The Search for Philip K. Dick (29 page)

In Los Angeles, I had obtained a lead to Doris Sauter in Yuba City, where she was the assistant to an Episcopal priest. We talked at great length on the phone, and later she came to Point Reyes to spend a weekend with me. We had a picnic on top of Mt. Vision and she recorded three tapes about her life with Phil. Doris, a stocky young woman with short dark hair, had lost her mother as a teenager. She went through some hard times growing up—times, she said, that toughened and matured her rather than leaving psychological scars. She wrote poetry and science fiction and was interested in psychology, philosophy, and astronomy. At the time she met Phil, she was planning to study for the Episcopal priesthood and eventually did become an ordained minister in a different Protestant denomination
.

Phil had asked Doris to marry him while he and Tessa were still living together but Doris turned him down. She told me, “When Tessa and Phil split the last time, it was pretty much because of indifference on both their parts, and, anyway, they had lost the lease on their house. Phil moved into an apartment in Santa Ana, where there really wasn’t any room for Tessa and Christopher. I moved in with him for three weeks. For Phil, it was a romance, but for me, it was a convenient situation. I loved Phil, but I wasn’t in love with him. Phil and I lived together for health reasons. Phil was worried about his heart and I had a history of seizures.”

Doris was from a conventional background and felt uncomfortable when her aunt called once from New York at 8 a.m. and Phil sleepily answered the phone. Her aunt asked her, “What’s that man doing there in your apartment?”

Doris said, “I came from a family situation where you didn’t live with people unless you were married to them. I felt a lack of privacy, too. Phil never let me alone; he wanted to talk to me about theological topics or his latest novel, or the latest news event … all the time. I needed time to be alone and I wasn’t getting any.” Doris told Phil that she was going to move next door. Phil was upset, but she showed him her front door, which was only five feet from his front door. “Look, Phil, I’m almost as close as I was. We’ll have dinner together every night and visit back and forth during the day.” Doris and Phil lived in side-by-side apartments for several years until the apartment went condo and Doris had to move because she couldn’t come up with a down payment.

Doris felt her relationship was with the person, not the writer, and was careful to keep it on a personal level. However, she did read
VALIS
. “I was Sherry in
VALIS
, and the theological conversation about that fish was exactly the way it happened. We had endless theological arguments. The conversation about whether Jesus communicated in a secret code was not complete. Phil found a section in the New Testament which seemed to support his position, but I brought in some irrefutable arguments to support my position. Phil left those out when he incorporated our discussion in
VALIS.”

Right after this argument with Doris, Phil joined a group that maintained the New Testament was written in code. He became involved with one religious cult after another, like a kid who’s onto something, is keen on it, then finds a flaw and goes off on something else. Finally, Phil’s religious goings-on began to sound like a bunch of hooey to Doris, but she listened and didn’t argue with him.

She told me, “Phil would sometimes put on a scatterbrain act. But it was just an act. If he was talking business, he would just cut out all that crap and get right down to work. Sometimes he would go to bed at 4 a.m. and Russ Galen, his agent, would call him at 9 a.m. New York time, which would be 6 a.m. Santa Ana time, but Phil would be right there. He was pretty astute when he wanted to be.”

During this period, Phil led a quiet life except for his Thursday nights out when he had a few drinks with the boys at Tim Powers’s apartment. Doris believed he was off all drugs and didn’t take any amphetamines at all. “He did a little grass, a little coke; that was all.” Tessa would visit once a week, bringing Christopher.

Phil was a night owl. He went to bed at 4 a.m. and got up at 12 or 1. He would eat a little breakfast and then go to the post office and the bank. He was just waking up when Doris would arrive at his apartment at 5 p.m. with takeout dinner from the Chinese restaurant around the corner. Phil’s apartment had no table to eat on, so he and Doris ate in the living room with their plates on their laps. After dinner, Phil and Doris would watch a movie, or Phil would work: “He worked steadily on his
Exegesis
or on research every evening. When he worked on a novel, he would write eighteen hours a day for a three-week period and then be exhausted.”

Women who visited Phil’s place noted that it was rundown and seedy. The carpet, a hideous green shag, was cheap and soiled. There were papers all over, and the garbage needed taking out. The color TV only got shades of green. The furniture was from a secondhand store. Men friends termed Phil’s place “a typical bachelor pad.”

Doris told me, “Phil wasn’t really into housekeeping, but then, I didn’t notice, because I was also a terrible housekeeper.” Phil chronicled Doris’s terrible housekeeping in
The Divine Invasion
. Rybys, the mother of God in
The Divine Invasion
, lived in an igloo filled with litter. Rybys was perhaps a combination of Doris and Phil’s later girlfriend, Joan Simpson.

Phil had two cats at this period, Harvey Wallbanger and Mrs. Tubbs. He had Harvey blessed by proxy at the local Episcopal church where Doris worked. One time when there was a fire drill at the apartment house, Doris grabbed some possessions from her apartment, and Phil grabbed some from his place, and they hurried down the apartment stairs. Then Phil realized he had forgotten the cats. “He felt so bad,” Doris said.

Doris remembered, “Phil was kind to me; he bought me a bed, gave me a car. However, when I had men friends over, Phil became jealous and angry. I didn’t consider it dating, though. Later on, he seemed to adjust.”

In the fall of 1976, Doris lost her remission from cancer. Phil seemed happy for the first time in years. His blood pressure was down. He felt really needed.

Phil wrote me on December 12, 1976, wanting to bring Doris to our place for Christmas: “[Laura] invited me up … but as I told her there is this woman living in the apartment next to me who has inoperable cancer … whom I’ve been shopping for…. She has no family she can be with at Christmas. Laura suggested I bring her up. I wonder, though, if that is a good idea. I’d like your thoughts about it….”

I didn’t answer. In the next month or so, Phil called and told me delightedly,

“I’m writing an autobiography about both of my personalities…. I’m calling it

VALIS.” VALIS
was a completely new version of
Valisystem A
. His editors had rejected the former; it was too autobiographical.

All during 1977, Doris was in chemotherapy. She told me, “Phil helped take care of me. I remember how kind he was and how good he was in emergencies. Once I had to go to the hospital because of a bad reaction to the anti-cancer drugs. Phil was level-headed and knew just what to do.”

Meanwhile, Phil’s novels had become an enormous success in Europe and suddenly he was rolling in money; he had a six-figure income but he was uncomfortable with all this money. He seemed to feel better if he could get rid of it and he began giving it away. He sponsored three children through the Christian Children’s Fund and wrote to them for two years. He was terrified, though, that he’d end up poor again.

Some of this money even came our way. I had no idea that Phil was now a big financial success. He didn’t tell me about this. Our daughter, Laura, had passed the high school proficiency test and needed transportation to junior college courses during her last year of high school. When she wrote Phil about this he offered to send her money for a car. Phil made out the check to me and wrote me: “Enclosed is my check to you for $1,400. I told Laura on the phone I’d reconcile my checkbook and see just how much I had, and, if possible, send more than the thousand I promised. It really gives me enormous pleasure to send this to you. I hope she can get a car with it, and one she likes.” We took the money for the car, and with half of it we bought an old clunker and with the other half made a down payment on a lovely thoroughbred mare.

On February 18, 1977, Phil wrote Laura:

During the period when Doris was living in the apartment next door, K. W. Jeter and Phil reestablished a relationship and became close friends. K. W. told me, “Phil couldn’t stand to be alone, he had to create some sort of family situation. He asked Tim to share the apartment after Doris had moved out. Tim told him that he liked the place where he was; then Phil turned to me and said, ‘How about you?’”

K. W. was working on the night shift at juvenile hall. Phil would phone him and the two of them would talk all night long. Both men, recently divorced, felt they had a lot in common. Sometimes, on his days off, K. W. would drop in at Phil’s to listen to the six o’clock news. They’d have dinner together and talk until 4 or 5 a.m. the next morning. K. W. told me, “Wonderful conversations, I wish I had tapes of them. One week Phil would say, ‘I’m a Buddhist.’ A week later he’d have a different idea—he’d be a Taoist. Phil had to test everything from the inside. He’d adopt a religion like an experiment, like he did his marriages. Phil and I spent the whole night taking the universe apart. We were glad that we could put it back together before people woke up.” K. W. noticed huge piles of paper for
The Exegesis
accumulating in boxes in Phil’s apartment.

Phil told K. W. that Tessa and Linda were the worst things that ever happened to him. He told K. W. that he tried to get custody of Christopher, but, because of his suicide attempt, his attorney said that there was no hope of this. Phil told K. W. that all his female friends were trying to get money from him all the time.

Jim Blaylock became friendlier with Phil at this time, and the two got together for conversations also. Sometimes Tim Powers was there. Jim said:

J
OAN

Joan Simpson, a lively, intelligent person, was very enjoyable to spend time with. We visited back and forth between Point Reyes and her new, owner-designed home in Sonoma County. She was enthusiastic and helpful with my project. I thought we were going to be friends, that we were friends, but suddenly she dropped me. I never knew why. I felt a little like Phil must have felt. Years have passed and just recently we have been e-mailing and talking about getting together for lunch, but she has become ill, and I don’t think it will happen
.

In the middle of his relationship with Doris Sauter, Phil had his last serious romance, his swan song, he called it, with Joan Simpson. Joan, a small attractive brunette in her mid-thirties, had worked as a psychiatric social worker at the state hospital for the mentally ill at Napa. At the time she met Phil, in 1977, she was a client’s rights advocate for the retarded patients at Sonoma State Hospital.

Joan had read Phil’s novels in college. She had loved
Confessions of a Crap Artist
. She told me, “It blew my socks away. Then I read
Ubik
. I looked for everything Philip K. Dick had written. I read everything he’d published two or three times over. I thought he was the closest thing to a genius writer in the USA. He stretched your mind and delighted you. A philosopher, a poet, just tremendous.”

An old flame of Joan’s, Ray Torrence, also a science fiction writer, said to Joan one day in late spring 1977, “Who would you most like to meet in the world? Bill Graham, the rock music promoter, or Philip K. Dick?”

“Philip K. Dick,” she responded. Ray told her, “I’m going to make that happen.” And he wrote Phil, told him about Joan, and gave him Joan’s phone number. About a week later, the phone rang at Joan’s place. A voice said, “Hello, Joan, this is Philip K. Dick.”