During the entire time Phil was staying in Vancouver he wrote me friendly, upbeat letters, giving me the impression that he was having a good life in Canada, and, to my chagrin, mentioning various new girlfriends. I didn’t answer. He told me nothing about his attempted suicide or his stay at X-Kalay.
In March 1972, Phil wrote Professor McNelly in Fullerton:
Well, it happened. I flipped out. Grief, loneliness, despair, the alienation of being in a strange country in an unfamiliar city, knowing virtually no one and at the same time … being so dependent on those few people I met here…. [A]nyhow, the X-Kalay people stepped in and have begun putting the pieces back together. Into something else, they tell me. Something that has a better chance of survival. Without them I wouldn’t be alive now. It’s hard to get into X-Kalay and easy to get out. I don’t really know what happened. It started back in San Rafael several months ago at least, possibly longer. With effort I can sort of remember. But perhaps it’s better if I don’t; remembering serves no useful purpose. “Our pasts have been written and cannot be erased,” the X-Kalay Philosophy says. “Therefore we must work for today with a vision of tomorrow.” That’s what I’m doing.
And in a later letter to McNelly:
I want to go back [to San Rafael], even though, really I can’t. My house is gone, and, god forbid, all my stuff has been shipped off, without my knowledge or permission, and stored. All I have is what I brought with me to Vancouver in one small suitcase, just a few clothes. My books, MSS, typewriter—everything either thrown away by the realtor, or stored somewhere. In my absence my senile old mother gave the realtor permission…. It was all done without my knowledge, as soon as I informed my mother I was remaining in Canada. Mothers should be towed out to sea and sunk. As a health hazard, like lead in the atmosphere.
What is it about s-f writers that so turns off the establishment, and also the criminals of the gutter? We are universally distrusted. As Cindy told me once, “It’s because they can’t figure you out; you’re an unusual person.” I asked her what she personally thought of me. “You’re a great man,” she said. “And you’re kind. Hey, can you lend me two bucks for a bottle of vodka so I can take it to the drive-in movie and turn on while we watch The Planet of the Apes?” …. Without Cindy, the death that I feared, the death she has shielded me from, seems to be coming. But I worry about her. It’s Cindy who matters, as far as I’m concerned.
Phil wrote Cindy back in San Rafael: “I’m afraid I won’t ever see you again, Cindy. Have a happy life. I’ll never forget you, Cindy. You were the best, the dearest, the prettiest.”
Phil must have been in contact with the girl Jamis while he was in X-Kalay, because he writes in a letter to an unknown person:
Jamis is the rational one and I’m the dingbat…. Maybe the gulf I sense between us is because I’m so spaced. “You really get down over nothing,” she said to me last night. Right on…. Somehow, Jamis embodies all I’ve lost, the whole past that’s over, and in clinging to her—and constantly feeling myself losing her—I’m clinging onto something that is gone, ought to be gone, which I just can’t let go of. I can’t really lock myself into the present as long as I’m involved with her. She’s not here, with me, now; she’s gone, in the past, there, not with me, lost forever, never to be found or seen again. She’s the rock, drug, hippy, kid, California culture I’ve got to cut loose from and let die and leave me. The unresolved conflicts, issues, feelings, and involvements of the past are still being thrashed out within the context of my relationship with her. It should just end, everybody thinks, but maybe it’s got to be worked through and out, not ended; otherwise it’ll just resume with someone else.
This enormous hostility that I feel is probably the primary hostility that underlay my depression which in turn led to my suicide attempt. I am mad at everyone and everything. So the X-Kalay game is working. Their analysis is that I’m possessive, that I want a chick to be MY chick and not independent. This is not true.
From X-Kalay on April 4, 1972, Phil wrote Willis McNelly’s wife, Sue:
I’m doing a lot better now. The ache inside me has virtually dimmed-out. Due mainly to the people I’ve been living with, here at X-Kalay. The furies are no longer driving me…. [I]n some ways the lessons in toughness that I’m learning here are perhaps not such a good thing. I don’t suffer, because I am ceasing to care. It’s easier on me, but is this really the solution? I feel like they’re burning out a part of my brain, the part that listens to the heartbeat of my brothers.
“Wait’ll I get you in a game,” one woman said to me. “I’ll reveal your real nature. I’ll show everyone what you’re really like, under the lies.” There is an assumption, possibly false, certainly metaphysical, that there is a “real” hidden, authentic personality hidden within and behind the false fronts of each of us….
“Lizard-eyed and liver-lipped” is the way I describe the faces here; cold and amused, mocking, detached, efficient.
And in a later letter to an unknown person:
I am leaving X-Kalay on Thursday…. Gradually, over the last week, person after person has left, and in a few days I will be going. There are many negative elements here that cause me to want to go, but basically I’m leaving because there is something better—I think—that I’ll be going to. If I’m wrong, I’ll come back. Really, though, if I were to pinpoint the elements here that have driven me off, I’d say that the enthusiasm, the energy, the excitement, the plans I had about doing things with X-Kalay have been killed off by X-Kalay itself…. I think my two basic plans were good: the point is that for over a year I have had no plans, no goals, and now, with X-Kalay’s help, I got myself together and did look forward, did have ideas I wanted to put into action—and at that point X-Kalay said, in effect, “No, you are not here for that. We are not doing that. Mind your own business; take orders and be quiet.” Initiative and inventiveness are discouraged, but not merely in the usual bureaucratic sense; what I bitterly resent is the use of the game, the encounter therapy sessions, brought into play as a method—THE method—by which actions on my part and on the part of others that do not conform to the group’s standards and views are zapped out of existence, zapped out before they can take place, by the effective technique of wiping out the individual’s faith in those proposed actions and ultimately in himself as the inventor of the actions…. But I have a viable alternative elsewhere that I’m going to, and I hope, when I get there I’ll feel a return of the energy and goal-oriented activity that I had here. Meanwhile, I feel fine. I am looking forward to productive, creative work elsewhere with other people along the same lines as here.
Phil left Vancouver in April 1972, “disappearing into the wilds of southern California,” Mike Bailey said, “to begin a whole new life.”
Nine
MORE DARK-HAIRED GIRLS: LINDA, TESSA
Phil was smiling that wonderful smile but looking unsure of himself. He carried a battered, old suitcase with an electric cord tied around it.
—Tim Powers, 1982 interview
IN LATE 1982, I drove alone the five hundred miles to Los Angeles. Once there, ensconced at my cousin David’s apartment in Arcadia, I drove many miles daily on the scary Los Angeles freeways to Fullerton in Orange County where some of Phil’s close friends and the Fullerton State University Library were located. The Philip Dick his Orange County friends talked about didn’t seem to be the same Phil that I had known. When he and I had talked occasionally over the phone in the months and years before his death, he had sounded pretty much like the same Phil. Tim Powers told me, “When you talk about [Phil] it doesn’t sound like anyone we knew.”
One of my main goals was to research the library archives at Fullerton, where Phil’s papers and manuscripts were located. Professor McNelly showed me how to use the library and gave me letters, papers, and fruitful leads. McNelly, a Jungian, told me, “Phil had a powerful shadow.” I was taken aback when he asked, “Was Phil a good lover?” He told me that he was worried about his wife in
regard to Phil: “Phil was just too damn charismatic.”
I read as much in the library as I could during the two days I was there. I was shocked by an incredibly poisonous letter that Phil wrote to Carol Carr in 1964 about his insane ex-wife—me. Later, a friend wrote me from Washington, D.C., that there was a letter in the Washington Post protesting the publication of letters of Philip K. Dick, some of which were scurrilous about an ex-wife. I finally decided that anything negative that Phil or his fans said about me wasn’t my problem. When very occasionally someone says something negative to me, I tell them jokingly, “Sorry, you can’t insult me; I’ve been insulted by a world-famous expert.”
One day I drove to Santa Ana and spent a morning with Phil’s best southern California friend, young sci-fi writer Tim Powers, and his wife, Serena, a very pleasant couple. Tim had written a daily journal in the early seventies and made it available to me.
I spent Sunday afternoon in North Hollywood with K. W. Jeter, Phil’s other “best friend,” and his wife, Jeri. They were a handsome couple and lived in a handsome apartment. Both were dressed as if they were on their way to work in an expensive law firm (or for the FBI). K. W. had on a well-tailored, well-pressed three-piece suit. Not what one expects in La La Land.
I talked several times on the phone with Linda Levy, another great lost love of Phil’s. Later, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and we had lunch together. Mary Wilson, Phil’s super girlfriend-secretary, and I talked on the phone when Phil was dying in the hospital, and again later. Jim Blaylock was a gracious phone interviewee who had enjoyed his relationship with Phil a great deal. Tessa Busby, Phil’s young, fifth ex-wife, declined to be interviewed. Her stepmother, Nita Busby, who had known Phil in Professor McNelly’s class, gave me a brief telephone interview.
Gwen Lee had a wonderful taped interview of Phil’s ideas for his next novel, The Owl in Daylight, an interview he had done only a few months before his death. She read the whole thing to me over the phone. I was again impressed and awed by Phil’s imagination. I wondered if Phil had in mind the owl we saw taking a shower bath in the first rains of winter in the cypress trees in our front yard so many years ago.
Tim Powers, Joanne McMahon, Sue Hoglind, and Linda Levy met Phil at the Orange County airport in April 1972. Phil had been allowed to leave X-Kalay only after finding someone who would sponsor him. He had written an emotional letter to Professor Willis McNelly at California State University, Fullerton, asking for help. McNelly had agreed to sponsor Phil and read the letter to his science fiction English class.
“Can anybody here help Philip K. Dick?” he asked his class.
Two girls, science fiction fans, Sue Hoglind and Joanne McMahon, raised their hands: “We can put him up.” Phil moved in with Joanne and Sue and slept on their living room couch—but the living situation was uncomfortable, and the three of them didn’t get along particularly well. While giving a talk to Professor McNelly’s class, Phil joked about his awkward living situation. Another student, Joel Stein, raised his hand and told Phil, “I’ve just split up with my wife and have an extra bedroom in my apartment.” Phil accepted Joel’s offer and continued with his talk.
Joel Stein was thirty-five years old then, and aspiring to be a writer. In 1983 when I reached him by long-distance telephone, he was a pit boss for Harrah’s Club in Reno.
“With Phil,” Joel said, “there was never a dull moment. Phil was a catalyst. There was never any peace and quiet while Phil was around Phil ranged between the agony and the ecstasy.” Joel would come home from work and find Phil sitting in a chair in a deep depression because four police cars had just gone by. The next night Phil would be bouncing off the walls with joy. It was a financially hard time for both men. They took turns buying food. Phil stayed with Joel almost six months.
Phil and Tim Powers soon became good friends. Phil told Tim that he was afraid of returning to Marin County, so many people there were “out to get him”; the police were down on him, and a paramilitary group in the area was hostile to him. He told Tim that this group had stolen disorientation-drug weapons from an Air Force warehouse and was selling them on the street as recreational dope. Phil described knifings that occurred at his house. Phil was off drugs and wouldn’t allow any drugs around the apartment at all. He told Joel Stein, “The cops will come and break down the doors.”
Joel and Phil got along well, although there were times when Phil was morose and would only grunt when Joel tried to talk to him. Joel felt sorry for Phil because of his age and the topsy-turviness of his universe, and because he had only a bunch of kids to rely on. Phil didn’t seem be strong at all. “He had coughing fits, his shoulder kept coming out of its socket, and was in a sling, and here he was, trying to keep up with nineteen-and twenty-year-old kids.”
Although Phil engaged in many strange, flaky conversations, Joel noted that he was businesslike about his writing and publishing. He was just finishing A Scanner Darkly. Later, Phil thought Joel was trying to kill him. Joel noted that Phil seemed to think that anyone he was getting close to was trying to kill him. Phil told a story, too, that Tim had menaced him with a knife.
LINDA LEVY
Joel told me, “I remember Phil was primarily concerned with chasing young dark-haired girls around—desperately. He felt his life was slipping away, and he was trying to get as much out of it as he could. He was terribly romantic about women to the point of unreality. He would describe a girl he’d just met as a goddess with an effervescent personality and long, flowing hair. I would get all excited, and then I would meet the girl and find her quite drab. However, Linda Levy was intelligent and attractive. A heck of a girl, sharp, witty, strong-willed.”
Linda had written Phil a letter while he was at X-Kalay, in response to the letter from Phil that Professor Willis McNelly had read to his class. Shortly afterward, Linda was summoned to Professor McNelly’s office and told that Phil would be arriving at LAX and wanted her to pick him up. She went with Tim Powers and Phil’s two roommates-to-be, Sue and Joanne. “My first impression was of a man with a long, gray beard, wearing a trench coat, carrying in one hand a box wrapped in brown paper … and a Bible in the other. He reminded me of a derelict rabbi. When he saw me, he stopped suddenly, eyes fixed on me. He never took his eyes off me the whole evening.”
Within two weeks Phil was intensely, mystically in love with Linda. He wrote her:
Linda, for God’s sake be eternal. Can you manage that? For all of us? Because I have this strange feeling that you can; that the decision, the choice, lies up to you…. If something happened to you intrinsically it would be a world disaster…. I would look up into the sky at night and see the stars flickering off one by one, and I’d be … indifferent. I’d walk through the side of a building and it’d collapse into dust. Wheels would fall off cars, like in an old W. C. Fields movie. Finally my foot would sink through the sidewalk…. All I ever want to do is hug you again and again, just wrap you up in my arms and hug you and hold you close to me forever and ever without letting loose, without change, and then after that we can pack a lunch, take a boiled egg and a thermos of warm purple, and go to the seashore. And there we’re going to have a real ball, Linda…. [W]e’re going to run along the beach with the seagulls hurrying to keep up with us so they don’t miss their handout … the sun over the water with a bright star at its tip going gazanggg…. We’ll come across a gigantic driftwood thing that resembles every conceivable imaginable good thing we ever saw or thought of, and we’ll sit there just being happy…. P.S. Linda, I am much, deeply in love with you. So this is what I’d like to ask you : will you marry me?
Linda recalled with astonishment, “Phil proposed in a letter after he had known me only two weeks. It made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t know how to respond. He later said it was a joke.”
She continued, “Phil’s intense attention could be unnerving to experience, and I saw him undergo personality changes that were frightening. Others in the group didn’t have the same experi
ences that I did. They saw him as a completely different person, and that made me uncomfortable also. I began to question my own sanity, since my experiences were so vastly different. I felt consumed by him, possessed, trapped. Phil’s flattery fed my ego, but the price I had to pay was too high. I was afraid of Phil, and his mood swings.”
Phil wrote to a friend back in Vancouver about Linda:
I’ve become involved with a black-haired groovy spaced-out foxy chick (as we say here), a wild, self-destructive, beautiful girl named Linda whom I love much, but who is hurting me and whom, I’m afraid, I’m hurting, too…. There is a sort of perpetual misunderstanding between us…. Destiny in a miniskirt … Durability … permanency, is what I want most of all…. That, I think, I do have with Linda; it appears to be a durable relationship.
I think, for me, knowing Linda and being with her, puts out of my mind a certain despair that comes when your attention wanders from the present and back to former times. I always have the feeling that things used to be better.
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 19
