Collected Essays (81 page)

I lost track of the Garbage King during the last evil times in Lynchburg, and then all at once it was 1986 and I was a computer scientist in California—more than that, a
hacker
—and I saw Phil again. He was back into the mode of
A Scanner Darkly
.

I first read that book, by the way, in Brighton: SeaCon, 1980, my first SF con, where I met my heroes Ian Watson and Robert Sheckley and sold my manuscript of
White Light
to Virgin Books in the person of Maxim Jakubowsky. I was partying the whole time thanks to following the first Brit I saw go by in lace-up white leather boots, I think his name was Gamma. I sat down next to him and his sleazy buddies and sexy girlfriends and began bragging about how great I was and how they should turn me on. One of them gave me hash and I smoked that for a day and then I couldn’t find him for more. I’m all, “Where’s Lester?” and they’re all, “Lester’s gone into the City to get some powdah.” I was shocked.

I was in Brighton two nights, staying in an attic flat up near the train station, all the hotels having been full on my arrival overland from Heidelberg. Both mornings I lay in bed leisurely reading
A Scanner Darkly
and wallowing in its greatness. Lester didn’t like the book because the ending was, “Too obvious, you know, so against drugs.” When it was time for me to go back to the
Mathematisches Institut
, I was on the subway-like Brighton train in time, reading
Scanner Darkly
, the part about Barris and the amphetamine plant, Barris
pausing in his work
, alertly slackful, and me laughing so hard that people are looking over, and the train is inching out of the station and I realize I’ve left my suitcase on the platform.

I’ve reread
Scanner
three or four times now. The plot is very intricate and delicate, like the nerves in a vivisected bat. And it’s an incredibly sad book, even though it’s so funny. Textually, the words “dreary” and “slushed” come back over and over, making a kind of sad oboe music in the background.

You wanna talk short stories, two Dick stories stand out in my mind. “The Golden Man” was the first of his stories I read, as a twelve-year-old, not noticing Phil’s name, but pondering that story for years, especially its key concept of being able to see alternate futures. The other story I think of right off the bat is “Explorers We,” about men who think they are astronauts landing and then they get killed because they are really Martian invaders.

How I got hold of that particular story was that my Swarthmore roommate, Greg (who appears as the canny Ace Weston in my
Secret of Life
), is now a book dealer, and, knowing my love of Phil (especially after the award), Greg gave me a dead man’s set of twenty-three 1950s SF magazines, each containing a story or novelette by Philip K. Dick. I had this great crappy writing office in Lynchburg, with an overstuffed white vinyl couch, and a bookcase with the Dick mags, and usually I didn’t feel like writing much on Mondays or Tuesdays, so then I’d likely lie on the white couch and read one of those old SF magazines. It always encouraged me to see Phil’s humble roots.

Now if we pop up the stack we have “Explorers We,” we have
Scanner Darkly
, we have the fact that Phil is alive, we have my move to San Jose. The way I found Phil in San Jose involves my friend Dennis. Let’s assume you’ve read one of my
Ware
novels. The character Sta-Hi, also known as Stahn, also known as Stanley Hilary Mooney, is transreally inspired by a real person: Dennis Poague, occupation freelance mechanic, legal status Blank (like the “Blank Reg” character in
Max Headroom
), long-term resident of San Jose, now residing in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. It was Dennis, also known as Dementex, who showed me the still-living, though terribly methed and bedusted, Philip K. Dick in the fall of 1986.

I met Dennis in the mid-seventies when I was teaching college in up-state New York, a state college in a small town called Geneseo, described as “Bernco” in
White Light
. Dennis’s brother Lee was an English professor who lived across the street from us. One day Dennis showed up from California on his way to Europe, acting totally outrageous. He took the cheap red nylon skateboard I’d bought my five-year-old and set to carving and ripping all up and down the steep campus’s sidewalks. He had some primo Thai-stick with him, and he gave me one in exchange for some acid someone else had given me—a good trade for me, as I was scared to take acid again anyway, having had my big “ordeal poison” initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries several years earlier. Dennis and I got along very well together, each of us happy to meet such a madman. And for the rest of the time in Geneseo, every half year or so Dennis would orbit through our town and we’d see him. One time he had a whole suitcase full of cheap green pot. It was so bad that he cooked a pound of it into tea. He took the rest of it to the Mardi Gras and got robbed.

When my wife and I moved from Geneseo to Heidelberg for a two-year grant I had, Dennis stayed in touch, sending joints, a hit of acid one time (see my short story “The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics”), tapes of the Dr. Demento show, and, best of all, tapes of the people who rode in his cab. He was driving a cab in San Jose—just an unknown Hispanic-sounding California city to me then. The cab tapes were amazing, like of drunk hookers, or of giggly teenage girls, with Dennis’s manic, insinuating voice going on and on, “You girls wanna stop and do a bowl? I’m Sta-Hi, live or die, just keep me high, chaos and confusion reign supreme!”

From Heidelberg we moved to Lynchburg, which I always write about as “Killeville,” and then I found out where San Jose really is (it’s at the southern end of Silicon Valley, which stretches up the Bay peninsula through Palo Alto to San Francisco), and ended up moving here. I hadn’t seen Dennis in a few years, and I was a little nervous about it. Finally he called up, and asked me to stop by his apartment in downtown San Jose.

Where he lived wasn’t actually a real apartment, it was simply a small room at the head of a flight of stairs in someone’s house. Wherever Dennis lives there are always four or five half-assembled cars in the driveway and backyard. He was fixing one or several of these cars in return for being allowed to live there. His room was not much larger than a bed; there were shelves on the wall piled with electronic music equipment, cartons of old
Heavy Metal
magazines, car parts, ragged clothes and hundreds of T-shirts.

“You got no idea how glad I am to see you, Rudy.”

I gave him a Xerox of the typescript of
Wetware
, and then Dennis took me downstairs to meet his speed connection, a muscular, shirtless fifty-year-old Filipino called Buffalo Bill. I watched them crush up some crystal, snort it, and begin to jabber about skin-diving for jade boulders as big as cars. Every so often a different woman would come in and disappear into the back room with Buffalo Bill. I sat around and enjoyed the scene. When it was time to go, I opened the wrong door, a door which led down into the basement. Standing there on the basement stairs was a punk in painter’s clothes and just below him, staring up at me like out of a cover of the PKDS news-letter, was the real Phil Dick, not too tall, balding with a beard with a white stripe in it, and with the unmistakable aura of a hologram from Hell. He and the punk painter were snorting lines of meth off a pocket mirror.

I freaked and closed the door right back up. “Who was that?” I asked Dennis as soon as we got outside. “On the stairs, who were the two guys on the basement stairs?”

“Hell that’s just Tommy the painter. His father owns the place. The other guy with him rents the back room by the garage. He doesn’t talk much. Just…” Dennis made loud piglike snorting noises, the same noise he’d made earlier when I’d asked him what he would do if he really did make a lot of money off jade.

“The other guy, Dennis, that’s Phil Dick. You know, the Philip K. Dick award I got for
Software
? That was him in the basement. He must not really be dead! He’s living right here in your building!”

“Why didn’t you talk to him?”

“What would I say? But, look, Dennis, do one thing for me. After you read
Wetware
, give it to him. It’s dedicated to him, wave? ‘For Philip K. Dick, 1928–1982, One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ That’s from Camus, see, Sisyphus being the proletarian of the gods, you understand, daily proving that scorn can overcome any fate, rolling another wad of paper up to the top of the same old mountain and letting it blow away, just imagine him happy. Does he seem happy?”

“I’ll ask him.”

But Dennis never did talk to Phil. Phil got on his motorcycle and left that house for good, right after I did. I saw him in my rearview mirror, right before I turned onto Route 17. He was all in black, idling on the putt, wearing shades, a greasy old biker, calm with meth. Looked to me like he was headed for South San Jose. He never waved.

Is there any meaning in my visions of Phil as Garbage King and Meth Biker? Well, the real meaning is simply that I was interested enough in Phil to imagine seeing him after his too-early death. I’ve always hoped that when
I’m
gone I’ll have fans as obsessive as Phil’s fans, people who piece together my letters, fiction and nonfiction to try and see a soul. As you read this: Am I dead yet?

Note on “Haunted by Phil Dick”

Written 1986.

Appeared in
Transreal
, WCS Books, 1991.

The first part of “Haunted by Phil Dick” appeared in the
Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter
. When I wrote the second part of this piece I was worrying about whether or not I could repeat and get the Phil Dick Award for
Wetware
. What with the demise of my then-publisher Bluejay Books, I was back in paperback-only format again, so
Wetware
was indeed eligible.

The reason I bothered to write the somewhat cranky second part was that Andy Watson, who was at that time the Managing Editor of the
PKDS Newsletter
, wanted to edit a book of stories all hinging on the notion that Phil didn’t really die in 1982. Andy contacted a number of SF writers, but I was the only one who sent him anything back. Next Andy thought of doing a pamphlet edition of “Haunted by Phil Dick,” but then he realized this would be a fairly pointless thing to do. Even so, he seemed to feel some sort of connection with me, and he suggested that he publish a book of my collected essays. I upped the plan and proposed that he publish a fat wonder-book of my poems, stories, and essays and call it
Transreal!
And that’s what happened. It was a cool book. I think Bruce Sterling wrote a blub along the lines of, “Reading
Transreal!
is like being hit in the head by a bowling ball.”

The Phil Dick Award ceremony for
Software
was held in a loft in New York City. My college friend Barry Feldman (model for Izzy Tuskman of
The Secret of Life
) showed up. I had an attack of shyness, I guess, or of wanting to show that fame doesn’t matter to me (ha!), so for the first hour of the party, I let Barry pretend to be me. Lots of editors and agents talked to him. He really enjoyed it, and I was dancing with Sylvia, drinking with Platt, and smoking pot with Eddie Marritz. Then I stood on the bar and gave my prepared speech.

I did in fact get a second Phil Dick Award for
Wetware
, but the ceremony wasn’t very much fun. It was at noon on Easter at the end of a fannish SF con in godforsaken Tacoma, Washington. Before I got the award there was a “banquet” where Sylvia and I sat with Platt and with another Dick Award candidate who didn’t know that I’d won the vote for the award. Everyone else at the table (except the man’s wife) did know that I’d won, so it was pretty awkward. Also Platt was being very depressing about “the death of SF,” and I had a bad hangover from a dull and crowded hard-liquor party the Scientologists had thrown the night before.

And then when I got the award I suddenly was so struck with emotion that it was all I could do to keep from breaking into sobs. I wanted that award so much. I felt like the guy at the end of Tender is the Night, when he’s a wreck of his former self, sitting on a deckchair gloating over getting his inheritance, and what good does it do him.

In my acceptance speech I talked about “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus, and about how Sisyphus is the god of writers. I was thinking, in particular, about Sisyphus being the god of
science-fiction
writers:

“Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

As so often happens to me, nobody in the audience understood what the fuck I was talking about. Outside, the weather was pearly gray, with uniformed high-school marching bands practicing for something in the empty streets.

Vision in Yosemite

One long weekend in August, 1992, my son Rudy and I went backpacking in Yosemite. The trip was utterly wonderful. The first day was Thursday, we got a late unhassled start from San Jose, and drove up to Tuolomne Meadows, getting there about 6:00 PM. We got a Wilderness Pass for free from a ranger-girl in a booth in the parking lot, we’d been worrying about getting the pass, but if you are willing to backpack to at least four miles from the road, you can just walk on in. We’ve been here in CA for six years, and I used to try and get reservations at the (actually quite shitty, I now realize!) Curry Company campgrounds at Tuolomne Meadows, and there would never be a spot available, even if you called in February for next July. But if you’re willing to backpack in with all your food and your tent for at least four miles, why then, brother, you can stay wherever you dang please. Simply treat the wilderness well and leave it as you found it. And now, finally, thanks to the energy of my son, we were able to do it. I used our old frame pack, he used his new internal frame pack, he bought a bunch of dehydrated food and a miniature alcohol stove, we used light old “Pup”, the pup-tent we bought the kids in Lynchburg grade school, and we each have a down sleeping bag and cheap sponge-rubber sleeping mat. The High Sierras at last!