Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (16 page)

Phil may have felt declasse early on as an SF writer, but he was honing his talent. And he was fortunate enough to find two persons who guided him through the solitude and uncertainties of a writer's life. The first was Kleo Apostolides, whom Phil married in June 1950 and with whom he spent the most placid (for Phil) eight years of his life. The second was Anthony Boucher, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who helped transform Phil into the most prolific young SF writer of his era.

Kleo was eighteen when she first met Phil in Art Music in the winter of 1949. She enjoyed opera, so naturally she and Phil began to talk. Kleo was Greek, dark-haired, with strong features, a rounded figure, and a pleasant laugh that shifted easily into high-pitched giggles. She liked life, knew what she was about, and was intensely curious and intellectual without the least bit of pretension. Kleo noticed that Phil was shy. She invited him over to her place to listen to records. Then they had their first real date.

Yee Jun's, in San Francisco's Chinatown, was Phil's place to take people because of its small size and high-walled private booths. A waiter named Walter knew Phil well. Recalls Kleo: "Walter wound up ordering for us. We didn't eat very much-we were too nervous-and at the end of dinner Walter scolded us, then packed everything up and made us take it home. Very charming."

Kleo became a regular visitor to Phil's Dwight Way attic apartment. He had two roommates at the time: Alex, a tall, blond Pole, and Taufig, of Turkish or Syrian descent. Everyone got on well, and the garretlike atmosphere of slanted ceilings and walls painted in bright primary colors (the prevailing Berkeley style) delighted Kleo. Phil's room was all books and records, along with a Dutch oven and a little gas stove for the simplest of meals. Ultimately Alex and Taufig bowed out and Kleo moved in.

While Phil alternated between Art Music and University Radio, Kleo was attending U Cal and changing her major often, finally settling on a general curriculum major. She read omnivorously and took up sculpture. A variety of university-related part-time jobs allowed her to make do and, ultimately, provide critical economic support for Phil through the first years of his writing career.

Even before meeting Kleo, Phil had begun making payments on an old house at 1126 Francisco in the west Berkeley flatlands. He was due to take occupancy in May 1950. Phil proposed marriage. Says Kleo:

I didn't care one way or the other but we were in a very romantic period, Phil mentioned it, and so I said okay, but it would have been fine if it hadn't been brought up-if you're living together everyone assumes you're married, so why make a big deal about it? But Phil was a little anxious. For one thing, I was under 21, and he was afraid that his mother might report us to the authorities at one time or another. I don't know, it sounded wacky to me.

Dorothy proved easily amenable to her son's second marriage at age twenty-one. But she never got on with Kleo, who seemed to Dorothy to be withdrawn in her company. Dorothy was quite right: Kleo did not like her, due to Phil's tales of childhood woes and to her own perception that "Dorothy was such a bright woman and made her own way but her relationships with people stemmed from a very bitter view of the worldone I didn't share."

The little opposition to the marriage that arose came from Kleo's side of the family. When Kleo told her mother, Alexandra, the news, she burst into tears-Phil wasn't Greek. Her father, Emmanuel, a San Francisco physician, didn't learn of the wedding until after the fact because it was assumed that he would vehemently disapprove. But Phil soon got on splendidly with them both, talking medicine with Emmanuel and Greek drama and mystery religions with Alexandra, who had a B.A. in classics.

The June 1950 ceremony took place in Oakland City Hall. Kleo recalls:

The judge was very sweet to us. He took longer than priests usually do in more formal weddings and gave a nice talk reminding us not to get angry and to try to see each other's point of view. On the way home we had to transfer buses, and I was wearing this awful brown coat, and while we were waiting for the second bus a bird on top of a building made droppings right on the coat. And I asked, "What does this portend?" Philip laughed like hell and said his mother had sent the bird.

Phil describes their two-story house just off working-class San Pablo Avenue in Radio Free Albemuth (1985): "The house was very old-one of the original Berkeley farmhouses-on a lot only thirty feet wide, with no garage, on a mud sill, the only heat being from the oven in the kitchen.

His monthly payments were $27.50, which is why he stayed there so long. "

His determination to be a writer held strong, despite a steady stream of rejections of his mainstream stories. It was still, as the decade began, the mainstream that held him. While his writing time was limited by his Art Music job, Phil was disciplined enough to pursue his craft in the late-night hours. He used the tiny dining room as his writing office; alongside his desk and typewriter were his Magnavox and record collection (he always wrote to classical music) and cats such as Magnificat, who would fall asleep and slide off Phil's file cabinets. Rejection slips were taped to the walls. Kleo swears that once seventeen manuscripts came back on the same day. "We had this little mailbox and they spilled out onto the porch. He just sent them right out again. We both knew Philip had talent. We also knew that didn't have much to do with whether his work would sell."

In the living room was a large TV (Phil believed in the Hollis goods he sold), for which he built a protective plywood case. The roof leaked (they positioned buckets when the rains came), and mice nested in a gap in the kitchen ceiling. Says Kleo:

We sat at our little kitchen table and looked up at the mouse tails. If you flipped its tail, the mouse would go away. When it got to four tails, we decided to rig up a trap in our little pantry-a coffee can propped up on a matchstick to which we tied a string. We caught thirty-two mice over several weeks, and would take them across to the vacant lots and let them go. Over the weeks the tails kept getting smaller and smaller, and we began to have bad feelings about it all. One of the last small mice was so weird and clever. We thought hard-and we just let him stay.

Phil had been devoting his primary writing energies to mainstream fiction-the massive Gather Yourselves Together and at least two dozen stories that have not survived. His return to SF came through his meeting with William Anthony Parker White, a/k/a H. H. Holmes or (as the SF world knew him) Anthony Boucher.

Under his real name of White, Boucher reviewed mystery novels in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. As Holmes, he wrote mystery novels and scripts for the Adventures of Gregory Hood radio show. As Boucher, he published SF and fantasy stories. Boucher's stories never influenced Phil, but his editing skills surely did. At age thirty-eight, in 1949, he had co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with J. Francis McComas. F & SF stressed literary graces over the hard-science angle-usually pseudo-science in execution-favored by most SF editors. If that doesn't seem like revolutionary literary theory, it passed for it in the pulp climate of the early fifties.

Boucher was a record collector and host of Golden Voices of the Opera on KPFA. It was at Art Music that Phil met him. Through him, Phil recalled in his 1968 "Self Portrait," "I discovered that a person could be not only mature, but mature and educated, and still enjoy sf." Phil was also struck by the man himself. Boucher was urbane and kindly, Catholic in faith and in intellect as well. Utterly devoted to books, Boucher read even as he walked along the Berkeley streets.

Boucher taught a weekly writing class at his Berkeley home at 2643 Dana Street. Every Thursday night, anyone who paid a nominal onedollar fee (generally eight to ten students per night) could submit manuscripts to Boucher's exacting yet gracious scrutiny. He read them aloud in a voice resembling that of Dylan Thomas. A constant smoker, he kept an atomizer near to hand. Writer Ron Goulart, who attended Boucher's classes in 1951, recalls that he stressed this rule for SF and fantasy: "You were allowed one initial premise from which everything followed-you could have a person who walked through walls, but not another person in the same story who was invisible. He would quote H. G. Wells that a pig that could fly over hedges was fantasy, but if all animals could fly it became something else."

Among the occasional students was Dorothy, whose efforts at mainstream fiction were having no more luck than Phil's. For all of his anger toward Dorothy, Phil often gave her his manuscripts to read. At her urging, Phil attended a few sessions, but soon felt twinges of the fear that so often marked his classroom experiences. Kleo would go in his stead and note down Boucher's comments on his manuscripts. At last came a breakthrough. The "Self Portrait" continues:

The literary ones he did not respond to, but to my surprise he seemed quite taken with a short fantasy which I had done; he seemed to be weighing it in almost terms of economic worth. This caused me to begin writing more and more fantasy stories, and then sf. In October, 1951, when I was twenty-one years old, I sold my first story: a tiny fantasy to F&SF, the magazine which Tony Boucher edited.

The story was "Roog" (originally titled "Friday Morning"), and Boucher forced Phil to go through several drafts before finally accepting it. In the tale, Boris the dog realizes that the garbagemen who haul away the trash are really alien Roogs who thrive on the food packed in metal "offering urns." Boris barks "Roog!" to alert his owners, but they are annoyed and plan to give him away. This human indifference helps the Roogs' cause:

"Roog! Roog!" Boris cried, huddled against the bottom of the porch steps. His body shook with horror. The Roogs were lifting up the big metal can, turning it on its side. The contents poured out onto the ground. [...]

Then slowly, silently, the Roogs looked up, up the side of the house, along the stucco, to the window, with its brown shade pulled tightly down.

"Roog" was inspired by Snooper, an Australian shepherd next door, who barked every Friday morning during garbage collections. Phil lost sleep, but the story remained a favorite:

So here, in a primitive form, is the basis of much of my twenty-seven years of professional writing: the attempt to get into another person's head, or another creature's head, and see out from his eyes or its eyes, and the more different that person is from the rest of us the better. [... ] I began to develop the idea that each creature lives in a world somewhat different from all the other creatures and their worlds.

Phil always remembered with pleasure "that day a letter arrived in the mail, instead of a manuscript back with a rejection slip." Boucher had paid him money (seventy-five dollars) for a story that he could write (or rather type at breakneck speed, with Kleo copy editing) in the magical privacy of his own home!

I began to mail off stories to other sf magazines, and lo and behold, Planet Stories bought a short story of mine. In a blaze of Faust-like fire I abruptly quit my job at the record shop, forgot my career in records, and began to write all the time (how I did it I don't yet know; I worked until four each morning). Within the month after quitting my job I made a sale to Astounding (now called Analog) and Galaxy. They paid very well, and I knew then that I would never give up trying to build my life around a science fiction career.

Did Phil really quit his job on the basis of that first sale? No doubt he considered it, but Kleo recalls that Phil was fired due to his breach of the rigid Hollis loyalty code.

In retrospect, the transgression seems ridiculously petty. Hollis had hired Norman Mini as a salesclerk for University Radio. Mini (who would marry Kleo a decade later, after her divorce from Phil) was a colorful Berkeley character, twenty years older than Phil, who once was a Communist party member. By the early fifties, Mini had renounced all party ties and even testified before the California State House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

By the early sixties, Phil would speak in worried tones about unspecified "communist" activities on Mini's part that somehow had led to Phil's coming under surveillance. At the time, however, Phil admired Mini, who was one of the few men in Berkeley to wear three-piece suits and was commonly taken to be the owner of the shop. While Hollis could stand being upstaged, he could not tolerate what he regarded as disrespectful behavior toward female customers. The ax fell when one day Mini punningly responded, after a woman asked for an album by the Kunsthalle Orchestra, "Oh, you mean that all-girl orchestra from Germany?"

Despite his agoraphobic fears, Phil (who had in the past made vehement protests against Hollis's autocratic style) testified on Mini's behalf at the unemployment hearing. Some months later, when Mini dropped by Art Music to visit, Phil spoke with him and was spotted by Eldon Nicholls, Hollis's second-in-command. Nicholls and Phil were fond of each other, but Nicholls's first loyalty was to Hollis, and he felt bound to report the unseemly fraternization. Hollis, outraged, fired Phil. The pain was considerable. (Phil later drew from his memories of Nicholls in creating Hoppy Harrington, a genetic freak whose fortunes rise in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust in Dr. Bloodmoney [19651.)