Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (35 page)

In the weeks just prior to the birth, Phil and Nancy attended a confrontation-oriented therapy group for "well" people, which Phil felt made them stronger. He also completed a treatment for The Invaders, a TV show whose premise was that aliens were secretly taking over Earth, with only the lonely protagonist aware that it is happening. Small wonder that Phil was drawn to the program, but the treatment didn't sell. During this time Counter-Clock World appeared as a Berkely paperback, with a cover featuring a dark-haired girl who resembled Nancy (upon whom the novel's character Lotta is based), a serendipity that delighted Phil.

As if by instinct, in anticipation of dramatic change, Phil purchased an expensive four-drawer fireproof case in which to house his treasured collections of Unknown Worlds and Astounding, as well as letters, photographs, his stamp collection, rare tapes, volumes of poetry, and copies of his own books and stories. It was an adult version of the secret desk drawer of his adolescence. In a February 1967 letter Phil wrote:

Without the drawers, the file-case weighs 700 pounds, and it took four men to hoist it up, on a dolly, three steps. I was one of the four men, and I got a hernia for my trouble, which annoys me, because it's as if God is saying, "You can't do it, Phil; you can't save any of the treasures of this world." Anyhow, I am wrapped up in a cloak of pain; I know that much of it is hysterical and psychosomatic, due to fear about the baby and the responsibility it'll mean ... I'm getting all sorts of physical stress-symptoms, despite the tranquilizers and codein[e] I'm taking.

As the March 1967 delivery due date neared, Phil's anxieties grew, as they had prior to Laura's birth in 1960. Since his 1964 accident, driving had loomed ever more threateningly to Phil, and the prospect of being at the wheel for Nancy's trip to the hospital appalled him. He asked Mike Hackett to stay with them during the final days and to be available as a driver. Mike recalls:

I believe Phil got her to the hospital by himself, but I went and joined him in the waiting room. Anyway, a couple of months later he showed me something he had written describing his beautiful daughter Isa, and he said, "My brother-in-law quit his job to sit with us and wait for Isa." I had quit my job, but it was over anyway. But that's like Phil to say I quit my job for Isa.

Isa's birth transformed their life as a couple. In the early years of their relationship, Phil had seen himself as Nancy's older and wiser protector. There was, of course, some basis for this: He loved her deeply and had provided a stable home after her tumultuous time in Europe. Nancy, in turn, had fallen in love with "this sensitive, protective, playful kind of person. He accepted me the way I was. I didn't have to know a great deal or be articulate or slim or whatever. He never put me down."

But the relationship included, even in the early days, a decidedly two-way dependence. "Phil was a real rescuer," Nancy recalls. Was he good at it? "Well, not completely, because he wasn't superstrong. Nobody can really rescue you, but he had so many problems of the same nature. So that eventually, even though it's a great comfort to have someone understand, you kind of drag each other down." At first, when Nancy took jobs at the post office and as a volunteer at a neighborhood kindergarten, Phil would have dinner waiting when she returned. But as time went on, and especially after Isa was born, his tolerance of her outside activities diminished. "He never wanted me away from therelike out to breakfast or anything. There wasn't a lot of freedom."

Lynne Cecil, who was close to both Phil and Nancy during this time, observes that "Nancy was somebody that Phil could focus upon totally. The urge to care for her comes from not being very good at taking care of yourself." Lynne recalls that the marriage had a "childlike" quality: "They just weren't mature adults together. Isa was somewhat threatening to him when she was little. Phil had a hard time sharing Nancy." Mike Hackett has similar memories: "Their relationship changed after Isa was born. Nancy became more independent and also changed her focus to Isa, and, well, Phil liked taking care of people but he also needed a lot of taking care of himself. Nancy didn't have as much time to do that with Isa."

Despite his anxieties, Phil was a most loving father. He seldom saw his first daughter Laura during this period. Phil's animosity toward Anne, and Anne's animosity toward Phil's lifestyle, combined to make visits a rarity. With Isa, Phil could resume the paternal doting that he had relished in the Point Reyes Station days. But the strain of sharing Nancy with a new baby showed itself in a strange sort of feeding contest. Recalls Nancy: "I was breast-feeding her at first and we started having competition about how much milk she would drink, and Phil wanted to feed her [with a bottle] twice a day. So Isa stopped eating all at once and the doctor said, `There's too much tension in your house.' " It is difficult not to see a connection here to twin sister Jane's inadequate nourishment. Another, more surprising parallel came in the form of Phil's insistence that holding Isa every time she cried would spoil her-a child-rearing philosophy that had been employed (much to Phil's retrospective contempt) by his mother.

Phil's feelings toward Dorothy, which had softened somewhat during the desperate months following his breakup with Anne in early 1964, reverted to pronounced antipathy during his marriage to Nancy. Dorothy was still greatly concerned-and with good reason-over Phil's considerable intake of both uppers and downers. But her warnings were met with rage. It was a sensitive nerve due to Phil's own fears, which escalated along with his intake.

Nonetheless, it was Dorothy and Joseph Hudner who made the down payment for a bigger house for Phil and family to move into in June 1968. Located in the Santa Venetia district of San Rafael, at 707 Hacienda Way, it was a suburban tract house with a lawn and garden that did not thrive under new ownership. Grania Davis, who visited with her husband in 1969, received a Phildickian tour of the garden: "He took us around saying, `This is the dead lemon tree, this is the dead rose bush, this is the dead lawn. The Unwelcome Wagon is coming to pick me up next week.' "

The house was registered in the Hudners' names because of Phil's poor credit rating. But despite the strained relationship between mother and son, Nancy emphasizes that she and Isa were treated with the greatest kindness by Dorothy, and adds:

There was a lot of misunderstanding between Phil and Dorothy. He would take things she would say and twist them around. One time she was over, and Phil and I used to wrestle and fool around, and she wrote to say she was afraid he'd hurt me. Not in a mean way-she had trouble communicating in a straightforward way; she had to write him a letter. He got so mad.

Phil and Dorothy's battles over drugs grew ever more heated. Before going into the details, it would be wise to recall that the sixties Zeitgeist lent to drugs a patina of glory and adventure lacking today even among avid users. When Phil took and talked drugs he thought he was being hip and was taken as such (Dr. Timothy Leary made a telephone fan call in spring 1969). Acid, pot, and hash held no special fascination. But pills ... ah, pills. He could mix, match, and fine-tune effects with Stelazine; muscle and stomach relaxants; Librium, Valium, and other tranks; Dexamil and all manner of speed-prescription quality preferred, white crosses (amphetamine pills) and street batches accepted. "It was," says Nancy, "like he was medicating himself-trying to get to a certain place."

One place he often tried to get to, with considerable success, was the state of inner focus required to write the way Phil nearly always wrote his novels-in streaks of two to three weeks. Says Nancy: "When we needed money, like when Isa was born and we were broke, he could just sit down and write a book and get money." Phil wrote nine full novels, parts of three others, and numerous stories and essays during his years with Nancy. It wasn't quite the rate of 1964, but at its heights it was awesome.

During the composition of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said in 1970, Phil poured out 140 pages in a forty-eight-hour session. Speed enabled him to work on little sleep and lifted him out of his searing depressions. Recalls Nancy: "His depressions just stopped him. He could go maybe three, four days without saying a word." Once he started a book, Phil's identification with his characters was extreme. During the writing of Androids, says Nancy, "Phil was working all night, and when he came to bed he was talking like a different person. He'd had some kind of experience while writing and thought he was someone else or somewhere else. "

Phil's primary source for pills were multiple prescriptions from a revolving group of doctors to whom he'd recite the requisite symptoms. This routine was and is a favorite method of users. Miriam Lloyd points out: "You could go to any meeting of Narcotics Anonymous and find out dope fiends are the cleverest people imaginable. Phil was way cleverer than most. In the world of drug abuse, prescription drugs are the most common." But Phil had further motivations for consulting psychiatrists. Recalls Nancy:

It seemed like he had this terrible fear of being crazy, so the psychiatrist would say you're not crazy. All the doctors would always tell him he was okay. He needed to hear that-he had a lot of anxiety. But he wasn't crazy. Even though he had crazy ideas sometimes, he knew what was going on all the time. He was never out of touch with reality.

Phil's fondness for speed led him to street dealers as well. These dealers tended to be in their teens and early twenties. They were a ubiquitous presence by 1967; Phil's stepdaughter Hatte, who attended San Rafael High School that year, heard through school friends that her father's house was a known locale for selling drugs.

From 1967 through the end of the decade, Phil and Nancy's life together became ever more difficult and desperate. Drugs were part of the problem, but only part. Entropic forces were shaking the once-placid household. First came the difficult adjustments that all parents face in caring for a new baby. Then Phil's two cats died. The ill tidings took on tragic proportions with the suicide of Maren Hackett in June 1967. In the next two years would come two more deaths-Anthony Boucher and Bishop James Pike, the two men who served most clearly as mentors to Phil, passed on. Now add in an IRS audit, economic instability, marital infidelity, the standard twisted weirdness of the California sixties, and the hairpin psychic risks of plotting SF novels that sought to mirror these realities. Loving couple though they were, Phil and Nancy were brought to their knees.

Weaving in and out of these crises were the mood pills-uppers, downers, and downright outers. Phil's pill consumption was marked by a near-blind confidence in the benefits the right drug at the right time could bestow. A typical example was his self-prescribed treatment of a "nervous breakdown" he suffered in July 1967. The primary catalyst here was Maren Hackett's suicide in June. Maren's woes had stemmed in part from the painful end of her affair with Bishop Pike; Phil and Nancy, who had seen it coming, were nonetheless shattered by her death. Maren had been a trusted source of encouragement to the younger couple.

In the weeks just prior to his "breakdown" Phil had been "mildly paranoid and very hostile," and then "what my psychiatrist called 'borderline psychotic symptoms' became the full and overt thing." The full breakdown lasted half a day and consisted "of vast distortions in per- ception"-horrible tastes, loss of memory and time sense, physical helplessness, acute terror while feeding Isa, suicidal urges. In addition, Phil misplaced "important IRS documents." So vivid were the distortions that Phil asked Nancy to hide his .22 pistol. But he battled through-"I took a good big dose of phenothiazines (sp) and made it over to see the Dr." (Stelazine, a phenothiazine, was the depressant Phil had urged on Anne in 1963.) Phil emerged "feeling active and vigorous and even elated-because I reasoned, I had met it head-on and licked it (however temporarily)." Now comes the paradoxical twist that marks so many of Phil's accounts of crisis:

The interesting thing, now that I look back on that day, is the amount I got done. At nine a.m. a T-man (i.e. a cop from the Treasury Department) showed up and demanded the back taxes I owe. I reached a settlement with him. [... ] The Dr. thought it was remarkable that in such a state I could deal with the T-man, since I fear them above all other life forms Terran or otherwise.

Phil had good reason to fear the IRS. Whatever settlement he thought he had worked out soon fell apart. Continued audits of Phil's 1964 and 1965 returns (in which he reported twelve thousand and five thousand, respectively) led to ever-greater penalty demands. In a September 1967 letter Phil pleaded: "How can it go on and on? I have almost no money left." But Phil moved courageously from the frying pan into the fire when he signed (along with five hundred others) a "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" petition that appeared in the February 1968 Ramparts magazine. The signatories, in oposition to the Vietnam War, pledged: "1) None of us voluntarily will pay the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or any war-designated tax increase. 2) Many of us will not pay that 23% of our current income tax which is being used to finance the war in Vietnam." Phil's stance, which enabled him to influence public opinion without facing the psychological ordeal of leaving the house, nonetheless exacted high personal costs-an IRS seizure of his car in 1969, as well as an intense, lingering fear. In a 1979 Exegesis entry, Phil reflected: "Looking all this over I realize that the 'Ramparts' petition & then my failure to file until the war ended was not just an anti-war act, a dissenting, or even civil disobedience but an outright sacrifice of my freedom and career: the punishment was inevitable, as was Jesus' when he entered Jerusalem. & I knew it. By '74 I lived in terror of them arresting me [... ]"