The Search for Philip K. Dick (13 page)

Life on ramshackle, dreary Mars is humdrum, not like it was promised to the immigrants. Silvia Bohlen, Jack’s wife, is disturbed by the noise of children, the radio, and the fact that her husband is away from home so much. She takes Dexedrine to wake up and phenobarbital to go to sleep. (Was Phil doing this?) The neighbors have four little neglected girls, the ages of ours. Phil put in such everyday details as the teaching machine a door-to-door salesman tried to sell us, and the Sunday
New York Times
that we read. Where did Phil get the model for Arnie Kott, a brutal redneck union leader? Arnie had a brother named Phil who graduated from the University of California as a milk tester, the profession of our Point Reyes Station friend Jerry Kresy. In my previous husband’s small book, there was a poem, “Arnie,” about a friend of his who died. The portrait of my ex-father-in-law, Maury Handelsman, as Leo Bohlen, bringing corned beef and rye to Mars was a good one. Of course he would be preoccupied with looking for real estate, taking up options, looking for a deal. Our friend Alys Graveson
was
Anne Esterhazy; Phil mimicked her patterns of speech perfectly.

Yet this somber novel didn’t cast a shadow over our everyday life, which went on merrily. When Christmas came we had a huge tree thickly covered with lights and ornaments. We had shopped for two months before Christmas, driving all over the Bay Area to get just the right presents and spending far too much money. We stayed up until 2 a.m. Christmas Eve wrapping the last presents. The children awakened at 5 a.m. to get their stockings. When we had the ceremony of the tree later that Christmas morning, a foot-deep layer of gifts covered half the living room floor. There were games to play and puzzles to work. Phil had bought a chemistry set for Hatte and an antique electric train that circled the Christmas tree. Later we had a big Christmas dinner with a turkey stuffed with chestnut dressing at one end and oyster dressing at the other. I was exhausted, but Phil loved every minute of the day.

“Just like Bob Cratchit and his family,” he said happily.

D
URING WET WINTERS
in coastal northern California, relentless heavy rain continues for weeks. In San Francisco, people have to stop their cars on the freeway until the downpour returns to being merely heavy rainfall and they can see to drive again. In West Marin, rains are sometimes accompanied by gale winds. On the point itself, hurricane gusts of up to 105 miles an hour frequently occur. It gets so windy near my house that it’s dangerous to take the garbage out to the garbage cans beside the road. They sit under a long row of cypress trees, and tree limbs can suddenly break off in the high winds.

The winter of 1962—63 was marked by this kind of rain. Our pasture turned into a sea of mud. The acre-size hollow in our field, which we christened “Lake Dick,” filled with water, and in the lulls between storms the children paddled around in galvanized washtubs and caught tadpoles.

A frog symphony enriched our nights. Almost every day we put on slickers and boots and went to hunt the mushrooms growing on Inverness Ridge.

I have such a vivid memory of driving into our driveway after dark on a cold evening, seeing Phil throw the door open, stride out to meet me, and help carry in the groceries. We started talking as we walked to the house and continued while unpacking the bags of groceries. All the lights in the house were on, and Phil had started a fire in the fireplace. He always wanted to know everything that had happened that day. He had been staying home more, too busy with his work to go out in the community much. I’d tell him about the volunteer work at the school library, what the Bluebirds had done, all about the local politics, and all the latest gossip.

We would talk about the children, Phil’s writing, the music on KPFA, our dreams and our interpretations of them. While I cooked, Phil would help Hatte with her English or Jayne and Tandy with their math or science. Phil’s relationship with Hatte had become special since she had become old enough to share some of his interests. After dinner we’d get out the Monopoly set and roll for tokens. Phil, with the old shoe, would build a hotel on Broadway. I would eventually land there and be forced out of the game.

The many people and events we talked about during those early-evening hours appear in
Dr. Bloodmoney
. The school-board meetings headed by Orion Stroud are like the ones Phil and I went to when we were trying to get a kindergarten started.
News and Views
, like the
Baywood Press
, had a reporter there. I hate to say it, but Bonnie was probably based on me. She is living in my house, anyway. In the book Phil dropped the H bomb on her. Phil had a crush on Jan Stratton, the principal’s wife, who was part of the character of Bonny, too. George Keller was the principal of the West Marin School in the novel, while Jan’s husband, George Stratton, was the principal in real life. George replaced another shortlived principal whom the school board was “out to get.” Phil and I and others rushed to his defense, but it turned out that before enlisting community support to save his job he had already secretly signed resignation papers.

Mr. Austurias was based on Bob Allen, the science teacher. (The school board “got him” the next year, too.) Mr. Austurias picks chanterelles and cooks them with our recipe. That rascal, Phil, has him making love to Bonnie. Then he kills him off. Dr. Stockstill in the novel has a house in West Marin and a boat in Tomales Bay like Dr. A’s. A local contractor had the name Stockstill in our real world. Phil was scrambling names and people as usual.

The mad atomic scientist who created the holocaust (this is the only novel of Phil’s in which the bomb drops) was based on the physicist Edmund Teller, the prime mover in the creation of the hydrogen bomb. Phil hated Teller. Mr. Tree, a.k.a. Dr. Bluthgeld—Dr. Bloodmoney—is paranoid. He has an attack of vertigo (as Phil had had in high school), the street tilting away from him. Mr. Tree has blotches, or thinks he has blotches on his face and can’t ride in a bus or go to the opera, ballet, or symphony, as Phil couldn’t as a young man. Mr. Tree believes he is disfigured. Foolish Bonnie likes evil Dr. Bloodmoney. She is promiscuous. In the end, she leaves her husband, deserts her children, and moves to Berkeley: “Her marriage is over and everybody realizes it.” Phil steps in and out of his characters regardless of gender.

In
Dr. Bloodmoney
there’s a big discussion about how good mass production is, the opposite idea to the admiration of handcraft discussed in
The Man in the High Castle
. I, of course, was deeply involved in making handcrafted jewelry.

Phil put some of his old friends from Berkeley in
Dr. Bloodmoney
. Phil and Maury Guy (Iskandar) share the role of Stuart McConchie. Jim Fergesson was inspired by Phil’s old boss at University Radio, Herb Hollis. Dean Hardy and Ella Hardy are based on Phil’s friends Vince and Virginia Lusby. Hoppy Harrington was created from Phil’s memories of the many eccentric radio repairmen who worked over the years at University Radio. Hoppy used the timer from our RCA washer-drier combination for repairs to the essential machinery of that post-holocaust society. There was a little of Pete Stevens and Tony Morris, another local friend of Phil’s who was an appliance repairman, in the character of Hoppy, too.

In
Dr. Bloodmoney
, Walt Dangerfield is cut off from Earth, stuck in a rocket that goes round and round in its orbit. It never got off to Mars the day the bomb fell, because the second-stage rocket never fired. Dangerfield’s wife, who accompanied him, has died, and he is all alone up there. Dangerfield has Phil’s ulcer. Heroically, he acts as cosmic disc jockey to the people struggling to survive on Earth. He soothes, entertains, educates, and keeps the world community together but, alas, he becomes ill. Is he dying? I was worried about Walt/Phil.

Was Phil also little Bill, a teratoma, living in his twin sister’s side, in touch with the voices of the dead? I was hopeful when little Bill got “born” out of his twin sister’s side but worried when he ended up in the impaired body of Hoppy. It was good that Hoppy/Phil wasn’t going to take over the world through his psychokinetic control of Walt. It looked as if he would for a while. In the end all ends well—I think. At any rate, it was more hopeful than
Martian Time-Slip
. Phil put together some of the strangest kinds of feelings in this novel.
Dr. Bloodmoney
, in some ways, is really horrible. But it’s also charming. Is there such a thing as charmingly horrible?

As the spring of 1963 approached, we were quarreling more. Phil pushed all my buttons regularly. Provoking arguments had become his new indoor sport.

I continued to compete with him and tell him straight out when he was wrong. But years later, my oldest daughter, Hatte, told me that she remembered a new note in our arguments. In one, Phil yelled, “You killed Richard and now you’re trying to kill me.” Back in those days, I couldn’t process this information. I didn’t even hear it. I do remember Phil saying on a number of occasions, “You don’t love me, you just wanted a husband and a father for your children,” repeating over and over the idea that Dr. A had verbalized to him during their first meeting. No answer I gave carried any weight with him. I tried many times an indignant, “I do too love you,” but when I couldn’t ever get him to acknowledge this avowal, I finally sarcastically replied, hoping to shake him out of this negative litany, “Well, of course, I just wanted a husband and a father for my children. Why else would I marry you?” No doubt he believed this.

One afternoon, as we were driving out of the field after hauling some lumber to the barn, Phil got out of the car to open the gate. As he was opening the gate, I slipped the clutch, gunned the motor, and inched the car forward, preparing to drive the car out on the road. Suddenly Phil flung the gate open and ran off in the field. I thought, disgustedly, “What is he doing, now?” After I had driven out on the road, he came back and got into the car. I didn’t even ask him what he thought he had been doing. Everything was too discouraging. My defense was denial. (But the other side of this coin was that I had a staunch unyielding faith in our love for each other and in our marriage. Yet, I was also annoyed.)

Looking back, I wonder how Phil interpreted my annoyance; he might have thought I was angry because I hadn’t been able to run over him with the car
.

Then Phil began sending the children off to their rooms for no reason. One day, one of the girls left the freezer door open and Phil took privileges away from all three girls. They felt he was being unfair, and so did I. I called a family meeting to try to solve this problem. “Great idea,” I thought, “We’ll solve our problems with family meetings.” But during a discussion of some domestic problem, the girls all agreed with me and each one said that she thought Phil’s viewpoint was wrong. Phil stalked furiously out of the living room, and there were no more family meetings.

Phil took up snuff instead of smoking Egyptian cigarettes. He might as well have taken up chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor as far as I was concerned. He often had snuff in his beard. Yet, he was funny, too, when he enthusiastically discoursed on the different brands of snuff, the history of snuff, and so on.

We sought some counseling with Dr. A and saw him alternately once a week, hoping that this would help our marriage. But Phil wasn’t really having therapy. He was playing games, gathering material for his writing, getting prescriptions, and preparing for a coup.

Next time Maury Guy came out to visit us he and Phil had a falling out. Maury was studying Subud and the
I Ching
. Phil told him, “The
I Ching
is a bunch of bullshit. I’m going to write a novel about it and show it up,” although at this time Phil consulted the
I Ching
at least once daily. Maury was deeply offended on the
I Ching’s
behalf. Maury had also gotten terribly tired of Phil’s litany about me: “Anne’s marvelous, she’s terrible, she’s marvelous, and she’s getting more terrible by the moment.” Maury said, “It was all so confused that I thought perhaps Phil was dabbling in drugs.”

June Kresy, Phil’s former neighbor, remembered that Phil came over to her house several times “expressing great fear” of me. Phil had told June that he felt that he wasn’t contributing financially to the marriage, and June noted that this feeling of Phil’s was turning into a strong resentment of me, but she couldn’t understand the fear of me he expressed.

I had absolutely no idea that Phil felt like this until June told me many years later
.

Once Phil and I quarreled so furiously that furniture was thrown, and Phil struck me. The children were upset and frightened. I called Bill Christensen to come and intervene. When Bill drove into the driveway in his official car, Phil walked out to talk to him. I expected Bill to tell Phil that he shouldn’t be hitting his wife.

But Bill said to me many years later, “Phil was so good with words. I had observed him being so loving and charming to you. And there was something about him that made you want to help him. I should have talked to you, Anne, but there was Phil, calm, cool, and collected, and you were standing there angrily on the porch, your arms folded, your eyes shooting sparks, and Phil would say, ‘You see, she’s just about to go off again. And I love her so. Isn’t it too bad?’” And so Bill drove off. I thought he had “talked to” Phil, but instead Phil had convinced Bill that I was violent and crazy. He had evidently been laying the groundwork for these ideas with Bill all along, and possibly he really believed them. I was assertive and direct, and yelled at times, although by then I had stopped throwing dishes.