Read The Search for Philip K. Dick Online
Authors: Anne R. Dick
Joan said sarcastically, “Oh, sure.”
But it was Philip K. Dick. He invited her to come down to Santa Ana and see him. She had a vacation coming, and two weeks later, she drove down to Santa Ana in her Honda Civic.
As Joan approached the huge white stucco apartment complex locked away by its wrought-iron gate, she thought of
The Man in the High Castle
and
Martian Time-Slip
. She was awed. She felt as if she were walking into a Philip K. Dick novel.
She rang the bell, and, as she walked up the stairs a bearded face peeked over the railing. “Hello,” it said, and disappeared. Joan continued walking up to the open doorway. She saw a big, bearded man with a pot belly, built like a bull, jumping from one foot to another like a little kid.
“You’re a fox, you’re a fox. Come in, come in,” he said as he grabbed her by the wrist. “I have to call up Jeter.” He called up Jeter: “She’s a fox.”
Joan was flattered, but thought it was unusually adolescent behavior for a grown man. They sat down to talk. She was nervous, but Phil’s humble manner soon put her at ease. Phil invited Joan to stay in the extra bedroom and she accepted, staying three weeks. She gave Doris, who was living in the adjacent apartment, some of her chemotherapy shots. She met Tessa, who was often there with little Christopher. Phil played on the floor with Christopher like another child. Joan noticed that Tessa was tolerant of Phil and kidded him a lot. She met Phil’s friends, an adoring young crowd. She was the oldest person there. All Phil’s friends told her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to Phil.
“Phil talked to me for hours and hours,” Joan told me, “about life, ideas, novels, writing,
The Exegesis
, acid trips, Nancy, Anne, Kleo. He was open about everything. He told me about his entire past, his books—that certain anti-heroines were Anne, certain anti-heroines were Nancy. Those books were real.”
Phil was magnanimous with Joan. “I’ll take care of everything,” he said. “Let’s get married.” But Joan refused:
We talked, we hugged, we kissed a little, but mostly I seemed to do a lot of mothering. Phil was so tentative, it’s as if I would have to stand him on his head and do the dance of the seven veils around him. What would it take to get this guy to perk up sexually? He would hug me, but it was more like a child. He didn’t seem to know that he was a sexual being.
At that point in time, Phil was really and truly kissing it all good-bye—he was checking out on life. He was extremely smart, amazing—but if I had met him at Napa State Hospital, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was nuts, paranoid, tremendously suspicious, afraid to have people in. He had great difficulty in leaving the apartment, great difficulty in dealing with money. He was taken care of by his agent, his banker. Tessa and Doris were there telling him, “Don’t take too many drugs,” and going to the grocery store for him. I felt he was damaged, that he had given up on certain areas of his life that had been too difficult. Things were going physiologically wrong. He would get excited and run around for three hours and then collapse with physical and mental exhaustion. At other times, he would get into a state of almost catatonia. He would say, “I have the flu.”
He wasn’t taking recreational drugs, but he had many prescriptions and several doctors prescribing for him; by this time the drugs had, of necessity, all become prescribed. He could afford to have people take care of him legally, financially, psychologically. He stayed home and petted the cat, talked to me, and listened to the record player.
Joan’s feeling was that Phil had never been a healthy person.
Joan had to go home. Her vacation time was up. She invited Phil to come up to her place. She thought it was amazing that he came. While she had been in Santa Ana, it had been a major project for him to get the car out of the garage and go to the store. “Okay, it’s time for me to go north,” he said, and got in Joan’s Honda. After they had been in Sonoma two weeks, he told Joan he wanted to go over to Point Reyes and see Anne, Laura, and Jayne, although, he told Joan, he was frightened of Anne. She had used and abused him and treated him like a servant.
When Joan and Phil came to Point Reyes on a pleasant summer afternoon, the visit wasn’t all that meaningful to me, even though I hadn’t seen Phil for seven years. I never enjoyed hearing about Phil’s girlfriends, much less meeting one. But I politely gave them tea. I thought Joan was Phil’s Episcopal nun friend who had cancer. Laura and Jayne and I were readying our horse-vaulting team to go to the national meet (where we would win the “B” Team Championship of the United States), and my energy was focused on this imminent competition.
Laura, now a tall platinum blonde beauty of seventeen years, vaulted over the car for Phil and showed him her horse. Phil was amazed. He had expected to see a little girl—the ten-year-old he had seen last—not a grown young woman.
Joan said that Phil had been very apprehensive about coming to see me that day, but afterward it was as if a great weight had been lifted from him: “The horror image of you, Anne, had been dispelled.” But Phil told Joan that he was terribly disappointed that he hadn’t found the skinny young blonde mother of little girls that he’d expected to find. Anne didn’t “emote” the way he’d remembered. But, Joan said, “A kind of peace seemed to settle on him after this visit.”
Then he told Joan that, of the older girls, he’d always loved Jayne the best. It was Jayne that he should’ve married, not Hatte. When Joan told me this in 1983, we both looked at each other in a kind of amazed horror. We agreed that it was a bizarre utterance.
Phil told Joan that he was too afraid of Nancy to visit her—Nancy, the most fragile and nonthreatening person I have ever met.
After Phil had been in Sonoma a few weeks, he asked Joan to come back to Santa Ana with him. She decided to quit her job and go. After the couple returned to Santa Ana, they started planning a permanent relationship. “We decided to set up house together in Sonoma. In July, Phil bought furniture for the apartment we found and we shared the cost of a washer and dryer.”
In September 1977, Phil had been invited to Metz, France for the Festival International de la Science-Fiction. He would be the Guest of Honor, provide the keynote speech, and accept the Grand Prix du Festival (the Graoully d’Or), for
A Scanner Darkly
. He invited Joan to go with him. Phil was excited to be going to the country that appreciated his work so much. When he arrived there, he found beautiful hardcover editions of his novels in every bookstore. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize by some of his French followers.
But for Joan, “The trip was horrible. The main thing I did was take care of Phil, wash his undies, make him eat, put him to bed, and tell him, ‘Don’t worry, Phil, I am here, and I will protect you from the dark powers of the universe.’ Phil was brave to go to France.”
During the stay in Metz, Joan was sick in bed, off and on, for two weeks, although she also went out with Phil between bouts of flu. But Phil told acquaintances that Joan had had a nervous breakdown, that’s why she was staying in bed. He described her rocking back and forth, refusing to go out because her hairdresser hadn’t done her hair right. He continued to tell this story after he returned to Santa Ana. To this day, Phil’s friends in southern California believe that Joan had a nervous breakdown on that trip.
“When we returned,” Joan told me, “the relationship had started to fall apart and I was ready to come home to Sonoma. I said, in effect, to Phil, ‘The house is ready. Come on up.’ Phil would say, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow, I’ll be there next week.’ I had made it clear that I needed to continue to lead my own life and could not run down to Santa Ana with him all the time. But he wasn’t going to move up to Sonoma and I wasn’t going to move down to Santa Ana. He was involved with Doris and her cancer before, during, and after his relationship with me.”
Phil told all his friends that Joan had dumped him after he bought furniture for her and that there was another man involved with her at the same time she was offering to share her apartment with him. Every friend of Phil’s knew about the stove and refrigerator that Joan, faithlessly, let Phil buy for her. Phil told Tim that Joan had assigned him a windowless room in their house, that he had paid more than his fair share, that when they split up, she wouldn’t let him take the hi-fi speakers, that he felt stifled by Joan, and that they were at odds over the decor of the house.
Joan’s views were quite different: “I would’ve had to sustain me and Phil both. I would’ve tried this if I had been younger and dumber. I loved Phil, but was not in love with him. I viewed him as an Einstein-like person, who was so lost in his own brilliance that he couldn’t tie his own shoelaces. I didn’t want to be the one to do it for him, as much as I admired his genius.”
Joan reflected:
God had not returned to him after his revelation that gave him the wonderful peace-providing, elevating experience of his life. He kept looking for this to happen again. Doris was getting well, Tessa was going to school, Phil couldn’t write, no one was there to make it okay. Everyone let him die. He could’ve lived longer but no one could take on that tremendous responsibility.
He had such a fear in him, probably from when he was a tiny baby and his sister was dying; it sprouted all these different roots. One was the agoraphobia, one was physiological, one was the money thing. He did a thousand and one things that equaled : “I cannot take care of myself, you must take care of me, but you have to make me feel that you’re not, and you have to do it exactly the way I want you to.” He blamed all his problems on a woman, whoever she was at the moment. He felt totally helpless and dependent. But also, he was powerful and could be destructive.
When he was good, he was very good. He was funny, smart, a genius, and a kind man. A dear, brilliant, driven, guilt-burdened man, a caring man, but too far gone. He had great magnetism and charm, tremendous language skills. He had fought the good fight as best he could in an extraordinarily bizarre world. There was a demonic power possessing him. After all those fifty years, it finally got him. The power of light was having a hard time. But if you asked Phil, “Whose side are you on?” he would say, “Light, Light, Light.”
He was so naive, like a child. He sacrificed himself. He gave himself up to it, that dark force. And it would make it better, not fighting it any more. This was a victory in itself. And he said with his life, “Here I am, love me, love me, love me…. I don’t know anything else to do. Because this thing we are born into, gets you. Have we done anything evil? No. Then why does it get you?…. There’s this dark force, and by virtue of the fact that you are innocent and good, you get done to.”
I could love and respect him, admire the hell out of him, and help him as much as I could, but if that meant giving up my own life, no, no.
Joan’s Phil was certainly different from my Phil. I did sense a despair in him in those last years, but I wondered, too, if the helpless role that Phil played with Joan, ombudsperson to the severely mentally retarded people at Sonoma State Hospital, was completely real.
Boldness is no virtue
If it causes the surprised organism
To fall a thousand years,
Wondering as he plunges
Where he went wrong,
Where error lay….
There was no road back, even had he lived
.—Philip K. Dick, poem in a letter to Anne Dick, 1977
T
RYING TO PUT
his relationship with Joan together one last time, Phil got his car out of the garage and, amazingly, drove alone from Santa Ana to Sonoma to visit Joan.
I was surprised when in Point Reyes on a beautiful, sunny afternoon the phone rang and I heard Phil’s voice say, “I just happened to be driving through town and thought I might stop by, if it’s convenient.”
As if this were an everyday occurrence, I said, “Yes, do come right up.” Luckily, Laura was home from school. When Phil drove in the driveway, I walked out to meet him in order to greet him and put him at ease. I hadn’t seen him since 1971 when he came out to visit with Sheila. Phil had a well-trimmed beard and a good haircut. He was a little heavier than I remembered him, but overall he looked well and attractive. He was dressed neatly in a good-quality plaid wool rancher’s jacket and jeans, a nice flannel shirt, and new shoes.
As we walked back to the house I started talking, Phil started talking, and the same wonderful conversation that we had had all through our marriage began again. We sat down out on the patio. I assumed that Phil was there to visit Laura but he directed all his attention to me. We talked and talked as if the conversation that we’d been having fourteen years ago had never ended, as if no time had passed. No shadow of old problems appeared. It was as if none had ever existed.
It was “instant family” that afternoon and evening. Later, Phil talked to his friend Kirsten about an intention to move back to Point Reyes
.
After a while, we went to “downtown” Point Reyes Station to see Jayne, her husband, and their three-year-old twin boys. Jayne lived in a white frame cottage much like the one Phil had owned when he moved to Point Reyes Station. Phil took her a bouquet of flowers. For a split second, when he met Jayne’s twin boys, Christopher and Aaron, his face twisted with some expression that I couldn’t quite read. It almost seemed to be anger. Then Phil, Laura, and I went to the Palace Market, just as we had all those years ago, and shopped for dinner. When we came home, we unpacked the groceries, and all of us hung out in the kitchen, cooking and talking. Phil set the table and opened the wine. We sat down, ate a marvelous dinner together, and never stopping talking. Afterward, Laura and Phil made a lemon meringue pie. At nine o’clock, Phil said he had to go. As I walked with him out to his car, we were still conversing. It had been a wonderful visit. I thought, “This was such a happy meeting, I’m sure I’ll be seeing Phil now occasionally, and who knows….”