The Search for Philip K. Dick (6 page)

Germanic culture had a great attraction for Phil. He told me he was one-quarter German and a “sturm und drang” romantic. He adored Wagner, Goethe, Schubert, and Bach. He loved Pope John and hated the Berkeley Coop, Edward Teller, Alan Watts, Alan Temko, and radio station KPFA, which he said was filled with communists. He hated old men passionately, especially old men drivers. He told me about the Gegenearth, the hypothetical hidden planet on the exact other side of the sun from Earth. It was impossible for us to ever see it. He gave lectures on countertenors, the castrati of the Middle Ages, and dwarves in jars.

One noon as we were eating lunch together, he said calmly, completely out of the context of our discussion, “I had a perfectly good wife that I traded in for you.”

All my life I had been very direct and outspoken and never at a loss for words before, but this man could come out with statements that I couldn’t figure out how to answer. He was so sweet and calm that I couldn’t possibly get mad at him.

In March, Phil went to court to get his interlocutory divorce decree. When he came back home, he was upset and a little angry. I was puzzled because up until then he’d told me continually about how happy he was regarding the change he had made in his life. The next day we took the children to the amusement park at Lake Merritt, Oakland. We bought tickets for the little train that ran through the park. The children and I got on one of the cars but there wasn’t enough room for Phil. The conductor put him in another car with a bunch of Cub Scouts.

He wrote about his thoughts at the end of
Confessions of a Crap Artist
:

At the end of March, we drove to Mexico to get married. When we got to Tijuana I persuaded Phil that we should continue to Ensenada; Tijuana was too ugly to get married in. Phil was apprehensive on the lonely, mountainous ride down the Baja Peninsula. We stayed in a motel on the beach at Ensenada—I remember the large, rough-beamed room, the beautiful handmade blue-tiled floor, and the delicious, fresh-caught sea bass we had in the motel restaurant that night.

I had wanted to wait until April 2 to be married, but Phil was anxious to get back to Point Reyes for Jayne’s birthday on April 8, so we hurriedly walked out on the streets of the town to find out what to do; we had no idea what the procedure for getting married was down there. Although I had taken five years of Spanish in college, I couldn’t communicate with anyone. We weren’t taught to converse in the forties, only to learn to grammar and how to read. Finally, we found an English-speaking marriage broker who would prepare the proper legal papers. The judge adjudicated in an ancient Spanish fort that looked like a small medieval castle with linoleum on the floor and chickens running here and there. Beautiful Mexican ladies with babies in their arms waited on the wooden benches placed around the walls to see the judge.

The marriage ceremony sounded beautiful in Spanish, and Philip K. Dick and I were married on April Fool’s Day, 1959.

We went shopping in the local bazaar for presents for the girls. As we drove north toward the California border, Phil said he had to tell me something terrible about himself. He was embarrassed about this matter and felt it would make me stop loving him. He was sure that it showed how inadequate and defective he was. It turned out that he had a hernia.

“Why don’t you get it fixed?” I said.

He said, “I’d have to go to the hospital and I couldn’t do that.”

This didn’t seem like a good decision to me but, after all, we were on our honeymoon, so I didn’t say anything.

In Ensenada we had bought a gallon of tequila (for thirty cents, I recall), and Phil decided that he wasn’t going to pay duty on it at the border. I was quite apprehensive when he hid it under our luggage. He looked right at the border guard, smiled, and said we had nothing to declare. Twenty miles into the United States we heard a siren. It was the U.S. Customs police. Phil turned pale. I thought he might faint. He thought they were after him for the tequila. However, they passed our car and went on. He was extremely relieved.

When we got back to Point Reyes, we had been gone only three days. The announcement of our marriage was in the local weekly newspaper, the
Baywood Press
, on April 16, along with such news items as “Lavinia Adams Motored Sunday to Novato” and “Giant Mushroom Found by Warren Merritt.” There were also mentions of the Ladies’ Garden Club Primrose Tea Flowered-Hat Contest, along with the usual drownings, people falling off the cliffs, etc.

On the drive back we had decided that the girls should call Phil “Daddy.” The children had no problems with this. When they spoke of Richard they called him their “first father.” They were happy with Phil. Besides reading to them and playing monster, he let them eat hot dogs in bed. I wanted Phil to adopt the girls, but he felt he would then have to be totally financially responsible for them and he didn’t have enough earning power. I was disappointed, but he pointed out to me that if he were to adopt the children he would be, to some extent, cutting them off from their paternal grandparents and he didn’t feel that this would be in the children’s best interest. After he explained this I could appreciate his position. After all, he was a good father and we had a great sense of family unity. These were the important things.

Now that we were married I felt comfortable introducing Phil to my friends. Once in a while I introduced him as “Richard.” “One husband is the same as another,” I kidded him. We went to dinner at the Okos. Adolph Oko was the local realtor. In 1948 he had been captain of an Israeli ship during the War of Liberation and ran the British blockade, taking seven thousand refugees from Bessarabia to Israel. Oko’s wife, Gladys, was a sweet, pretty, somewhat vague woman who drank a lot. Phil created a not-very-sympathetic picture of them as the Runcibles in
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
, and in this book he recounted some of the terrible, sacrilegious “Easter jokes” that Captain Oko liked to tell.

Captain Oko was a friend of Admiral Nimitz and a moving spirit of the Drake Navigator’s Guild, which sought to prove that Sir Francis Drake had landed not in Tiburon, but on the shores of West Marin, where the “plate of brasse” had been found in the 1930s. Oko had reproductions of it made and gave us one to hang on our wall. (Years later the plate was proved to be a fake.) Phil wove all this lore into
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
.

We became friends with our next-door neighbors, Pete and Joan Stevens, and they often came over for drinks and dinner.

In 1983 when I was working on this book, I contacted Joan by phone in a town in Arizona. Chris Stevens, one of her grown children who still lived in Point Reyes Station, told me that she didn’t have a phone but that she could be reached at the local bar Wednesday evenings. I did reach her and we had a great talk. She remembered Phil with great affection and nostalgia and was rereading all his books.

Pete and Joan no longer lived together at that time (although they did again later on); Pete lived somewhere in the Bay Area. I was lucky to run into him in front of the Palace Market meat counter when he was visiting in the area and to be able to talk with him briefly. Pete enjoyed hearing that he was the model for the inventor in several of Phil’s books and stories, among them
The Zap Gun
and
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.

Pete was a brilliant inventor and technician who worked for Walter Landor, a well-known San Francisco product designer. He commuted daily to a remodeled warehouse on the San Francisco waterfront. Phil and Pete became quite fond of each other.

I introduced Phil to Bob Allen, the slightly plump, five-foot, four-inch popular science teacher at the West Marin School. He took the two of us on a dig at Limantour Beach to excavate a fire lens, the remnants of hundreds of years of Indian campfires. We found obsidian arrowheads, bird points, pieces of an Indian pipe, and shards of Ming pottery that had been washed up from a shipwreck from Spanish Colonial times. Bob donated all our finds to a museum in Sausalito. Phil put Bob Allen and these events in
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
. Bob was a prominent figure in
Dr. Bloodmoney
, also.

After Phil met Bill Thompson, the president of the Lions Club and the local butcher, he put him in
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
as Jack E. Vepp. Dr. Plattes became Dr. Terance, and Joe Gomez, a local contractor, became John Flores. Flores was the name of an old Berkeley friend of Phil’s who had died some years ago, so perhaps both of them occupied this character. Phil often melded two or more people into one character.

Lois Mini, the bouncy red-headed gym teacher at the West Marin Elementary School, had known Phil in Berkeley. Her ex-husband was Norman Mini, a close friend of Phil’s. She became a good friend of mine, too.

Phil was extremely frugal, whereas I had holes in my pockets. Phil tried to teach me to be careful with money. He told me, “Save up errands and do them all at once to avoid wasting gas. Shop at more than one supermarket, buy loss leaders, and stock them up, but only if they are something you use a lot. Use discount stores for everything you need to buy. Never, never impulse buy.” I tried, I bought a pair of white shorts from Sears Roebuck instead of going to Peck and Peck. I had to buy some decent clothes for Phil; this was a necessity. I bought him a few good-quality casual clothes, the sort that Richard used to wear, and new underwear.

Phil was happy with his new wardrobe. Then he said, “I’d really like to grow a beard.”

“Great.” I told him. He kept thanking me because I’d allowed him to grow a beard. I couldn’t figure out why he felt he had to thank me. With the beard and the new clothes he looked quite distinguished.

Phil was the perfect husband. Almost too good to be true. If all my fantasies of a mate had been realized they wouldn’t have come to one one-hundredth of life with Phil. He was a wonderful companion, lover, and husband, as I told him frequently. He told me in detail how beautiful, intelligent, wise, and kind I was. We hugged, kissed, and held hands off and on all day long. The children teased us about how mushy we were. When we all went to the zoo together and saw two capuchin monkeys twined together on a branch, Hatte pointed at them and exclaimed, not unkindly, “Look. Mother and Phil.”

Phil was generous with his time and energy. He comforted the children when they had problems, but he didn’t spoil them. He was a good disciplinarian, too. He talked to the children and reasoned with them. He helped fold the laundry. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do. He never sat around while I was working. He was the most considerate as well as the most lovable person I ever met.

That’s what I thought back then
.

In addition to all Phil’s other charms and virtues, it turned out that he knew how to make frozen daiquiris. He had a talent for martinis too, and made me two every evening. He, himself, drank only one glass of wine. On one of our excursions with the girls, we went to the town of Sonoma to visit the Buena Vista Winery. Phil fell in love with a zinfandel that Buena Vista Winery bottled, a wine made from a mysterious grape of unknown origin. In the evening when we returned, he opened one of the bottles and sat in the living room sipping wine. He said, “In vino veritas,” and then, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,” followed up by, “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” and then he talked of “hubris.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him apprehensively. He laughed and laughed, and never did explain.

We had brought back duck eggs that Phil found under a bush in the Sonoma town square. We put them on a heating pad in the study in order to hatch them. Ten days later the eggs started to smell. We opened the windows to air the room out, theorizing that all the eggs couldn’t be bad, and turned on the radiant heat in that room in case it was too cold. Three weeks later the smell became really bad and we had to give up. We took the eggs outside and threw them against the apple tree in the front yard. The sky was instantly full of turkey vultures, twenty of them, circling above the apple tree. The electric bill for that month was $135, astronomical for those days.

We used to buy ducks to cook from an old codger who raised several different kinds of birds in a marshy area on the other side of the Bay. He charged 25 cents a pound, but we had to do the plucking ourselves. It was disconcerting to buy a bird from him. He would chop off its head on a stump which he used for a chopping block and the head would fall on the ground and quack a little. Phil, the animal lover, described himself as originally a farm person on those days and was totally unperturbed. After our duck egg hatching failure, we bought some live ducks from the old codger, a Rouen and a Muscovy. A little boy who had to move away gave us his pet duck, “Alice,” a wonderful white Pekin duck who was very intelligent and laid two hundred eggs with large yellow yolks every year. We bought a pair of guinea fowl, and they hatched their eggs somewhere off in the bushes without any attention from us. Soon we had twelve guinea fowl running around continually making loud, clacking sounds. The children and Phil trooped out to the former dog runs to feed all these fowl creatures twice a day.

We bought a half-dozen banty chickens in Petaluma, Phil had always wanted some. He loved to watch the colorful little roosters hopping around with their wings outspread herding the females. “They’re just like me,” he said.

Somehow we ended up with four roosters and no hens. All four roosters would perch on the fence outside of the study window where Phil was trying to write and crow for hours, much to his irritation. Soon we gave them away. We acquired a guinea pig as a pet for the girls. It looked to me as if it was always cowering in terror but it did let itself be petted.