Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (38 page)

Phil's "inspiration of the moment" approach required a fervor that just wasn't there at this time. Too many people dear to him were dying.

In April 1968, longtime mentor Anthony Boucher died of cancer. Phil would write two essays in tribute to Boucher, and also dedicated Ubik to him. To the end of Phil's life, memories of Boucher lingered. For it was Boucher who had tapped young Phil on the shoulder and told him that he could be a writer. And Boucher's urbanity and intelligence had bolstered Phil at those times in the bleak fifties when it seemed that the SF field was populated exclusively by "trolls and wackos." Then, in September 1969, Bishop Pike died in the Judean desert while in quest of the truth as to the historical Jesus. The Bishop's influence upon Phil had been immense-Pike exemplified the passionate, no-holds-barred quest for ultimate knowledge that fueled Phil's best work. In a later interview, Phil recalled this dual loss: "It was terrible, man, they were croaking like-they were falling around me like World War One, you know, just like in the end of 'All Quiet on the Western Front.'

These deaths added to the strain of a marriage in which both Nancy and Phil had begun to bristle in their caretaking roles. Nancy was experiencing a recurrence of the nervous difficulties that had beset her in 1964, and, in addition, Phil's mounting speed intake frightened her. Some nastily cut street speed led to Phil's hospitalization, in August 1969, for pancreatitis and acute kidney failure. Severely weakened, Phil couldn't return to novel writing until well into the following year. The prospect of renewed pancreatitis attacks was a torment to Nancy. "I was so afraid he'd die. I used to be that way about my parents-and then my mother died. Then I just felt like I can't handle this." Despite the risks, Phil continued to purchase street speed. Occasionally he'd try to quit, to no avail. Nancy recalls: "I tried to hide the amphetamines. Then he'd go through this horrible bit. I couldn't stand it. Then I ended up in the hospital, and I realized I couldn't go back and live that stuff again. I couldn't get above his depressions and stuff." Nancy did go back, briefly, but she could not remain.

Phil's account of their final year is equally painful. In a later interview he explained that speed was a necessary means of escape:

[T]he taking of amphetamines at that point, I think, was masking why my memory was faulty and my behavior was erratic and my perceptions were disturbed. They were disturbed because of traumatic shock, and because of deeper mechanisms, like amnesia. But if I didn't take the dope, I would have to face it myself, and other people would have to face it, and it was easier to just pass it off in a simple way, "Well, he's spaced, he's spaced from the amphetamines."

But Phil was being evasive here. As he well knew, the speed did more than conceal his problems. It heightened them. The bouts of fear, panic, and anguish that constantly plagued him were amphetamine-fueled. These side effects of the massive dosages he downed were ineluctable, however much he tried to explain them away.

The writing well had been too long dry. Phil applied for welfare and food stamps for July-August 1970, a step that wounded his pride. But by that time he was at work on a novel again.

To understand how Phil lived through the pain of again losing his family, it helps to understand the genesis of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a novel that Phil wrote and rewrote furiously between March and August 1970.

In May 1970 Phil took a mescaline trip. He never seems to have used mescaline again, but this particular trip wowed him:

With acid I never had any genuine insights, but on the mescalin[e] I was overwhelmed by terribly powerful feelings-emotions, I guess. I felt an overpowering love for other people, and this is what I put into the novel [Flow]: it studies different kinds of love and at last ends with the appearance of an ultimate kind of love which I had never known of. I am saying, "In answer to the question, 'What is real?' the answer is: this kind of overpowering love.["]

The basic tale is of TV star Jason Taverner-rich, famous, brilliant, and incredibly handsome-losing all status when transported into an alternate world in which, according to the police state of General Felix Buckman, he does not officially exist.

With its noir atmosphere of dread, Flow is the culmination of a series of post-1964 novels-Counter-Clock World, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Galactic Pot-Healer, and Our Friends from Frolix 8-in which the terror of living in a "betrayal state" of police spies and surveillance dominates the characters' lives. But only Flow can boast a character of the subtlety of Felix Buckman, into whom Phil poured all his intense fear and hatred of authority, as well as his love for his fellow lost and lonely humans.

It is Buckman who lives out the novel's title, when his twin sister and incestuous wife, Alys Buckman-a bisexual leather queen who abuses drugs and binges on direct brain-stimulus at orgies-dies of an overdose of the mysterious time-binding drug KR-3. The parallel, in Alys's death, to Phil's loss of Jane is confirmed by the Exegesis. Phil often imagined Jane as a lesbian, and always he thought of her as strong and courageous. In the razor-tongued Alys, who hates the aloof efficiency of her brother, the sister within finds fictional form.

Felix and Alys do love each other, and exploration of the various forms of love is the grand theme of Flow. In 1969 Phil had written that the greatest weakness of SF was its "inability to explore the subtle, intricate relationships which exist between the sexes." Phil intended Flow to rectify this situation. Protagonist Taverner encounters many women in his hellish new world-lovers old and new, a dark-haired girl, and even a friend-and Flow is a portrait gallery of sexual styles. But Taverner begins as a crass TV crooner and ends as little more. The heart of Flow, as Phil himself confirmed, lies in the scene in which General Buckman cries.

It is the middle of the night, and Buckman is flying home in his quibble, trying to cope with the loss of Alys-his twin, his sister, his wife. He cannot. Stopping the quibble at an all-night gas station, he meets a black man, Montgomery L. Hopkins. Buckman cannot speak, but hands him a piece of paper on which he has drawn "a heart pierced by an arrow." At last Hopkins understands that it is sheer grief that has silenced this white stranger. And they hug. As simple as that.

Phil realized, in August 1970, that Flow needed one final runthrough, but he was tired. Then, in September, Nancy and Isa left him. Their years of efforts at happiness were at last at an end. It was Phil's fourth failure at marriage and second sundered family. He was forty-two, poor, portly, and woefully weary of losing love. Sustained writing would remain out of the question for the next two years. (In 1971, in the midst of his sorrows, Phil entrusted the Flow manuscript to his attorney, and it was not until 1973 that he typed the final draft for Doubleday.)

But the May 1970 mescaline trip had given him not only the plot for Flow, but also the vision he needed to get by. In a September 1970 letter he wrote of "a kind of mystical love of strangers that I previously never thought existed. It is all new to me, this divine love; it fills me up and I hate no one, even Mr. Jackson, Nancy's paramour."

Nancy had an affair with Honor Jackson, a black neighbor who lived across the street, but it was not love for another man that finally prompted her departure. But Phil later referred to Jackson in letters and interviews as a "Black Panther" who stole Nancy away.

Jackson, who still lives across the street, bursts into laughter when asked about Black Panther ties back then, and Nancy confirms that there were none. Back then Jackson and Phil got on well; after Nancy left Phil even bought a used car from Jackson-a red '63 Pontiac. Jackson remembers Phil as a "nice guy" who also seemed "a little loony" because "he had trouble thinking straight from day to day" and tended, when outside the house, to hunch, stalk, and peer. Jackson never spent time in Phil's house, but heard about the drug deals and would see cars come and people go in and stay two or three days. Nancy left, Jackson says, because there were too many drugs.

Why accord Black Panther status to a man who held an ordinary, peaceful job? A number of Phil's friends suggest the obvious: Given the sixties scene, it was just the detail to lend drama to a sad, drawn-out parting. Mike Hackett moved in with them in the final weeks to help with driving and other chores, but his presence only eased the break.

Isa, then three, recalls the day in early September: "We were in the car leaving, and my dad came running out of the house after us. And we were driving away."

8

Dark Night Of The Soul, Dark-haired Girls, A Scanner Darkly-It's
Always Darkest Before The Dawn, Of Course, But Try Remembering That
When The Shit Has Finally Hit The Fan Like It Does In Those Weird Phil Dick
Novels (1970-1972)

But, um-there really was no point in writing. As a matter of fact, when you conceive of how you write-one writes by going off into privacy, alone-one hour of solitude would have meant my demise, after Nancy left with my little girl, it was too risky. I had to be with people. I flooded the house with people. Anybody was welcome. Because the sound of their voices, the sound of their activity, the din in the hall, anything, it kept me alive. I literally was unable to kill myself then, 'cause there was too much going on.

Pin[., 1974 interview (in Only Apparently Real)

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed-run over, maimed, destroyed-but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terribly brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief even when we could see it, we could not believe it.

"Author's Note," A Scanner Darkly (1977)

PHIL was a bachelor again-of the middle-aged variety, with greying hair and beard, expanding gut, and a litany of lost loves and bitter memories. Yet he remained an imposing figure. His blue eyes flashed beneath his broad, writerly brow. He could set a roomful of people aglow with his brilliance, or awash with laughter at his straight-faced absurdities.

These gifts served him well just now, because, above all else, Phil needed to hold a crowd.

To do so, he would consent to any terms. He opened his Santa Venetia house first to friends, then to all comers. He offered them drugs, beer, music; his mind, wit, kindness, and broken heart.

He craved affection. And embraced chaos.

The same week Nancy left Phil, Nancy's sister Anne left her husband, Bernie Montbriand. And Nancy's brother Mike, already living in the Santa Venetia house, was served with divorce papers. So Phil invited Bernie to join them. Bachelors three.

And amiable companions they proved to be. Late-night giggling, dazzling raps fueled by white crosses. Music going always-Mozart to the Grateful Dead. Young drifters and dealers passing through free and easy, which was fine since Phil was generous with his drugs and money. He felt safer with strangers around; trusting strangers, he believed, was very antischizophrenic. But he didn't much like to leave the house. Mike handled errands. Bernie recalls: "There was a iot of fear in Phil. He was living in that one world-in that house. Things would come to that house, things would leave that house. He never dealt in real-world things ... he talked about pills a lot, oh, good shit, bad shit, where can we get some more of this?"

The fear seldom took the form of overt anger. Phil was gentle, almost withdrawn, when he wasn't in animated monologue mode. He could not easily be aroused, even by classic roommate irritations. Bernie tells of dropping the needle of Phil's expensive stereo right into the middle of a treasured record with the volume cranked to the max. "He'd just come out of his room and nicely say not to play it so loud. Polite and kind, a gentleman."