The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Phil had told me that he and Kleo bought a very old small house at 1126 Francisco Street for $2,000. He said it was financed by Dr. Apostolides, Kleo’s father. But Kleo said, “This is not true. My father never gave us any money for the Francisco Street house…. When Phil and I first got together, he had already put the down payment on the house; it was his house, and that is why all I asked for and got in the divorce was the ‘55 Chevy; we paid it off together, and no one ever helped us in paying it off.”

  Lynne Hudner remembered the house well: “It was a somber, musty-smelling house in the bad part of town with two bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen, and a front room too small to be called a living room. Phil and Kleo had nothing, only a few chairs that didn’t match. But there were lots of books and records in bookcases made of apple crates and pictures on the walls. Phil, sitting in his dark, huge, filthy old easy chair, was an omnivorous reader and read Styron, Sigrid de Lima, Malamud, James Joyce, Beckett, and the other literary writers … writing in the late forties and early fifties…. Kleo had no interest in domestic arts or clothes. Both Phil and Kleo wore dirty jeans all the time. There were a whole mess of cats, one named Magnifa.”

  Vince told me, “Phil and Kleo argued about everything—how to make coffee—they fought all the time.” Phil describes the house in his 1980 story for Playboy magazine, “Frozen Journey,” and in his last novel, published thirty years after his Berkeley days, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Kleo remembered that Phil became apprehensive about things going wrong with the house.

  Phil told me a story about his life there: “One day, a fly buzzed and buzzed, circling around in the living room. I watched it for a while and then I began to hear a tiny voice talking.” He didn’t tell me what it said, and I was so amazed at his experience I didn’t ask.

  Phil used to sit on his porch railing and watch the kids play at the school across the street until he realized that some older women who lived next door watched him every time he sat there. He became afraid that they would think he was some kind of a sex fiend, so he didn’t watch the children anymore.

  In 1951, Herb Hollis fired the whole bunch that worked at University Radio, including Phil. Vince Lusby said, “It was Norman Mini that got Phil fired. There was some sort of intrigue going on at University Radio. On top of this, Norman told an obscene joke to a customer. Herb, a prude, fired him and later fired Phil for talking to Norman when he came in the store. At that point Phil listed his vocation as a writer, because the unemployment benefits were better. If the Unemployment Bureau couldn’t find you a job in your line, they had to pay you benefits. At that time you could list yourself as anything. Although Phil had written some things earlier, he really became a writer at this time.”

  Phil stayed home full-time to work on his writing. Agoraphobia seemed to be a determining factor for his writing career. An early story, “The King of the Elves,” describes the beginnings of this lifestyle.

  “Phil’s output, even at the beginning, was so voluminous,” Kleo said, “that when I went out to get the mail one day there were seventeen returned manuscripts lying on the porch. Phil was writing literary fantasies and science fiction, all mixed. I read the manuscripts and criticized.”

  Phil was a protégé of Anthony Boucher, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Phil went a few times to his private class, but he was so uncomfortable in a group situation that he had to send in his manuscripts in to be criticized. Phil sold “Roog,” his first story, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He papered the walls of the small center room of his house with rejection notices. Later, he sold some of the stories that had been rejected to the same magazines that had spurned them.

  Alan Rich remembered, “Phil’s first writing consisted of impressionistic portraits, thinly disguised, of people he knew. I was a character named Max who always read the New York Times. I was uncomfortable with this portrait.”

  Kleo paid a large share of the couple’s household expenses, working full-time, while Phil was beginning to write and publish: “We had a simple lifestyle—Phil was making a little money from his writing and I was working—we had little to spend.”

  Phil had told me that one of his treats was boiling canned milk to make Depression pudding. He made this dessert for me once in Point Reyes, and it was surprisingly tasty. Kleo told me, “I don’t even know what Depression pudding is…. We ate meals of ten-cent chicken-giblet gravy on potatoes once a week. But,” she said with mock indignation, “we did not have ground horse meat; we got whole steaks from the pet-food store and broiled them.”

  Phil frequently described his early poverty as being characterized by eating hamburger bought from the Lucky Dog Pet Store. When I lived with him, he liked to talk about how poor he’d been and how ingenious at getting by on almost no money. He told how he’d gone from store to store buying loss leaders, and how he and Kleo had eaten for only $10 a month. One of their entrees was a popular noodle dish prepared with gravy that only cost a dime.

  Jack Sanders, who later became an editor of New York Magazine, gave Phil and Kleo their first car. For years Phil talked about this car, a Raymond Loewy Studebaker Starlite coupe. He put it in at least one of his novels. After the Starlite coupe wore out, the couple bought a black 1938 Cadillac that got four miles to the gallon from a place like Looney Luke’s (Phil’s prototype car lot in several novels) on San Pablo Avenue. The Cadillac wouldn’t go uphill. It turned out to have a couple of dead cylinders. They traded it back to Jalopy Jungle after a short time, although they had loved that car, and bought a Renault.

  Vince remembered when Phil and Kleo decided to take a trip to the Mendocino coast “to have a wilderness experience.” They packed provisions and camping equipment in their Renault. They arrived, made camp, ate dinner, and curled up in their sleeping bags. But they couldn’t sleep—they heard noises. They didn’t sleep all night long. The next morning they packed their things in the car and came back to Berkeley.

  One day, there was a knock on the door of the Francisco Street house. Kleo said, “It was two FBI agents wearing suits and dark grey fedoras, looking exactly like one would imagine FBI agents would look. Their names were Jones and Smith, they said, and they wanted us to identify the people in a photograph of a crowd scene at Sather Gate—a Socialist Workers’ Party meeting. I looked over Phil’s shoulder at the picture and giggled, pointed my finger, and said, ‘Look. There I am.’“ Kleo went to all the radical rallies but was too independent to join any particular group or party.

  The real name of one of the agents was George Scruggs. He became a good friend of the Dicks and helped Phil learn to drive; Phil and Kleo had a cordial relationship with the FBI or at least with one FBI agent. He asked them if they would go to the University of Mexico—the FBI would pay them to spy on the students there. They said no to that idea. Later George retired to run a hardware store.

  A year after Kleo and Phil married, Phil’s mother remarried her late sister Marion’s widower, Joe Hudner. Phil was extremely disapproving of this match. Kleo said, “Dorothy made a strange marriage to her brother-in-law nine months after his wife died. Phil was angry about this match and suspicious about Marion’s death. He blamed Dorothy. Dorothy had been deeply involved in Marion’s many hospitalizations, and, in desperation, she and Joe had put her in a private experimental nursing home, where Marion had been allowed to remain in a catatonic posture too long and died. Phil was just starting his writing and felt rejected, because Dorothy had a new, ready-made family.”

  Lynne Hudner said, “Phil, my cousin, became my stepbrother; Dorothy, my aunt, became my mother.”

  Joe Hudner, an artist, an intellectual, a blue-collar worker, and an extremely versatile man, was only five foot five, though he didn’t seem small. A warm, compassionate man, he was a second-generation Irishman. His father was a blacksmith, and Joe had practiced blacksmithing since he was a young man. He had been a professional sculptor in the WPA program in the thirties and danced naked at bohemian parties. H
e learned carpentry and built buildings, furniture, clocks, and cabinets. He had sung in opera and acted in plays. He was psychic, deeply involved with his own brand of metaphysics, with a foot in another world. Raised a Roman Catholic, he had a prejudice against organized religion. He was a person with strong opinions and lots of energy, a Socialist, although not a party member. The marriage between Joe and Dorothy turned out to be a good marriage. Joe was protective of Dorothy. Shortly after they married, Dorothy retired on disability pay. Their warm, compatible relationship lasted until Joe’s death in 1971.

  Kleo, heavily influenced by Phil’s negative views, had a different tale. “Dorothy was an early feminist, contemptuous of Joe, Edgar, Phil, everyone. Dorothy found no male worth the dirt he walked on. She was a hypochondriac who lived in her illnesses and her pills.”

  After Kleo and Phil had been married a couple of years, “Phil became uncomfortable about leaving the house. He couldn’t even walk to the movies. He was uncomfortable in crowds from two people on up.” Kleo’s father, Dr. Apostolides, prescribed Semoxydrine, a trade name for amphetamine, for Phil’s agoraphobia. Phil also suffered from tachycardia and took a drug, Serpasil, for this condition.

  He wanted to get back into the record business and took a job at Tupper and Reed, a record store on Shattuck Avenue, but his agoraphobia was so bad that he couldn’t function there. He went back briefly to manage Art Music in order to help his old friend, Pat Hollis, after Herb died, but he was too uncomfortable there, too.

  Kleo said, “He was depressed that he was cut off from so much because of his agoraphobia. Though Phil loved music, he could no longer go to concerts. Only recorded music was available to him. He was interested in the writing of Samuel Beckett, but when I bought tickets for Waiting for Godot, Phil couldn’t go see it.

  “Phil … projected various personalities at different times. Phil really lived in the pages of his books … on paper. Phil’s was a life of hiding.”

  Lynne remembered, “Phil had a brooding quality about him when he lived in that Francisco Street house. Those moods of Phil’s were awful, those black, black moods. He would sink into a horrible lethargy, completely enclosed, you couldn’t reach him. Dad became angry at Phil at times, because of the tumultuous relationship between Phil and Dorothy. Dorothy wouldn’t say anything, but she would get sick, and Dad blamed Phil. Dad always took Dorothy’s side.”

  Neil said, “Phil would take a little bit of reality and anticipate negatively what people’s reactions would be, then act as if these were their [actual] reactions. He would act out his pictures without testing….”

  Phil often walked over to his mother’s house to visit her, because she and her new husband, Joe, lived only a few blocks away. Dorothy read and criticized Phil’s early manuscripts.

  Kleo said that Phil’s novel Nicholas and the Higs, was about a friend: “The main character was unsuccessful, and never knew why. He wore powder blue suits, left home, never knew why. He left his wife, never knew why. Jim Briskin, the radio announcer in the novel The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, [sic] who announced for the program on which Looney Luke advertised his cars, was based on Don Sherwood, a famous Bay Area disc jockey. The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt had a character named ‘Mary’ in it. Mary really existed; she was a tough, good-looking lady with long dark hair who worked at the drugstore across from University Radio. She taught Phil about sex. Phil was in love with her for a short time.”

  Later, in Point Reyes, Phil told a story of being offered the script-writing job for Captain Video at $500 a week, big money in those days, but he would have had to fly to New York, and he felt he was too nervous, he couldn’t do this. Also, he realized that in order to produce a weekly show, he would soon use up all his material. Kleo told me that this story wasn’t true.

  Ray Nelson, Phil’s good friend after Phil left Point Reyes, wrote me about a party he went to at “Kleo’s” house years before he met Phil:

  I was living with my parents in the Berkeley hills, and had come down to the South Campus neighborhood to hang out with some other science fiction fans at the Garden Library bookstore … the center of Bay Area fantasy and science fiction fandom…. So many fans gathered, together with a sprinkling of KPFA radio volunteers, that someone said, “Let’s have a party!” … “Let’s go to Kleo’s … she has a house!” … Note that nobody said, “Let’s go to Phil’s” or “Let’s go to Kleo and Phil’s, or the Dicks.” … I can’t remember anyone that day mentioning Phil even in passing.

  … [W]e all caravanned over to 1126 Francisco Street…. Carrying our jugs of … “Dago Red” … we trooped up the front walk, across a small porch, and into the rather dim and musty-smelling interior. I glimpsed some pictures of nudes on the wall, and an old upright piano, then we continued on into the relatively well-lighted kitchen…. Berkeley student-types never liked to get too far from the refrigerator…. The cigarette smoke got thick. The discussions got deep…. At some point I became aware that someone was playing the phonograph rather loud, forcing the conversationalists to raise their voices in order to be heard…. Someone yelled into the next room, “Can you keep it down in there?” … The music continued to boom … classical music. Wagner…. [S]omeone said to me, “Can you talk to him?” with an angry gesture toward the next room. I had the reputation for being very diplomatic. “Okay.” … I went into the other room. The shades were drawn … and no lights were lit…. I made out the figure of a man sitting hunched over in a shabby armchair. He was clean shaven, thin and hunted-looking, and wore jeans, sneakers, and an army surplus shirt. He looked like a typical student, with straight, messy hair, a broad forehead. I judged him to be somewhere in his middle twenties.

  “Hi,” I said grinning. He … did not even turn his head to look at me. Somewhat disconcerted, I added, “Uh, pardon me, but….” He said nothing. My own words died in mid-sentence. There was such an intensity in his eyes, in his posture, that the notion wandered into my head that he was insane. Did I dare demand that this strange statue of a man … turn down the volume of his hi-fi? You never know when someone like that might get violent…. I began over. “Uh, could you tell me the way to the bathroom?” He did not speak, did not look at me, did not betray the slightest awareness of my presence. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” continued to rattle the windows…. I wondered suddenly if he might be dead, but then I noticed a movement, so slight as to be almost invisible. He was nodding his head, ever-so-little, in time to the music.

  Vince went with Phil to a party given by Allan Temko for writer Herb Gold. Phil had just sold his first science fiction novel, Solar Lottery. Vince told me, “Temko had recently come back from being educated in Paris. He and the various writers at the party were discussing what they had sold. Phil said he had sold a novel, and Temko said ‘What sort of stuff do you write?’ Phil said, ‘science fiction,’ at which point everybody exploded into ridicule. Temko, wearing pink denim pants and a green striped shirt, started dancing around singing songs about people who write science fiction. I left with Phil—it was a horrible experience for him. Even if you weren’t Phil Dick, it would’ve been a horrible experience.”

  John Gildersleeve, the editor of the University Press for many years, had had an office around the corner from University Radio. Retired now, he and his wife, Grace, lived in the small town of Fort Bragg on the rugged Mendocino coast. I phoned him to arrange an interview. The two of us tried to get together on one of John’s infrequent visits to the Bay Area, but we could never coordinate. In the summer of 1983, I drove up the coast to the Gildersleeves’ home with my friend Angelina Hnatt. Great, foggy, forested hills appeared in the headlights of our car as we neared Fort Bragg. John and his wife had invited us to stay in their Maybeck-style redwood home on the edge of a great ravine, a half-mile from the ocean’s edge. The house was filled with artworks and surrounded by rhododendrons and azaleas. It was lined with books. Bookshelves covered the bedroom walls in the guest room, where we spent the night. In the morning the first th
ing I saw as I opened my eyes were the complete writings of Trotsky.

  When we sat down to talk, to his chagrin, John couldn’t remember much from those long-ago days. He told me, “Phil gave me some of his first stories to read. I felt all of them went to pieces in part. I thought Phil was spoiled because he didn’t have good editing in the beginning. Phil made up the stories as he went along. His typing was incredibly fast.”

  John was always discovering some little hole in Phil’s stories, something unexplained: “I discovered a flaw in Solar Lottery. The hero had a bomb implanted in his side. If he got within a certain distance of something or other, this bomb would go off. In the first part of the book, he gets within this distance. I asked Phil, in front of Kleo, ‘Did you make a change, take care of that contradiction?’ Phil wouldn’t answer, and when Kleo asked what we were talking about, he said to her, ‘Oh, it’s just a little joke between John and me.’”

  Phil was fascinated with a story John told him: “When I was a little child, my grandmother told me to remember sitting on her lap, because when she was a little child, she had sat on the lap of one of Washington’s soldiers. Phil went into ecstasy over this story, the idea that only a few generations separated us from the founding of the nation.”

  Eventually, John and Phil fell out. John kept finding logical flaws in Phil’s writing. Phil dismissed John as “just a proofreader.”

  Phil remained friendly with Vince Lusby, who now was married to Monica and had an autistic child. Phil was interested in this child. At that time, autism in small children was thought to be a form of schizophrenia caused by the mother. It was believed that the mother didn’t talk enough to her baby. Vince was writing a novel about this child and took little heart-shaped green pills, Dexamyl, a form of amphetamine, to help him write. In that era, many writers used amphetamines.

  Phil published eighty-five science fiction stories and seven science fiction novels between 1951 and 1958, as well as seven literary novels. The literary novels weren’t published until after his death. Most of the major themes that appear in Phil’s later writing appear in the novels and stories of the fifties. Among them: a killer robot with six personalities; and another robot, “The Imposter,” who is a bomb but thinks he’s human, as does the reader, until he/it explodes. In The World Jones Made, seven humanoid creatures live in an artificial world, unable to survive in the real world. They look longingly out of their bubble at San Francisco, but when they try to leave, they collapse. Jones, a fortune-teller, can see a year into the future. There are drugs in this story, and a policeman is the protagonist. “The Golden Man” can see a half-hour ahead and can always find a woman to keep him out of society’s traps. Shadrach Jones in “The King of the Elves” has been lured into becoming the king of the elves, instead of working at his prosaic job running a filling station. He’s wanted and needed in the kingdom of the elves and is a king there. The leader of the trolls, whom he has killed, looks like one of his friends. In “Progeny,” Phil uses the name of Janet Doyle, a woman with whom he had an affair. “The Turning Wheel” deals with Elron Hu. (Phil’s mother was a Dianetics auditor and wanted to “clear” Phil.)