Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (41 page)

By September 1971, Phil had returned to Santa Venetia and welcomed in a new arrival. "Sheila" had just graduated from high school and was going out with Phil's friend Daniel. Phil invited her to move in. At first-with all bedrooms full-Sheila slept in his writing office. But the live-in situation was constantly changing, and by November Sheila was the only stable housemate Phil had. At first she was delighted by Phil, who could talk on virtually any subject. They went out often to nearby restaurants. Phil took Sheila for drives in the country and bought her new clothes at the mall. She recalls that Phil hated the IRS for hounding him on back taxes, and would go on spending sprees as soon as royalty checks arrived. Afterward, he would fall into a gloom.

"Phil was like three or four different people," says Sheila. "There was the educated Phil who would talk history and philosophy, and the paranoid Phil who was popping pills and ranting and raving about the CIA. And then there was the Phil who wanted to hug me and marry me and would cry when I refused." The educated Phil seemed to come and go in direct correspondence to his speed binges. "He used to do a handful at a time, several times a day, for a week or two, and then he'd sleep for two or three days. I used to wonder why he was getting crazy, and then I caught on that after a few days on a binge he'd get real crazy, then he'd need to sleep, and then he'd be okay for a while again."

Sheila was drawn into Phil's fears concerning former housemate Rick, he of the loaded rifles. In late summer Phil had forced Rick to move out. Phil was convinced Rick bore a grudge and would kill him. One night the phone rang; Phil answered, and the caller hung up. Sheila recalls that Phil was sure it was Rick:

So he grabbed a hammer and a hatchet and said let's go in the back room and wait for him. So Rick never shows up. We didn't sleep that night, so we took bennies. The next day Phil decided we needed some contract killers to protect ourselves. I don't know how, but he got two black guys who lived around the corner to be on call twenty-four hours a day. These guys were just out of high school; I'm sure they just wanted the money. One time Phil called and they weren't there, so he decided to fire them. Then he decided to get real contract killers. We drove down to San Rafael and saw a man and wife. I sat in the living room while Phil and they went into a bedroom to talk. Later Phil comes out and says let's go. He told me they were contract killers and would kill Rick if he showed up. I wasn't sure if it was real or not. We get home and these three grown men show up. They had guns with them-they called it going hunting. So they sat lined up on the couch and just waited. Phil and I had been taking bennies for two days and hadn't slept, so we were nervous wrecks. Nothing happened all night, and they left in the morning.

To Paul Williams in 1974, Phil stated that during this time he had hired two "militant blacks" to protect a girl that "a junkie pusher was trying to kill." The fee was $750, and "they did their job beautifully." The girl was trying to break away from the pusher and asked Phil to take her to the hospital, which he did. Sheila doesn't recall any threats against her-but Phil's version has the threat made to him while Sheila was in the hospital. As for her request to be taken there, Sheila's version goes like this:

Phil decided I was crazy. So he said I'm taking you to a psychiatrist because you're crazy. So I say okay. I wanted to talk to somebody because things were really weird. So we drove to somebody's house, he knocked on the door, nobody answered, and I say, "Who was that?" and Phil says, "I don't know." So then he took me to Dr. [X], his psychiatrist. So I told him all the weird things. I was starting to wonder if these things really were happening or if I was crazy. The doctor wouldn't really discuss Phil's problems with me, but he did say Phil was paranoid and there was nothing wrong with me. I don't think Phil and I discussed the meeting. But he was reassured-he didn't think I was crazy anymore.

It was getting to the point that I had to get out of there. I didn't know how or when. Then Phil decided I was a junkie. I've never had anything to do with heroin-never even seen it. But I decided to go along with it, thinking I could go someplace and get, you know, rehabilitated. Phil only allowed me to take a few days' worth of clothes. He wanted to make sure I'd come back. I guess he thought I was acting weird. So I went to Marin Open House.

There Sheila arranged for two adults to pose as her parents and return with her to Phil's house to get her things. "Phil was so depressed he looked like he was going to cry." He wasn't taken in by the fake parents, but what did it matter? Sheila was gone.

Part of the weirdness that so frightened Sheila was the intense anticipation, on Phil's part, that there would be a hit of some kind on the Santa Venetia house. There were a number of ominous portents. Phil was experiencing repeated mechanical difficulties with his car, including a brake failure that almost cost Phil and friends their lives on Mount Tamalpais. (Bob Arctor and friends nearly perish due to a car-tampering incident-the accelerator, not the brakes-in Scanner.) Then there was the time Phil and Sheila returned to find all doorknobs on exterior doors of the house removed. The stereo was gone, the refrigerator was open, and there was food scattered in the backyard. Says Sheila: "Phil used to call the cops all the time-Rick was going to kill him, the doorknobs, the car. After a while they wouldn't show up anymore."

Perfect time for a major break-in. In a later journal entry, Phil described the horror:

[... ] in the early part of November 1971 1 had reason to believe that some sort of violent hit against my house in San Rafael was about to take place, and because of this I bought a gun. During the mandatory 5-day waiting period before I could obtain possession of the gun, on November 17 or so, my house was hit. I came home (I had to abandon my car because of peculiar damage to it, stranding me miles away) to find windows smashed in, doors broken, locks smashed, most of my possessions gone; my fireproof files had been blown up evidently by plastic explosives [. . .] all business papers, cancelled checks, letters, documents, papers of every sort gone. The floor a chaos of debris, wet asbestos from the files, combatboot footprints, broken drill bits, rugs and towels soaked in water which had been thrown over the files to muffle the explosion.

Immediately after the break-in Phil began to theorize about who and why. The many and contrasting fruits of his speculations (set forth in a November 1975 Rolling Stone feature by Paul Williams that made the break-in a hip cause celebre/mind twister) will be reviewed in a moment. It may be said, at the outset, that Phil never did find out who or why. There is only one real certainty with respect to the break-in: It scared the shit out of Phil, and made further life in Santa Venetia impossible.

Williams writes: "The night after the break-in, Phil stayed at the house of another science-fiction writer, Avram Davidson. Avram said Phil professed himself to be 'absolutely baffled' at who could have done it; at the same time he seemed 'intrinsically undisturbed, marveling at the efficiency of the job.' " A number of eyewitnesses who saw the Santa Venetia study after the break-in recall a mess much like Phil's description above. These include Tom Schmidt, Donna, and Sheila. Sheila recounts the scene this way:

The file cabinet had been blown up-Phil said by plastic explosives. There was this powder on the floor that Phil said had lined the files [presumably asbestos] and footprints like army boot prints in the dust. One of the drawers looked exploded-just enough to break the lock, not a big bomb. Phil said some manuscripts were stolen. He seemed to think it was some plot, like the CIA. I don't know if somebody did it or if maybe Phil did it or what.

While eyewitnesses corroborate that the files were broken into, there is some cause to wonder why that would have been necessary. After his hospitalization in August, Phil had noted in his journal that during his absence housemate Daniel had "[s]ystematically and thoroughly damaged beyond repair" the file locking mechanisms.

Tom Schmidt conjectures that "I've always thought maybe Phil did it himself. But there was a break-in. The file cabinet-it was forced open. I'm not sure on the explosion. Phil said they were going after his manuscripts." Certainly Phil had been fearful enough over the possibility of the Flow manuscript's being stolen to entrust it to his lawyer, William Wolfson, back in August. But other than his mainstream novels of the fifties, there do not seem to have been further unpublished manuscripts of significance in Phil's possession at the time. The SF he wrote was always quickly sold and published. And Phil never spoke, at this point or in later years, of any of his works having been lost by virtue of the break-in. What manuscripts might the perpetrators have been after? Phil never specified.

The investigation was handled by the Marin County Sheriffs Office. In an October 1972 journal entry, Phil recounted:

A police sergeant in Marin County warned me that if I didn't leave "I'd probably get a bullet in my back some night or worse." He further said, 'This county doesn't need a crusader," referring to me. I feel that the authorities in Marin County did little or nothing to investigate the hit on my house or even to prevent it; I had informed them several times during the week before Nov 17 that I believed my house would be hit; they told me to buy [a] gun and defend myself [...] When I did call them [...] they objected to sending out a police car and didn't appear for almost an hour. The next day when I came to the County Sheriffs Dept with my list of what had been stolen, they had no report of a robbery having occurred [... ] I feel I was driven out of Marin County by violence, the threat of future violence, and the authorities were passive, even telling me I ought to leave.

Despite diligent efforts over the next three years-letters to the Sheriff's Office, the FBI, the American Civil Liberties Union, and to congressmen-Phil never learned what, if anything, the police investigation uncovered. The Sheriffs Office report (to which I was denied access) was orally summarized to Williams (who also was not permitted to see it) in 1974:

There was a metal cabinet, the police report said, that had been drilled or pried-the homeowner said it had been blown open but it looked to the reporting officer like it had been pried. A gun was taken. A stereo system was reported missing. The file indicated that there had been a previous burglary "not reported, but heard about indirectly." There was no information on further developments: "We didn't have any suspects."

Confusions, contradictions, and obfuscations .. .

Here are Phil's primary theories of the break-in, summarized from his 1974 interview with Williams and from essays, journals, and letters:

1. Religious fanatics. Phil's association with Bishop Pike led fanatics to ransack Phil's files for info on Pike's heresies.

2. Black militants. Phil's Santa Venetia turf was predominantly black. Certain neighbors with Black Panther sympathies may have wished to drive him out.

3. Minutemen or other right-wing group. Phil believed that "Peter," a sinister house hanger-on, belonged to such a group. Peter (who inspired the diabolical Jim Barris in Scanner) tried to persuade Phil to insert "secret coded information" in his novels about a virulent new strain of syphilis being used against the U. S. Peter threatened Phil's life if he refused to cooperate.

4. Local police or narcs. Motive: Check up on drug deals in the house and Phil's influence on the kids who hung out there.

5. Federal Watergate-type agents, including FBI and CIA. Phil stated in a June 1973 letter to the Alien Critic fanzine:

An article in the June 11th [1973] Newsweek let the American public in on what may be the most dismal and horrifying aspect of all this: that in the years 1970, 1971 and 1972 (and possibly now) a secret national police, operating outside the law, existed in this country, probably under the jurisdiction of the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department; it acted against the so-called "radicals," that is, the left, the anti-war people; it struck them again and again, covertly, everywhere, in a variety of ugly ways: break-ins, wiretapping, entrapment ... all with the idea of getting or forging evidence which would send these anti-war radicals to prison.

Consider the testimony of fellow SF writer Norman Spinrad, who was close to Phil throughout the seventies:

Everything Phil thought about the government always turned out to be true. Anybody who really saw what was going on in the early Seventies would be regarded as paranoid and crazy until Watergate broke.

Phil told me another "paranoid" story. He said, "These guys called me up from a Stanford University radio station, came down and asked me all these weird questions. Then when I called Stanford I found out the radio station didn't exist." Sounds like more Phil paranoia, except the two guys had done the same thing to me. Got a call from a Stanford radio station and two guys showed up and took me to dinner, asked me things like is Chip Delany [Samuel R. Delany, a black SF writer active in the antiwar effort] the illegitimate son of Philip K. Dick, a rumor I'd never heard but they'd gotten from God knows where, and about drug habits ... all this shit. I'm sure they were agents for some agency.