The Search for Philip K. Dick (33 page)

Phil was even having his biography written. He had invited Gregg Rickman, a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, to his apartment for a series of taped interviews, because Gregg had written an article in a fanzine about the empathy Phil had for “people, animals, and life.” The first time Gregg came, Phil told him that he recently had lost a great deal of weight. He said that he hadn’t been able to eat because of grief and his hyper-empathy.

Phil made Gregg his official biographer. On one tape that Gregg and Phil made, Phil talked about his mother. He said that when he was a small child, he believed his mother was trying to kill him.

Phil was still giving money away. He gave
$10,000
to the Quakers for Cambodian relief. He gave Kleo $1,200 when her husband, Phil’s old friend Norman Mini, died.

Phil phoned his friend Jim Blaylock one evening and said he was being paid $40,000 for
Blade Runner
. He asked Jim, “What will I do with the money?” He told Jim that he couldn’t think of anything he wanted but a ham sandwich—so he went out and bought a ham sandwich.

Phil was still telling stories to Tim Powers about his wife, his house, his kids, and his animals back in Point Reyes Station. Tim told me, “Anne, I could draw a floor plan of your house. In 1981, Phil still told stories of how you had chased him with a gun for two years after the divorce, tried to run him down with a white Jaguar, and waved knives at him. He told these stories with great relish.”

My own conversations with Phil had become more and more relaxed. He seemed so much less touchy that finally, after eighteen years, I got up the nerve to ask him a few things. I said, “I heard from Laura that you’ve helped Nancy and others with money, why haven’t you ever helped me?” I was thinking of the back child support of $75 a month. I didn’t really have any idea of how successful he’d become.

He replied bitterly, “You’re too strong.” I was so surprised I couldn’t think of a response or my other questions. Later, in another phone conversation I asked him, “Phil, why did you leave Point Reyes? I really never knew.” He answered so quickly and mechanically it was as if he had been waiting for me to ask him this question for years. As if by rote, he said, “I thought that we fought too much. It was bad for the children.”

About two months before Phil’s death I thought, “It’s important to tell people how you feel about them while you can.” I didn’t have any premonition about Phil’s impending death, at least not consciously, but I wanted to express to him in some nonthreatening way that I had loved him and that love was still there. The next time we talked I told him, “I always loved you.” He didn’t respond at all. It was as if he didn’t even hear me. I was so nervous and timid about talking about love to him—maybe he didn’t want to hear what I wanted to say—that I didn’t know how to continue or even if I should continue. Still, I was glad I had put my feelings in words even though he may not have believed me or didn’t like me telling him this. It may even have been a burden to him—more guilt to carry.

Tessa was serious about remarrying Phil, but Phil told his friend Tim that the prospect of remarrying Tessa terrified him more than anything in the world. He started going with Mary Wilson and invited her to go to the next Metz meeting with him. He told me over the phone, “She’s a kind of super-secretary, not a girlfriend.”

Mary said, “We had a relationship on so many levels, it was hard to describe. We were going to sign partnership papers. Phil was going to back my acting career. He liked to have me around to gauge people’s reactions.”

Phil was also dating a woman architect in her early thirties who lived by the beach and drove a turbo Porsche. It annoyed Phil when she talked about her great car.

Old friend and fellow sci-fi writer Ray Nelson came down from Berkeley and visited Phil in December. Phil was expecting one of his current girlfriends to visit and told Ray, “She’ll be here any minute, and I’ll introduce you to the girl I’m going to marry.” Then he got an odd look on his face and said, “But I can’t remember her name.” He got out his address book, looked up the woman’s name, and wrote it on the inside of his hand. “Now I won’t have any problem,” he told Ray, happily.

Ray wrote me in 1988:

Phil’s days were busy and productive. He was active in the management of his condominium complex. The Perezes, his next-door neighbors who lived in Doris’s old apartment, were extremely fond of him and invited him over for dinner two nights a week.

The last time I talked to Phil on the phone, three weeks before he died, he was carrying on about Mary Wilson, and I thought to myself, “There he goes again.”

Phil had a stroke on February 18, on a Thursday. He called his doctor in the morning and described pre-stroke symptoms. His doctor urged him to go to the hospital, but evidently he either didn’t go or couldn’t. The Perezes found him on the floor of his apartment late that afternoon. Tim Powers rushed over to be with him while he was being taken to the intensive care unit of nearby Western Hospital.

Laura, back in Michigan, Phil’s only adult relative, was notified and phoned me. The next morning I called the hospital, and the head nurse on the floor told me that Phil had had a mild stroke and there was every reason to believe that he would have a full recovery. But on Saturday morning, when I phoned again, he had had a much worse stroke. The nurse told me he had been resuscitated and was now in intensive care. Laura flew out from Michigan on the advice of the hospital staff. Phil recovered consciousness Saturday evening when Laura arrived and was extremely glad to see her. I was on the phone half the day with Laura, the hospital, and other relatives. My telephone bill was
$1,000
that month, a great deal of money at that time.

I debated with myself about whether it was the right thing to do to go down to see Phil one last time, but Laura told me that I wouldn’t have been admitted.

Many friends were trying to get in to see Phil, and science fiction fans were hanging around in the corridors—one even managed to get into the intensive care section. Reporters from
Newsweek
and
Time
magazines were phoning. Ex-wives and old girlfriends were coming out of the woodwork. There was a lot of intrigue. Finally, the hospital withdrew visitation privileges from everyone except the family: Laura, the only adult family member.

Phil sank rapidly on Sunday. On Monday, strongly against the wishes of Phil’s current girlfriend, Laura brought in an Episcopal priest, who “laid on hands” and prayed for healing for Phil. But by Tuesday, Phil had sunk further, and the priest, who had come again, told Laura that they must read the last rites. Phil was anointed with unction, and, standing by his bed, Laura read the responses: “Have mercy upon him … have mercy upon him … grant him your peace.” Laura thought that Phil squeezed her hand faintly at the end of this ritual. He fell into a deeper and deeper coma and suffered extreme tachychardia and many heart failures. Toward the end of the week, the nurses and doctors told Laura to go up to stay with Jayne and me in Point Reyes Station. She was emotionally exhausted, and there was nothing more she could do. Phil was gone. There was only a body being kept artificially alive. Doris Sauter was allowed to sit by Phil’s bed and read the Episcopal litanies. There had been no brain activity for five days when on March 2, the head of the hospital’s neurological division called Laura. We had all been sitting around the kitchen table at Jayne’s house talking and waiting. The neurologist told Laura that if there were no objections from the family, he would order the life-support system turned off. He stated that it was cruel to keep it going. Laura hesitated. Perhaps some of her concern was that some of the women in Phil’s life were in a state of denial and were sure he would somehow recover and, also, she was only twenty-two years old. Without thinking I said firmly, “I’ll take the responsibility.”

A memorial service was held in Santa Ana. I worked out a plan with Phil’s father, who arranged for Phil’s ashes to be flown back to Fort Morgan, Colorado, and buried beside his twin sister, Jane. Later, at Paul Williams’s suggestion, I arranged another service in St. Columba’s Church in Inverness for Phil’s northern California friends and relatives.

Phil finally got into
Time
magazine. It printed a short obituary.

There was great shock and grief among Phil’s friends and in the science fiction community when Phil died. One friend said, “He was one of those special people whose like will not be seen again….”

As I learned about Phil’s life after Point Reyes, it seemed to me that the luminous spirit of the man I had known had been obscured. It was still there—but like a dim reflection in an old scratched mirror. I had wanted to understand what had happened between Phil and me, but what I found still didn’t make an understandable pattern. I decided to learn everything I could about Phil’s past—and there was my Phil again!

When her labor pains began more than a month early, on December 16, 1928, Dorothy Kindred Dick had no idea she was going to have twins. She and her husband, Edgar, were at home in their Chicago apartment, and the woman doctor whom Dorothy, an early feminist, had chosen had not yet arrived, much to Edgar’s disgust. He didn’t think his wife should have chosen a woman doctor. A tiny blond boy was born at 8 a.m. Over fifty years later, his father, long estranged from the family, still spoke of that child fondly and tenderly. Edgar wiped the mucus from the newborn baby’s face. “I knew how because I had delivered a lot of calves,” he told me at his home in Menlo Park when I interviewed him in 1983.

Much to the couple’s and the doctor’s surprise, labor pains started again. A tiny, quiet, dark-haired girl was born. Dorothy and Edgar named her Jane Charlotte.

Dorothy, always thin and frail, had no milk, and Edgar wanted the babies to be sent to the hospital, but the doctor disagreed. There were great discussions about what the babies should be fed. Edgar said that Dorothy “even consulted the janitor,” who suggested goat’s milk.

Dorothy’s mother, Meemaw, was sent for, but Edgar said, “She didn’t remember much about raising babies.” She arrived in Chicago two weeks later, but very soon it was clear that the situation was too much for her. When the babies were three weeks old, two visiting nurses came to the house to check the children for an insurance policy Edgar had taken out on them. The nurses saw that the babies were dying and insisted on taking them immediately to the hospital. Meemaw grabbed Phil and ran into the bathroom and hid. She was afraid he would never come back. But the nurses prevailed and both children were taken to the hospital.

The two babies were diagnosed as being severely dehydrated. Jane died soon after. Phil was put in an incubator and improved enough in two weeks to be brought back home. A wet nurse was found, a big Polish woman, and baby Phil smiled his first smile at her.

The death of Jane had a profound affect on Phil’s entire life. The separation from that incredible closeness that twins experience in the womb, the separation from his mother, the physical deprivation the tiny baby experienced—all left their mark. Dorothy talked mournfully about Jane’s death throughout Phil’s childhood. “I heard about Jane a lot,” he said years later, “and it wasn’t good for me. I felt guilty—somehow I got all the milk.” As a child he imagined a playmate whom he called “Becky.” He thought of her as his lost sister.

Jane’s body was sent back to Colorado. Edgar’s family held a graveside ceremony in a blinding snowstorm at the Fort Morgan cemetery. When Dorothy told about this terrible time, she repeatedly stated that Edgar had stayed at his club. He wasn’t there to help her when things were really rough. Edgar’s account made him sound like a good guy and portrayed Dorothy as having bad judgment and bad instincts.

When Phil was born, Edgar and Dorothy had already been married eight years. They had met in their home state of Colorado, when Edgar came back in 1918 from serving with the Fifth Marines in France, the most highly decorated infantry battalion in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Edgar was second oldest of a farming family of ten boys and four girls. Dorothy told me that the family ate in two shifts. The dining room table wasn’t big enough for them to all eat together. Edgar had been born in Johnstone, Pennsylvania, at the turn of the century. In a memoir that he wrote about his natal family, Edgar referred to his mother, Bessie Mack, as Irish, but another time he said she was Scotch-Irish, as was his father. Phil, as an adult, put great emphasis on the one-quarter German blood he claimed to inherit, but actually his mother was of English descent and his father’s family was Scotch-Irish. Phil had no German blood in him at all—but he never mentioned any Irish ancestry.

Edgar adored his mother, and saw her as “protecting her children’s lives and a wonderful cook.” He spoke of his father as an excessively severe, although intelligent, man: “I can remember my father whipping us for trying to mimic him gargling.” Edgar’s father was frugal, organized, and hardworking and taught his son to be this way.