Shortly after the event, Sheila came back to visit. Phil pleaded with her to sleep with him; he wanted only to be hugged. After their one night together, she left. The next day was: "Entropy day. Disorientation. End of world." Later: "Day after day, alone, I know someone, at night, is going to get me. Isolation. No one comes by or calls." Sandy, Donna, Sheila ... none was there for Phil in the aftermath. But he continued to love them, despite their refusal to play mother:
When you lose someone you love, like when a mother animal, a cat, loses her kittens, she runs out into the forest & grabs some first small other living helpless dependent thing to give her milk to-that's what I was doing after Nancy & Isa left. But I craved it for myself, with growing intensity. I had lost my love-I wanted to give, & hug something else to me & protect it. [Donna and Sheila and Sandy) felt this, & got this from me. But a reversal of the roles was intolerable, totally threatening, to all three [.)
Fate, at once cruel and kind, intervened. Phil was invited to attend the Vancouver SF Con in February 1972 as guest of honor. Normally travel wouldn't have held much appeal. But with nights filled with fear, a get-the-hell-out all-expenses-paid trip to Vancouver had its charms. Phil bought a ticket for Donna, who promised to accompany him. He then set to work on a speech, "The Android and the Human"-his first sustained writing since Nancy had left. He dedicated it to Donna, and planned to kiss her upon delivering it to the Con audience. But at the last minute Donna traded in her ticket for cash; she hadn't traveled much, and she was afraid.
Just before the trip, there was a brief respite, all the more welcome for being unexpected. Phil paid a visit to Anne at Point Reyes Station for the purpose of seeing Laura and his three stepdaughters. During the visit Phil broke down into tears and Anne comforted him. For the first time since 1964, kind feelings passed between them. This was, in truth, an isolated instance; Phil could never bring himself to forgive Anne for the failings he saw in her. But her kindness at this point was a balm for which he was intensely grateful.
Phil flew up to Canada alone, carrying a battered suitcase, a rumpled trench coat, and a Bible. The Santa Venetia house with broken back windows for easy illicit entry went into foreclosure. Soon after, Phil's remaining possessions were ripped off.
Hard, strange times. And no Donna to set reality straight. In Canada, alone, Phil tried his hardest to die.
9
Contemplating Suicide In A Foreign Land, Phil Decides Instead To
Commence A New We From The Bottom Up, Kicks The Amphetamine Urge,
Finds A New Wife In Orange County, Writes A Tragic Classic On The Drug
Culture, And Concludes ThatRealityls "Amazingly Simple" Just As His Life
Is Turned Upside Down Once More (1972-1974)
They think I'm weird, Carol. That probably surprises you. Weird sexy Phil, they call me. There are no psychiatrists here, so I can't go see anybody; I just bop around getting weirder all the time. Gradually everybody is beginning to realize that despite my fame and my great books I am a distinct liability to know or have anything at all to do with.
PHIL, in black humor mode, in March 1972 letter from Vancouver to Carol Carr
I live a straight life now; no one here /in Orange County) knows that I was once a hippie doper (as they would put it) . . . and yet I grieve for the loss of my former wife and the child of that marriage, whom I would very much like to see but can't. Anyhow Tessa and I will soon have a new baby I...] and it is my hope that the solution to the death of the old life-pattern and elements (if there is one) lies mainly in the forming of new.
PHIL, July 1973 letter
I have already said a great deal about him, and can only add that we had a mad, romantic love affair that nearly killed us both. Phil was no saint, and he could be very cruel at times, but he loved me more than Dante loved Beatrice, and I fear that is something I will never find again.
TESSA DICK, letter to the author
PHIL arrived in Vancouver on February 16, 1972, and found himself, to his evident delight, a feted Con guest of honor.
Within two hours of his arrival, Phil had settled into his hotel room and gone out to visit a cabaret. The next day, the University of British Columbia held a posh Faculty Club luncheon in his honor, at which his speech "The Android and the Human" was received enthusiasticallyas it would be by the Con audience two days later. Mike Bailey, the Con organizer who accompanied Phil on his rounds, was surprised by Phil's energy, as Phil had confided to him, during a low moment the first night in, that he didn't expect to live long or ever to write another book.
At the Con the next day, Phil mingled madly, focusing on the women. All vied to make the acquaintance of the SF legend of whom strange tales were told. By the end of day one, Phil was telling folks that he'd decided to stay on. The Vancouver Provence ran this proud headline: "Canada Gains a Noted Science Fiction Writer."
"Android," Phil's full-house speech, was his conscious effort "to sum up an entire life-time of developing thought." At the time he thought it was his most important work; then again, he said the same of Flow, Scanner, and Valis just after completing them. "Android" evokes the sixties' impatient transformative Zeitgeist, and it's a vital document for anyone seeking to understand Phil. But "Android" is also a roller coaster taking the reader from brilliant heights of insight to vertiginous depths of naivete.
The speech began with a fine turnabout of the basic cybernetics premise that useful comparisons can be made between human and machine behavior: "[S]uppose a study of ourselves, our own nature, enables us to gain insight into the now extraordinary complex functioning and malfunctioning of mechanical and electronic constructs?" This brought Phil to a question always at the heart of his fiction: "what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human?" Distinguishing the "android" and the "human" was difficult because "inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and such-like agencies, now." In opposition to such Orwellian manipulation, Phil set his hope in the youth. He even prophesied Scanner: "These kids, that I have known, lived with, still know, in California, are my science fiction stories of tomorrow [... ]" What Phil valued in them was not the street protest of the sixties: "[P]olitically active youth, those who organize into distinct societies with banners and slogans-to me, that is a reduction into the past, however revolutionary these slogans may be. I refer to the intrinsic entities, the kids each of whom is on his own, doing what we call `his thing.' " They rebelled "out of what might be called pure selfishness."
If androidization meant predictability and obedience, the "sheer perverse malice" of youth was the paradoxical guarantor of ultimate values. "If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society [... ] the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities." Phil conceded that his faith in youth might be wishful thinking, and he spoke out against the menace of street drugs; while he hadn't yet given up amphetamines (inhaling, during Con rounds, speed mixed into menthol nose drops), he had abandoned all romanticism as to drug explorations.
But the speech concluded with the story of how Donna stole cases of Coke from a truck, drank them down with her friends, then returned the empties for deposit refunds. Phil allowed that this was "ethically questionable," but defended it as "truly human: in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness." This was less political oratory than it was an impassioned love letter to Donna. And, like most love letters, it translates badly into sound general advice. One person's righteous rip-off is another person's tragic loss, and Coke trucks are driven by people with families and bills to pay.
On the final day of the Con, Phil met "Andrea," a college student in her early twenties who was the same physical type as Nancy and Donna. An account of Phil's falling in love with Andrea is included in The Dark-Haired Girl, a manuscri
pt he assembled in late 1972 and described, on its title page, as "A collection of personal letters and dreams which undertake the worthy artistic task of depicting what is fine and noble in humanity, found sometimes in the worst possible places, but still real, still shining." The Dark-Haired Girl (p. 1988) includes breathtaking love letters, the sentiments of sonnets rendered in onrushing prose as Phil falls in and out of love with Donna, Andrea, and others. Years later, upon rereading the manuscript, Phil observed in the Exegesis: "In 'TDHG' it is evident that I am desperately trying to find a center (omphalos) for/to my life, but that I was failing; I was still 'stateless.' "
Phil was serious about staying in Vancouver. Back in California, his home was being foreclosed on and his friends were scattered. He was truly stateless. Here at least he had adoring fans and a new woman to himself adore.
The account in The Dark-Haired Girl of his time with Andrea bears out the intensity of his search for new roots. At first, Phil was enchanted by the look that had drawn him to so many women: "[S]he's so pretty, with her long black hair and her jeans and her fur coat and so selfconscious. So at bay. So fragile and brittle, but so full of life and ambition and guts." Andrea was from the sparsely populated coastland north of Vancouver; she confided to Phil that she yearned to leave the city and go back home, though her family life was troubled. One night they went out dancing and had an "ecstatic time," losing themselves utterly in the music. Phil saw her to her door, went home, and had a dream that obsessed him for years to come:
I was back in West Marin, in the big glass-walled living room [of the house he and Anne shared], with friends and animals and children. Suddenly I looked up and saw, through the glass side of the house, a horse coming at me, head on, driven by a rider [a policeman]; it was virtually on me, about to shatter the glass. I've never seen or dreamed such an animal before: its thin body, elongated, pumping legs, goggling eyes-like a racehorse, swift and furious and silent it came at me, and then it leaped up to hurdle the house . . . I crouched down, waiting for it to crash onto the roof above me and collapse the house. Impossible for it to clear. But it did. [... ] I ran out front, knowing it must have hit dirt cataclysmically. There it was, thrashing in the mud and foliage, broken and mutilated, horrible. [. ]
Phil pondered the dream. As a well-versed Jungian, he likely knew that the horse often symbolizes the "life force" and is linked to the "masculine solar deities" and heroes (in Greek mythology, Apollo, Bellerophon, Perseus). Phil's early interpretation was that the riderpoliceman referred to his past misunderstandings with the law, while the leaping horse symbolized Andrea's unhappy state and Phil's inability to help her harness the "life force." Then Andrea told Phil that she was leaving Vancouver, returning to her backcountry home immediately. Like Donna, Andrea was scared: of Vancouver, of college, of Phil. And Phil, heartbroken, revised his interpretation: "Andrea has left. Goodbye, Andrea. I am that broken horse."
In the days after the Con, with his expenses no longer reimbursed, Phil needed an interim place to stay while looking for his own apartment. Michael and Susan Walsh agreed to put him up on their living-room couch. Michael was a reporter from the Vancouver Provence who had favorably covered the "Android" speech; Susan, an SF fan, found Phil "weird but fascinating." Both welcomed the chance to get to know him better. He was a constant improviser. "Everything was put on," Susan recalls. "Phil was always onstage, even with people he could be sure were with him." In his beard and rumpled trench coat, he grunted: "Me Sam Spade." His tour de force performance came during a sales call by a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman named (yes) Frank Noseworthy. Says Susan:
Phil set up the scenario. He would be my brother-a writer who was sponging off us-and Michael was my husband-too cheap to buy this expensive vacuum cleaner. When Frank Noseworthy arrived, he started to pleasantly explain the virtues of the Kirby. Then he made a reference to the cleanliness of the house-"if you want to continue living in these con- ditions"-and that set Phil off.
There was this escalating family argument, with asides by Phil like "Isn't it wonderful to realize that in hundreds of years we'll be dust, but this Kirby will live on?" Frank Noseworthy did not crack a smile. His complete lack of affect delighted and appalled Phil, who had studied these kinds of sales techniques and knew how best to disrupt them. And so he would wander in and out of the room during his pitch and start side conversations about the price of tomatoes.
Phil and Susan developed a flirtation and, briefly, she fell in love with him, though there was no infidelity. Why the attraction to Phil? "I still haven't figured it out. He was intellectually fascinating, cynical, entertaining, and bizarre-a puzzle." But during Phil's two-week stay, Susan came to see a darker side: manipulative, controlling, probing the weak spots of others' psyches. His mood swings were pronounced, and he described himself as manic-depressive. To friends of Michael and Susan's Phil complained of wrongdoing on their part, which, when relayed back to them, bore no relation to events they could recall. He flirted with virtually every woman who came his way, trying all approaches from flattery to piteous declarations of need. Phil finally decided that Michael wasn't good enough for Susan and pledged to take better care of herwhich Susan resented. And Michael, who had handled Phil's flirtations with good grace, now grew weary: "Phil lived at a higher level of intensity than anyone I had ever met. He insisted that you be a participant in his world, rather than merely tolerate its existence. I didn't want to."
The hallmark of Phil's intensity during this period was his capacity to fall in and out of love at a vertiginous rate. The strain he placed upon others-in this case, Michael and Susan Walsh-was relatively mild compared to the sufferings he heaped upon himself. In asking for love at every turn, he was living out his sense of being "stateless" by posing impossible emotional demands that, when duly refused, would cause him heartbreak. Phil's statelessness had less to do with being in Canada than with being without a wife. Since losing Nancy he had never stopped falling in love. That the pace should accelerate in a foreign land is hardly surprising.
Phil found new digs. But within a short time he became disenchanted with his new Canadian acquaintances. They were mostly in their thirties, "career-oriented." The Vietnam conflict that had polarized political consciousness in the U. S. hardly mattered in Vancouver. In early March Phil wrote to inquire if he could live at Center Point, an open clinic in the Bay Area he'd dropped by during the final months in Santa Venetia; the Center Point recommendation was that he should not. Phil also wrote to Professor Willis McNelly at Cal State Fullerton, who had interviewed Phil shortly after the break-in, to inquire if Fullerton would be a good place to relocate. On March 14 he canceled plane reservations for San Francisco, then wrote to Ursula Le Guin (with whom he had struck up a correspondence, though they had never met) to suggest that he visit her in Portland. Phil suspected-accurately, Le Guin confirms-that outlandish tales had preceded him, and tried to reassure her: "In spite of the trauma of my move here to Vancouver, my head is really in a pretty good place; I'm not nearly so spaced as I was back in December. I swear I can conduct a civilized, rational conversation, without breaking anybody's favorite lamp. In fact, I would say I've got it all together pretty good, everything considered; my identity crisis seems to be ending."
Sadly, it wasn't. After the loss of Andrea, Donna, Sheila, Nancy, of his entire Bay Area world, Phil fell into the tomb world. Later, to fifth wife Tessa, Phil told of Mafia types in black suits who put him in the back of a limousine and drove him around for hours asking questions he couldn't remember. In all: a two-week gap in memory. As he emerged, he was committing suicide.
The scene was his newly rented, nearly empty Vancouver apartment on March 23. Phil took 700 mg of potassium bromide, a sedative. On a piece of cardboard he had written the emergency number of a suicideprevention center in case-at the last moment-he changed his mind. "Fortunately the last number was a one," he said later, "and I could just barely dial it."
Before that final digit, Phil had already phoned Susan Wals
h to inform her that he planned to "turn out the lights." Susan was unfamiliar with this slang and had no idea that Phil was thinking suicide; meanwhile, Phil was infuriated by her lack of sympathy. In an interview for Vertex, Phil omitted this prior call but told of talking by phone to a counselor for "an hour and a half" (typical of Phil's frequent interview hyperbole-ninety minutes of talk on 700 mg of potassium bromide? No ambulance called by a trained counselor in all that time?). "[The counselor] finally said, `Here is what is the matter. You have nothing to do; you have no purpose; you came up here and you gave your speeches and now you're sitting in your apartment. You don't need psychotherapy. You need purposeful work.' " And so Phil was taken to X-Kalay, a live-in drug and alcohol rehabilitation center run along the same strict communitywithin-a-community/hard-work/cold-turkey rules as the onetime Synanon drug treatment center in Los Angeles. Phil told Vertex that to get into X-Kalay ("The hidden path"), he had to pretend he was a heroin addict. "I did a lot of method acting, like almost attacking the staff member interviewing me, so they never doubted that I was an addict." Trained experts taking Phil for a junkie? Heroin was one drug Phil never did mess with. A late-March letter gives a far more somber account:
[... ] I was really down. The next day or so I had a total freakout, breakdown, identity crisis, psychotic break, convulsion of misery and just general bad time. Now I'm part of X-Kalay; they came in and scooped up the puddle of ooze from the floor of my apartment that was me, or what remained of me, carted me to their house where they-and now 1-live, put me to work, put my head back together enough so I didn't try to snuff myself every half hour, kept someone with me night and day ... and finally, a week later, I'm again beginning to function. For one week I cleaned bathrooms, washed pots and pans, fed the children-there're chicks, dudes and children living together, here-and now I have my own office, typewriter, back at work for the first time in a long while, at writing [PR material for X-Kalay]. [... ] As you recall, the friends I had that last year in San Rafael led me down and down into the gutter with them; I got started up here in Vancouver with the same kind of bumtrippers, and went the same way fast. X-Kalay cut me off from those people: no phone calls, no visitors, nada. Complete break with my past, the outside world, my alleged friends. There are only two rules here at X-Kalay: No intoxicants and no violence. Those were the two evil verities of my former life; right? Right. I at last have a home, a real home, a family, a real family, and am beginning to develop a meaningful, goal-oriented life.
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Page 28
