Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (55 page)

Friends to confide in and his work to take him through the night, an established career and a safe place to live-when last had Phil known such calm?

But there was something missing, and Phil knew what it was. "In February of 1977 I began to hallucinate (if that is the right word) during nocturnal states, hypnogogic, sleep, hypnopompic, etc., the presence of a woman, very close to me; in my arms, in fact, as close as could be. Once begun this sensation persisted."

The woman Phil was destined to meet was Joan Simpson, then thirty-two, a psychiatric social worker at Sonoma State Hospital in the Valley of the Moon. Through her book dealer friend Ray Torrence, Joan had discovered Phil's work and became a collector of the lovely, lurid Ace Doubles of the fifties. Personally and financially independent, Joan was sharp, funny, and sensual, with curly brown hair and large brown eyes. When Torrence once asked Joan to name the two people she most wanted to meet, Phil edged out rock promoter Bill Graham for first place. Unbeknown to Joan, Torrence wrote a letter of introduction on her behalf to Phil, who phoned to invite her to visit. Joan recalls her April 1977 arrival:

It's a twelve-hour drive. I got down there at nighttime and phoned-Phil said, "Come on over." You had to buzz the gate to get in. He lived upstairsand there around a corner of the staircase a head was poking out. Turns out it was Phil. He saw me, went, "Oh! Oh!" and ran away. Actually, he said, "Are you Joan Simpson?" I said, "Yes, are you Philip K. Dick?" and that's when he went, "Oh! Oh!" I went up after him, and when I got to his apartment he was on the phone to Jeter, saying, "She's a fox, she's a fox . .

I was so relieved. He certainly was not the severe or scary person I thought he might be. Crazy maybe, but also boyish and nonthreatening. That sort of describes many things about Phil-he was naturally very childlike and naive. That, coupled with a lot of craziness, physical and emotional trouble, and so much mental energy and genius, made him the most unusual person I'd ever met.

We talked a long time. He told me how relieved he was my knuckles weren't dragging along the ground. Wanted to know if I was married, had a boyfriend. At the same time, very gentlemanly, no hanky-panky. He was just awful at hustling-it really wasn't his style. He told me, "Here is your room, you can stay here, lock the door if you like." Yeah, I did stay there. For a week. That was the beginning of our relationship.

That very first night Phil talked about Zebra and things like that-he was a living actuality of his novels. It was amazing. I told him that when I first began reading his stuff I thought it wasn't fiction in the normal sense of the word. I still think that. There wasn't this person who had this inspirational idea for a story or novel and wrote it down. It was a person's experience.

During Joan's visit, Chez Phil was in typical disarray. The cats were depositing flea eggs over the two glass-topped coffee tables, and there was snuff everywhere-numberless little tins of Dean Swift, shipped in by the case each month from San Francisco, as well as brown coatings of snuff dust. Piles of books and records and Exegesis pages. Enough pill bottles to stock a pharmacy. Phil was taking several prescribed medications dailymuscle relaxers, blood-pressure controls, antidepressants. The food on hand was mainly frozen dinners and pot pies.

Their time together went wonderfully. Life was a P. M. shift, with lots of sleeping in late. Activity commenced in mid- to late afternoon. The daily pile of mail to contend with. Friends dropping by. And Phil wrote every day-letters and the Exegesis. Says Joan: " I wanted to be around him to learn from him. I never loved him in that young lover heartthrobbing way. I loved him like you would a great master. After three weeks I came back up to Sonoma, and he came with me-which was amazing!"

Indeed. Phil's willingness, on the spur of the moment, to leave behind his Orange County home (on which he kept up the rent) and return to the Bay Area-the scene of the break-in and so many other past sorrows and dangers-is the greatest possible testimony to the joy he took in the new relationship. Phil and Joan were extremely close, but they never became lovers in the strict sense. Phil, at this time, was not capable of sex; the reasons are unclear (one possible theory is that loss of interest in sex is a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy), and by the early eighties Phil was sexually active again. With Joan, it was hugs and warmth that mattered.

Together, in May, they rented a house on 550 Chase Street in Sonoma and established a circle of friends that included Ray Torrence and fellow book dealer Nit Sprague, Paul Williams, SF writer Richard Lupoff, and psychologists David and Joan May. Lupoff conducted an interview with Phil over Berkeley's KPFA FM; they also talked casually at the Chase Street house. One exchange recalled by Lupoff shows the humorous protective coloring Phil employed to ward off fruitless debates:

Phil and I were sitting on the floor and he was wearing a crucifix-a big hand-carved wooden one. And I asked him why he was wearing it and how seriously did he take it? He said, "Listen, I live in Santa Ana and Joan lives in Sonoma. That means I spend a lot of time on 1-5 in my car. And on occasion I get stopped by the highway patrol and they will come over to my car and lean in my window and say, 'Sir, do you realize you were exceeding the speed limit?' And I'll fondle my crucifix and say, 'Why, no, Officer, I didn't know that.' " Phil said he never got a ticket.

To begin with, Phil did not in fact commute regularly on 1-5. Once he moved up to Sonoma with Joan he stayed put there. More to the point, friends such as David May recall numerous spiritual talks with Phil. Writes May: " I am certain that his prime directives were to await faithfully the Grace he sought, and on a day to day basis, to do good deeds-acts of loving kindness toward his fellow humans."

However high his aspirations, Phil could not evade his bouts of severe depression. Joan recalls:

Whoever was with him at this time would have to be a full-time ... I was going to say nursemaid-but companion, housekeeper. And not expect the same from him. A lot of it was housekeeping, nursing care-Phil would really go into states of collapse where he would be nonfunctional. He'd be so depressed or physically ill that he'd have to take to bed, and God knows when he'd come out again.

Phil suffered from palpitations, sweats, high blood pressure, sometimes quite elusive things. He has been accused of malingering by everyone in the book. But psychological states of unease can manifest physical symptomsheadaches, ulcers; I think everyone agrees with that. Phil's depressions took on a multitude of forms.

I had to give him lots of TLC [tender loving care] and let him be. You couldn't, like, say, "Come on, get out of bed, you'll feel better." He didn't respond well to reality therapy. It was more like "I will take care of you, you don't have to do anything, don't worry."

That summer, Phil wrote a story as a gift for Joan: "The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree." Composed in a childlike tone, "Mr. Computer" is a dress rehearsal of certain key themes in Valis. It is also a declaration of love that both delighted and frightened Joan, who feared she might not be up to the task of keeping the world intact, as the female protagonist in "Mr. Computer" must:

Not only does that take a lot of time and energy-it takes away from anything you might want to do for yourself as a singular entity. It calls for total twenty-four-hour devotion-make sure the computer and everything else is okay.

Phil, it seems, always was with women who were strong, and yet there was that about him that wanted to make women little girls, buy things for them. That was his form of caring and devotion. If something was bothering me and I wanted to climb in his lap and be comforted, that was okay. But if it was something more profound, he wasn't good at that, because that always carries a responsibility to it. It can be a burden.

I really couldn't let him pamper me in a little-girl way. I had my own car, money, life-I was in many ways the antithesis of what he wanted me to be.

That pampering also had a backlash effect. If things weren't working out, or there was a divorce, that same woman he'd wanted to buy things for turned into the flip side-"She wants my house, my novels."

That summer in Sonoma, Phil resumed his acquaintance with fellow SF writer Robert Silverberg. They had first met in 1964, but since then Silverberg had gone on to garner numerous Hugos and Nebulas and to earn advances that dwarfed Phil's. In interview he recalls: "Phil did feel competitive with me in some fashion-a nice fashion. But there was always an edge on Phil, whether because I was the hot new kid on the block or maybe because he resonated with something in my character. He would always duel with me in a playful way-defying me to keep up in banter." The humor could serve as a facade. Silverberg writes: "Once we held a long public conversation in fractured Latin in the cocktail lounge of a convention hotel; it was wildly funny, but I would rather have been speaking English with him. I figured he was lost to me."

In early 1977, Silverberg had favorably reviewed Scanner in Cosmos. A correspondence ensued, in which Silverberg confided to Phil the anguish of his then-ongoing divorce. To Silverberg, Phil was a man who had lived on the edge long enough to serve as a worthy guide through hard times. Indeed, Phil did offer solace and advice, and the competitive edge vanished. In their private talks, Phil seemed to Silverberg "much quieter and much more authentic-less the performer. Mainly he sounded very troubled and frightened. His publishers, health, women, the break-in. Always something."

In June-July 1977, D. Scott Apel and Kevin Briggs conducted interviews with Phil, which are included in Apel's excellent Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection (1987). Apel writes: "Photos do not do him justice. He was large, physically imposing and hairy. He was wearing slacks and an open shirt, as if his hairy barrel chest and barrel belly couldn't stand being confined." Apel notes that when Phil took phone calls, he would often break off to consult his Rolodex. "When he came back on the line, it was always with some personal comment, like, `How'd the surgery go on your cat?' or `How come you haven't called in six months?' After ringing off, he'd make a note of the conversation on the caller's card, and then continue with the interview."

Phil battled depressions throughout the summer-his failure to find a novel to fit 2-3-74 left him feeling woefully unproductive, and his unfulfilled contract with Bantam weighed heavily upon him. But the relationship with Joan had infused him with new confidence. Proof of this was his willingness to travel with her, in September 1977, to Metz, France, for an SF festival of which he had been named guest of honor. Phil was nervous enough about the trip to score a supply of speed-the only time he resorted to amphetamines in his final decade.

Nonetheless, for Phil, the Metz Festival was a triumph over longstanding fears. He enjoyed the fine architecture of the city, relished sampling French food and wine, and was understandably thrilled to find that in France he was regarded by fans and the press as the greatest SF writer in the world. Meanwhile, Joan came down with stomach flu and was largely confined to their hotel room. During their breakup two months later, Phil would claim that she'd had a "nervous breakdown" in France-a claim he denied when Joan confronted him about it. The reality was that it galled Phil not to have her by his side throughout the festivities, though it did leave him free to flirt madly.

Roger Zelazny, who also attended the Metz Festival, recalls that Phil's sixties reputation had preceded him. At one dinner, a young Frenchman popped the pill that Phil had placed alongside his plate, then asked what to expect. Phil explained that he'd soon feel better if he happened to have a sore throat.

There was a perfect Phildickian mix-up with regard to Phil's guest of honor speech, "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." The speech raised a number of speculations derived from 2-3-74, such as our world seen as a Gnostic computer chess game: "God, the Programmer-Reprogrammer, is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter; he is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the gameboard-our universe in space-time-the dark counterplayer makes a move; he sets up a reality situation." All of this would have been startling enough if Phil had read the speech as he'd written it (with simultaneous translation into French). But at the last moment the festival organizers asked Phil to shorten it by twenty minutes. Phil made some hasty deletions, which were not, alas, the same deletions made by his translator. The resulting bilingual hybrid, coupled with Phil's delight in sowing tongue-in-cheek chaos, left the audience in a daze. Zelazny recalls:

[... ] Several hours after the time the talk was scheduled, people began drifting in from the hall where Phil had been speaking. A man came up to me with a book and said, "Monsieur Zelazny, you have written a book with Monsieur Dick [Deus Irae]. You know his mind. I have just come from his talk. Is it true he wishes to found a new religion, with himself as Pope?"