Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (54 page)

Money Phil had in something like abundance for the first time. Mark Hurst, a young editor at Bantam Books, was a staunch Phil Dick advocate. Publicity in Rolling Stone and other venues gave Hurst the leverage to strike the best deals in Phil's career to date. In May 1976, Bantam acquired three novels-Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and A Maze of Death-for $20,000, a far cry from Phil's typical $2,000-per-title reprint advances. Still more dazzling was a $12,000 Bantam advance for a novel to be called Valisystem A (finally published, in 1981, as Valis). Of course, SF in the mid- to late seventies was enjoying a boom. Phil's big money paled beside the six-figure advances less talented peers raked in-but then, his sales hardly rivaled theirs. No matter. Phil was flush, and the novel targeted for so long in the Exegesis had a contract.

Phil enjoyed a summer of happiness with Doris. Their new apartment had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, assuring him privacy for writing. He'd brought along his cat Harvey and his massive record collection. One album cover depicting an alien being (probably the Starship album Dragonfly) led to a startle for Doris during their first week together. Phil confided to her that, while looking at this cover, he'd realized that, fundamentally, his being was not of this Earth. Was he sincere or testing the limits of future readers' credulity? Both, most likely. Doris confirms that Phil seemed sincere when he said it-and that such speculations came and went.

Together they explored the barrio neighborhood, but Phil continued to be troubled by agoraphobia. To Doris, he ascribed his anxieties to his chronic mourning for Jane. In restaurants, Phil was careful to take large enough mouthfuls to provide an adequate bolus for easy swallowing. In their apartment, Doris recalls, "Phil only had two switches: 'I'm not writing now and I want your attention entirely' and 'I'm writing now and I want no one's attention.' " In the first mode, Phil was a charming man with a sly, weird sense of humor that could pull Doris out of her blackest moods. They would cook dinner together and then sit down to a cable movie. In the second mode, you wanted to stay clear.

He went at it eighteen to twenty hours a day by this schedule: Wake up at 10:00 A.M., write all day, down some quick "swill" at 5:00 P.M., and then back at it till 5:00 to 6:00 A. M. Stories took one or two days, novels ten days to two weeks. His concentration was intense-no noise allowed but for his own music. Phil would joke that he had to write fast, as his notes were so lousy he'd otherwise forget his plot. But Phil was great at making detailed notes he never followed. Fast was essential: The book took hold of him as it was written, flowing from his fingers. Phil avoided playing the piano, as he feared it might decrease his typing speed. Not that Phil would refuse to revise: under the guidance of Ballantine editor Judy-Lynn Del Rey, he undertook painstaking revisions to Scanner in 1975. He would bemoan the fact that his pulp past had trained him to churn it out to stay alive. But even when Phil could afford to take his time, that first draft had to come in a flash.

It didn't take long for problems to arise. When Phil wasn't writing, his intense demands made Doris feel that no privacy was left to her. Writing or not, Phil writhed when Doris spent time away from him with other friends-male or female. And there was the nasty image of "cohabitation." Phil canceled, in August, a planned visit by Isa (now nine years old) on the grounds that she shouldn't be exposed to such an arrangement. Then there were money hassles. Phil generously paid for their food and rent and gave Doris his old Dodge. But he was also prone to pointing out just how generous he was, making himself seem victimized (to his friends) and manipulative (to Doris). Doris recalls offering several times to pay half the expenses; Phil refused her money. In August, Doris decided to return to college in the fall, a necessity for her goal of Episcopal priesthood. Phil offered to pay two thousand dollars in tuition, then backed out at the last moment on grounds of financial necessity. Doris barely managed to make alternate arrangements-and she was furious.

In September, the apartment next door opened up, and Doris took it. She saw it as a move that would preserve the good times while giving her needed privacy. To Phil, it was a devastating confirmation that his "rescuer" role would backfire forever. In June he'd walked out on a marriage, and here it was September and he was living alone again. Gak. In late September Phil asked Powers to drive him to his analyst's office. The reason: Phil had recently gone the wrong way against traffic, turning into a gas station at the last minute to avoid a suicidal crash; now he didn't quite trust himself to drive. Thankfully, as his depression persisted, Phil checked into the mental ward of St. Joseph's Hospital in Orange on October 19. Powers's journal records: "Doris drove him to the hospital and she took delight in him telling everyone, `This is Doris-she drove me here.' He told her he loved her so much it made him crazy."

Two days after his admittance, Powers paid Phil a visit:

He was entirely cheerful (unlike the aftermath of the [February] suicide attempt), and he told me about a girl he'd met in the hospital, a Dylan fan and ex-doper; he had vague plans to look her up after he checked out. He told me he'd "flipped out" in Trader Joe's on Tuesday while buying kitty litter, but I think to some extent Phil used to buy therapy just to cheer himself up.

One of the doctors there had told Phil that he (Phil, not the doctor) picked remarkably unsuitable girls to fall in love with. Phil told me this and shrugged. "It's true, Powers," he admitted. "The way I get girls is to put two rocks in a sack and go out in the woods with a flashlight, then I bring the rocks together and close up the mouth of the sack after something's run into it."

The jest does no justice to Doris. Phil's fierce attachment to her endured even after he left the hospital and they made the adjustment to neighborly relations. And he grieved when, in December, Doris lost her remission. Ultimately, she would regain full health. But during a difficult first year of recovery, Phil bought Doris a bed, looked after her fondly, and endured the painful vomiting noises that came through their adjoining wall (the same is endured, to a humanizing end, by Herb Asher in The Divine Invasion). Phil also gave roughly $2,400 to fund Doris's social work job at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah. He'd help Doris and the poor at the same time: perfect. Except that the money wound up funding a higher-up bureaucratic committee. The diversion from immediate needs did not please Phil, who had long been skeptical of the Church as an institution. But his feeling for Episcopal teachings had run deep since the Palmer Eldritch days. And he followed doctrinal disputes sufficiently to take a position against female priests, because during the mass the priest becomes Christ-a man.

In late 1976, editor Hurst asked for minor revisions in the Valisystem A manuscript (which would ultimately be published, in the form in which Phil submitted it to Hurst, as Radio Free Albemuth in 1985). Unbeknown to Hurst, this set Phil to thinking of a completely new novel (as opposed to mere revisions) that would grapple with 2-3-74 more completely. After all, the Exegesis was yielding ever more startling ideas. In December 1976 came the "Zebra Principle." Back in the sixties, Phil had read The Mask of Medusa, a study of insect mimicry which suggested that humans could be as deceived by a hypothetical "high-order mimicry" as birds are by insect mimicry (or lions by zebras' stripes). Phil's Zebra Principle asks: What if the "high-order mimicry" were that of a higher, or even divine, intelligence? To Hurst, Phil explained:

Zebra, if it can be said to resemble the contents of any religion, resembles the Hindu concept of Brahman:

"They reckon ill who leave me out,
When me they fly I am the wings.
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahman sings."
(quotation from Bhagavad Gitaj

Creating a worthy new novel seemed to necessitate that Phil reread and analyze all of his past SF to determine what, in light of 2-3-74, he had already accomplished. (Crap Artist alone among the mainstream works receives attention in the Exegesis.) Here's one stab at a summation, from a 1977 entry:

So one dozen novels & too many stories to count narrate a message of one world obscuring or replacing another (real) one, spurious memories, & hallucinated (irreal) worlds. The message reads "Don't believe what you see; it's an enthralling-& destructive, evil snare. Under it is a totally different world, even placed differently along the linear time axis. & your memories are faked to jibe with the fake world (inner & outer congruency).["]

In another 1977 entry, Phil underscored that kindness is the sole means we possess to ascertain the truth of this world:

If this [the influence of occluding satanic powers] be so, then my writing has been of value, beyond the obvious contribution of indicting the universe as a forgery (& our memories also) & present the most accurate and stringentrigorous-revised criteria to pull the truly real as set out of ground (Love, making exceptions, humor, determination, etc. The little virtues).

Exegesis ferment was one reason Phil could make a successful adjustment to living alone. Another was the peaceful and friendly relations he had established with Tessa, who came with Christopher for a visit two or three times a week, even as the divorce was finalized in February 1977. Though legal custody of Christopher had been given to Tessa, Phil could continue to be with his son.

Then too, Phil had the good fortune to live within walking distance of Powers, whose good humor, calm outlook, and broad reading made him an ideal confidant. Powers was hosting Thursday-night gatherings that solidified into a tradition. Informality was the rule, and the core group, aside from Phil, consisted of budding authors Powers, K. W. Jeter, and James Blaylock, who have since become three of the most prominent SF writers of their generation. Also often present were Steve Malk, who worked in a bookstore and supplied Phil with the latest in philosophy and religion; Roy Squires, a bibliophile and small-press publisher; and brothers Chris and Greg Arena, whose street smarts fascinated Phil. Thursday nights had a decided men's club feel: Women were excluded (Serena Powers became the exception after her marriage to Tim in 1980). Guidelines were established as necessity dictated: no firearms, no coming or going through the window of the second-floor apartment. As Powers was working at a tobacconist's, there were pipes and aromatic blends to sample, while others brought fine malt Scotches.

But Phil usually kept to snuff and Orange Crush. He was one of the guys and writing was what he did for a living. Says Powers, in interview: "I think Phil's very emotional side that his girlfriends saw was not one he dragged out among his male friends. He looked at his sessions with his friends as a kind of relief from that." Phil's typical topics were health worries, car worries, the Bible and anything metaphysical, music, politics, and his big crushes on Victoria Principal, Kay Lenz, and, most of all, Linda Ronstadt. Blaylock recalls:

It wasn't his writing that made me admire him so much, it was his sheer depth of goodness. He had this idea that a person you didn't know would help you for no reason at all-and Phil was that person. And he was very funny. The laughter seldom stopped.

He would always be eager to discuss whatever idea in the Exegesis he was working on at the moment-he was fascinated with Fibonacci [the discoverer of the golden rectangle ratio] and the Gnostics. We would sit there gaping while Phil spun out big extravagant relationships between these seemingly random things in such a convincing way. By the end of the evening ... I won't swear I believed it, but I was scared shitless sometimes, or in awe other times.

K. W. Jeter, the third young writer of the triumvirate, was equally fascinated by Phil's speculations but always more skeptical than Blaylock or Powers. Phil and Jeter had first met in 1972 after Professor McNelly showed Phil the manuscript of a novel Jeter, then a student, had written. (The novel, Dr. Adder, was finally published in 1984, with an "Afterword" by Phil.) But Phil had been suspicious that Jeter might be a government agent and so resolved to break off personal contact. But they resumed their friendship in late 1976, after a three-year hiatus, and now Jeter played the gadfly role to perfection. A former antiwar activist in the Socialist Workers Party, Jeter was little drawn to the religious theories Phil fashioned from his 2-3-74 experiences. But Jeter knew how to stoke the theoretical fires, adding complexities on top of Phil's own. He called attention to the similarities between Phil's novels and those of William Burroughs-such as an invading alien virus occluding human faculties (for Burroughs, the virus is language). Deter and Phil even performed their own Burroughs-influenced "cut-up" writing experiment, scrambling texts from Roderick Thorp's The Detective, Melville's Moby Dick, and the New Testament Book of Acts.

Jeter held down a graveyard-shift watchman job at the Orange County Juvenile Hall, which allowed time for late-night phone calls from Phil, who would interrupt his Exegesis stints to test out the latest possibilities on his friend. To interviewer Andy Watson, Jeter emphasizes that, for all his theoretical enthusiasms, Phil retained a skeptical outlook: "[I]n his other hand, out of sight, is always kept what we would call [...] the minimum hypothesis. Which is that it [2-3-74] was nothing." In interview with the author, Jeter suggests that, even in his most fervent Exegesis passages, "Phil is getting inside a belief and walking around it and testing it out by the measure of absolute truth." Jeter also allows that, as Phil knew of Jeter's skepticism and would sometimes adapt to his listener's expectations, Phil's own skepticism may have played a larger role in their talks.