The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  The doctor at Langley Porter prescribed a medication, Stelazine. I tried one pill but it made me so groggy and depressed that I held the next one under my tongue when the nurse gave it to me and shortly afterward quietly spit it out in the toilet. Taking this awful drug was mandatory, but no one in his right mind would take it. Every day after I was given one I surreptitiously spit it out.

  When I looked around me, I found that in some ways this was going to be an interesting experience. The other people in the ward with me weren’t crazies at all, as I had expected. They were just people—pitiful people with terrible problems. I wanted to help them. I listened to their stories and gave some encouragement and good advice.

  Generally it was very boring there. I felt isolated from my busy life and insisted that Phil and the girls come every day to keep me company. They spent the entire time I was in the hospital driving back and forth over the curvy thirty-five miles between the hospital and Point Reyes Station.

  Hatte was the valedictorian of her class for eighth-grade graduation and I couldn’t go. Though she had been popular with her classmates, she was suddenly uninivited to all of the parties that were being given. On one occasion during the drive to the hospital, Phil told her, “I’m going to talk to the doctors today. I’m sure they’re going to tell me that I’m the one that should be in there, not your mother.” On the way home he told her, “That’s what they told me.”

  Hatte reflected, “I already thought that, myself. Well, maybe it’s true and maybe not, that’s the kind of thing he’d say.” The hospital records say Mr. Dick “was unhappy. He says that he has never seen his wife looking worse. Mr. Dick feels he is the mentally ill partner and should be hospitalized. He feels he may be schizophrenic.” The doctor who wrote the record went on to say that he feels the problem is that Mr. Dick was “unable to control his wife.” Well, of course not. That’s not what marriage is about.

  A few days later Phil and I took part in a group therapy session at the hospital. The psychiatrist in charge was amazed and entertained at the snappy dialogue, the complex interaction between us, and all the depressed patients momentarily woke up.

  At that time Phil was writing The Simulacra. Part of the story is set in Jenner, a town like Point Reyes Station, described as a dismal, rainy, swampy, jungle populated by vegetarian “chuppers,” throwbacks to Neanderthal Man. Richard Kongrosian, world-famous psychokinetic pianist, is falling to pieces. The beautiful woman president of the country, Nicole Thibodeaux, has turned out to be a phony, a simulacra of the real Nicole, who died long ago. The country has been taken over by the head of the secret police. To save Nicole, Richard Kongrosian uses his psychokinetic ability to send her to Jenner to stay with motherly but boring Mrs. Kongrosian and her five chupper children. From this time on a policeman has a major role in Phil’s writing.

  Langley Porter released me after two weeks. Phil insisted that I stop and see Dr. A on the way home from the hospital. As far I was concerned, Dr. A was a non-person: he didn’t exist in my universe anymore. That afternoon, I remember Dr. A saying to me, “You fooled Ross Hospital, you fooled Dr. S, you fooled Langley Porter Clinic, but you don’t fool me. I know you’re a manic-depressive.” And grumpily, after I had given him my coldest response, he said, “All manic-depressives drop their psychiatrists.”

  He advised me to switch over to a female psychologist, Dr. J, who was also a marriage counselor. She was there at his office to meet me, a skinny bleached blond with harlequin glasses, a designer suit, and high-heeled shoes. I had to agree. I certainly would never talk to Dr. A again, and she seemed warm and kind. It was arranged that Phil would come with me to sessions with her.

  I phoned Dr. J, my ex-psychologist, and we met for an interview at her house in Mill Valley. She seemed awfully nervous at first. It was almost like she had a guilty conscience. She told me that she didn’t like Phil; his magic and charm and her receptors “weren’t in phase with each other.” She said that Dr. A got a kickback from the fees I paid to her. After Phil left, I went to see her once a week for about two years. Often my second daughter, Jayne, would ride with me, and we’d grocery shop afterward while the family laundry was washing at a nearby laundromat. During our last session, Dr. J thanked me for coming to her and didn’t charge me. I remained in touch with her over the years.

  That afternoon in Dr. A’s office, Phil’s usual cheerful self appeared clouded over by bewilderment as he put his arm around me in a protective manner. But it was too late. He hadn’t protected me from himself.

  I thought I had just been through a horrible experience, but worse was to follow. The morning after we got back home, Phil told me that Dr. A had said I must continue taking the pills I had been spitting out in the hospital (of course, I had told Phil about this), that I was sick, and I must take these pills or he would leave me. So I took them. I wanted to keep my family together, and, in spite of everything, I loved this man and didn’t want to lose him.

  Stelazine, an antipsychotic drug fashionable at that time, has many side effects. Sometimes it is referred to as a chemical straitjacket or a chemical lobotomy. Some people taking it develop an extreme lethargy that can pass into a coma and death. It is helpful to about 40 percent of schizophrenics. It makes some people think more clearly. Phil was lucky; it affected Phil this way.

  These drugs must have been much stronger that the ones I had spit out at Langley Porter because they turned me into a zombie. I had no energy, I couldn’t think, and all I could do was lie on the couch. Once I had taken one of them I didn’t have sense enough not to take any more. I took these horrible mind-dulling pills for two or three months. Later, in The Ganymede Takeover, written by Phil and Ray Nelson, a young woman is described as undergoing oblivion therapy. She loses her personality and keeps staring at ants building anthills. Unhappiness has been cured—but there’s no one left in that psyche to be unhappy.

  My friend, Sue Baty, the local judge’s wife, told me in 1982, “You weren’t sick before you took those pills; the pills made you sick. I was horrified, but I didn’t know what to do. I had grave reservations about Phil’s motives and felt Dr. A was acting unprofessionally.” Unable to accomplish anything or even do much housework, I practically lived over at Sue’s during the day that September. I read all her books but I couldn’t remember a single thing that I read. I didn’t know that Phil was also taking Stelazine. He told June Kresy how good it made him feel. She told me in our phone interview that she remembered him saying, “It doesn’t have the same effect on me that it does on Anne, at all.”

  In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Richard and Emily Hnatt make a lot of money selling her ceramic pots and decide to take the expensive Evolution Therapy (or E Therapy) from famous Dr. Denkmal in Germany. Richard evolves, his thinking becomes clearer, more subtle and creative, but Emily is one of the rare failures: she devolves, her features coarsen, she becomes rather simple, loses her creativity, and begins doing pot designs that she has already done before.

  When I finally stopped taking those dreadful pills, I was very angry. I hadn’t been doing anything for months and I was rested and strong. But I shoved the anger down where I wouldn’t have to deal with it or even know about it. I wanted to put my life and my family back together, to restore it to a happy, normal condition. But in my brain, my whole past was a series of blurs: my grade-school friends; my favorite brother; the junior-high fudge club; my little dog, Spot. They all were like ruined frescoes in my mind, the colors gone, the outlines partly missing, the middles totally obliterated. I’d forgotten everything I learned in my favorite college courses about the Renaissance and invertebrate paleontology. I’d forgotten my children’s infancy. I’d forgotten most of the good times with Phil.

  We both went together to see Dr. J. Once, during a visit to her office, she told Phil that his aim had been to control me—in a novel, in a hospital, or with drugs. She pointed out to Phil that he had a problem that may have existed in his family for generations.

  Phi
l replied agreeably, meekly, “You’re probably right.”

  I told Phil, “You want a submissive wife who is an interesting intellectual companion. It’s like wanting dry soup or warm ice. I can’t be submissive. It’s not my nature. My idea of a relationship is an equal partnership.” I reproached him about the whole hospital-Stelazine episode.

  He replied emphatically, “The whole thing was a mistake.” But that didn’t change how I felt or what I had experienced. I wasn’t to forgive him for a very long time, maybe not ever.

  At Dr. J’s, Phil blamed me for a decision he had made. Earlier in the year we had discussed where Hatte would go to high school. Should she go to local Tomales High or make the long commute to one of the large suburban high schools in southern Marin County? Phil had made the decision that she should go to Tomales High. This topic came up at a therapy session with Dr. J, and Phil was bitter at me about it. I told him, “You decided, Phil.”

  He was startled and said, “Yes, I did, and that’s just typical of me to blame you.”

  Dr J said, “Put away your rusty old weapons.” Phil really liked this image and puts this idea into the hilariously funny The Zap Gun. In this novel, Lars Powderdry, weapons fashion designer for Wes-bloc, designs such items as a sixty-stage guidance system that is “plowshared” into a cigar lighter that will compose new Mozart string quartets when lit. Lars’ Peep-East counterpart, Lilo Topchev, designs similar fake weapons. The political balance between the two superpowers depends on public belief that each side has military superiority, and that these phony designs are real. On his way to neutral Iceland to collaborate with Lila on real weapons to repel real invaders from space, Lars Powderdry, terrified of failure, buys a copy of the Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan comic book at the airport magazine stand and finds that all his “original” designs had already been printed there.

  In the midst of some of the funniest writing Phil ever wrote, serious personal and theological tidbits and incredible political precognition surface. There is a Julian the Apostate satellite. Lars is almost killed by an overdose of drugs that Lilo gives him. Meanwhile, he is taking his own combination of Escalatium and Conjorizine in quantities that would kill an ordinary person but which only give him a post-nasal drip. Pete Freid, in this novel, is a dead ringer for Pete Stevens. In real life, Pete worked for Walter Landor. In the novel, Pete Freid works for Jack Lanferman. Walter Lanferman was a high school buddy of Phil’s.

  Pete Freid is the one who makes the actual weapons that Lars designs. Surly G. Febbs, typical man-of-the-times, dreams up a real weapon, a needle-eye converter that will turn an enemy into a bearskin rug. A fascist type, he has made the first real weapon in years and is planning to take over the government but falls victim to the hypnotic man-in-the-maze game, the prototype of Phil’s famous empathy box. There are endless secret police in this novel. Phil probably finished this novel in 1965 while he was living in Oakland and added a lot of drug information that I don’t think he would have known about when living in West Marin. He also added aspects of his new housemate Nancy Hackett to the portrait of Lilo Topchev.

  Almost simultaneously, Phil was writing a novel about a woman who was a drug addict. Kathy Sweetscent, in Now Wait for Last Year, is probably Phil’s most monstrous female character, a woman with malignant worms of the psyche. She is sadistic, self-destructive, and makes more money than her husband, dear, earnest Dr. Eric Sweetscent. She has whimsically addicted herself to a fatal hallucinogenic drug, an addiction that can’t be cured. She surreptitiously drops this drug into Sweetscent’s coffee. Good man that he is, he travels into the future and obtains a cure for both of them. In the future, he finds that she has deteriorated physically and mentally. In ten years, she will become unmanageable and violent and will have to be forcibly committed. Eric considers suicide, but in a touching conversation with an automatic taxi in Tijuana, decides to go back and care for her.

  Phil didn’t show either of these two novels to me. I didn’t read them until after his death. The checks for these novels didn’t go into our joint bank account, either.

  In the midst of all these unhappy events, a happy event occurred. Phil won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. The Baywood Press sent a photographer to take a picture of Laura holding the Hugo and displayed it prominently in its next issue. We cooked a special celebration dinner. But that fall, one terrible thing after another happened. Our blue merle collie died. We bought a white borzoi, a living sculpture. Phil named him “Ollie,” after Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I came to love this dignified, intelligent dog more than any other pet I had ever owned, but in retrospect, I don’t think it was the right dog for a proletarian writer.

  Next, President Kennedy was shot. Phil literally fell on the floor when he heard the news over the radio. He followed the events of the next several days closely and was terribly emotional about the situation. He remained depressed all that fall.

  Tumpey, Phil’s beloved tomcat, disappeared. Phil began muttering that the fates were out to get him. “We’ll get some kittens, Phil,” I said, “some darling Siamese kittens.” We drove to Tiburon and bought two Siamese kittens, a boy and a girl, twins.

  Shortly after we got them home they developed cat distemper. They wouldn’t eat; they were dying. The vet came and said, “They probably can’t be saved.” But Phil was determined to save them, so the vet told him how to force-feed the kittens for a one-in-a-hundred chance of success. Phil stayed up all night and fed the kittens with an eyedropper for a couple of weeks. But they kept fading away. I told Phil I thought it would be more humane to put them to sleep. But he wouldn’t. He just kept trying to keep them alive. He was terribly depressed when they died. I should have realized something was terribly wrong when Phil didn’t want to get another cat.

  Soon after this, we quarreled over some trivial matter, and Phil packed his suitcase and went to Berkeley to stay with his mother. I couldn’t believe it. He went to his mother’s! In my rule book, grown men did not run back to their mother’s house even if they did become angry with their wives and leave home for a respite. I drove to Berkeley with the girls to bring Phil back. Near his mother’s house, I saw him walking along the street. He got in the car with us.

  “You mean you’d drive clear over here to bring me back to Point Reyes?” He was astonished.

  “Of course, dummy,” I said.

  Seeking a way to help our marriage and our whole state of being, I had the family begin attending St. Columba’s, the small High Episcopal church in Inverness. Tandy had been going to Sunday school, loved it, and had been trying to persuade us to come to church with her. The church was in a handsome old Craftsman-style summer mansion overlooking Tomales Bay that had been the vacation home of a branch of the Frick family. It had teak floors and heart of redwood walls and was located in a grove of oak trees.

  Phil said, “If I could invent a church, I’d invent one just like this.” He became quite excited when he found a hymn that was dated A.D. 496. He was fascinated with the High Mass, and became friendly with the vicar, Fr. Reade. Phil would visit him and they’d talk theology for hours.

  We decided to join the church, go to confirmation classes, and become baptized. Every Sunday Phil got dressed up, wore a suit or a sport coat, and all of us in our best clothes went off to church—”religiously,” kidded Phil—every Sunday.

  One Sunday, we met an interesting woman, Maren Hackett, who was church hopping. The three of us soon became best friends. She’d visit us or we’d go to dinner at her place in San Rafael. She was a double-dome intellectual, a member of the Mensa Society, an ex-policewoman, and an ex-pile-driver operator. Honestly! We discussed theology and church history with her as well as other topics. She was not only theologically well informed and devout, but a sophisticated, knowledgeable person.

  Once, Maren brought her nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, Nancy, with her, when she came to visit at our house. Nancy was an attractive girl with long dark hair and bangs, but she hardly said anything—she just sa
t on the couch during the entire visit, almost as if she weren’t there. I had never seen such a quiet teenager. I didn’t pay much attention to her and, of course, I never had any inkling that one day she would be Phil’s next wife and the mother of his second child.

  One weekend night that fall, we went to a party at Jack and Patty Wright’s house, which was near the top of Mt. Vision in Inverness. Phil drank several martinis, unusual for him because he wasn’t a drinker. Unfortunately, he was driving that night, and as he came out of the Wright’s driveway, he didn’t turn the wheel sharply enough and the car went over the edge of road and hung there, nothing underneath its front end.

  The neighbors came with a rope and a truck to pull our car back on the road. While we were waiting for them to get everything set up, Phil took my arm and tried to forcibly lead me into the driver’s seat. He said, “Get in, and I’ll push.” If he had pushed the car it could have gone over the side of the mountain. Of course, there were trees to stop it from going terribly far—I think. I pulled away from him, annoyed—and as usual, immediately put this incident out of my mind. I was very good at denial—or was it faith—or bourgeois family values—or an excess of loyalty?

  On a happier note, the Wrights invited Phil and me to go hear Harry Partch, the composer, give a world premiere of one of his symphonies in an old warehouse in Petaluma. The huge room had thirty of Partch’s sculptured wood instruments and glass “cloud chambers” in it. As well as musical instruments, they were beautiful as sculptures. Partch and his assistants ran from one instrument to another to perform the symphony. Partch used a forty-nine-tone scale, and his music was unique and lovely. Phil mentions Partch in his novel The Crack in Space.