The Search for Philip K. Dick (16 page)

Phil, the girls, and I were baptized together like one of those Northern European pagan tribes back in the dawn of Christianity. I had hopes that now we would stop burying each other alive in the peat bogs. As we drove home, Phil told me cheerfully, “At the moment of my baptism I saw, slinking out of the baptistery, his tail between his legs, a small red devil, the classic type, with horns and a spiked tail.” Was this the day when, on the way home from church, Phil, seeing a dead cat in the road, pulled the car over, picked up the cat, and gently, almost reverently, laid the little cat body on the grassy shoulder?

A month after our baptism, in early February 1964, we were confirmed, kneeling together at the altar rail at St. Columba’s Church. The vicar told us that when a man and wife were confirmed together at the same time, their marriage was blessed by the church. It was like a second marriage ceremony. Phil took an active part in his confirmation and this ceremony. I really believed it was not simply a routine he was going through—but he was such a complicated man.

At this same time he was working on perhaps his greatest novel,
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
. Years later, he told friends that he had seen a terrible face in the sky, a face with stainless-steel teeth, slotted-metal eyes, and a steel arm—the face of “Palmer Eldritch”—but he didn’t tell me. If he had, I would have probably said to him, “You probably ate something that didn’t agree with you.”

Phil was packing his clothes and going to his mother’s “forever” and then coming back home to Point Reyes about twice a week. Our life was an emotional roller-coaster. I almost got used to this unsettled behavior. I thought, “Phil will be doing this forever. Well, that’s the way it is. Sort of like being married to a sailor or a traveling salesman.” But Hatte was resentful and remembered Phil disciplining her and the other children in an arbitrary manner.

When Phil was in Point Reyes, he would come home from working at the Hovel in the late afternoon and flop down in his big armchair. His face would sag. He would look like he was half-dead.

“Phil, what’s the matter?” I would ask.

“I’ve got the flu again,” he would say in a nasal voice. Every afternoon he would have the flu. Phil started “carrying on” about our neighbor, Lorraine Hynes, as if he were in love with her. I regarded this as terrible disloyalty and it evoked no end of battles. Actually, Phil could have flirted with anyone if he had made me feel like the special woman in his life as he used to, but, insecure, I could give him no freedom. He gave Lorraine a hundred of our books. Then he gave away my unabridged dictionary to a casual guest, an antique decoy duck that I’d had restored to another guest, and an autographed first edition of an e. e. cummings collection of poetry to a third.

One day, after a quarrel, he was packing to leave again, walking around the bedroom in his underwear—and suddenly he sat down heavily on the bed and said, “You’re the great love of my life.”

“But Phil, if you love me and I love you, why are you leaving?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He sat there for a while, and then got up and continued packing.

I ran around the room after him asking him over and over, “But why are you leaving?” But he wouldn’t answer.

Now, when he came back from his mother’s, he’d say, “I’m afraid that I’m going to kill myself with the drugs in Dorothy’s medicine cabinet. She’s going to kill me, the way she leaves those drugs lying around.”

When I interviewed Lynne, Phil’s stepsister, she told me, “Dorothy’s medicine cabinet was like a minipharmacy. She had everything! Phil would come to the house and open the cabinet and just start taking pills. He would take whatever he happened to pick up. It was amazing that he didn’t make himself ill.”

Bill Christensen remembered an earnest one-and-a-half-hour conversation he had with Phil at the Hovel one evening. Phil paced the floor. “Anne is the great love of my life,” he told Bill. “A writer is the worst one in the world for this to happen to. I’m at my wits’ end.” Bill said, as the evening went on, it seemed as if Phil were repudiating the way he’d described the situation between him and me at the time of my forced hospitalization. Bill said, “I realized I was dealing with a guy who was getting slightly off his rocker, but then he got right back on…. He could be so cool and intelligent and charming.”

I had long ago made my peace with Bill Christensen, retired now and still a neighbor. A great raconteur, his memories of the 1960s were detailed and clear
.

He was to die of Alzheimer’s a few years later. It was a tragedy that no one had been able to interview him about the time he fought in the International Brigade and about the many incredible police situations he had been involved with when our area was like the Wild West and he was the only lawman. He had kept copious notebooks, but his wife thought all that old, bad stuff should be forgotten
.

Then, in the middle of an argument, Phil suddenly started pummeling me. We were just having an ordinary argument and, totally unexpectedly, he started hitting me. This happened on two different occasions. I tried to talk to him. His face was set. He looked like he didn’t hear me. I wasn’t there, just a punching bag. Then he grabbed me and hugged me and cried. It was all too much. I began to feel as if I were ninety-five years old and half-dead. The third time this happened, I clenched my fists and stood up and moved in his direction, preparing to hit him back. He looked almost happy and ran away from me and out of the room.

To add to my depression, everything in the house was breaking. The dishwasher broke, the oven broke, one of the burners on the range broke, the washer-drier broke (although it was always breaking), the couch springs suddenly sagged to the floor—the whole house was falling to pieces.

Then, one day, just before going to church, Phil said he had something serious to tell me, something that would explain why he couldn’t function properly in life. Before he even spoke, I knew I didn’t want to hear whatever it was he wanted to tell me. He could function just fine. Why did he have to go on as if he couldn’t? I was rushing around trying to get myself dressed and yelling at the girls to hurry up and get themselves ready.

Phil said, “When I was quite small I was homosexually molested.”

Confused thoughts flashed through my mind. “It’s probably not true,” or “It was probably a neighbor,” or “Things like this just don’t happen.” “Why is he telling me this? I can’t do anything about it and it’s just too horrible.”

But all I could say out loud was, “You should tell this to your psychotherapist.” It is possible that at that moment I had an opportunity to help Phil and I really blew it. I just couldn’t process this information. In the ambience of those days even homosexuality was exotic. Pedophilia was hardly believed to exist. I had never ever heard of a case of it. I was trying to hold a middle-class marriage together and this information was far out of my range. His timing was hardly propitious either. His admission went unresolved.

Now when Phil left, he wouldn’t come to the phone at Dorothy’s when I called. When very occasionally he did, he was cruel. Cruel. He had never been like this before. Dorothy was cold and unkind over the phone, also. I felt pure hatred emanating from Berkeley. I had read about this emotion in books but never observed it or experienced it in real life before. It struck me as a very strange emotion to have. What good is it?

At one point Phil got in a terrible state of rage with Dr. J in a telephone conversation. She let him rant on for a half hour and then hung up on him and never spoke to him again.

Dr. J told me unapologetically that she had a hard time with anger and she absolutely wouldn’t deal with it. That seemed very strange to me. Wasn’t it a psychologist’s job to deal with difficult emotions?

The next time Phil came back home and we tried to make love, he was impotent. I reassured him, “It’s okay, you’ll be fine next week.” In
Now Wait for Last Year
, he wrote, “He couldn’t. This, too. Miserably, he moved from her, sat on the edge of the bed…. He stroked her hair…. ‘Too bad,’ he thought, ‘I wasn’t able to make love to her.’”

Then Phil brought
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
to me to read. I probably failed Phil again when I failed to understand this novel. Was it because our life was so disturbed, or had my intellect really been impaired? I didn’t like reading about Emily devolving. Her mind was muddy. She was drawing the same pictures and making the same pots that she had already made last year. She couldn’t think creatively anymore. We had just joined the church, and here was this novel telling about something like a Black Mass or perhaps worse. Whoever ate the wafer that has been brought back by Palmer Eldritch becames Palmer Eldritch. Wasn’t this a blasphemous distortion of the symbol of the wafer and the body of Christ? I was baffled, uneasy, upset.

I am aware that there are many interpretations of
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, considered by some Dickian scholars to be one of Phil’s finest novels. My small personal encounter with this novel was not on a literary level. There was something almost demonic in this novel of Phil’s, while at the same time he seemed to love the church services, the confirmation class, the ancient hymns, and talking with Fr. Reade about theology.

I think Phil started out to write about the wafer of worldly pleasure, Can-D, as opposed to the spiritual wafer, Chew-Z, brought by a being from the skies. Phil didn’t know about LSD at this time. He based his ideas on his reading about hallucinogenic mushrooms. Chew-Z was made out of a fungus. In the beginning of the novel, Palmer seems to be a good spirit; in fact, perhaps he is God. As the novel progresses, there is great confusion as to whether he is good or evil. Good and evil seem to be all mixed up together. The novel got away from Phil, like his life got away from him at that time.

Sadly, I didn’t see then, in the shocking strangeness of this novel, how much the protagonist Barney Mayerson loved Emily Hnatt, how much he wanted to get her back, how guilty he felt that he had abandoned her so selfishly.

I didn’t see, then, how terrible Barney felt that he hadn’t responded to a call for help from his friend and employer, Leo Bulero, when Leo was imprisoned and forcibly drugged by Palmer Eldritch. Barney hated himself; he felt he was rotten, evil. He always put himself first. To expiate his sin, he was going to exile himself to dreary Mars, a trip from which there was no return. He was going to infect himself with deadly Martian epilepsy; he was going to eat Chew-Z and be taken over by Palmer Eldritch. When Ronnie Fugate, a precog who also worked for Leo, looked into the future, she saw Leo murdering Palmer Eldritch. Barney remained on Mars but became like Palmer Eldritch. He tried to get back to Emily. He had a chance but he ruined it, making the same mistakes he made when he lost her the first time.

I didn’t see, in the midst of the great spiritual and emotional confusion and upheaval both in our lives and in the novel, that Barney acknowledged responsibility for his actions. He didn’t blame them on Emily or some other female. This novel told it like it was. In later years, Phil disavowed
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
. He said he wished he hadn’t written it and didn’t want to hear anything about it.

I believe now that Phil was trying desperately (and failing) to work out a major inner conflict in this novel. He was trying to become whole, as he writes years later in
VALIS
. In the confirmation classes and at church he had looked inside himself and found not Christ but Palmer Eldritch. He got the idea of Christianity all right but couldn’t make it work for himself; he couldn’t integrate it. It became all twisted and evil. Or did it? At the end of the novel, at the last minute, Phil throws out a question mark about the nature of Palmer Eldritch. Perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all; perhaps, instead of an evil thing he was just a weird creature that had been hanging out in outer space for countless eons.

Phil continued to travel back and forth between his mother’s house and Point Reyes. I picked up the mail when he wasn’t home and was surprised when I received a large bill from the West Marin Pharmacy for various pills and drugs: Sparene, Stelazine, Preludin, an amphetamine, and others. I hadn’t known anything about any of these. I scolded the druggist for selling them to Phil.

Phil was writing, partly in Berkeley, partly in Point Reyes Station,
Clans of the Alphane Moon
, a novel with a theme of divorce and reconciliation. He produced a great deal of work that spring. Another novel,
The Penultimate Truth
, probably revised from a 1950s story, was written at about this same time. The plot involves a man emerging from underground after having been deceived by the government.
The Crack in Space
(I bet Phil got the idea when his muffler sprang a leak) was partly based on material left over from
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
. The scary stories “What the Dead Men Say” and “The Little Black Box,” and the novel
The Unteleported Man
, were also part of this output. None of the money from these works went into our joint bank account.

Also at his time Phil wrote a touching story, “Precious Artifact,” about engineer Briskle, a man exhausted by his work of the past five years, transforming arid, dreary Mars into a garden. He was so tired that he doesn’t even care that his wife and child were arriving on the next rocket. It’s just as well; they weren’t his wife and children, anyway, but the enemy, Proxers, disguised as members of his family. Briskle just wanted to go home to Earth, but, in fact, everyone and everything on Earth, even his cat, were Proxers who had destroyed Earth and covered up the devastation with an illusory human civilization and illusory people.

Phil left for Berkeley and filed for divorce on March 9, 1964. He rented a room near his mother’s house. He phoned me from Berkeley in a week and told me, “It was a good try, Anne, church; too bad it didn’t work.”

Lynne Hudner told me, “Dorothy had a lot of guilt about the breakup of this marriage.”