Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (13 page)

As a young man Hollis had hankered, in fantasy, for the life of a writer, and he always liked to surround himself with creative types; his employees were often budding artists from the Berkeley scene. He and his wife, Pat, never had children, and perhaps for this reason Hollis was susceptible to strays-faintly distracted, odd-seeming Berkeley idealistswho wandered into his orbit. One such was Homer Thespian, who went barefoot through the streets and was a crack repairman when he wasn't engaging his boss in surly philosophical disputes or disappearing for days at a time. Hollis kept him on the payroll without complaint.

Phil, budding artist and stray, was a favorite of Hollis's from the beginning. Phil's first part-time job was breaking apart vacuum tubes and adapters to scavenge the parts (scarce during wartime) for reassembly. Menial as it was, the job may have been-at first something of a favor to a boy in need of a break. Phil would later say that working for Hollis was his first "positive validation." For a time, Phil had an innocent crush on Pat Hollis. For one of Phil's birthdays, Hollis's gift was a choice of any recording in the catalogue; Phil picked Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, featuring his then-favorite vocalist, Gerhard Husch.

In a letter on his twenty-first birthday ("I am writing this on my own time," he states in the first line) Phil recounted how he had joined on in 1944. The letter was a paean (in a painfully self-conscious man-to-man tone) to Hollis's guidance:

The first words I ever was addressed by you, were, "If you like both albums so much it really doesn't matter which you buy; you'll get them both, sooner or later." You were right, I did, within a week. I thought: what a smart fellow. I was fifteen. Six mo. later I went to work for you at AMC [Art Music] [...]

[... ] You aided and abetted my mental growth, and also frightened me backwards occasionally, because I take everything you say seriously, then and now. [. . . ]

At 15, 1 did everything wrong, at 21 you are at AMC and can't see what I'm doing. [.]

I once made a series of pictures of you, which you seemed to like. They are still hanging up at UR&E [University Radio], and when I noticed them I am inclined to think that if I drew them again they would be exactly the same at 21 as I drew them at 16. Maybe you know what I mean. [.. ]

Love,

pkd

As the letter indicates, Phil found it difficult, at first, to cope with the job. But the anxieties and vertigo attacks arose in connection with Berkeley High-not the Hollis stores. Life with salesclerks and repairmen could be fun, especially when you got the news (in 1945) that at long last the war was over:

[W]e all piled into the store truck, grabbed a carton of professional-size firecrackers, picked up some GIs along the route, and turned on Berkeley by blowing it up. Later, everybody went across to San Francisco and we really tore it down for like ten days, roving about in armed bands menacing everything which walked. It was fun. Later in the year I was promoted from sweeping floors to emptying the ashtrays. All in all it was a good year.

Dick Daniels (who also worked for Hollis for a time) recalls the banter between Phil and his boss:

Phil was never really loose around Hollis, but was instead in something like the position of the fool who jests in the king's court-but only within understood parameters. Phil played the fool and Hollis responded. The affection that Hollis had for him was Phil's repayment-that is, that Hollis let him get away with it. Hollis was the first older person with whom Phil had that kind of relationship.

Hollis sponsored and supplied records for a folk-novelty program on local FM station KSMO in San Mateo in the late forties. Phil wrote DJ patter and Hollis shop commercials for the programs. He claimed, in later years, to have hosted a classical music program on KSMO, but no one who knew Phil at the time can recall his having been on the radio. But he must have paid frequent visits to KSMO: The ambience of an FM station is captured in fine detail in his 1956 mainstream novel, The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, and the genial manner of a small-time DJ is touchingly embodied in Walt Dangerfield, whose broadcasts from the Earth-orbiting satellite (in which he is trapped until he dies) are of great solace to the postnuclear war survivors in Dr. Bloodmoney (1964). A few pages of Phil's writing for KSMO survive. Already he had the ear for American sales shuck that would, in his SF, sound so strangely right coming from the mouths of aliens. Here Phil pitches those newfangled TVs:

University Radio in Berkeley greets you. Yesterday when we came to work we found that our salesman had moved his potted palm to the other side of the store, so that he could see the television screen better. Customers are requested not to bother him with inquiries about buying things. If you wish to purchase a Magnavox, kindly lay the money on the counter with a note describing the set you want. If you are lucky, he may notice your request between television programs.

The years with Hollis provided Phil with a mother lode of writer's capital. Characters based on Hollis can be found in several of Phil's mainstream and SF novels, particularly in the fifties and sixties (see Chronological Survey). The lonely, cranky figure of the "repairman" also recurs as a symbol of integrity and courage in the face of impossible odds. In the Exegesis, Phil observed that much of his work was "palpably autobiographical-the little business firm, & the fatherly owner or world leader." The boss-employee relationships between Jim Fergesson and Stuart Hadley (Voices from the Street, c. 1952-53), Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1965), and Glen Runciter and Joe Chip (Ubik, 1969) are the most notable portraits of the trust and tension that existed between Hollis and Phil.

In Voices from the Street, an apprenticeship mainstream novel, the Hollis figure is Jim Fergesson, owner of "Modern TV Sales and Ser- vice"-"a small, muscular man in a blue serge suit, middle-aged, face red with wrinkles and wisdom." As Voices was written during and just after Phil's employment with Hollis, vivid memories lingered. How strong a figure was Hollis in Phil's psyche? Fergesson's opening of Modern TV for the day's business is patterned after the creation in Genesis:

Here no life existed. [...] He bent down and clicked on the main power; the big neon sign sputtered on, and after a moment the window lights warmed to a faint glow. He fixed the door wide open, caught up some of the sweet outdoor air, and, holding it in his lungs, moved about the dark, damp store [... ] The dead things came reluctantly back to life. [... ] He threw the Philco display into whirring excitement and carried it to the back of the store. He illuminated the luxurious Zenith poster. He brought light, being, awareness to the void. Darkness fled; and after the first moment of impatient frenzy he subsided and rested, and took his seventh day-a cup of black coffee.

The ultimate tribute to Hollis is Leo Bulero in Palmer Eldritch, the greedy, needling, cigar-chomping, heart-on-sleeve owner of Perky Pat Layouts, Inc., who becomes Earth's only hope of resisting the psychic invasion (conducted through masterful marketing of the drug "Chew-Z": "GOD PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE. WE CAN DELIVER IT.") by Palmer Eldritch, the magisterial embodiment of pure evil. Bulero, whose "Can-D" drug product is being pushed off the market by Eldritch, writes the little memo (Hollis frequently wrote memos to employees) that serves as a frontispiece to the novel-a pure, stuttering affirmation of the human spirit:

I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?

In a 1977 interview, Phil refuted the notion of an "anti-hero" slant in works such as Palmer Eldritch:

I think very often I'm accused of writing my protagonist as an anti-hero. [...] And what I'm doing is just taking the people that I've worked with, that I've had as friends, had as fellow workers and I get a tremendous sense of satisfaction. [... ]

And I always think, well, the ultimate surrealism [...] is to take somebody that you knew, whose life time ambition was to sell the largest television set that the store carried, and put him in a future utopia or dystopia, and pit him against this dystopia, or place him in a position of power. Like I like to take employers that I've had who've owned small stores and make them supreme rulers of entire-

Uwe Anton [interviewer]: Galaxies?

Phil: Galaxies, yes. That to me is very enjoyable, because I still see this person as sitting at his desk, looking at a lot of invoices for purchases that have never been made, saving who authorized this?

Phil loved to tell stories of the philosophic realizations he achieved while working in the Hollis shops. Once, while sweeping the floor at age fifteen, Phil got into a debate with a repairman as to whether radio speakers allowed one to hear music (the repairman's view) or a "simulation" of music (Phil's position). Another time, a repairman pointed out to Phil, while they were at a traffic light, that there was no way to prove that they were both seeing the same color, even though they both called it red. Underlying the lessons was the sense of dignity provided by doing one's work well. There was the time they tried to repair a Capard, a complex marvel that automatically stacked records. After much labor it was fixed, but the bumpy ride to the customer's house undid the effort:

And we said there is no bill, we're not charging you. [...] And I was very proud [.] that we had all admitted to our own defeat, in the face of the situation. I ... ] I was only about fifteen years old-this made a vast impression on me-that this Capard epitomized an inscrutable ultra sophisticated universe which was in the habit of doing unexpected things. [... ] But the great merit of the human being is that the human being is isomorphic with his malfunctioning universe. I mean, he too is somewhat malfunctioning. [. ] He goes on trying and this, of course, is what Faulkner said in his marvelous Nobel Prize speech, that Man will not merely endure, he will prevail.

The support and warmth of the Hollis operations, and the steady salary they provided, assisted Phil in an undertaking that he came to regard as one of the most difficult-and ultimately triumphantchallenges of his life: moving out of his mother's house in the fall of 1947:

Parents have a vested interest in keeping their kids little and dumb and in chains, like all oppressed groups. I remember when I told my mother I was moving out. "I'll call the police," she said. "I'll see you in jail first." Naturally I asked why she felt that way. "Because if you move out and leave me," she said, "you'll wind up a homosexual." I had to go and ask why, again. "Because you're weak," she said. "Weak, weak, WEAK."

Dorothy heard out these accusations again and again, but never acknowledged them to be true:

Philip was 19 when he moved out of the house. Here again, his account will differ from mine. It was friendly, in fact it was at my suggestion, and he came back almost every evening for a long talk-test. I remember the yellow cat we had at the time; he couldn't understand why Philip would come in the front door, stay a couple of hours, and then leave.

But Phil was always adamant: The struggle to break free from his mother's rule was a paradigmatic act of courage that allowed him to enter the dreaded koinos kosmos on his own terms. He recognized the erotic overtones of the struggle. To third wife Anne he confided: "When I was a teenager, I had 'the impossible dream.' I dreamt I slept with my mother." His interpretation of the dream: "I won my Oedipal situation." But true victory would not come until he left Dorothy's home. In a 1981 journal entry, Phil theorized that his pattern of impermanent relationships with women was rooted in that event: "I am drawn to women who resemble my mother (proud, intelligent, cruel, judgmental, suspicious, scathing, etc.) in order to re-enact the primordial situation in which I fight my way loose at the end and divide off into autonomy." Later in the same journal entry Phil flip-flopped: "An even more important point could be made: I am searching-not for my mother, the cruel i.e. bad mother-but the good mother, the tender, kind, sympathetic and loving mother I never had but always wanted."