Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (10 page)

Laura, honey, did you know that (I never told anybody this before. Get ready. Be cool, baby). Laura, when you were born, neither your mother [Anne] nor I had a name for you. [... ] The nurse said to me, "What are you going to call her?" I admitted I didn't know. The nurse frowned at me; she was very pretty and I almost said, "What's your name?"-but wisely I didn't. I then remembered-it flashed into my mind-the name of the first girl I ever dated, back in junior high school, a really foxy chick named Lora Heims. So I called you Laura, after her, and never told anybody until now.

If you tell that, you die.

Phil's sexual fantasies-and occasional small triumphs-were part and parcel of the coming of age of most boys. But there was a darker side to his growing psychic self-awareness. During this period, Dorothy de cided that her son's academic apathy and anxieties might be dispelled by psychiatric therapy. Phil likely saw more than one psychiatrist during his late elementary and junior high years; little can be said as to the specifics of their treatments. But one thing is certain-the therapy left in Phil a deep sense of tragic difference between himself and his peers. Kohler recalls Phil discoursing on Rorschach tests as a seventh-grader: "Phil, in fact, made up his own and he and I played Rorschach test. Phil knew all about the Thematic Apperception Test too. He knew the names of various phobias. He told me, I have some I can't fight.'

But Phil did have one comforting means of breaking out of his introverted woes-writing. Kohler had a tiny printing press, which Phil commandeered for a second brief attempt-this time, in collaboration with Pat Flannery-at a self-published newspaper. The Truth made its debut in August 1943 and went for two cents. ("However, if we start to show a huge profit, we'll bring it down to one cent.") Its motto: "A Democratic Paper With A Democratic Principle." The writing was nearly all Phil's, including this fervid pronouncement: "This paper is sworn to print only that which is beyond doubt the TRUTH." It featured a serial story, "Stratosphere Betsy" (about a daring test pilot), and a comic strip hero, "Future-Human," who was Phil's first full-fledged SF creation:

Future-Human, champion of right, defender of the oppressed. Few gangsters dare to oppose him; and when they do they are soon vanquished.

Future-Human lives in the year 3869. Using his super-science for the welfare of humanity, he pits his strength against the underworld of the future. Appearing each issue in:

THE TRUTH!

At thirteen, Truth editor Phil was pale, slightly overweight, and often coughing or snuffling due to his asthma. Necessarily, he was contemptuous of team sports. When, rarely, he played games with his friends, he was ungainly and even dangerous, once hitting Flannery with a dart and drawing blood, another time shoving him into a bramble bush. With Kohler, Phil did take rambling walks up the Berkeley hills to Tilden Park (passing the newly constructed cyclotron). But he was delighted when Garfield Junior High reduced phys ed class hours.

Dorothy came home late from work and was soon upstairs in bed reading from piles of books-mostly best sellers, but also works on nutrition and healing. Her nightstand was covered with prescription medications for kidney and other ailments. This home atmosphere of illness was difficult for Phil, who was coping with his own physical and phobic woes. He could be moody, but his outbursts of sharp anger were vanquished by Dorothy's calm. Most often, mother and son spoke formally, using "Philip" and "Dorothy." One can imagine them passing the nights reading fervently in separate bedrooms. But the bond between them was growing-and Edgar was far away. During this period Phil considered dropping "Dick" in favor of his mother's maiden name, Kindred.

Dorothy was polite but taciturn to Phil's chums, seldom engaging them in conversation or inviting them for supper. Those suppers seldom varied from night to night: ground round, peas, mashed potatoes. Phil welcomed dinner invitations from Kohler's grandmother, who provided decadent delights denied to Phil at home, such as chocolate milk and soda pop. He always left a tiny bit of food on his plate, in respect for the Depression custom of showing you'd been fed enough not to require seconds.

Dorothy's upstairs seclusion did allow Phil and visiting friends uninterrupted confidential talks, toy-soldier battles, classical music listening sessions, and chess matches (in which Phil invariably trounced his pals). Phil could fashion Rube Goldberg-like circuitry: a light switch to turn on the Victrola, tiny electrical boxes for show-and-tell that scared his teachers. His musical abilities surprised even close friends. Once he sat Kohler down and played first a Chopin funeral march and then what Kohler recalls as a "macabre kind of thing." When Phil asked which he preferred, Kohler chose the second. Phil played it over and over to make sure his friend really liked it-and only then confided that it was his own composition.

Phil's bedroom was a clutter: records, model airplanes, stamp albums, a microscope, a portrait of the German kaiser. There was also a secret compartment in his desk in which Phil kept a little Kodak camera, nudist magazines, and a teaser known as "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang." He invited Kohler to join him in masturbation sessions in the bedroom, with the blinds drawn. Kohler also slept over on occasion, and naturally they discussed sex. There were no overtures: Kohler recalls that Phil regarded "homosexual" as a derogatory term.

Dorothy offered freedom and privacy, which fostered the adoles- cent's intense existence. Some idea of it is afforded by his early (circa 1949) unpublished mainstream novel Gather Yourselves Together. One character, a young man named Carl, bears a striking resemblance to Phil-including a passionate interest in philosophy (Carl's lengthy journal writings on truth and reality prefigure the Exegesis) and in dark-haired girls. In the following passage Carl, secluded in his room, copies a picture he has torn from a magazine:

The original, the print torn from the magazine, fell from his lap, skidding into the corner. He did not notice or care. This girl, emerging on his drawing paper, did not come from any magazine. She came from inside him, from his own body. From the plump, white body of the boy this embryonic woman was rising, brought forth by the charcoal, the paper, the rapid strokes. [...]

In the steamy, musky room the boy was much like a kind of plant, growing and expanding, white and soft, his fleshy arms reaching into everything, devouring, examining, possessing, digesting. But at the windows and doors of the room he stopped. He did not go beyond them. [...]

Like a plant, he fed on things brought to him. He did not go and get them for himself. Living in this room he was a plant that fed on its own self, eating at its own body. What came forth from his own vitals, these lines and forms generated onto paper, were exciting and maddening. He was trapped, held tight.

Recall that Edgar described Phil as seeming "trapped" at this time.

Leon Rimov recalls Phil as essentially an "introvert" who lacked self-confidence. "He had a waddle and his head was always down." When he was in a sociable mood, Phil could be charming, "but it was like passing a car in high gear-he'd only go fast for a short time." He notes Phil's futile efforts to found the Rocky Creek Club (after the creek in nearby Live Oak Park) after having been rejected by another neighborhood social club. Phil gathered his pals together, declared himself president, but failed to hold his audience. "He was constantly delaying things, saying let's not make a decision now but instead get together again and talk about it some more. After a few times people were scratching their heads, and finally they moved on." Rimov believes that Phil "would have liked to have been a politician, to have manipulated situations, but he wasn't able to get people to follow him."

In junior high Phil proclaimed himself an atheist, since no one could prove God existed. He also asked Rimov to join a Bible Club he was attempting to found. In Rimov's view Phil wasn't religious, but rather "a devil's advocate for many things-and searching." Phil often adopted an air of authority with friends-it was Phil who found the best reference source, lane's Fighting Ships, on naval warfare. But one topic he seldom discussed was his own writing. Occasionally he showed stories to friends-to Pat Flannery, a modern setting of the Faust legend-but none sensed in Phil a writer, as opposed to a paleontologist or a politician. The one sign of his future vocation was Phil's own disciplined efforts.

At fourteen, he completed his first novel, Return to Lilliput, loosely inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The manuscript is lost. Phil's humorous account of it in a 1976 interview does no justice to the dreams of his younger self

PID: [T]hey had rediscovered Lilliput, in the modern world, you know, like rediscovering Atlantis, these guys report they've discovered Lilliput. But it's only accessible by submarine because it's sunk under the water. You'd think even a fourteen year old kid would have a more original idea than that. I even can tell you the numbers on the submarines, I have so vivid a memory. It was A101, B202, C303, were the numbers and names, the designations, of the submarines.

In addition, he regularly published stories and poems in the Berkeley Gazette's "Young Authors' Club" column. Between 1942 and 1944, from eighth grade through his sophomore year, Phil's work appeared fifteen times. The stories easily exceed the poems in quality. The prose is polished and economical; the plots are derivative but fully imagined. In "Le Diable," set in a French village, wicked Pierre Mechant burgles the castle of a dead Count. The action is fluid, cinematic: "And that night, if there had been anyone around to see it, he would have seen fat little Pierre carrying a candle and climbing up one of the castle walls. They might have seen the candle bob and weave about the castle until it eventually found its way, with Pierre's help, into the wine cellars." Pierre encounters the Devil, who wins his soul in exchange for the Count's gold. Pierre's fatal end in the dank wine cellar was surely inspired by Poe's "A Cask of Amantillado."

"The Slave Race" is the only SF story in the group. In the future, androids created to ease humans' toil have overthrown their lazy masters. Explains the android narrator: "And his science we added to ours, and we passed on to greater heights. We explored the stars, and worlds undreamed of." But at the story's end the same cycle of expansive energy followed by sybaritic idleness that doomed the human race threatens the androids as well:

But at last we wearied, and looked to our relaxation and pleasure. But not all could cease work to find enjoyment, and those who still worked on looked about them for a way to end their toil.

There is talk of creating a new slave race.

I am afraid.

The rise and fall of civilizations pursuant to cyclical laws and limits of human (and artificial) intelligence was a favorite SF theme in the forties. Phil's extensive pulp reading had already linked him to the key concerns of the genre.

Phil writhed under the editorial predilictions of the Gazette's "Aunt Flo." Evidence for this comes from Phil's written asides in the notebook into which he carefully pasted his contributions to the "Young Authors' Club." Aunt Flo-pictured with a black hat and generic Betty Crocker features-rendered judgment on each published piece. On "He's Dead" (the poem on the death of Phil's dog) she waxed effusive: "Pathos walks in every line of this poem-and I'm not sure my eyes weren't a trifle moist when I'd finished reading them." Praise like this was hard enough to bear. But when "The Visitation" (Beethoven's ghost returns to compose one last piece) won only second place in her "Senior Day" contest, Phil fumed that Aunt Flo "said it was written well, but'little authors' shouldn't write about the big unknown-just things they know about!" On Aunt Flo's behalf, it must be allowed that her strictures on keeping to known reality were echoed by a number of Phil's later editors and critics. Phil's frustration and defiance were constants as well-thirty years later, he would fulminate over Ace editor Terry Carr's suggestion that he move on from the "What is Reality?" theme that dominated his work. As if-Phil would complain-there was a real reality out there ready to hand.

The break with Aunt Flo came when Phil, age fifteen, published "Program Notes On A Great Composer," a faint satire on solemn record dust jacket biographies, using the invented composer William Friedrich Motehaven. When Aunt Flo termed the piece a not "strictly creative" factual essay, Phil fumed in his notebook:

Fooled her completely on this one-knew I would, she doesn't know a satire from a hole in the ground. I hoped she'd say something foolish in her comments, and she did. Made her apologize right out in our paper, too!