The Search for Philip K. Dick (26 page)

One of my main goals was to research the library archives at Fullerton, where Phil’s papers and manuscripts were located. Professor McNelly showed me how to use the library and gave me letters, papers, and fruitful leads. McNelly, a Jungian, told me, “Phil had a powerful shadow.” I was taken aback when he asked, “Was Phil a good lover?” He told me that he was worried about his wife in regard to Phil: “Phil was just too damn charismatic.”

I read as much in the library as I could during the two days I was there. I was shocked by an incredibly poisonous letter that Phil wrote to Carol Carr in 1964 about his insane ex-wife—me. Later, a friend wrote me from Washington, D.C., that there was a letter in the
Washington Post
protesting the publication of letters of Philip K. Dick, some of which were scurrilous about an ex-wife. I finally decided that anything negative that Phil or his fans said about me wasn’t my problem. When very occasionally someone says something negative to me, I tell them jokingly, “Sorry, you can’t insult me; I’ve been insulted by a world-famous expert.”

One day I drove to Santa Ana and spent a morning with Phil’s best southern California friend, young sci-fi writer Tim Powers, and his wife, Serena, a very pleasant couple. Tim had written a daily journal in the early seventies and made it available to me
.

I spent Sunday afternoon in North Hollywood with K. W. Jeter, Phil’s other “best friend,” and his wife, Jeri. They were a handsome couple and lived in a handsome apartment. Both were dressed as if they were on their way to work in an expensive law firm (or for the FBI). K. W. had on a well-tailored, well-pressed three-piece suit. Not what one expects in La La Land
.

I talked several times on the phone with Linda Levy, another great lost love of Phil’s. Later, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and we had lunch together. Mary Wilson, Phil’s super girlfriend-secretary, and I talked on the phone when Phil was dying in the hospital, and again later. Jim Blaylock was a gracious phone interviewee who had enjoyed his relationship with Phil a great deal. Tessa Busby, Phil’s young, fifth ex-wife, declined to be interviewed. Her stepmother, Nita Busby, who had known Phil in Professor McNelly’s class, gave me a brief telephone interview
.

Gwen Lee had a wonderful taped interview of Phil’s ideas for his next novel
, The Owl in Daylight,
an interview he had done only a few months before his death. She read the whole thing to me over the phone. I was again impressed and awed by Phil’s imagination. I wondered if Phil had in mind the owl we saw taking a shower bath in the first rains of winter in the cypress trees in our front yard so many years ago
.

Tim Powers, Joanne McMahon, Sue Hoglind, and Linda Levy met Phil at the Orange County airport in April 1972. Phil had been allowed to leave X-Kalay only after finding someone who would sponsor him. He had written an emotional letter to Professor Willis McNelly at California State University, Fullerton, asking for help. McNelly had agreed to sponsor Phil and read the letter to his science fiction English class.

“Can anybody here help Philip K. Dick?” he asked his class.

Two girls, science fiction fans, Sue Hoglind and Joanne McMahon, raised their hands: “We can put him up.” Phil moved in with Joanne and Sue and slept on their living room couch—but the living situation was uncomfortable, and the three of them didn’t get along particularly well. While giving a talk to Professor McNelly’s class, Phil joked about his awkward living situation. Another student, Joel Stein, raised his hand and told Phil, “I’ve just split up with my wife and have an extra bedroom in my apartment.” Phil accepted Joel’s offer and continued with his talk.

Joel Stein was thirty-five years old then, and aspiring to be a writer. In 1983 when I reached him by long-distance telephone, he was a pit boss for Harrah’s Club in Reno
.

“With Phil,” Joel said, “there was never a dull moment. Phil was a catalyst. There was never any peace and quiet while Phil was around Phil ranged between the agony and the ecstasy.” Joel would come home from work and find Phil sitting in a chair in a deep depression because four police cars had just gone by. The next night Phil would be bouncing off the walls with joy. It was a financially hard time for both men. They took turns buying food. Phil stayed with Joel almost six months.

Phil and Tim Powers soon became good friends. Phil told Tim that he was afraid of returning to Marin County, so many people there were “out to get him”; the police were down on him, and a paramilitary group in the area was hostile to him. He told Tim that this group had stolen disorientation-drug weapons from an Air Force warehouse and was selling them on the street as recreational dope. Phil described knifings that occurred at his house. Phil was off drugs and wouldn’t allow any drugs around the apartment at all. He told Joel Stein, “The cops will come and break down the doors.”

Joel and Phil got along well, although there were times when Phil was morose and would only grunt when Joel tried to talk to him. Joel felt sorry for Phil because of his age and the topsy-turviness of his universe, and because he had only a bunch of kids to rely on. Phil didn’t seem be strong at all. “He had coughing fits, his shoulder kept coming out of its socket, and was in a sling, and here he was, trying to keep up with nineteen-and twenty-year-old kids.”

Although Phil engaged in many strange, flaky conversations, Joel noted that he was businesslike about his writing and publishing. He was just finishing
A Scanner Darkly
. Later, Phil thought Joel was trying to kill him. Joel noted that Phil seemed to think that anyone he was getting close to was trying to kill him. Phil told a story, too, that Tim had menaced him with a knife.

Joel told me, “I remember Phil was primarily concerned with chasing young dark-haired girls around—desperately. He felt his life was slipping away, and he was trying to get as much out of it as he could. He was terribly romantic about women to the point of unreality. He would describe a girl he’d just met as a goddess with an effervescent personality and long, flowing hair. I would get all excited, and then I would meet the girl and find her quite drab. However, Linda Levy was intelligent and attractive. A heck of a girl, sharp, witty, strong-willed.”

Linda had written Phil a letter while he was at X-Kalay, in response to the letter from Phil that Professor Willis McNelly had read to his class. Shortly afterward, Linda was summoned to Professor McNelly’s office and told that Phil would be arriving at LAX and wanted her to pick him up. She went with Tim Powers and Phil’s two roommates-to-be, Sue and Joanne. “My first impression was of a man with a long, gray beard, wearing a trench coat, carrying in one hand a box wrapped in brown paper … and a Bible in the other. He reminded me of a derelict rabbi. When he saw me, he stopped suddenly, eyes fixed on me. He never took his eyes off me the whole evening.”

Within two weeks Phil was intensely, mystically in love with Linda. He wrote her:

Linda recalled with astonishment, “Phil proposed in a letter after he had known me only two weeks. It made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t know how to respond. He later said it was a joke.”

She continued, “Phil’s intense attention could be unnerving to experience, and I saw him undergo personality changes that were frightening. Others in the group didn’t have the same experiences that I did. They saw him as a completely different person, and that made me uncomfortable also. I began to question my own sanity, since my experiences were so vastly different. I felt consumed by him, possessed, trapped. Phil’s flattery fed my ego, but the price I had to pay was too high. I was afraid of Phil, and his mood swings.”

Phil wrote to a friend back in Vancouver about Linda:

One evening, Linda and Phil went out together to have dinner and to see the movie
Fiddler on the Roof
. On the way home, Linda stopped for gas, remembering only belatedly that the gas station attendant was someone whom she had dated. Knowing how intensely jealous Phil was and wanting to avoid a confrontation, she got out of the car to talk to the attendant because:

Phil wrote to Linda afterward:

But later Phil told some of his acquaintances that the reason he and Linda broke up was that she attacked him. Phil’s account of the breakup to Tim was different still. He told Tim that Linda had led him on, and then when he proposed to her, she was angry because he’d “ruined” the nice relationship they’d had. He told Tim he’d struck her once in hurt and anger.

Phil’s collection of letters to Linda forms part of a manuscript of a book of his letters titled
The Dark-Haired Girl
. Following the letters to Linda, Phil records a dream: “TERRIBLE—a child, a naked baby in a frying pan, suffering. The child is on fire; flames surround it and it burns shiny red. It leaps into the ring of fire beneath the frying pan to escape; but it has made a mistake. It is now down below, in hell, in the flames themselves, from which it was trying to escape.”

Phil, Joel, and Tim met the women in the next apartment, Mary Lou Malone, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Stanlow. The night they met they went out on a date to see
A Clockwork Orange
. They became close friends.

Another new friend was K. W. Jeter, a young science fiction writer who had studied Phil’s works and revered Phil before he had even met him. But Phil’s fear of the FBI and CIA continued to haunt him. After an initial friendly period, Phil suddenly stopped speaking to K. W. Several years later when they had become friendly again, Phil told K. W. that he had dropped him because he believed that K. W. was an FBI informer.

Linda was not the last of the dark-haired women whom Phil fell instantly in love with. In July, Phil started dating tall, slim twenty-seven-year-old Ginger Smith, whom he had met at the Westercon in Long Beach. Everyone was asked to wear a name tag, so Phil wore the name of an early obscure
Amazing Stories
writer. A month later Ginger planned a beach party, but the several groups who were planning to drive to the beach decided to go to someone’s house instead. Ginger had invited seventeen-year-old Tessa Busby. She knew Tessa because Tessa had been on the high-school bus Ginger drove.

Everyone was drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke. Tim Powers was having a good time at the party when, “The next thing I noticed was that Phil was huddled with Tess on the couch and they were whispering and muttering to each other. I thought, ‘Wow. That’s quick. What happened here? I only just turned around and went for a beer.’”