The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  The winter of 1962—63 was marked by this kind of rain. Our pasture turned into a sea of mud. The acre-size hollow in our field, which we christened “Lake Dick,” filled with water, and in the lulls between storms the children paddled around in galvanized washtubs and caught tadpoles.

  A frog symphony enriched our nights. Almost every day we put on slickers and boots and went to hunt the mushrooms growing on Inverness Ridge.

  I have such a vivid memory of driving into our driveway after dark on a cold evening, seeing Phil throw the door open, stride out to meet me, and help carry in the groceries. We started talking as we walked to the house and continued while unpacking the bags of groceries. All the lights in the house were on, and Phil had started a fire in the fireplace. He always wanted to know everything that had happened that day. He had been staying home more, too busy with his work to go out in the community much. I’d tell him about the volunteer work at the school library, what the Bluebirds had done, all about the local politics, and all the latest gossip.

  We would talk about the children, Phil’s writing, the music on KPFA, our dreams and our interpretations of them. While I cooked, Phil would help Hatte with her English or Jayne and Tandy with their math or science. Phil’s relationship with Hatte had become special since she had become old enough to share some of his interests. After dinner we’d get out the Monopoly set and roll for tokens. Phil, with the old shoe, would build a hotel on Broadway. I would eventually land there and be forced out of the game.

  The many people and events we talked about during those early-evening hours appear in Dr. Bloodmoney. The school-board meetings headed by Orion Stroud are like the ones Phil and I went to when we were trying to get a kindergarten started. News and Views, like the Baywood Press, had a reporter there. I hate to say it, but Bonnie was probably based on me. She is living in my house, anyway. In the book Phil dropped the H bomb on her. Phil had a crush on Jan Stratton, the principal’s wife, who was part of the character of Bonny, too. George Keller was the principal of the West Marin School in the novel, while Jan’s husband, George Stratton, was the principal in real life. George replaced another shortlived principal whom the school board was “out to get.” Phil and I and others rushed to his defense, but it turned out that before enlisting community support to save his job he had already secretly signed resignation papers.

  Mr. Austurias was based on Bob Allen, the science teacher. (The school board “got him” the next year, too.) Mr. Austurias picks chanterelles and cooks them with our recipe. That rascal, Phil, has him making love to Bonnie. Then he kills him off. Dr. Stockstill in the novel has a house in West Marin and a boat in Tomales Bay like Dr. A’s. A local contractor had the name Stockstill in our real world. Phil was scrambling names and people as usual.

  The mad atomic scientist who created the holocaust (this is the only novel of Phil’s in which the bomb drops) was based on the physicist Edmund Teller, the prime mover in the creation of the hydrogen bomb. Phil hated Teller. Mr. Tree, a.k.a. Dr. Bluthgeld—Dr. Bloodmoney—is paranoid. He has an attack of vertigo (as Phil had had in high school), the street tilting away from him. Mr. Tree has blotches, or thinks he has blotches on his face and can’t ride in a bus or go to the opera, ballet, or symphony, as Phil couldn’t as a young man. Mr. Tree believes he is disfigured. Foolish Bonnie likes evil Dr. Bloodmoney. She is promiscuous. In the end, she leaves her husband, deserts her children, and moves to Berkeley: “Her marriage is over and everybody realizes it.” Phil steps in and out of his characters regardless of gender.

  In Dr. Bloodmoney there’s a big discussion about how good mass production is, the opposite idea to the admiration of handcraft discussed in The Man in the High Castle. I, of course, was deeply involved in making handcrafted jewelry.

  Phil put some of his old friends from Berkeley in Dr. Bloodmoney. Phil and Maury Guy (Iskandar) share the role of Stuart McConchie. Jim Fergesson was inspired by Phil’s old boss at University Radio, Herb Hollis. Dean Hardy and Ella Hardy are based on Phil’s friends Vince and Virginia Lusby. Hoppy Harrington was created from Phil’s memories of the many eccentric radio repairmen who worked over the years at University Radio. Hoppy used the timer from our RCA washer-drier combination for repairs to the essential machinery of that post-holocaust society. There was a little of Pete Stevens and Tony Morris, another local friend of Phil’s who was an appliance repairman, in the character of Hoppy, too.

  In Dr. Bloodmoney, Walt Dangerfield is cut off from Earth, stuck in a rocket that goes round and round in its orbit. It never got off to Mars the day the bomb fell, because the second-stage rocket never fired. Dangerfield’s wife, who accompanied him, has died, and he is all alone up there. Dangerfield has Phil’s ulcer. Heroically, he acts as cosmic disc jockey to the people struggling to survive on Earth. He soothes, entertains, educates, and keeps the world community together but, alas, he becomes ill. Is he dying? I was worried about Walt/Phil.

  Was Phil also little Bill, a teratoma, living in his twin sister’s side, in touch with the voices of the dead? I was hopeful when little Bill got “born” out of his twin sister’s side but worried when he ended up in the impaired body of Hoppy. It was good that Hoppy/Phil wasn’t going to take over the world through his psychokinetic control of Walt. It looked as if he would for a while. In the end all ends well—I think. At any rate, it was more hopeful than Martian Time-Slip. Phil put together some of the strangest kinds of feelings in this novel. Dr. Bloodmoney, in some ways, is really horrible. But it’s also charming. Is there such a thing as charmingly horrible?

  As the spring of 1963 approached, we were quarreling more. Phil pushed all my buttons regularly. Provoking arguments had become his new indoor sport.

  I continued to compete with him and tell him straight out when he was wrong. But years later, my oldest daughter, Hatte, told me that she remembered a new note in our arguments. In one, Phil yelled, “You killed Richard and now you’re trying to kill me.” Back in those days, I couldn’t process this information. I didn’t even hear it. I do remember Phil saying on a number of occasions, “You don’t love me, you just wanted a husband and a father for your children,” repeating over and over the idea that Dr. A had verbalized to him during their first meeting. No answer I gave carried any weight with him. I tried many times an indignant, “I do too love you,” but when I couldn’t ever get him to acknowledge this avowal, I finally sarcastically replied, hoping to shake him out of this negative litany, “Well, of course, I just wanted a husband and a father for my children. Why else would I marry you?” No doubt he believed this.

  One afternoon, as we were driving out of the field after hauling some lumber to the barn, Phil got out of the car to open the gate. As he was opening the gate, I slipped the clutch, gunned the motor, and inched the car forward, preparing to drive the car out on the road. Suddenly Phil flung the gate open and ran off in the field. I thought, disgustedly, “What is he doing, now?” After I had driven out on the road, he came back and got into the car. I didn’t even ask him what he thought he had been doing. Everything was too discouraging. My defense was denial. (But the other side of this coin was that I had a staunch unyielding faith in our love for each other and in our marriage. Yet, I was also annoyed.)

  Looking back, I wonder how Phil interpreted my annoyance; he might have thought I was angry because I hadn’t been able to run over him with the car.

  Then Phil began sending the children off to their rooms for no reason. One day, one of the girls left the freezer door open and Phil took privileges away from all three girls. They felt he was being unfair, and so did I. I called a family meeting to try to solve this problem. “Great idea,” I thought, “We’ll solve our problems with family meetings.” But during a discussion of some domestic problem, the girls all agreed with me and each one said that she thought Phil’s viewpoint was wrong. Phil stalked furiously out of the living room, and there were no more family meetings.

  Phil took up snuff instead of smoking Egyptian cigarettes. He might as w
ell have taken up chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor as far as I was concerned. He often had snuff in his beard. Yet, he was funny, too, when he enthusiastically discoursed on the different brands of snuff, the history of snuff, and so on.

  We sought some counseling with Dr. A and saw him alternately once a week, hoping that this would help our marriage. But Phil wasn’t really having therapy. He was playing games, gathering material for his writing, getting prescriptions, and preparing for a coup.

  Next time Maury Guy came out to visit us he and Phil had a falling out. Maury was studying Subud and the I Ching. Phil told him, “The I Ching is a bunch of bullshit. I’m going to write a novel about it and show it up,” although at this time Phil consulted the I Ching at least once daily. Maury was deeply offended on the I Ching’s behalf. Maury had also gotten terribly tired of Phil’s litany about me: “Anne’s marvelous, she’s terrible, she’s marvelous, and she’s getting more terrible by the moment.” Maury said, “It was all so confused that I thought perhaps Phil was dabbling in drugs.”

  June Kresy, Phil’s former neighbor, remembered that Phil came over to her house several times “expressing great fear” of me. Phil had told June that he felt that he wasn’t contributing financially to the marriage, and June noted that this feeling of Phil’s was turning into a strong resentment of me, but she couldn’t understand the fear of me he expressed.

  I had absolutely no idea that Phil felt like this until June told me many years later.

  Once Phil and I quarreled so furiously that furniture was thrown, and Phil struck me. The children were upset and frightened. I called Bill Christensen to come and intervene. When Bill drove into the driveway in his official car, Phil walked out to talk to him. I expected Bill to tell Phil that he shouldn’t be hitting his wife.

  But Bill said to me many years later, “Phil was so good with words. I had observed him being so loving and charming to you. And there was something about him that made you want to help him. I should have talked to you, Anne, but there was Phil, calm, cool, and collected, and you were standing there angrily on the porch, your arms folded, your eyes shooting sparks, and Phil would say, ‘You see, she’s just about to go off again. And I love her so. Isn’t it too bad?’” And so Bill drove off. I thought he had “talked to” Phil, but instead Phil had convinced Bill that I was violent and crazy. He had evidently been laying the groundwork for these ideas with Bill all along, and possibly he really believed them. I was assertive and direct, and yelled at times, although by then I had stopped throwing dishes.

  I continued to worry aloud about money. I didn’t mean to put pressure on Phil and in my heart I always believed that somehow we would manage, but, looking back, I think Phil didn’t perceive my faith. Perhaps I only expressed the negative side of my thoughts and feelings.

  I continued to develop my jewelry business, opening up accounts in southern California by mail, and told Phil, “Maybe the jewelry business will grow enough to help our family finances.” It never occurred to me to worry about Phil’s ego in relation to my earning money. After all, he was a recognized writer. How could a brilliant and accomplished person like him have any ego problems?

  Phil told me that he was going to sell the Inverness cabin that Joe and Dorothy had given him. I was sorry to hear him make this decision. I loved that place; we’d had some wonderful times there. But there were a few rotten boards on the front porch and Phil said that he didn’t want to spend any time doing carpentry or house repairs. This sounded logical. He did sell the cabin. I didn’t know that he had promised Joe and Dorothy that he would transfer the cabin back to them for the purchase price if he were ever going to get rid of it; nor did I know that he told Joe and Dorothy that it was my idea to sell it.

  Next, Phil told me, “I’m tired of being a writer. I can’t get what I want published, I don’t earn any money for what I write. I want to go back into the record business.” After a lot of conversation about writing versus having a record store, he convinced me that this was what he really wanted. I said, “So, let’s mortgage the house and buy a record store.” Shortly after this conversation, Phil’s mother phoned. Speaking coldly, she told me it was improvident of me to believe that mortgaging one’s house was a good way to finance a business.

  The next time I saw Dr. A, he bawled me out and told me that I had “delusions of grandeur for wanting to mortgage our house and go into the record business.” “But,” I told him, “it was Phil’s idea, I was just going along with what he said he wanted.” Dr. A didn’t seem to hear me. Behind both Dr. A’s and Dorothy’s comments was the implication that I was trying to make Phil give up his writing. Looking back, I think that I had missed my cue. When Phil talked about giving up writing and buying a record store, my role should have been to beg him to continue to write. I wouldn’t have minded doing this at all. I liked that he was a writer. That was one of his big attractions. I could have cared less about owning a record store.

  That summer I had planned a vacation for all of us, a week camping at Yosemite. I told Phil, “Going on a camping trip will be good for this family. It will bring us together.” Phil wasn’t enthusiastic. He didn’t want to go, but I insisted. I was trying to find some way to improve our relationship. “Next year, let’s go to Mexico or Canada,” I said. I made all the preparations, food, equipment, clothes, but at the last minute Phil balked and refused to go. The girls and I were disappointed; we went to the Russian River just up the road twenty miles and camped in a tent for one night.

  Then occurred the first of Phil’s unpredictable actions that was to frighten and paralyze me, and also to make me very angry. I was eating a pleasant dinner with my family when Sheriff Bill Christensen came to the door. Bill had a bunch of papers in his hand that said I had to go with him to Ross Psychiatric Hospital for seventy-two hours of observation. The papers were signed by Dr. A.

  It was easy in those prefeminist days to arrange psychiatric commitments in California in 1963. I wasn’t the only woman this happened to. Only one doctor’s signature was required. The laws have since been changed to prevent this kind of civil-rights violation.

  Phil was perfectly charming to Bill, and calm as a cucumber. You’d think Bill was coming by to have a cup of coffee and gossip with us. Hatte remembered Bill’s saying, “You girls will understand this when you’re older.”

  But even as a thirteen-year-old girl, she thought to herself, “I understand as much as I’ll ever understand; I know that he’s wrong and I know better than he what’s right.”

  Phil had been telling Dr. A that I was ruining the family with my outrageous expenditures; that I had a “grandiose” plan to mortgage the house for $50,000 and buy a record business; that I was planning trips to Mexico and Canada; that I had threatened him with a knife, and tried to run him down with the car. Phil had arranged for Bill Christensen to confer with Dr. A, too, after having primed the latter with the same stories. Phil used to say to me, as a commentary on human nature, “Everything I tell you three times is true.” In this case, he got quite a bit of mileage with this technique. Hitler originated it.

  Earlier, he had approached my best friends to persuade them to testify against me at a sanity hearing, but they wouldn’t agree. They thought I was fine mentally. But Phil’s big lie technique had left them stunned, and in those days it was taboo to get involved with husband-and-wife problems. Years later my friend, Missy Patterson, told me, “Anne, you were railroaded.”

  I couldn’t believe what was happening; it was like a bad dream. One minute I was sitting with Phil and the girls at the dinner table, the next minute I was riding in the sheriff’s car going to a psychiatric hospital. I gave Bill a piece of my mind in a deadly calm way. I knew I had to be cool but I would really have liked to hit him over the head with my purse.

  Hatte was furious at Phil; this was something he didn’t expect. She never felt really friendly to him again. During my stay in the hospital, Missy Patterson told me that Phil asked her several times to take the girls
to the beach, but she refused. She didn’t want to do anything for him. At one point Hatte bawled out Dr. A, but she was just a thirteen-year-old and had no power to change anything.

  When I got to Ross Hospital, I told the head psychiatrist, Dr. S, my story. I began, “I was having normal fights with my husband; I used to occasionally throw a plate or two for emphasis….” At the time he led me to think he believed me. After talking with me, Dr. S talked to Dr. A. He was furious with Dr. A and wouldn’t even speak to Phil (who had shown up at the hospital). His lips literally curled with contempt when Phil tried to talk to him that evening. Phil slunk away, looking ashamed.

  Dr. S pointed out to me that I had the choice of going to a legal hearing with judges, lawyers, and witnesses or agreeing to going to Langley Porter Clinic for two weeks for an evaluation. At the end of that time, he felt, they would release me as a person who did not have the sort of serious psychiatric problems that would warrant hospitalization. I felt crushed and stigmatized. I had no spirit left to fight and to go through an involved legal hearing. I had no option but to take his advice and go to Langley Porter.

  Researching for this book, I was able to obtain my medical records from Ross Hospital and Langley Porter Clinic under the Freedom of Information Act. In 1963, there were no such rights. But I was in for a surprise. Dr. S, who I had thought was sympathetic to me, wrote, “The husband was the more stable of the two…. [H]e would never lie.” He must have talked to Phil later and, like Dr. A and me, been enchanted by Phil, the magical shaman of the twentieth century. Maybe Bill Christensen weighed in there, too. I was brought up believing in male chivalry, but in many cases I’ve noted men bond together against a woman. I was amazed when I got older to realize that many men are quite afraid of women.

  It was frightening as those heavy metal doors shut and locked behind me when I entered the fifth-floor ward at Langley Porter. But I learned something important. Now, I have a lot of empathy for the political prisoners of the twentieth century who were seized and carried off and imprisoned—often for good. I was one of them, but luckily one who got back home.