Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (43 page)

Phil was serious about staying in Vancouver. Back in California, his home was being foreclosed on and his friends were scattered. He was truly stateless. Here at least he had adoring fans and a new woman to himself adore.

The account in The Dark-Haired Girl of his time with Andrea bears out the intensity of his search for new roots. At first, Phil was enchanted by the look that had drawn him to so many women: "[S]he's so pretty, with her long black hair and her jeans and her fur coat and so selfconscious. So at bay. So fragile and brittle, but so full of life and ambition and guts." Andrea was from the sparsely populated coastland north of Vancouver; she confided to Phil that she yearned to leave the city and go back home, though her family life was troubled. One night they went out dancing and had an "ecstatic time," losing themselves utterly in the music. Phil saw her to her door, went home, and had a dream that obsessed him for years to come:

I was back in West Marin, in the big glass-walled living room [of the house he and Anne shared], with friends and animals and children. Suddenly I looked up and saw, through the glass side of the house, a horse coming at me, head on, driven by a rider [a policeman]; it was virtually on me, about to shatter the glass. I've never seen or dreamed such an animal before: its thin body, elongated, pumping legs, goggling eyes-like a racehorse, swift and furious and silent it came at me, and then it leaped up to hurdle the house . . . I crouched down, waiting for it to crash onto the roof above me and collapse the house. Impossible for it to clear. But it did. [... ] I ran out front, knowing it must have hit dirt cataclysmically. There it was, thrashing in the mud and foliage, broken and mutilated, horrible. [. ]

Phil pondered the dream. As a well-versed Jungian, he likely knew that the horse often symbolizes the "life force" and is linked to the "masculine solar deities" and heroes (in Greek mythology, Apollo, Bellerophon, Perseus). Phil's early interpretation was that the riderpoliceman referred to his past misunderstandings with the law, while the leaping horse symbolized Andrea's unhappy state and Phil's inability to help her harness the "life force." Then Andrea told Phil that she was leaving Vancouver, returning to her backcountry home immediately. Like Donna, Andrea was scared: of Vancouver, of college, of Phil. And Phil, heartbroken, revised his interpretation: "Andrea has left. Goodbye, Andrea. I am that broken horse."

In the days after the Con, with his expenses no longer reimbursed, Phil needed an interim place to stay while looking for his own apartment. Michael and Susan Walsh agreed to put him up on their living-room couch. Michael was a reporter from the Vancouver Provence who had favorably covered the "Android" speech; Susan, an SF fan, found Phil "weird but fascinating." Both welcomed the chance to get to know him better. He was a constant improviser. "Everything was put on," Susan recalls. "Phil was always onstage, even with people he could be sure were with him." In his beard and rumpled trench coat, he grunted: "Me Sam Spade." His tour de force performance came during a sales call by a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman named (yes) Frank Noseworthy. Says Susan:

Phil set up the scenario. He would be my brother-a writer who was sponging off us-and Michael was my husband-too cheap to buy this expensive vacuum cleaner. When Frank Noseworthy arrived, he started to pleasantly explain the virtues of the Kirby. Then he made a reference to the cleanliness of the house-"if you want to continue living in these con- ditions"-and that set Phil off.

There was this escalating family argument, with asides by Phil like "Isn't it wonderful to realize that in hundreds of years we'll be dust, but this Kirby will live on?" Frank Noseworthy did not crack a smile. His complete lack of affect delighted and appalled Phil, who had studied these kinds of sales techniques and knew how best to disrupt them. And so he would wander in and out of the room during his pitch and start side conversations about the price of tomatoes.

Phil and Susan developed a flirtation and, briefly, she fell in love with him, though there was no infidelity. Why the attraction to Phil? "I still haven't figured it out. He was intellectually fascinating, cynical, entertaining, and bizarre-a puzzle." But during Phil's two-week stay, Susan came to see a darker side: manipulative, controlling, probing the weak spots of others' psyches. His mood swings were pronounced, and he described himself as manic-depressive. To friends of Michael and Susan's Phil complained of wrongdoing on their part, which, when relayed back to them, bore no relation to events they could recall. He flirted with virtually every woman who came his way, trying all approaches from flattery to piteous declarations of need. Phil finally decided that Michael wasn't good enough for Susan and pledged to take better care of herwhich Susan resented. And Michael, who had handled Phil's flirtations with good grace, now grew weary: "Phil lived at a higher level of intensity than anyone I had ever met. He insisted that you be a participant in his world, rather than merely tolerate its existence. I didn't want to."

The hallmark of Phil's intensity during this period was his capacity to fall in and out of love at a vertiginous rate. The strain he placed upon others-in this case, Michael and Susan Walsh-was relatively mild compared to the sufferings he heaped upon himself. In asking for love at every turn, he was living out his sense of being "stateless" by posing impossible emotional demands that, when duly refused, would cause him heartbreak. Phil's statelessness had less to do with being in Canada than with being without a wife. Since losing Nancy he had never stopped falling in love. That the pace should accelerate in a foreign land is hardly surprising.

Phil found new digs. But within a short time he became disenchanted with his new Canadian acquaintances. They were mostly in their thirties, "career-oriented." The Vietnam conflict that had polarized political consciousness in the U. S. hardly mattered in Vancouver. In early March Phil wrote to inquire if he could live at Center Point, an open clinic in the Bay Area he'd dropped by during the final months in Santa Venetia; the Center Point recommendation was that he should not. Phil also wrote to Professor Willis McNelly at Cal State Fullerton, who had interviewed Phil shortly after the break-in, to inquire if Fullerton would be a good place to relocate. On March 14 he canceled plane reservations for San Francisco, then wrote to Ursula Le Guin (with whom he had struck up a correspondence, though they had never met) to suggest that he visit her in Portland. Phil suspected-accurately, Le Guin confirms-that outlandish tales had preceded him, and tried to reassure her: "In spite of the trauma of my move here to Vancouver, my head is really in a pretty good place; I'm not nearly so spaced as I was back in December. I swear I can conduct a civilized, rational conversation, without breaking anybody's favorite lamp. In fact, I would say I've got it all together pretty good, everything considered; my identity crisis seems to be ending."

Sadly, it wasn't. After the loss of Andrea, Donna, Sheila, Nancy, of his entire Bay Area world, Phil fell into the tomb world. Later, to fifth wife Tessa, Phil told of Mafia types in black suits who put him in the back of a limousine and drove him around for hours asking questions he couldn't remember. In all: a two-week gap in memory. As he emerged, he was committing suicide.

The scene was his newly rented, nearly empty Vancouver apartment on March 23. Phil took 700 mg of potassium bromide, a sedative. On a piece of cardboard he had written the emergency number of a suicideprevention center in case-at the last moment-he changed his mind. "Fortunately the last number was a one," he said later, "and I could just barely dial it."

Before that final digit, Phil had already phoned Susan Walsh to inform her that he planned to "turn out the lights." Susan was unfamiliar with this slang and had no idea that Phil was thinking suicide; meanwhile, Phil was infuriated by her lack of sympathy. In an interview for Vertex, Phil omitted this prior call but told of talking by phone to a counselor for "an hour and a half" (typical of Phil's frequent interview hyperbole-ninety minutes of talk on 700 mg of potassium bromide? No ambulance called by a trained counselor in all that time?). "[The counselor] finally said, `Here is what is the matter. You have nothing to do; you have no purpose; you came up here and you gave your speeches and now you're sitting in your apartment. You don't need psychotherapy. You need purposeful work.' " And so Phil was taken to X-Kalay, a live-in drug and alcohol rehabilitation center run along the same strict communitywithin-a-community/hard-work/cold-turkey rules as the onetime Synanon drug treatment center in Los Angeles. Phil told Vertex that to get into X-Kalay ("The hidden path"), he had to pretend he was a heroin addict. "I did a lot of method acting, like almost attacking the staff member interviewing me, so they never doubted that I was an addict." Trained experts taking Phil for a junkie? Heroin was one drug Phil never did mess with. A late-March letter gives a far more somber account:

[... ] I was really down. The next day or so I had a total freakout, breakdown, identity crisis, psychotic break, convulsion of misery and just general bad time. Now I'm part of X-Kalay; they came in and scooped up the puddle of ooze from the floor of my apartment that was me, or what remained of me, carted me to their house where they-and now 1-live, put me to work, put my head back together enough so I didn't try to snuff myself every half hour, kept someone with me night and day ... and finally, a week later, I'm again beginning to function. For one week I cleaned bathrooms, washed pots and pans, fed the children-there're chicks, dudes and children living together, here-and now I have my own office, typewriter, back at work for the first time in a long while, at writing [PR material for X-Kalay]. [... ] As you recall, the friends I had that last year in San Rafael led me down and down into the gutter with them; I got started up here in Vancouver with the same kind of bumtrippers, and went the same way fast. X-Kalay cut me off from those people: no phone calls, no visitors, nada. Complete break with my past, the outside world, my alleged friends. There are only two rules here at X-Kalay: No intoxicants and no violence. Those were the two evil verities of my former life; right? Right. I at last have a home, a real home, a family, a real family, and am beginning to develop a meaningful, goal-oriented life.

In the discussion group "attack-therapy games," X-Kalay residents and staff confronted each other no holds barred. In Phil's case, aside from the obvious drug problem, one issue raised repeatedly was his tropism for dark-haired girls. "It's a moving, incredible experience to feel and see the people here [...] insert themselves between me and the reality I seek out that kills me. They forcibly stop me from doing what I've been doing. `You fucking asshole,' they yell at me. `You dingbat. You like incest? You enjoy screwing your daughter?'

Phil knew that a "self-destructive drive" lay within him, and was capable, for a time, of enduring extreme abuse (as did all residents) for the sake of coming to grips with it. In the meantime, he developed close friendships within the X-Kalay community. The agony of the young heroin addicts-who seemed to have aged by decades, with bleak pallors and glazed eyes-lingered nightmarishly in Phil's memory.

But Phil's X-Kalay stay lasted only three weeks; its demands began to grate on him as he recovered from the lost weeks in Vancouver. In an April letter, Phil-who, after all, was not a heroin addict-focused on the limitations of X-Kalay life:

The problem here, I think, is that there is so much aggression, so much hostility, sadism and general anti-social violence in these people-most of them have served term after term in Canadian federal prisons-that all emotional and physical expressions must be rigidly disciplined out of them during the normal course of the day, and then released verbally in the game [. ..] And, in the game, accusations really pathological in intensity and nature, are unleashed. [... ] They guess every possibility, scent out every twist imaginable. They can only score when you respond with the sort of sniv[e]ling freakout "You've got me" look. [... ] They have not guessed what you are; they have guessed what you fear. [...] He [the X-Kalay resident] is not broken down into nothing and then rebuilt; the new personality is erected on his fantasy worst self.

Similar criticisms were leveled at Synanon during its heyday in the early seventies. To give X-Kalay (which went out of existence in 1976) its due, it succeeded in making Phil realize the deadly folly of his amphetamine usage. Never again did Phil take speed on a regular basis-this after nearly twenty years of steadily increasing doses.

During Phil's X-Kalay stay, Professor McNelly at Cal State Fullerton read aloud to his class Phil's letters detailing his desire for a new home. This prompted two female students to write, offering to take Phil in as a roommate; a third, Linda Levy, wrote to offer her friendship. In addition, Professor McNelly suggested that the university library might serve as a repository for those of Phil's papers and SF pulp collections that had survived the break-in.

Phil was on his way. In mid-April he flew from Canada to Fullerton, near Los Angeles, in the heart of Orange County, California-one of the most stolidly conservative areas in all of America. The airport greeting committee consisted of his two new roommates plus Linda Levy, a dark-haired-girl type, with whom Phil promptly fell in love, and Tim Powers, then a neophyte SF writer in his early twenties, who would remain one of Phil's closest friends. Phil arrived in Sam Spade trench coat with Bible in hand (in hopes of placating the ominous customs officials) and a suitcase tied shut with an extension cord. That first night, as Phil stared at Linda rapturously, they drove to Norman Spinrad's place in the Hollywood Hills and talked over his stay at X-Kalay.