Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (39 page)

But threats from without-real or imagined-weren't as easy to handle. Recalls Mike: "He was fearful about the police, the drug thing. I think it also gave him a sense of adventure-you know, we have to watch out or they'll bust us." Tom Schmidt, who in October 1970 replaced Bernie Montbriand as the third housemate, acknowledges that Phil worried over communists, Nazis, the FBI, and the CIA. But keep in mind that there were, on Phil's premises daily, various weird and dangerous casualties of the drug scene who owned guns and were subject to mood swings of their own. It wasn't unreasonable to keep an eye open for rip-offs or bust setups.

It's also not unreasonable to point out that bouts of intense paranoia are a known common side effect of amphetamine abuse, and that Phil was abusing amphetamines-Dexedrine, Benzedrine, and god knows what awful street shit thrown in-to the hilt. In the refrigerator he kept cartons of protein-fortified milkshakes side by side with large jars of white crosses-$ 100 for a jar of a thousand, which Phil consumed by downing unmeasured handfuls with the milkshakes (damn smart to avoid speeding on an empty stomach). Phil and others in the house would stay up three or four days or even a week straight without sleep and then would crash out into forty-eight hours of bed immobility. And when you're speeding that long on large doses, a sense of high energy and utter awareness can-and usually does-turn into watchfulness, suspicion, fear. You look through the blinds to see who's out there. Phil would often say he saw someone lurking in the yard, or even beside his bed, during the night. His housemates never knew whether to believe him (mostly they didn't), but they knew what it felt like. Says Bernie: "In my personal experience-you've been up three days, your mind is screaming up there, you need relaxation; all vitamins, anything that gives stability to your body and mind, are depleted. That's when the paranoia hits."

Phil was aware of the side effects of speed. In notepad journals of the time, Phil speculated now and then as to whether a fear of the moment was the product of the pills. Once, late at night, he documented the struggle: "12:30. 1 am going to bed. I hate the bedroom-an empty bed-but I hate even worse sitting out here in the cold living room at night with the music muted [... J The happiness pills are turning out to be nightmare pills." A few paragraphs later, a fortunate upturn: "The happiness pills have been helping me-putting a warm glow of possession in my stomach."

Speed gives for a time-a good, glorious, roaring time-and it can take away forever. Phil understood the dialectic and didn't give a damn. He was playing, the grasshopper mocking the ants of the "real" world, and imagining a masterwork-A Scanner Darkly-without knowing it. In a November 1970 letter he gave a portrait of life in what had come to be nicknamed "Hermit House":

We all take speed and we are all going to die, but we will have a few more years and we will be happy. We don't want to live more than a few more years, and while we live we will live it as we are: stupid, blind, loving, talking, being together, kidding, propping one another up and ratifying the good things in one another. [... ]

[... J No group of people can be this happy. We knew we were ignoring some fundamental aspect of reality, such for example as money, or in my case sleep. Soon it will catch up with us. [... J That's all one can really hope for, I think, to be happy awhile and then remember it.

Phil's detachment from economic pressures was no mean feat. Since May he had been having trouble with house payments. The credit company was on his ass, and he borrowed often from the Hudners. But the emptiness left by Nancy's departure made holing up alone to produce a novel unthinkable. And so he turned his intense range of feeling on his housemates. Tom Schmidt recalls that moving in with Phil was like changing worlds:

There was something about him that made you feel involved. Phil had this softness. But depth. He was like a director. Almost like he'd bring certain people in to see how they'd react. And sit back and watch and create science fiction.

I think he lived in a fantasy overall. He seldom left the house. His whole existence was like he could create everything there. [...]

Phil told me he thinks in paragraphs. When he'd carry on a conversation, the whole thing is already there. He could talk about anything. There would be a variety of people coming in, dumb people. I'm not saying he brought himself down to their level, but he could deal with them like on any level.

Of the people I've known, if I had to spend eternity with one, it would be Phil.

But Tom, who abstained from drugs, could not choose to spend eternity in "Hermit House" and moved out after a few months. The open-door policy was too much to bear. Word of mouth had Phil's place a safe bet for selling or scoring drugs. By spring 1971 Mike also had decided to move on: "What made Phil fun in a way, and difficult in other ways, was that he'd create his own reality. It took a large supporting cast to accommodate his phobias. On the other hand, he had a lot to offer on his own, so it isn't a parasitic thing. just as time wears on, there are other things you have to do."

Even while living with Mike and Tom, Phil had been intently searching for a woman to replace Nancy. As he had in 1964, between Anne and Nancy, Phil fell in love again and again, and absolutely sincerely each time. But there were differences this time around. Phil was now in his early forties. Pale from an indoor nocturnal life, his features ranged from youthful innocence during manic raps to deep-lined weariness when he crashed. He slouched and packed a gut from too many frozen chicken pot pies and chocolate chip cookies (for all his speed use, Phil never fit the archetypal strung-out mode). And he dressed badly, even by the tattered standards of the sixties-a haphazard look that included a never-pressed Nehru jacket.

Phil's intensity and disheveled-genius aura could easily override his physical shortcomings. What stacked the game against him, causing him to undergo a bruising series of heartbreaks during this period, were two critical factors: He usually pursued women half his age or a little less; and he wanted, wanted, WANTED so much.

Also, there were the personal problems that sometimes marked the women he pursued. Tom recalls: "Phil always had relationships with women who were troubled. I don't think he was capable of having a relationship with a straight woman. Because he wouldn't have control. Not that he really had control-it was a sort of uncontrollable control."

Phil would fantasize-quickly, vividly, and in ideal terms-ardent futures with women he'd just met and scarcely knew. It maddened even the madness of ardent courtship. One of the women whom Phil courted in late 1970 was J'Ann Forgue, dark-haired, attractive, and in her midtwenties when she first befriended Phil, during his marriage with Nancy. (J'Ann served as a model for Sally Jo Berm in A Maze of Death, w. 1968.) After Nancy left, Phil tried to deepen the relationship. J'Ann recalls:

I know I was frustrating to Phil, because as much as I respected him as a writer, I wasn't interested in a romantic attachment. I had such an intense feeling that he didn't know who I was-that he was in love with some internal image of his that he had pinned on to me. I went over to see him because he would beg me to, basically. He didn't come down too hard in telling me that he loved me-what he did say was that he needed me and that I could save him.

The J'Ann he thought he loved had remarkably little to do with me. He would make grandiose and quite abstract statements about how I was so bright and how I could cope with things. It's true I'm a strong woman, but that time in my life was an extremely bad one-I wasn't coping with anything. So for him to say how strong I was really struck me as bizarre.

By November 1970, J'Ann felt compelled to break off her visits. Phil's journal entries on their failed romance parallel J'Ann's account. Early on, Phil wrote that J'Ann "stepped in and saved me." How? By filling in for bitch-mother Dorothy:

In contrast, consider my mother who has not visited me since Nancy left, although she visited I stepsister] Lynne and in fact came right to the door of this house-but wouldn't come in. Well it was she 42 years ago I at the time of Phil and Jane's birth] who set into action the security drive that finally at long last someone satisfied. ]...] So in a sense J'Ann has been the mother I never had

I...l

And now J'Ann was gone. "I don't merely love her; I require her to live." But within a month, Phil (demonstrating the recuperative powers that fortunately accompanied his head-over-heels approach) was able to see J'Ann more clearly: "Maybe the reason I turned so bitterly on her did not have to do with her flat point out blank refusing to go in my room but rather her detailing how realistically she had failed to cope-in contrast to my idealistic, romantic picture of her coping to beat hell."

By December Phil had fallen in love again-with both members of a lesbian couple in their early twenties. Again the relationship was rather intense, especially since Phil identified one of the couple with Jane and fantasized about bringing both of them to confront his mother. From his journal:

I would be saying, "Look, Dorothy; I know two girls who are stronger than you. You are old and will soon die, but these girls are strong and young and capable. They will survive long after either of us." [...] A lifetime ambition fulfilled. One-upmanship on my sainted, aged mother who, when I was nineteen, told me I was so weak that I would become homosexual once I left her.

Whether the visit-Phil presenting a living Jane to Dorothy-ever took place is not known. But Phil's journals indicate that by January 1971, the relationship had come apart. The young girl who had reminded Phil of his sister had looked to him to "ease the pain," but instead he brought only more pain. "She was like Jane-and she was killedneglected-allowed to die-all over again. Can I bear it? Has she the courage to face the life ahead of her without me?" Further on, Phil realized that she would survive. Still further on, his concern for her (and others) turned to fear:

I hate them because they let me hurt them because their love for me depends on me trusting me. I'm terribly afraid of them and of what I might further do to hurt them-I just want to get away. [... ] Maybe they were all weak, fragile, delicately balanced people and my intensity was too much for them. What I wanted from them and to see happen-I was imposing myself on them and their reality the way I do in a book. Maybe I tried to write their lives. I wouldn't let the people around me live; I had to mastermind everything.

In his next entry Phil could absolve himself: "I'm very angry and I can't sleep-I also know I'm tired-nuts to their protective drives; in the final upshot no one can protect anybody. It doesn't matter whether you're well or sick, you still have to do it."

With this girl, Phil reenacted the trauma of Jane's death, including both his desperate desire to bring Jane back to life (through the fantasized visit to Dorothy) and his guilty identification with Dorothy (through failing the girl). Jane's survival as a defiant lesbian (like Alys Buckman in Flow) would be a slap in Dorothy's face; her taunts over Phil's "weak" "homosexual" tendencies would be refuted in an ultimate manner: by the sight of a strong child who had survived her neglect (which Phil, the guilt-filled surviving twin, had in fact done but could not believe he had done). It was, to Phil, an agony that at forty-two he still yearned for Dorothy to visit, to love him, to affirm his manhood.

In fact, Phil was in close contact with Dorothy-through lengthy, frequent phone calls-all through the misery of 1970-71. Vituperative contact it was, but it persisted. Son and mother remained bound, even as Phil's search for a woman to eclipse her intensified.

Joseph Hudner, Phil's stepfather, kept a diary for the first half of 1971, some entries of which reveal the painful relations between Phil and Dorothy, as well as Phil's utter unreliability, during this period. The entries summarized here provide a valuable record of Phil's doings and of Dorothy's (and Joseph's) view of him. Early 1971, as seen through a diary darkly:

January 13: Phil calls Dorothy twice. He has taken on the care of a seventeen-year-old girl whom Phil describes as "psychotic." Phil's psychiatrist says he functions best in crises-and so must have them one after another. Dorothy believes "Philip cannot function in the dull daylight." He handles emotional crises on four-to five-year-old level-his age when she and Edgar divorced.

January 18: Phil phones, excited over new use of I Ching.

January 31: Phil's house full of "oddball characters," whom Phil terms a "family."

February 4: Joseph unhappy that Hacienda Way house is in their name. "We love him. Let it go."

February 26: The loan company begins foreclosure. Phil late with payments but never told the Hudners. Joseph fears his credit is shot.