Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (14 page)

Whether or not Dorothy ever threatened to call the police when Phil moved out, it is fair to assume that she was concerned over Phil's choice of accommodations. His new Berkeley address of 2208 McKinley Street was a warehouse, the upper floor of which had been converted into a rooming house. The rooms were occupied by some of the most notable young gay artists on the Berkeley scene. The leader of the group was Robert Duncan (then twenty-nine), who had just returned from a visit to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital at Washington, D.C. Others in the shifting house population included poet Jack Spicer, in his early twenties, and Phil's high school friend Gerald Ackerman (a future art historian), who had become lovers with the charismatic Duncan.

Ackerman recalls that Robert Duncan (himself a U Cal Berkeley dropout) and Phil would have long talks: "Being with Duncan was like being in a literature class." Phil also got on well with Spicer, who would come to Phil's room to listen to classical music. Writes Ackerman: "I remember once as they were listening to the Kipnis recording of excerpts from Boris Goudonoff, I waited for the music to end, and knocked on the door, thinking I was not interrupting their music, but I had wrecked, as they loudly lamented, their mood: Boris had just died." The fondness for marijuana by certain of the house residents was not shared, at the time, by Ackerman or Phil. "[T]hc giggling and talk Phil and I heard through the door made us think the 'ecstasy' produced by the drug was pretty silly."

Phil's prize possession was a disc recorder, a floor model from University Radio that could produce shellac records. There were "game" sessions in Phil's room, in which Duncan and various visitors would gather to produce strange recordings. Ackerman recalls:

George Haimsohn started out with a slow cut-time "Edna St. Vincent Millay, Millay, Millay," very nancy on the last name. Duncan came in with a deep "W. Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, W. W. W. W. W. Somerset Maugham," as in a round. Then I came in with a high, piping "E. E. Cummings. E. E. E. E. E. Cummings E. E." And while this was all going along someone else started a loud Salute to the Flag. [... ~ Then we all broke down laughing.

Phil's friendships with Duncan and others encouraged him along mainstream literary paths. His interest in SF fell off correspondingly. As for career, Hollis would provide the framework. As Phil recalled in his 1968 "Self Portrait":

I would advance up the ladder, step by step, and eventually I would manage a record store and then at last I would own one. I forgot about sf, in fact I no longer even read it. Like the radio serial, "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy!" sf fell into place as an interest of childhood. But I still liked to write, so I wrote little literary bits which I hoped to sell to the New Yorker (I never did). Meanwhile I gorged myself on modern classics of literature: Proust and Pound, Kafka and Dos Passos, Pascal-but now we're getting into the older literature, and my list could go on forever. Let us say simply that I gained a working knowledge of literature from The Anabasis to Ulysses. I was not educated on sf but on well-recognized serious writing by authors all over the world.

In a 1977 interview, Phil allowed that he had continued to read SF, but that the Berkeley culture of the late forties "required you to have a really thorough grounding in the classics." An SF fandom was emerging, but only "freaks" read SF-who were as ignorant of the classics as the literati were of Robert Heinlein. "I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people." The earliest fans were "trolls," and "being stuck with them would have been like something in the first part of Dante's Comedy-up to your ass in shit."

While Phil enjoyed the literary talk at McKinley Street, other aspects of life there-passes made at him by one of his housemates-disturbed him. Ackerman doesn't recall Phil having any affairs-homo or heteroduring his stay. "Phil may have begun to think that since he had similar tastes to the rest of us, he might have similar feelings. I would have told him not to worry."

Meanwhile, a whole new social scene was opening up to Phil due to a new influx of hirings at the Hollis stores.

Vincent Lusby, who joined on in 1947 to manage Art Music, imparted to Phil his enthusiasm for Gregorian chants and Dixieland jazz. In addition, Lusby was serious about writing (producing several wellcrafted, unpublished novels of a street-real bent); by the early fifties, he and Phil were exchanging manuscripts and criticism. Lusby also served as the first of many driving teachers for Phil; he recalls Phil as "erratic" behind the wheel. Another newcomer was Alan Rich (now a classical music critic), whose wit and musical erudition provided Phil with a worthy foil for debate. Chuck Bennett, a stylish Irishman from an upper-middle-class family, intrigued Phil as a Lost Generation type (there is something of Bennett and of Phil himself-in Stuart Hadley in Voices from the Street). Jose Flores, a salesclerk with whom Phil developed a particularly close friendship, was gay, a dancer whose skills were failing as he neared forty. When Jose later committed suicide after a failed romance, Phil was desolate.

Among these new faces, Phil was still the youngest of the Hollis crew. At nineteen, Phil had developed a reasonably assured sales manner. His cartoons and graffiti were comic highlights on the walls of the employee bathroom. His typing speed earned him the bill-preparation chores, which he handled flawlessly. But Phil was subject to streaky moods, often starting the day by walking straight to the back of the store without turning his head-"as if on a beam," Lusby recalls. Phil later credited his sales work with providing useful discipline in curbing his temper. He preferred evening shifts, on the theory that passersby would be drawn to the lit-up TVs. In the process, he became a devoted on-duty viewer of Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

Phil would sometimes go to hear Dixieland and jazz in local bars like the Steppenwolf, the Blind Lemon, and Hambone Kelly's. The Lu Wafters and Turk Murphy bands were the big draws. But by and large he was a hard guy to get out of the house. Vince Lusby recalls him as "agoraphobic." Whatever the label, it was more than an aversion to night life. The Art Music staff habitually lunched at the nearby True Blue Cafeteria. Phil would always choose a balcony table very close to the men's room-both to stay out of sight while he ate and to assure a quick trip if required.

By early 1948, Phil was looking to move out of McKinley Street. He enjoyed Lusby's footloose company and confided in him his worries over being gay. (The irony: Phil had been initially fearful that Lusby was gay and that he would have to do some "ass-kissing" to get in good with the "old auntie" manager.) Lusby first pointed out differences in literary taste between Phil and his gay friends. When that failed, Lusby took more drastic measures:

At that time we had some rather peculiar ideas about homosexuality. Philip, who was a virgin, thought he might be one. I thought it was a curable condition. A good piece of ass and it would be all over. So I availed him of a good piece of ass.

And so came about, at age nineteen, Phil's first marriage-which lasted for six months in 1948, and of which he seldom spoke for the rest of his life.

She was named Jeanette Marlin, a blond-haired regular customer with whom Lusby was acquainted. Edgar Dick, who met her after the wedding, recalls Jeanette as a "short fat little girl." Lusby's physical description is less flattering, and he adds that Jeanette was not particularly artistic or musical. She was no "girl," however, being, in her late twenties, several years Phil's senior. Jeanette was outspoken, with a frank approach to sex. They were introduced one day as she was browsing at University Radio. Phil led her to a listening booth and brought in his favorite classical recordings. Their talk became ever more friendly. There was a seldom-used storage room down in the basement, past the repair shop. Lusby notes that this room-in which Phil first made love with Jeanette-forms an important setting (as shelter, during the nuclear blasts, for the employees of Modern TV Sales & Service) in Dr. Bloodmoney.

As Phil was below the age of majority under California law, Dorothy had to sign the certificate to make their spring 1948 marriage legal. She had her doubts but gave her consent in hopes that marriage would make Phil feel better about himself. At the least, from her point of view, it separated him from the McKinley Street scene. The new couple found a tiny apartment (located behind a drugstore) on Addison Way. Gerald Ackerman recalls the setting:

All was dark, messy, disorderly; the usual painting of the new apartment had not taken place, nor did there seem to be any furniture of charm. I have the feeling that although they had been there some time, the place was full of unpacked boxes. [... ] And perhaps I was mad that he got married, as if that was a betrayal of our communal life. [...] At any rate, the visit was one of discomfort: the apartment was uncomfortable, the circumstances uncomfortable; the wife seemed to fit into no conception of Phil's or my life. I can only see her as either an unfriendly or frightened presence, standing behind a stuffed chair with her hands resting on the back, as if it were a shield. [... ] I can see now that they were just as bewildered to be there as I was to see them there.

One could speculate that a brief account of a marriage in Gather Yourselves Together, written shortly after the divorce from Jeanette, expresses some of Phil's own feelings on their home life: "Her treasure was sold dearly; he found himself married, all at once, living in a one-room apartment, watching her string bras and underpants across the bathroom, smelling the starch and iron in the kitchen, and the eternal mechanical presence of pin curls next to him on the pillow. The marriage lasted only a few months."

Phil told his fifth wife, Tessa, that when he and Jeanette had been married less than two months, she told Phil that she had the right to see other men. At this, he moved her things outside the apartment door, changed the locks, and refused to allow her to return. "Looking back," Tessa writes, "Phil realized his mother had been right, that they were too young to get married. At the time, though, it cut him to the quick."

But the crowning blow to their marital bliss was Phil's love for his Magnavox. Jeanette complained that Phil kept her up at night by playing records over and over, records that Jeanette said she hated-the same records with which Phil had wooed her that first day in the listening room. Once she threatened to have her brother come over and break the damn things.

The judge at their autumn 1948 court hearing said he had never heard more silly grounds for divorce than threatened record smashing, but granted it anyway. The one thing Phil liked about Jeanette, he would later say, was that she left him alone while he worked on storiesprimarily mainstream-that did not sell. The marriage might not have been a roaring success, but it did wonders for Phil's confidence. Three decades later, in the mid-seventies, Phil called Lusby long distance to thank him again for saving him from homosexuality.

In early-1949 Phil moved to a new place on Bancroft Way. The Magnavox and piles of SF magazines dominated the tiny space. In addition, he and Lusby leased an apartment near Grove and Shattuck, which they time-shared on the basis of who had gotten lucky with Art Music's female customers that day. Phil at twenty had boyish good looks-brown hair that hung lankily over his broad forehead, sensual lips, and the guarded, penetrating blue eyes. He walked slightly stooped and dressed in flannel shirts. But he could turn on a smile and had the gift of gab. Lusby's assessment: "Phil became fairly competent at hustling once he found out what girls were for."

It's doubtful that Phil quite kept pace with Lusby (who would soon remarry). But he did go through a series of brief, intense affairs of the heart. Not all of his loves were reciprocated, of course. He developed a mad crush on Kay Lindy, who worked at University Radio, but she preferred Lusby. There was a Miriam whom Phil adored, but she instead became lovers with Connie Barbour, a future Jungian therapist; Miriam and Connie became Phil's neighbors when he moved (later in 1949) to larger digs at 1931 Dwight Way. Kleo Mini describes Connie as "like an older sister" to Phil; she led him to read virtually all of Jung's work available in translation.

One love whom Phil would recall with deep feeling was Mary, a striking Italian woman who worked in a drugstore and was unhappy in her marriage. Like Jeanette, she was several years older than Phil. Mary soon called off the illicit affair, in part because of guilt, in part because she felt that Phil needed her more than he loved her. Also, she felt uncomfortable within Phil's circle of friends, disliked his narrow musical tastes, which excluded popular songs, and distrusted his casual sophistication (newly acquired!) about sex. Phil insisted, in letters pleading with her to see him again, that they had a unique understanding; he contrasted this understanding to his vision of a koinos kosmos, rife with pseudorealities, that resembles the SF novels to come. Adults must protect their "unique center of consciousness" by "a series of false-front personalities which we shine in the faces of the people we meet to try to dazzle them." One longs to find someone with whom all masks can be dropped. "Have you someone in your life that you can feel this freedom with, Mary?"

But the woman whom Phil was to bemoan, in later years, as his great lost love was Betty Jo Rivers. He and Lusby both marveled at her beauty one day in April 1949, as she stood outside the Art Music window. Phil thought that her short brown hair looked like the helmet of a Valkyrie from Wagner. When she entered the shop, looking for a gift for her clean-cut boyfriend (a fellow English major at U Cal), Phil immediately took her by the arm and led her to a listening room. When she mentioned Buxtehude (a composer her boyfriend had requested but whom she'd never heard of), Phil assumed she adored classical music and brought her album after album for approval. When she made her purchase, he walked her home. They talked fervently the whole way, and upon arrival Betty Jo invited Phil in for a sandwich. She recalls that he "turned green" and asked, "Eat with another person in the room?"