The Search for Philip K. Dick (42 page)

I am expected to make the funeral oration. I step forward. “Phil, you were mad at me because I loved you and knew you were okay and expected great things of you. You see, I was right—as usual.” In the box, the small Phil, who isn’t dead after all, turns his head and starts dictating into a tape recorder. Then, suddenly, he flips over and dies for good. His voice starts coming out of my mouth, and he gives his own funeral oration to the assembled throng: “I’m sorry I can’t stay for the whole wake, but I’m unavoidably called away. Bless all of you—enjoy your lives, enjoy all the little things. Don’t mourn for me—my life is complete—I’m at peace.” The funeral service is over; the little box is now Phil’s coffin. Just as the lid is being closed, I drop a blobby gold ornament into it, a small metal figure of a man striding forward carrying a walking stick, a little child on his shoulder.

3
. I am riding in a convertible with Phil. He is driving and full of good spirits. I notice large red blotches on his face. He impudently leans over and kisses me on the cheek. “Where were you all my life?” I say to him indignantly, as if he were an hour late for dinner. “What’s the use of your kissing me and being so charming now?”

“You did okay without me,” he says.

“Why do you have those horrible spots all over your face?” I ask him.

“You should see what I really look like,” he says, and as he turns his face toward me, I see that the whole left side of his head is empty space.

My last words to him as the dream fades away: “I tried to be your Boswell, too.”

I
STILL DON’T
really understand what Phil’s problem was—drugs? Mental illness? Drugs making a mild mental illness worse? Childhood trauma? Not being socialized as a child?

Posthumously, he sent many interesting and entertaining people to visit me. The BBC came twice: a pleasant man with a tape recorder early on, later, a group filled with deception and carrying a video camera. PKD scholars and serious fans came to visit me from all over the United States and from most of the countries of Europe—Spain, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and Italy—and one from Iran.

Larry Sutin, the official PKD biographer, stayed with me in Point Reyes Station on two occasions. I drove him around the area, talked extensively with him, and loaned him a file drawer of materials and tapes as well as the manuscript of
Search
. He acknowledged part of this material. (If he had acknowledged it all, it would have looked as if his whole book had come from mine.)

Emmanuel Carrère, the French novelist and movie producer, stayed with me while doing research for his imaginative biography of Phil’s thoughts,
I’m Alive and You Are Dead
. My daughter Hatte cooked him fresh salmon sautéed in butter and lemon slices. He drank two bottles of good California wine with it, one red, one white. I gave him my manuscript. I don’t think he used any other sources. He ran with the “dream autobiography” idea.

It seemed logical to first send my book to Phil’s agent, Russ Galen. He wrote me in May
15, 1985:
“… [I]t seems to me (and again I’m seeing this through an emotional fog so can’t say anything for sure) that you’ve done a wonderful job of capturing what it was like to live with Phil in those days—the domestic, day-by-day side of things. And you’ve certainly brought him vividly to life as a character, as a personality…. [R]eading … [your manuscript] brings Phil back for me.” But Galen felt he was too close to the subject matter to handle my book. He wished me luck.

Top science fiction agent Virginia Kidd liked
Search
and tried to place it. After her initial reading, she said, “So that’s what really happened? We’d heard so many things.” I was surprised that people would be talking about my relationship with Phil back in Pennsylvania. Virginia was sure my book was going to go over in a big way, and that I would be giving talks and signing books all over the country. She sent it to all the top houses, but that was in the mid-eighties before there was so much interest in Philip K. Dick. There were some literary politics involved, too, and my credibility was put into question. Discouraged and disgusted, I gave up. Then in
1992
, Professor Sam Umland, who taught a course on PKD at the University of Nebraska, worked with me on a revision and arranged for the publication of
Search
by Mellen Press. It is still publishing a hundred-year library edition priced at
$119
.

Virginia Kidd gave a manuscript of
Search
to Tom Disch, a close friend of hers, and he and I began an occasional correspondence that some years later after the death of his partner turned into a friendly e-mail interchange lasting until his death by suicide on July
4, 2008
. He was very angry at Phil because Phil had turned him in to the FBI, but he thought Philip K. Dick was the best writer there was. Along with himself, Phil was one of the only two writers Tom admired.

I met my best friend, Miguel Díaz Fernádez of Segovia, Spain, via the Mellen edition of this book when he wrote me January
25, 2000
, regarding his Ph.D. dissertation on PKD. We have been e-mailing and phoning for ten years.

In
2001
, Darryl Mason, a talented Australian writer, came from England and stayed with me off and on for much of the summer to work on his biography of Phil for a contract with Albion Press. Too bad he never finished it. Phil is too much for some people.

An Argentine documentary crew came here in
2006
to do a documentary about Philip K. Dick and stayed with me the weekend they filmed in this area. In the evenings, we drank Argentine wine and had dinner in front of an open fire. I still correspond with two of them: the sound man, Sebastien Lipsicz, who was recently working with Francis Ford Coppola, and the director of the PKD documentary project, Dario Schwartzstein, who next went off to Basel, Switzerland, to video interview Dr. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, now
101
years old.

Tony Grisoni, who wrote the script for
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
and other avant-garde independent films, came from London and stayed with me two days in the summer of
2006
while doing research for a biopic about PKD.

There are three biopics in the works and a German biography has already come out.

Now Phil is world-famous and the world has become “Dickian” or maybe “Phildickian.” Twelve of his books have been or are being published in the Library of America—he’s been literarily canonized. His books are outselling many other American great authors: Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson. Meanwhile, almost no one here in Point Reyes Station has ever heard of Philip K. Dick.

If you go to the
New York Times
book page and scroll down the slot that says “Authors,” you will find Philip K. Dick’s name in the most distinguished literary company of today’s world. Click on him, and several pages of articles come up.

Michael Dirda of the
Washington Post
referred to Phil in an article for that publication as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Time
magazine puts Phil’s
Ubik
in their list of the one hundred most significant novels written since
1923
.

Then there are the movies:
Total Recall
with our governor, Arnold (a new version is coming out, too);
Blade Runner
, now a classic, with Harrison Ford;
Minority Report
, by Steven Spielberg with Tom Cruise;
Paycheck
, by Ang Lee with Ben Affleck. Some lesser-known films are
Screamers, Imposter, A Scanner Darkly, Next
, and the French film
Barjo
.

Phil’s old house is still here in Point Reyes Station and looks almost the same as when he and Kleo moved there in the fall of
1958
. The white picket fence has been replaced by a natural wood fence with no pickets, but I couldn’t climb over it anyway now.

Only a few people who knew Phil still live here. I see Sue Baty once in a while, and we play Boggle. Judge Baty, who married Philip and Nancy, is still around. Occasionally, I see Inez Storer at the Bovine Bakery. Missy Patterson works at the
Point Reyes Light
(the
Baywood Press
in Phil’s novels).

Phil was a unique super-being who made my life wonderful for a while and then terrible for a while. Recently, when I revised the early chapters of
Search for Philip K. Dick
, I enjoyed those happy times again, a period when Phil wrote many of the books that made him world-famous.