of a branch of the Frick family. It had teak floors and heart of redwood walls and was located in a grove of oak trees.

Phil said, “If I could invent a church, I’d invent one just like this.” He became quite excited when he found a hymn that was dated A.D. 496. He was fascinated with the High Mass, and became friendly with the vicar, Fr. Reade. Phil would visit him and they’d talk theology for hours.

We decided to join the church, go to confirmation classes, and become baptized. Every Sunday Phil got dressed up, wore a suit or a sport coat, and all of us in our best clothes went off to church—”religiously,” kidded Phil—every Sunday.

One Sunday, we met an interesting woman, Maren Hackett, who was church hopping. The three of us soon became best friends. She’d visit us or we’d go to dinner at her place in San Rafael. She was a double-dome intellectual, a member of the Mensa Society, an ex-policewoman, and an ex-pile-driver operator. Honestly! We discussed theology and church history with her as well as other topics. She was not only theologically well informed and devout, but a sophisticated, knowledgeable person.

Once, Maren brought her nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, Nancy, with her, when she came to visit at our house. Nancy was an attractive girl with long dark hair and bangs, but she hardly said anything—she just sat on the couch during the entire visit, almost as if she weren’t there. I had never seen such a quiet teenager. I didn’t pay much attention to her and, of course, I never had any inkling that one day she would be Phil’s next wife and the mother of his second child.

One weekend night that fall, we went to a party at Jack and Patty Wright’s house, which was near the top of Mt. Vision in Inverness. Phil drank several martinis, unusual for him because he wasn’t a drinker. Unfortunately, he was driving that night, and as he came out of the Wright’s driveway, he didn’t turn the wheel sharply enough and the car went over the edge of road and hung there, nothing underneath its front end.

The neighbors came with a rope and a truck to pull our car back on the road. While we were waiting for them to get everything set up, Phil took my arm and tried to forcibly lead me into the driver’s seat. He said, “Get in, and I’ll push.” If he had pushed the car it could have gone over the side of the mountain. Of course, there were trees to stop it from going terribly far—I think. I pulled away from him, annoyed—and as usual, immediately put this incident out of my mind. I was very good at denial—or was it faith—or bourgeois family values—or an excess of loyalty?

On a happier note, the Wrights invited Phil and me to go hear Harry Partch, the composer, give a world premiere of one of his symphonies in an old warehouse in Petaluma. The huge room had thirty of Partch’s sculptured wood instruments and glass “cloud chambers” in it. As well as musical instruments, they were beautiful as sculptures. Partch and his assistants ran from one instrument to another to perform the symphony. Partch used a forty-nine-tone scale, and his music was unique and lovely. Phil mentions Partch in his novel
The Crack in Space
.

That Christmas, Tandy was the Virgin Mary in the Christmas play at St. Columba’s, and Hatte was the archangel Gabriel, her blue eyes flashing as she told Mary, “And you will bear a child.”

Phil was excited, he told the girls, by his choice of a gift for me: a garbage disposal. I was furious when I opened the package on Christmas morning. It wasn’t at all the kind of thing I wanted. It wasn’t at all the kind of gift that he had usually given me. Ungraciously, I told Phil he’d have to take it back. The girls got Barbie dolls and clothes, and even a Ken doll. Hatte remembers Phil measuring the Barbie dolls and trying to figure out their proportions. He said, “They couldn’t exist in the real world. Their heads are much too small for their bodies.” Phil started working on a new novel around this time. “It’s about the Barbie dolls,” he said. “It’s going to be named
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.’’

Phil was fascinated with the theology that we were learning at confirmation classes, but it didn’t stop our having another argument and his running off to his mother’s again. I phoned there and after we talked at length, he came back home.

A few days later in a session with Dr. J, Phil complained, “Anne doesn’t pay enough attention to me; she loves the dog more than she loves me.”

Dr. J told him, “You experience Anne moving away from you emotionally, but, actually, you’re moving away from Anne.” Phil looked thoughtful.

We still hugged all night, sleeping like spoons, and our sex life was as loving as ever. I tried to be more affectionate during the day, but when I would hug him he would push me away, saying angrily, “You’re only being dutiful.” Later, he told Dr. J his mother had been “dutiful” and he had hated it.

Dr. J had arranged for Phil to see a new doctor, Dr. P, because she felt he needed to talk to a man, that the therapy situation in which he had to deal with two women wasn’t productive for him. After seeing Phil a few times, Dr. P told Dr. J that he was afraid that Phil was going to kill me.

I was surprised and disturbed to hear this from Dr. J in 1982
.

Back in 1963, although struggling with feelings of anger and confusion, I still thought Phil was a wonderful, brilliant, talented man. I believed that, as my husband, he had made a commitment to me as deep as the one I had made to him and that even though we were having problems they would somehow all work out. Along with the quarrels and the trips back and forth to Berkeley, like a whole parallel life, we still enjoyed family life, working in the garden together, great conversations, and good sex.