The Search for Philip K. Dick (38 page)

He rented a room in a boardinghouse that Gerry Ackerman had found, a house on Milvia Street in which some gay poets of that era lived: Jack Spicer; Robert Duncan; Philip Lamantia, who had a girlfriend; and Gerry Ackerman, Duncan’s friend of the moment. Dorothy was upset about Phil moving to the Milvia Street house. She was worried that he was becoming a homosexual.

In the small world of San Francisco Bay Area intellectuals, my first husband, poet Richard Rubenstein, had also known Robert Duncan when Richard was auditing classes at Berkeley. In the late 1940s, when we were first married and had just moved to San Francisco, Philip Lamantia, who had become a well-known San Francisco poet at the age of seventeen, was an occasional visitor to our San Francisco apartment
.

Gerry Ackerman remembered that one day, Phil and Jack Spicer were listening to the Kipnis recording of
Boris Gudunov
. Jerry waited for the music to end to knock on the door of Phil’s room because he didn’t want to interrupt them. When the music stopped and he finally knocked, they lamented, “You just wrecked our mood. Boris has just died.”

Berkeley was divided between the students and some of the faculty versus the old inhabitants. The former were deeply involved with left-wing politics and the McCarthy investigations. Both liberals and radicals were fearful of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which was secretly observing all the political activity and the radical bookstores. The Progressive Party office was just around the corner from University Radio where Phil worked. All Phil’s friends were leftist. In the 1948 election, Phil voted for Henry Wallace.

Lois Mini and I corresponded after she moved to Bogota, Columbia. Lois had been married to one of Phil’s best friends at University Radio, Norman Mini. I phoned her to see what she remembered about Phil’s life. Lois suggested that I contact Vince Lusby. “He loves to gossip,” she told me. She, herself, couldn’t recall much, although she believed, “Phil was ‘
a
naïf’ [a person marked by a lack of worldly experience].”

Vince Lusby and his wife, Virginia, were easy to find. Vince and Virginia were still living in Richmond in the same house where Phil and I had visited them twenty years earlier. I hadn’t realized how important Vince had been in Phil’s early life. Vince, now in his sixties, had just had a triple bypass and a cataract operation. Virginia hardly seemed to have changed at all. Vince was very encouraging about my project and anxious for me to be the one to do a biography of Phil. He gave me the names of more of Phil’s friends from the University Radio crowd: Bill Trieste, John Gildersleeve, and Betty Jo Rivers. I made the trek to Richmond several times to interview him and Virginia. After I met Pat Hollis in Oakland and told her I had seen Vince, the two of them got together and exchanged reminiscences
.

Vince had met Phil in November 1947, when Phil was eighteen years old. He was still living at home and taking high school classes from a home teacher. Herb Hollis, the owner of University Radio, had brought Vince, a jazz expert, down from Sacramento to run Art Music, Herb’s new record store on Telegraph Avenue. Art Music became enormously successful. Vince was soon running two radio jazz programs, one on KPFA and one on KRE. Vince and Phil became best friends, although Phil had some reservations because Vince had already been through several wives and a number of girlfriends. Vince soon became Phil’s mentor.

Phil invited Vince to his home for Thanksgiving dinner. Vince noted, “Dorothy, Phil’s mother, wasn’t particularly sexy—I thought she was somewhat colorless. She served a fine dinner, though. Phil seemed to be boss of the situation—maybe it was just a pose. Kay Linde, who also worked at University Radio, was at this dinner, too. Phil thought Kay was the greatest thing on Earth. He was in love with her, but later I became her boyfriend.”

Vince remembered that Phil was charming when his mood was right. He described Phil as a mild-mannered person, pleasant to be around, “and he could talk…. [H]e had a line of b.s. that wouldn’t quit. He was a strange combination of wisdom and naïveté, but he wrote great graffiti in the bathroom—original, full of wit, some in verse.”

Phil made a whole new group of friends at University Radio and Art Music. By then, he was a well-constructed, clean-shaven, active young man who got along well with his fellow workers. In a photograph of that period he is quite good-looking.

I phoned Bill Trieste, a premier Bay Area announcer, and was impressed with his rich baritone voice—the perfect voice for a radio announcer
.

When he met Phil in 1948, Bill had just become an unpaid announcer on KPFA, the new educational radio station, one of the first in the nation. He worked at University Radio to earn a living, marking time while the transmitter for KPFA was being completed. Later, he became an announcer for the reputedly Communist radio station.

Norman Mini, a protégée of writer Henry Miller, was another employee at University Radio. Norman went to West Point in the thirties and was kicked out for his Russian sympathies and/or because he got drunk at the Yale—West Point football game. He then joined the Communist Party and was the first person in the United States to be convicted and sent to jail under the Criminal Syndicalism Act. Phil went to one Communist Party meeting with Norman and later felt as if he had been marked forever.

Another character who hung around University Radio was Inez Ghirardelli, a member of the famous and wealthy Ghirardelli family. Once she had been a debutante. Now she was emaciated-looking, wore men’s trousers, suspenders, and shirts, and shaved her hair to a length of three-quarters of an inch. Even in Berkeley, she was considered extremely eccentric. Phil became a good friend of hers. Connie Barbour, a lesbian psychiatrist, was another member of the crowd. She became Kay Linde’s girlfriend after Vince stopped going with Kay. Then there were Alan Rich, who later became a well-known music critic, Kleo Apostolides, and Chuck Bennett.

Phil, Vince, Norman, and Bill hung around together in the evenings, going to the famous bars of those days, the Steppenwolf and the Blind Lemon, to listen to Odetta and other folksingers.

Although Phil seemed to get along well with Dorothy at her home, he hid from her when she came looking for him at work, hoping to have lunch with him. People thought that Dorothy was his girlfriend. At that time she had long dark hair, and was thin and Garbo-esque.

“Phil did the bills at University Radio,” Vince said. “He was an incredibly fast typist and had won contests. He sold radios and TVs. He swept the sidewalk. He sold records.” Phil worked in the stockroom under the store, unpacking records. Phil and Vince used to joke that they wanted clothes the color of packing dust, so that when they had to run upstairs to wait on a customer, they didn’t have to brush all the dust off their clothes.

Phil had some odd mannerisms and said he was being monitored by Langley Porter because, as a child he had an exceptionally high I.Q. Vince recalled, “He certainly was not a normal preppy type. He worried that he wasn’t normal and surrounded himself with security mechanisms. He had to sit alone every day with his back to the wall on exactly the same stool in the balcony of the True Blue Cafeteria where he could see the door of the men’s room.” Phil told Vince he had a phobia that he wouldn’t get to the men’s room in time. He felt uncomfortable if his friends, at another table, looked at him while he was eating, because he had trouble swallowing.

It disturbed Vince that when he and Phil would lock up at night, Phil would try the doorknob, leave and come back a minute later, try the door again, shake it, and bang it; then they would get to the street, and Phil would have to go back again and try the doorknob, and shake and bang the door again. Phil’s mood changed from month to month. Sometimes, he would be extremely reclusive. At other times, he would come out of his shell and be the life of the party. One night he danced with Lois Mini all evening, at one point falling over John Gildersleeve’s feet.

Some days when he came to work, Vince remembered, Phil, with a dark look on his face, would march to the office in the rear where he kept the books, not looking to the right or left, not speaking to or acknowledging anyone. Vince noted that Phil could change his face, either voluntarily or involuntarily, so that he looked like a different person: “Something would trigger him, and his face would actually change.”

That year, Phil passed the entrance exam at the university and enrolled, but he went for only part of a month. He got claustrophobia so badly that he couldn’t stay in a classroom. He went to ROTC but didn’t like it at all.

Phil acquired an interest in Gregorian and pre-Baroque music from Vince. Vince also introduced Phil to Gilbert and Sullivan, and Phil became a Gilbert and Sullivan fan. At University Radio, when things were dull, Vince, Phil, and the other clerks would go in a record booth and play records all day long. Vince couldn’t get Phil interested in jazz, though. “Phil had to have frameworks, that’s why he didn’t like jazz.” Phil hated
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
, but after Vince explained why they were so funny and charming, Phil changed his mind and decided that he loved them.

Phil had never been taught to drive. He practiced driving in Herb’s University Radio truck with Vince’s help. Phil took the driver’s test seven times. He would always err in some way. He drove erratically.

Although he was still a virgin, not so unusual in those days when the sexual revolution was barely beginning, even in Berkeley, Phil told Vince that he believed that he was a homosexual. Vince said that back in 1947, the theory about homosexuality was much different. He said, “If you were a sensitive and creative man, chances were a hundred to one you were a homosexual who hadn’t been ‘brought out.’ In time, I disabused Phil of this idea. He thought because he was a person who liked artistic things, loved music, and had creative impulses, he was gay. One of my arguments was, ‘Go look at their records and books, Phil. They all have the same records and books.’“ And Vince and Phil both felt Vince had saved Phil from being homosexual.

The next problem Vince addressed himself to was that Phil wasn’t heterosexual either, because he’d never been with a woman: “University Radio was a sort of dating bureau. If the record clerks found someone they thought attractive, they’d give her a record to play in one of the booths. Then they’d find another record, similar to the one she’d asked for, and take it back to the booth and tell her, ‘Play this; it’s much like the first one.’ She might end up listening to two or three albums, although she might end up not buying anything. That wasn’t part of the scenario anyway.”

One day, Phil met his first wife, Jeannette Marlin, when she came into the store to buy a record. Vince didn’t find her to be “particularly artistic or musical. She couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Debussy,’ but Phil evidently got some sort of vibrations. She asked for a record; Phil gave it to her and showed her a booth. He did the inevitable thing and took another record back and another, and subsequently—there was a large listening room in the basement next to the radio repair shop, and beyond, another room that was a storage area. You’ll be familiar with both these rooms from reading
Dr. Bloodmoney
. Phil and his future wife cohabited in the basement of University Radio one night and he established his masculinity. They married shortly afterwards.”

In those days, you very likely would marry the first man or woman you slept with. Phil was nineteen at the time, and Jeannette was twenty-six. Phil had to get his mother’s signature in order to be allowed to marry. Dorothy didn’t think that the marriage would work but she signed anyway, thinking that Phil would learn something from the experience.

Gerry Ackerman remembered visiting Phil and Jeannette in their new apartment. He came with composer Dick Maxfield. He wrote:

Six months later, Jeannette and Phil decided to divorce, and Vince appeared as a witness. Jeannette’s complaint was that Phil kept playing three records that she couldn’t stand, the three records that he had played for her in the booth the first time they met. Phil told Vince that he was glad it had all happened because he had been saved from homosexuality. Phil roomed with Vince for a while, until Vince married his fourth wife, Monica. Years later, Phil based a character in one of his literary novels named Nikki on Monica, and Vince and Monica’s autistic child became Manfred in
Martian Time-Slip
. Phil found his own place on Bancroft, an apartment that he immediately painted. He moved in his large record collection, his Magnavox console, and stacks and stacks of science fiction magazines. Friends remember that he told them he was learning to write science fiction stories. The divorce with Jeannette must have been an amicable one because he had a photograph of her on the mantel. He said that he had liked Jeannette, because she had left him alone. At this time, Phil was caught up with German Romanticism and heavily into Wagner, and Germanic myths and legends. He played Wagner at full volume into the early hours of the morning until the neighbors banged on the walls.