Read The Search for Philip K. Dick Online
Authors: Anne R. Dick
Susan found Phil to be intense, needing to be the center of everything. He was exhausting: “I recall him as a bearlike presence hunched into a ratty trench coat, sort of like Sam Spade. He took menthol snuff continually. I couldn’t tell when he was telling the truth—even when I knew it was truth, it had so much else mixed in with it. Often his conversation seemed to be based on finding the other person’s weak spot. He could have a person in a screaming rage within ten minutes. He would save up information on a person’s weak spots to needle him with later on. A friend of ours, Mary, got into a van that Phil happened to be riding in. Out of the blue, Phil started telling her bad things about us. Later, Mary asked me about the matters Phil had told her about. Nothing like what he’d described had happened at all. His version of events was often quite different from those of other participants.”
Susan remembered Jamis, all right. Phil gave Jamis Susan’s copy of
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
. Susan began laughing as she told a story about Phil and a Kirby vacuum-cleaner demonstrator who had made an appointment to come to her apartment. “You’re not having a demonstration by one of those high-pressure salesman,” Phil said. “Yes,” Susan said, “it will be a three-hour demonstration.” “Okay,” Phil told the Walshes, “let’s have some fun. Michael, I’m your brother-in-law, a writer who is sponging off you and Susan. You, Michael, are Mickey, a husband too cheap to buy the vacuum cleaner. That’s the scenario. I’ll try to draw you into a family argument, because I think you should buy my sister this vacuum cleaner. We’ll get the salesman into the argument.”
The vacuum-cleaner salesman, whose name was Frank Noseworthy, proceeded to demonstrate the vacuum cleaner. Phil chatted with Frank, “South Pasadena is my favorite city,” while Frank dumped little papers of dust throughout the apartment and proceeded to vacuum them up. Phil chatted on, “I wanted my other brother, Bill, who drives a bus, to drive me out from Chicago, but those city buses can’t make the trip.” Picking up the sweeper and examining it, he remarked, “My ex-wife used to have one of these. She insisted that she get it in the divorce settlement.”
By this time the Walshes were smothering apoplectic laughter and couldn’t even stay in the room. Meanwhile, Frank Noseworthy was vacuuming the mattress, exhibiting the vacuum cleaner with a bench grinder and polisher attachment, and polishing Susan’s wedding ring.
“How much is this vacuum cleaner?” Phil asked. “$ 800,” Frank Noseworthy replied. Phil couldn’t get Frank into a family argument, although he kept needling Michael about buying this vacuum for “Sis.” Then he said, “Isn’t it wonderful to think that in hundreds of years we’ll all be dust, but that this Kirby will still be in working condition?” Then he said something about vacuuming up a can of eight-legged bugs.
Frank Noseworthy became more and more disaffected. Finally, when Michael said that he would not buy the vacuum cleaner, Frank huffily packed up all of his equipment and left, saying, “Well, if you want to continue living in these conditions….”
Michael had a record of Marshall McLuhan’s,
The Medium Is the Message
, with multiple sound channels. On it McLuhan presents his material with illustrations: music, sex, little girl’s voices, etc. It’s a James Joycean sort of thing, an incoherent cacophony of sound. When Michael played it for Phil, Phil clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Turn it off. Turn it off. It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go to the hospital.”
After Phil had stayed with the Walshes for two weeks, he started picking on Michael in an area where Michael was sensitive. He told Michael that he was a bad husband and that he, Phil, was going to take Susan away and make her happy. After listening to this for a couple of days, Michael became angry and kicked Phil out of the apartment.
Phil found another place to live. Then he phoned Susan and said, “I’m going to turn out the lights.” Susan couldn’t imagine what Phil was talking about and soon hung up on him. But Phil
had
taken a lethal dose of some kind of pill and actually was on his way out. However, he had written the number of the suicide prevention squad on a small piece of paper and put it in front of the phone in case he changed his mind. He did change his mind and called them, and they came and took him to the hospital and saved his life. When Michael and Susan Walsh came to see him, he told them, “I was committing suicide, you didn’t care, you didn’t come over, you didn’t do anything about it.”
Phil signed himself into X-Kalay, a self-help organization inspired by Synanon and inhabited by ex-convicts and ex-drug addicts. Michael Walsh later wondered cynically, “Was the suicide attempt only to get into X-Kalay for material to write a novel?”
Susan and Michael visited Phil in X-Kalay. Phil was wearing a ski jacket and looked strange to them, after his trench-coat persona. The doors were locked and some X-Kalay people stayed in the room during the entire visit. Phil, still of the opinion that the Walshes had failed him, was cold.
Michael Walsh found the ex-head of X-Kalay, Dave Berner, for me. Dave had a talk program on Station CJOR across the street from the
Province,
the newspaper where Michael Walsh worked. I interviewed Dave Berner by telephone. In exchange he interviewed me, live, the next day for his program
.
David Berner told me, “X-Kalay means ‘the unknown path.’ Phil came out of nowhere and went back to nowhere. When I first saw him, he looked like a burnt-out middle-age drunk. He shook, he was thin, his skin was blotchy. He told me that he was a writer. ‘You’re not a writer,’ I told him. ‘Whatever you did before to get yourself in here, you’re not going to do again. You’re going to wash dishes and mop floors.’ Phil’s imagination was wild. In the games, he was bugged and haunted by monsters he’d made a long time ago. After he had been with us thirty days, he came to me again and said, ‘I really am a writer,’ and volunteered to write for X-Kalay. Altogether, he stayed at X-Kalay for three months. Later, I saw his novels at a bookstand. ‘Is that that nut burger?’ I thought.”
During the entire time Phil was staying in Vancouver he wrote me friendly, upbeat letters, giving me the impression that he was having a good life in Canada, and, to my chagrin, mentioning various new girlfriends. I didn’t answer. He told me nothing about his attempted suicide or his stay at X-Kalay.
In March 1972, Phil wrote Professor McNelly in Fullerton:
Well, it happened. I flipped out. Grief, loneliness, despair, the alienation of being in a strange country in an unfamiliar city, knowing virtually no one and at the same time … being so dependent on those few people I met here…. [A]nyhow, the X-Kalay people stepped in and have begun putting the pieces back together. Into something else, they tell me. Something that has a better chance of survival. Without them I wouldn’t be alive now. It’s hard to get into X-Kalay and easy to get out. I don’t really know what happened. It started back in San Rafael several months ago at least, possibly longer. With effort I can sort of remember. But perhaps it’s better if I don’t; remembering serves no useful purpose. “Our pasts have been written and cannot be erased,” the X-Kalay Philosophy says. “Therefore we must work for today with a vision of tomorrow.” That’s what I’m doing.
And in a later letter to McNelly:
I want to go back [to San Rafael], even though, really I can’t. My house is gone, and, god forbid, all my stuff has been shipped off, without my knowledge or permission, and stored. All I have is what I brought with me to Vancouver in one small suitcase, just a few clothes. My books, MSS, typewriter—everything either thrown away by the realtor, or stored somewhere. In my absence my senile old mother gave the realtor permission…. It was all done without my knowledge, as soon as I informed my mother I was remaining in Canada. Mothers should be towed out to sea and sunk. As a health hazard, like lead in the atmosphere.
What is it about s-f writers that so turns off the establishment, and also the criminals of the gutter? We are universally distrusted. As Cindy told me once, “It’s because they can’t figure you out; you’re an unusual person.” I asked her what she personally thought of me. “You’re a great man,” she said. “And you’re kind. Hey, can you lend me two bucks for a bottle of vodka so I can take it to the drive-in movie and turn on while we watch
The Planet of the Apes?”
…. Without Cindy, the death that I feared, the death she has shielded me from, seems to be coming. But I worry about her. It’s Cindy who matters, as far as I’m concerned.
Phil wrote Cindy back in San Rafael: “I’m afraid I won’t ever see you again, Cindy. Have a happy life. I’ll never forget you, Cindy. You were the best, the dearest, the prettiest.”
Phil must have been in contact with the girl Jamis while he was in X-Kalay, because he writes in a letter to an unknown person:
Jamis is the rational one and I’m the dingbat…. Maybe the gulf I sense between us is because I’m so spaced. “You really get down over nothing,” she said to me last night. Right on…. Somehow, Jamis embodies all I’ve lost, the whole past that’s over, and in clinging to her—and constantly feeling myself losing her—I’m clinging onto something that is gone, ought to be gone, which I just can’t let go of. I can’t really lock myself into the present as long as I’m involved with her. She’s not here, with me, now; she’s gone, in the past, there, not with me, lost forever, never to be found or seen again. She’s the rock, drug, hippy, kid, California culture I’ve got to cut loose from and let die and leave me. The unresolved conflicts, issues, feelings, and involvements of the past are still being thrashed out within the context of my relationship with her. It should just end, everybody thinks, but maybe it’s got to be worked through and out, not ended; otherwise it’ll just resume with someone else.
This enormous hostility that I feel is probably the primary hostility that underlay my depression which in turn led to my suicide attempt. I am mad at everyone and everything. So the X-Kalay game is working. Their analysis is that I’m possessive, that I want a chick to be MY chick and not independent. This is not true.
From X-Kalay on April 4, 1972, Phil wrote Willis McNelly’s wife, Sue:
I’m doing a lot better now. The ache inside me has virtually dimmed-out. Due mainly to the people I’ve been living with, here at X-Kalay. The furies are no longer driving me…. [I]n some ways the lessons in toughness that I’m learning here are perhaps not such a good thing. I don’t suffer, because I am ceasing to care. It’s easier on me, but is this really the solution? I feel like they’re burning out a part of my brain, the part that listens to the heartbeat of my brothers.
“Wait’ll I get you in a game,” one woman said to me. “I’ll reveal your real nature. I’ll show everyone what you’re really like, under the lies.” There is an assumption, possibly false, certainly metaphysical, that there is a “real” hidden, authentic personality hidden within and behind the false fronts of each of us….
“Lizard-eyed and liver-lipped” is the way I describe the faces here; cold and amused, mocking, detached, efficient.
And in a later letter to an unknown person:
I am leaving X-Kalay on Thursday…. Gradually, over the last week, person after person has left, and in a few days I will be going. There are many negative elements here that cause me to want to go, but basically I’m leaving because there is something better—I think—that I’ll be going to. If I’m wrong, I’ll come back. Really, though, if I were to pinpoint the elements here that have driven me off, I’d say that the enthusiasm, the energy, the excitement, the plans I had about doing things with X-Kalay have been killed off by X-Kalay itself…. I think my two basic plans were good: the point is that for over a year I have had no plans, no goals, and now, with X-Kalay’s help, I got myself together and did look forward, did have ideas I wanted to put into action—and at that point X-Kalay said, in effect, “No, you are not here for that. We are not doing that. Mind your own business; take orders and be quiet.” Initiative and inventiveness are discouraged, but not merely in the usual bureaucratic sense; what I bitterly resent is the use of the game, the encounter therapy sessions, brought into play as a method—THE method—by which actions on my part and on the part of others that do not conform to the group’s standards and views are zapped out of existence, zapped out before they can take place, by the effective technique of wiping out the individual’s faith in those proposed actions and ultimately in himself as the inventor of the actions…. But I have a viable alternative elsewhere that I’m going to, and I hope, when I get there I’ll feel a return of the energy and goal-oriented activity that I had here. Meanwhile, I feel fine. I am looking forward to productive, creative work elsewhere with other people along the same lines as here.
Phil left Vancouver in April 1972, “disappearing into the wilds of southern California,” Mike Bailey said, “to begin a whole new life.”
Phil was smiling that wonderful smile but looking unsure of himself. He carried a battered, old suitcase with an electric cord tied around it.
—Tim Powers, 1982 interview
I
N LATE
1982, I drove alone the five hundred miles to Los Angeles. Once there, ensconced at my cousin David’s apartment in Arcadia, I drove many miles daily on the scary Los Angeles freeways to Fullerton in Orange County where some of Phil’s close friends and the Fullerton State University Library were located. The Philip Dick his Orange County friends talked about didn’t seem to be the same Phil that I had known. When he and I had talked occasionally over the phone in the months and years before his death, he had sounded pretty much like the same Phil. Tim Powers told me, “When you talk about [Phil] it doesn’t sound like anyone we knew.”