“Okay, Harlan,” Phil murmured, clutching his wine bottle. “Lay off.”
“You may have wound up in the gutter,” Harlan continued, unabashed, “but I have my big house in Sherman Oaks; I have my library of all my thousands of—”
“I knew you when you were a twerp fan,” Phil broke in. “Back in 1954. I gave you a story for your fanzine.”
“And a crummy story it was,” Harlan said, with a smirk.
Falteringly, Phil murmured, “But you said you liked it.”
“I liked the name of the main character,” Harlan corrected. “Waldo. I remember exactly what I said; I said, ‘I always admire people named Waldo.’ I threw the story away.”
Slumped over in misery, Phil said nothing. The bus continued on; and, as I scrutinized the gloating, amused face of Harlan Ellison and the unhappy, defeated figure beside me I wondered what it was all about, what it was all for. Which of the two of them did I feel the most pity for? Gloating cruelty and triumph, or wretched despair? It was hard to say.
Phil’s letter to Daniel continued:
Meanwhile, due to all the money I’m making I’m experiencing a vast depression, mirrored by a decay in the reality around me. (1) The refrigerator makes odd noises. (2) There is CB interference on my TV. (3) The rear-end of my car is leaking oil. See? Ubik revisited. However, my girlfriend who has had cancer has been pronounced cured. I guess that’s good (boy, I AM depressed).
In a later letter to Daniel, Phil writes:
You’re off to a terrific start. You really are. The two stories are full of life and vigor and wit, and the endings in both are superb. I foresee a career for you. Yes, you’re right; it’s like when “Roog” [Phil’s first published short story] came out … and I feel it, too; I share your excitement (which seems out of line to me, because after all they are your stories, not mine; but, nonetheless, I feel a deep pride in them and a sense of the new beginnings of creativity. It’s as if time has rolled back to 1952 for me).
On her own, while she was going to Stanford University, Laura visited Phil in early 1979. Phil was out of his mind with joy that his beautiful grown-up daughter was visiting him. He took her out, bought her clothes, and gave her money. After this first visit, Laura went down to Santa Ana several times.
Phil wrote to Laura right after that visit, on February 19, 1979: “Generally I have tended to think of my success or failure in terms of my writing, but I realized tonight that for me having you as my daughter, and being so close to you—I really have felt incredibly close to you these last days—means more to me.”
On March 12, 1979, he wrote her:
You know, your visit here with me has had a strange effect on me. I go into a peculiar state or mood which is a mixture of absolute joy and bitter pain. The joy is easily understood, but the pain has puzzled me. I’ve decided it’s simply because I miss you. That’s easy to understand. Anyhow, the joy is winning out.
Keep in touch. I really intend to make major changes in my life; I feel new tides and new waves flowing in me and over me, the winds of something I have never done before, never been before, a new start, the end of the old. It’s as if an old fossilized part of me has perished, and should perish, and, like my jade plant, I am thrusting out new leaves. Wow. It’s painful, like birth, but good. I feel like I could go anywhere and do anything.
But by April 2, 1979, his mood had changed:
I woke up this morning—all freaked out—it has to do with the Three Mile Island reactor, I think, because I stayed up until 4 a.m. to get the final news over my rock station, and I was so sleepy I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I found this morning that I had the impression that a meltdown was taking place right now, but today’s news was good, so I guess the only meltdown is in my own brain. You’re right; it’s amazing that so few people are upset by this. They just do not understand. I remember when I was a child on December 7, 1941, and there was the news on the radio about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor; I phoned my mother to tell her. “We’re at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan.” I yelled, to which she replied calmly, “No, I don’t think so, Phil,” and went back to her gardening. I was 12 years old and I was more in touch than a grown person. That made a big impression on me, my mother’s failure to react; it was both an intellectual failure and an emotional one, if you ponder it.
This, maybe, is one reason I get along so well with people a lot younger than me; I think the older you get the dumber you get; I mean people in general. You start losing touch with reality by subtle, gradual degrees until you wind up puttering around with your flowers in the backyard while World War Three breaks out. This is how I imagine my father, assuming he’s still alive: out in his back yard unaware of the world and, worse, wanting to be unaware of the world.
Phil didn’t know that his long-estranged father was still alive. Laura had discovered that Edgar Dick, her grandfather, lived literally right over the fence of the Stanford campus. She climbed it, went over to his house, and introduced herself to her grandfather and his wife, Gertrude. She visited them frequently and did her homework lying on her stomach on their living room floor. I went down to Menlo Park to meet Edgar and Gertrude with Laura. Edgar was a spritely and intelligent man in his eighties, interested in politics, conservative. The next time I talked to Phil on the phone I told him, “Your father is okay, Phil.” Phil called his father, and a telephone dialogue began between the two of them that continued until Phil’s death. Phil sent his father autographed copies of some of his novels and copies of magazine interviews. His father was immensely proud of them.
Phil wrote Laura on May 27, 1979, complaining of deep fatigue:
Yesterday (Saturday) I was exhausted and unable to function. On Friday I completed my tax work and it left me drained. Yesterday I took a long nap and had a sort of dream, almost a delusional vision, in which I was meeting you at the airport and putting my arms around you and hugging you and giving you a kiss. I woke up and felt pain in my jaw from trying to kiss you. Never have I known such pain. I felt as if my jaw would break. I asked myself, “How has it come about that I screwed up so badly? What is wrong with me?” I sense something wrong with me, something profound. I can’t discern its nature but it scares me. I ask myself, “Am I afraid of something? Afraid to love my own daughter? And if so, why? Is it because I have lost person after person that I loved, so that now I am damaged?” I feel damaged. I sense myself taking the line of least resistance, in every situation. I am conserving my psychological energy. But only an organism preparing to die does that. Am I withdrawing from life itself? Maybe that is it. I don’t know.
Then I think … another thing that has drained me: my writing. Five years on my recent novel, VALIS, which I sent off last November. And I am working on a follow-up to it. Night after night I work until 4 or 5 a.m. During the day I am exhausted. But I have to do it; it’s my job. This is that goddamn Protestant work-ethic. Can’t I forget about my book? I can’t. Twenty-eight years of writing—decades of writing—have cut into my brain so that in my brain there is this rut and I keep going around and around in the rut….
I have reached the point of exhaustion. They are turning this apartment building into condominiums and I have to deal with that. My life may change radically—I may move away from Orange County—and here I am exhausted from my professional work and my friendship with a sick girl. I am neglecting entire parts of my life such as my relationships with my children because of my worry and exhaustion. I have become a machine which thinks and does nothing else. It scares me. How did this come about? I posed myself a problem and I cannot forget the problem but I cannot answer the problem, so I am stuck in fly-paper. I can’t get loose; it’s like a self-imposed karma at work. Every day my world gets smaller. I work more, I live less. Whole systems and circuits in my brain, I believe, I sense, are shutting down. I am like a ship which people are preparing to abandon. The power is being shut off. And yet at the same time I have a clear idea of what I want; I want to be with my children. I
want to be with Laura. Then why am I working on my goddamn book? Have I no power to stop? Right; I have no power to stop: I am obsessive. The epistemological/theological/philosophical problem which I posed to myself years ago runs me and has turned me into a servo-assist mechanism. Somewhere along the line, maybe years ago, I lost control of the idea so that it began to dominate me rather than I it. I have become a mechanical function of my own idea, the idea that something is wrong in the cosmos and I have to figure out what it is. No one ever has been able to do this but I am going to do this. I am like a rat trying to get aboard a rat-proof ship; there is simply no way that rat is going to get aboard the ship—no matter how long he tries to figure the situation out. He is on a rope leading to the ship but there is one of those rat guards that no rat can cross.
Meanwhile I wear myself out more each day; my energy level drops. Every now and then I imagine I’ve figured out some small clue in my epistemological search. But for every clue I figure out, ten more unexplained things pop up. The ratio between what I know and what I don’t know worsens. This means that the longer I continue to try the worse it’s going to get; all I know right now is that I do not know. A mystery confronts me. God is a mystery and the reason for God’s silence is a mystery….
Phil was still giving away money to his friends and others. He paid $2,700 to the Church of the Messiah for the community services project from which Doris was drawing a salary. K. W. Jeter said that Phil was an easy touch for rent, groceries, and car money for Tessa and Doris. Phil offered to put up the down payment on a condominium for best friend, Tim Powers, and his new wife, Serena, but Tim wouldn’t accept the money.
Jim Blaylock said, “Phil was the most generous person with money that I ever saw. If someone said to him, ‘I need a thousand dollars by Friday,’ Phil would reply, ‘Okay, when can I get it to you?’ The teller who had worked at the local bank asked Phil for a loan of a thousand dollars. Phil didn’t loan it to her: he gave it to her.”
Phil was generous with his praise when I sent him a sixteen-page color brochure that I had made to promote my handcrafted jewelry. By then I was selling to galleries, museum shops, and fine stores all over the United States and employed thirteen people. I was the largest employer in Point Reyes Station. Phil lavishly praised the designs, the graphics, and the logo, and showed the catalogue to everyone who came by his condominium. Tim said that Phil seemed to be more proud of it than he was of his own work.
By this time, Doris had moved to another apartment and saw Phil less. Although she dated others, she still brought meals over to Phil’s place. Phil couldn’t go out to eat at this time. His throat constricted when he was in a restaurant and he couldn’t swallow.
Laura was to be married in August 1980. Throughout the year, Laura had been writing and talking with Phil about coming to Point Reyes and taking part in the wedding. I had seconded her invitation, and Phil sounded as if he would actually come. He asked Laura to make him a list of what his obligations were and sent money for much of the wedding expense. As the wedding came close, he called and told me, “I can’t come. My doctor says that my tachycardia is too bad and that I might drop dead from the excitement of being in a strange situation.”
I didn’t feel I could urge him to come if he was liable to have a heart attack, but Laura and I were both disappointed. It wasn’t six weeks later that Phil told me that he’d accepted an invitation to go to Metz. I didn’t ask him about his tachycardia. But Phil told Doris and Tim that he didn’t come to Laura’s wedding, because “Anne didn’t really want me to come.”
Laura sent him the book of wedding pictures (at his request) showing a large group of family and friends smiling and having a wonderful time at the wedding at St. Columba’s and the subsequent party on our patio. The next time Phil called, I asked him how he had liked the pictures. He was so short with me that he was almost rude and wouldn’t comment on the pictures or wedding at all. He must have believed his own version of why he didn’t come to Laura’s wedding.
In the fall of 1980, Phil wrote a story, “Frozen Journey,” for Playboy magazine, depicting a man who is burdened with terrible guilt and terrible fear, emotions that destroy all possibility for inner comfort. When an early wife, older now, appears to comfort him, he can’t believe in her reality.
During the last year of his life, 1981, Phil continued in his night-owl routine in Santa Ana. He’d do his shopping at midnight, buying kitty litter and frozen chocolate pies at Ralph’s grocery store, around the corner from his condominium. The people who worked at Ralph’s loved Phil.
Doris and Tessa were still hanging around Phil’s apartment, and sometimes Christopher came over to play. But when Doris moved away from Santa Ana in 1981, Phil felt deserted. The close friendship that these two had had disappeared. When Doris tried to talk to Phil by long distance, he was cold and unresponsive. Then Phil started dating Tessa and there was some talk between them of remarriage.
During this last period, Phil seemed to be on top of the world in some ways. He was continuing to make a lot of money. He was excited about his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? being made into a 30 million dollar movie, Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. One day, the studio sent a limousine to pick Phil up and take him to the studio to see an early version of the movie.
His doctor had told him to lose some weight and he did so, quite rapidly, getting back his old slim figure and a lower blood pressure reading. He bought some fashionable clothes, had his beard and hair trimmed by a good barber, and looked quite elegant. He was dating several ladies and going out socially more than he ever had before. He told his friend Tim Powers how good he felt as he munched on his diet of Rice Krispies and chocolate cookies.
He was extremely pleased that, finally, a literary novel of his would be published. A major New York publisher, Simon and Schuster, would be publishing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer in May 1982. This novel summed up much of Phil’s past. It dealt with Phil’s experiences with Bishop James Pike but it was set in the Berkeley of Phil’s youth. Phil told Laura that Angel Archer, the leading female character, was based on her. This powerful, blunt, direct young woman is the most sympathetic female character in all of Phil’s forty novels, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is the only novel written from a female point of view.
In 1983, Pike’s widow and younger son, Chris, lived in Inverness and also went to St. Columba’s Church. At the coffee shop one day, Chris happened to be sitting next to me at the counter. We struck up a conversation, and after a while he asked me if the story about his late brother, Jim, in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was true. His mother had read it recently and was worried that Jim had really had an affair with Maren Hackett. “No,” I said. “It was Philip’s way in his writing to fictionalize real people and manipulate their actions whatever way he fancied that day.” Chris was very relieved and said his mother would be, too.
Phil was even having his biography written. He had invited Gregg Rickman, a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, to his apartment for a series of taped interviews, because Gregg had written an article in a fanzine about the empathy Phil had for “people, animals, and life.” The first time Gregg came, Phil told him that he recently had lost a great deal of weight. He said that he hadn’t been able to eat because of grief and his hyper-empathy.
Phil made Gregg his official biographer. On one tape that Gregg and Phil made, Phil talked about his mother. He said that when he was a small child, he believed his mother was trying to kill him.
Phil was still giving money away. He gave $10,000 to the Quakers for Cambodian relief. He gave Kleo $1,200 when her husband, Phil’s old friend Norman Mini, died.
Phil phoned his friend Jim Blaylock one evening and said he was being paid $40,000 for Blade Runner. He asked Jim, “What will I do with the money?” He told Jim that he couldn’t think of anything he wanted but a ham sandwich—so he went out and bought a ham sandwich.
Phil was still telling stories to Tim Powers abo
ut his wife, his house, his kids, and his animals back in Point Reyes Station. Tim told me, “Anne, I could draw a floor plan of your house. In 1981, Phil still told stories of how you had chased him with a gun for two years after the divorce, tried to run him down with a white Jaguar, and waved knives at him. He told these stories with great relish.”
My own conversations with Phil had become more and more relaxed. He seemed so much less touchy that finally, after eighteen years, I got up the nerve to ask him a few things. I said, “I heard from Laura that you’ve helped Nancy and others with money, why haven’t you ever helped me?” I was thinking of the back child support of $75 a month. I didn’t really have any idea of how successful he’d become.
He replied bitterly, “You’re too strong.” I was so surprised I couldn’t think of a response or my other questions. Later, in another phone conversation I asked him, “Phil, why did you leave Point Reyes? I really never knew.” He answered so quickly and mechanically it was as if he had been waiting for me to ask him this question for years. As if by rote, he said, “I thought that we fought too much. It was bad for the children.”
About two months before Phil’s death I thought, “It’s important to tell people how you feel about them while you can.” I didn’t have any premonition about Phil’s impending death, at least not consciously, but I wanted to express to him in some nonthreatening way that I had loved him and that love was still there. The next time we talked I told him, “I always loved you.” He didn’t respond at all. It was as if he didn’t even hear me. I was so nervous and timid about talking about love to him—maybe he didn’t want to hear what I wanted to say—that I didn’t know how to continue or even if I should continue. Still, I was glad I had put my feelings in words even though he may not have believed me or didn’t like me telling him this. It may even have been a burden to him—more guilt to carry.
The Search for Philip K. Dick Page 24
