The Search for Philip K. Dick (4 page)

“It has resistance electrical wire in the floor,” I told him. “We bought this house for $16,000, nothing down, $101 a month, on a 4 1/2 percent GI loan.” We looked at the black-faced sheep in the field and at the large, rounded green hills across the valley. A flock of quail flew up. “There are dozens of meadowlarks around, and last night a fox walked by the corner of the living room.”

Phil and Kleo browsed in Richard’s collection of modern poetry. “Can I borrow this?” said Phil as he picked up a copy of Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
, which a friend of Richard’s had smuggled into the United States. It was illegal in the United States under the censorship laws of the time. Phil and Kleo stayed for dinner, and afterward we played games with the children. When the children went to bed, we talked and talked.

Phil said that he and Kleo had been invited by their neighbors, June and Jerry Kresy, to a “flying saucer group that met at ‘Claudia Hambro’s’ house in Inverness.” (Claudia Hambro was Phil’s fictional name for this real woman in
Confessions of a Crap Artist.)
I had already heard about this group. It first met to talk about philosophy, but soon these otherwise sensible people came to believe Claudia’s ideas about flying saucers. Claudia told them that soon the world was going to come to an end, but she was in touch with beings from outer space who were going to save a select number of people, among them, her group. When the last days came, her house would turn into a flying saucer. This would happen early next year on April 22, 1959.

Claudia told Phil that she perceived that he was from somewhere else. “In some way,” she told him, “you will help the poor lost people from Earth when the last days come.”

Phil wrote about Claudia in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
:

Phil told me that after his first “flying saucer” meeting he was terrified that Claudia was going to come to his house and “get him” and he wouldn’t be able to keep from being involved with her and her group. When later she did come and knock on his door, he hid. Kleo and I laughed together at the thought of Phil hiding in his own house. The rest of the evening we talked about books and ideas. It was after midnight when the couple left. It had been a wonderful evening.

After that, they came over almost every day. We ate together and played soccer, baseball, and board games with the children. Sometimes Phil came over alone when Kleo was at work. I found him to be the best conversationalist I had ever met. I even stopped talking long enough to listen to him. We found we had endless ideas, attitudes, and interests in common. Both of us were shy, though we hid our shyness. Both of us were trusting to the point of gullibility and very romantic. Both of us had been expected to be big achievers by our parents. Both of us loved animals, books, and music, though Phil’s tastes ran to Baroque music and opera and I liked modern classical music, “moldy fig” jazz, and folk music.

Both of us had been cherished children. Phil’s mother, father, and grandmother had doted on him. I had been affectionately spoiled by my father, mother, our housekeeper, and my two much-older brothers. Both of our mothers were rather domineering. Phil’s mother had wanted him to be a writer, mine wanted me to be a college professor. Both of us had lost our fathers at an early age. Mine died. Phil’s mother divorced his. I told Phil about my two big brothers who had carried me around on their shoulders when I was small, about my brother who had died suddenly when he was only thirty-eight, about my father who had died suddenly when he was only forty-two. Phil told me about his twin sister who had died three weeks after his birth and how he felt guilty about this. He said that he carried his twin sister inside him.

When I read about twins later to learn more about Phil, I found out that it isn’t unusual for a surviving twin to feel that he or she carries the dead twin inside him or her
.

“And she’s a lesbian,” he told me seriously.

I hardly had been able to take in this remark, much less respond, when he topped it. “When I was a teenager, I had ‘the impossible dream.’ I dreamt I slept with my mother.”

I was taken aback. Why would he tell me this?

“I won my Oedipus situation,” he continued. When Phil spoke, a pleasant lilt in his voice, it was easy to go along with whatever he said. In the past I had always had a retort for anything that anyone would say, but I have to admit that some of the things that Phil came up with were so far outside my mental framework that I was struck dumb.

When I talked, Phil paid flattering attention. His responses were quick, detailed, and imaginative. It seemed as if we could go anywhere in the universe as we talked. Phil was unselfconscious, funny, delightful. I never had met anyone I enjoyed so much. I told Phil about Richard—that he hadn’t been very happy in the luxurious environment he’d been brought up in. His father had made a fortune in the scrap-metal business, and after he died his mother had married another millionaire Jewish “junk dealer,” as Mr. Handelsman, her new husband, jokingly called himself. I told him that Mrs. Handelsman, despite her fashionable clothes and her diamonds, was warmhearted and kind.

I had met Richard, a stocky, handsome man with a wry sense of humor, when he waited on a table where I sat with my college friends. He was a partner in Little Bohemia, a unique bar located on the St. Louis waterfront, with painter Stanley Radulovich and his best friend, Jay Landesman. As he poured wine into our glasses, he recited bits of Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s poetry.

I told Phil about hand-setting type for Richard’s little poetry magazine,
Inferno
, while standing in puddles of water in the basement of a house on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill and printing it on an old anarchist press. I collated the pages, put on the cover, and sent the magazines on consignment to small bookstores all over the United States. Once in a while we would get a very small check back. I had become very tired of these, to me, fruitless labors. Richard’s continual depression made me depressed too. I had gone into that marriage a bouncy, energetic female just out of a happy college life. I wondered, “Is this what adult life is supposed to be like?”

In those days before women’s lib, women were told that marriage was their vocation. Most women, with only a few exceptions, didn’t pursue professions. At one time in college I had thought about being a doctor, but there were no role models. I married because I was expected to marry. Richard pursued me, he had interesting friends, he wrote poetry. I had never met anyone who wrote poetry before. In those days, poets and writers and painters were rare.

Richard had been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having an anxiety neurosis. No wonder—his mother had been sending him to psychiatrists since he was a young child. Recent discoveries suggest that his symptoms may have been due to an allergic condition. He was depressed and withdrawn at times, and when he drank, like many heavy drinkers, he had a personality change and didn’t behave well. In those days, women were held responsible for everything that went wrong with the family. I was supposed to make our marriage harmonious and happy, and I thought I was a failure.

It made Richard very anxious when he had to go to the barber. Men kept their hair short in those days and he felt he had to get his hair cut every six weeks. Every six weeks there would be an unpleasant incident in our household. Finally, Richard’s psychiatrist, Dr. A, insisted that Richard submit himself to in-patient therapy. There weren’t rehab and detox facilities everywhere in those days. Richard’s family came to California to accompany him to the Yale Psychiatric Institute. Two months later, on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, the most holy day of the Jewish year, he dropped dead.

Phil was fascinated with everything he heard about Richard and based Charley Hume on him in
Confessions of a Crap Artist
, but he didn’t get him right at all. That character was also partly based on his friend, Mike Hnatt.

Richard’s family and some of his friends never spoke to me again after they read that book. Some people draw incorrect conclusions from fiction that is only partly related to the author’s life
.

Phil told me his life story in great detail, presenting himself as a member of the working proletariat, a self-educated person dedicated to his work. After his father and mother had divorced, he hadn’t seen much of his father. His mother and he moved to Washington, D.C. for two years. After they moved back to Berkeley, he dropped out of the last year of high school and had a home tutor. He had a decade-long job with University Radio and later worked for Art Music, both record stores. He was enthralled when I called him a “Berkeley beatnik.” He thought this was an accolade.

One afternoon two weeks after we had met, Phil came over to visit me. Tandy was taking her afternoon nap and Hatte and Jayne were at school. We sat on each end of the couch talking. Suddenly, Phil grabbed my hand and said in a low, intense voice, “You represent everything I’ve ever dreamed of.”

I was so surprised I almost fell off the couch. I sat there and stared at the floor like some Victorian maiden. I had absolutely no idea of what to say or do next. Phil drew me toward him and kissed me. After a moment’s hesitation and without conscious volition, I kissed him back. We kissed and talked and talked and kissed. Ah, a whole new topic, our mutual attraction. Each of us had endless words to say.

I told Phil about the experience I’d had when I first met him; it must have been love at first sight, a phenomenon that I hadn’t believed existed. I certainly never thought it would happen to me. I felt like one of those mythical heroines who has been awakened out of her enchanted slumber by a hero leaping over a ring of flames. Phil was enthralled when I told him this; he adored Wagner. The next time he came over, he brought the entire
Ring
and played excerpts from it. He said we would listen to the whole thing later on.

My emotions were in a turmoil. When he left I realized that this man I had fallen for was married, and I shouldn’t be feeling the way I was feeling. I made an appointment with Dr. A. I thought of him as a kindly uncle and trusted him implicitly.

I had gone to Dr. A the previous year. Richard had been his patient, but Dr. A told me in those prefeminist days that he believed in treating the wife when the husband had problems. I didn’t mind. It was fashionable to be psychoanalyzed—to have the imprint of the couch on one’s back. In fact, psychoanalysis was the popular religion of the times. Of course, Dr. A was a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst, and when I visited him I sat in a chair, but still—it was almost like psychoanalysis because Dr. A didn’t talk much and I did. While waiting out in Dr. A’s anteroom, I skimmed through the medical magazines on the coffee table, noticing that all the illustrations advertising the new heavy tranquilizers showed women—bitchy-looking or depressed-looking women.

“Why don’t they show any men?” I thought idly.

When I finally got in to see Dr. A, I asked him, “What shall I do? I’m in love with a married man.”

Dr. A advised me not to worry about Kleo. He said, “Kleo is Phil’s business, not yours. Don’t get involved with Phil’s relationship with Kleo.” I tried to take this advice, but my feelings of guilt didn’t go away.

Dr. A wanted to meet Phil. When I told Phil, he said, “Fine, I want to meet Dr. A.” Dr. A was quite taken by Phil. In fact, Dr. A fell completely under Phil’s spell and later was drawn into his delusional system and consequently was not helpful to him as a therapist.

I was caught up in a whirlwind relationship. Phil salved my conscience by telling me that Kleo refused to have children and that even the ultraconservative Roman Catholic Church granted annulments in that kind of marital situation. I had fallen madly in love, hook, line, and sinker. Even Phil’s telephone number seemed to have a mystical beauty. Phil lavishly praised my character, my looks, my ideas, and the way I raised my children: “You treat them as if they were adults.” He was continually affectionate. He did the dishes and mopped the floors.

“I always knew true love would be like this,” I told him.

We walked, hand in hand, on the beaches, in the forests and up and down the hills of the Point Reyes peninsula. I drove—Phil liked me to do the driving—to the old lime kilns, to the historic graveyard, to the oyster farm. One minus-tide day we drove out to Pierce Point and climbed down the cliffs to the abalone rocks. Later I learned that Phil was quite apprehensive but finally mustered up his courage and climbed down the dripping rope.

He describes this in
Confessions of a Crap Artist: