That spring Phil fled Point Reyes and returned to Berkeley. Emerging from the awful interlude, from the suburb of life that every unhappy marriage is in some way, he discovered that the world had changed while he was gone, and he liked what he now found. In the boondocks, he had been only vaguely aware of the changes sweeping the country during the early 1960s. He had heard about the first student sit-ins, about Caryl Chessman and Martin Luther King Jr., and about those new drugs his psychiatrist had suspected him of experimenting with; he had wept when he learned that John Kennedy had been shot. But it had all seemed to be happening only on the radio, where you could hear the piercing, twangy voice of a twenty-year-old genius proclaiming that “the times they are a-changing.” For Phil, it was as if those times belonged to some other era and the changes had taken place somewhere else, in a parallel universe, a theater of real life to which he would never gain access so long as he was rusticating in Point Reyes. His newfound freedom altered all of that: the show would not go on without him, he realized. There was a part in it for him.
A noncommissioned officer I once knew divided recruits, and by extension all humanity, into two distinct groups: Good Kids and Punks. Whatever the limitations of this classificatory scheme, I for my part continue to find merit in it. Consider the picture of Bob Dylan on the jacket of the record containing the song I mention above: skinny, arrogant, and stubborn, with his girlish eyelashes, he looks like someone who will say no to whatever you ask of him. There you have the Punk in all his perverse splendor. In the great cultural upheaval that was turning such people into the heroes of the day, Phil’s handicaps became so many advantages. So what if hadn’t finished college and was on an FBI watch list? To be a dropout, someone who rejected the system and its values, was a mark of distinction; to have an FBI file was a badge of honor. So what he if he worked in a fringe genre, turning out pulp novels and short stories for a second-tier audience? That merely showed what integrity he had in refusing to court the suit-wearing zombies of the literary establishment. If he couldn’t make it as a Good Kid, he’d shine as a Punk.
And so it was that in 1964 Phil Dick, maladjusted scion of the lower middle class who had never overcome his adolescent shyness, discovered to his absolute delight that he was completely in synch with the Zeitgeist. He who had always felt marginalized by life had landed smack into the middle of those handful of years when the margins took center stage. He easily inserted himself into the little circle of Bay Area science fiction writers who seemed to have made a collective decision to wear their hair long, sport ethnic jewelry, and smoke dope. And the best thing about this milieu, as far as Phil was concerned, was that it was strongly endogamous: the novelist Avram Davidson had just gone through an amicable separation from his young wife, Grania, who admired Phil and, despite a fairly serious weight problem, managed to charm him handily. Consulting the I Ching together, they drew Pi, signifying “solidarity and union,” and thereupon decided to share a small house in Oakland that soon became a meeting place for neighborhood science fiction buffs. After his exile in Point Reyes and the claustrophobia of family life, this new sociability delighted Phil. It also revived his sense of self-respect, which had suffered rough treatment at Anne’s hands over the previous five years, devoted as Anne was to the cause of “great literature.” Now he lived as he pleased, among his peers, people who also saw science fiction as a royal road to the uncharted regions of the soul and who believed Phil Dick to be the boldest of the new adventurers. He could do as he pleased—sit cross-legged on the floor if he wanted or sprawl out on old, coffee-stained couches without worrying about spilling on them. He no longer had to bother with trimming his beard. Once upon a time, when he worked at University Radio, he had refused to sell anything but classical music and considered rock ’n’ roll a waste of time—except for Elvis, who had earned Phil’s respect for having survived a stillborn twin. But now he became an expert on what was beginning to be called pop music, snapping his fingers to the beat, jiggling his hips, and throwing his considerable heft into a studious effort at being cool. Finally, he thought, he was starting to live.
* * *
The audience of admirers that would henceforth surround him brought out the ham in Phil, and he played to their expectations, loath to compromise the little legend that had sprung up about him. His books, his reclusiveness during his Point Reyes period—together with the few public appearances he had actually made—had conferred on him the reputation of a strange, drugged-out, paranoid genius. He was all that, and without even trying.
His new friends spent their time visiting one another, hanging out at one another’s houses, but Phil, playing up his agoraphobia, didn’t budge from his. His car would only run between home and his psychiatrist’s office, he said; take it anywhere else and it would steer itself right into an accident. So people had to come and see him, and this new role, that of Old Man of the Mountain, brought out the Rat in him.
As far as his paranoia was concerned, his fears seemed on the face of it to be well-founded. He was in the middle of a nasty divorce, and all his friends who had gone that way before him—and there were quite a few of them—sympathized with his overly vigilant behavior: it was a matter of not giving legal ammunition to a woman who, by general consensus, was a complete harpy. Thus, even though he and Grania were sharing a tiny house, he tried to hide his relationship with her—which for him meant letting anyone and everyone in on the secret and then swearing them to silence. His friends were even willing to believe that Anne had hired a private detective to have him tailed and had had a tap put on his phone line, but even their indulgent credulity must have cracked under his insistence that they help him look for microphones in the kitty litter. When he didn’t find any he decided that he was up against his old enemies at the FBI, who, ever since the publication of The Man in the High Castle, had sworn his downfall. Phil asked people to prove their identity when he talked to them on the phone—were they really who they said they were?—and, once satisfied with the proof, he would pepper the conversation with comments directed toward eavesdroppers (“Hey, guys, I know you’re listening to us and that you can’t answer. So fuck you. Do you hear me? I said fuck you!”). His friends didn’t know whether to laugh or to feel genuine concern, and in the end they concluded that this was just Phil Dick being Phil Dick, as nuts as his novels and as fascinating.
And he was fascinating; about this everyone agreed. His obsessions were fueled by an artistic imagination always at the boiling point. Anything might happen in a conversation with Phil, for he had all the furious energy of the paranoiac but without the monomania. Thus, his enemies, their methods and aims, and especially the degree of seriousness with which he denounced them could vary depending on the circumstances, the inspiration of the moment, and the person he happened to be talking to. Phil was a chameleon, an actor adept at reading his audience and figuring out their expectations, and if he overshot the mark from time to time, it was because he was trying too hard to please them. One evening he might go on a rant about being a victim of a global conspiracy and the next day he might have forgotten all about it or else calmly refer to his monologue of the previous evening as a manifestation of his legendary paranoia and give you to understand how surprised he was that you had taken him seriously. And if indeed you had taken him seriously, that meant either that you were paranoid as well or that you had good reason to believe that he was right, which meant you were in cahoots with his enemies.
Except in his work—which he had to turn out as quickly as possible before he became disgusted with what he was producing—he could be erratic to the point of pathology. With great solemnity, he showed Grania the little revolver he had bought when he was afraid Anne might attack him. He was ready to use it, he said, against Anne or, if necessary, against himself. Grania was worried and told their friends, who feared the worst. One Sunday morning, Anne showed up at the house with baby Laura in her arms. She wanted to talk to him. Panicked, he refused to open the door and ran from room to room waving the pistol, eventually shoving Grania into a closet, as in some vaudeville routine. She stayed there for several hours, expecting at any moment to hear the gun go off. But all she heard was Laura babbling, the sound of bacon and eggs frying on the stove, and Phil singing some Schubert lieder in his fine deep voice, then the sounds of a peaceful family get-together around an amply laden dining room table. The brunch went on until early afternoon, when Anne and her daughter left and the heroic and half-asphyxiated Grania emerged from the closet. Phil seemed surprised to see her. Why hadn’t she come out and said hello? In the face of Grania’s protests, he decided that his memory must have been playing tricks with him; the drugs he had taken must have had something to do with it. The next day he brought his revolver back out while talking about Anne and again started subjecting his friends to complicated tests in order to find out if they were spying for her—or for the FBI, or the Nazis, or whomever.
After several months, Grania found a calmer, more peaceful roommate and moved out. Hoping to get her to stay, Phil asked her to marry him, but to no avail; then, because he couldn’t stand to be alone, he invited a couple of friends to move in with him. They lasted three weeks, during which time he dropped acid for the first time in his life.
* * *
Through the newspapers, Phil had followed Tim Leary’s goings-on at Harvard, which struck him as something out of 1950s-style science fiction, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Distinguished academics had started a research program to study a drug considered useful to the field of psychiatry. As soon as they took the drug, their colleagues found them changed: their pupils were dilated, they looked ecstatic and mysterious, and though all had been confirmed empiricists, they now spoke only of love, ecstasy, and becoming one with God. When pressed for details, they turned evasive. What they had experienced couldn’t be described; it could only be … experienced. Those who, their curiosity piqued, decided to try the drug for themselves were transformed in turn. And unless you followed suit and took the drug yourself, you couldn’t talk with them. Rumors began spreading across the campus as more and more students came knocking on Leary’s office door, asking to be initiated, then returned from their “trips,” eyes aglow; and held forth in singsong voices about the wonders of acid. The dean was at his wits’ end. He had an epidemic on his hands.
At first Leary had been regarded as a benign eccentric. Then he began to speak out, to organize conferences and seminars, to explain to journalists that a decisive moment in the history of humanity was at hand. It was no coincidence that Albert Hoffmann had synthesized LSD at the very moment that Enrico Fermi split the atom. One had given man the means to destroy the entire species, and the other the opportunity for reach a higher evolutionary level. If man embraced the latter gift, if he plunged into the unexplored oceans contained within the human brain, he would leave Homo sapiens behind and enter into a wise and joyful communion with the cosmos. He would know God; indeed, in a certain way, he would be God.
By themselves these pronouncements would have won few converts. But unlike previous illuminati, Leary had the means—thanks to Sandoz Laboratory—to have them substantiated. Indeed, whoever subjected himself to the overpowering effects of LSD emerged from the experience either terrified or, as seemed more often the case, converted. Prominent intellectuals and artists and even businessmen become followers, including the head of the Ford Foundation. Leary got permission from the Massachusetts state penitentiary board to offer LSD therapy to inmates at the state prison in Concord. This new Eucharist filled even hardened criminals with mystical inspiration that amazed the wardens.
Terrified by the association of Harvard’s august name with flaky experiments so at odds with the rigors of the scientific method, the administration fired Leary, and, in doing so, confirmed him in his new vocation as prophet. He called his detractors dried-up relics of a bygone age, citing Niels Bohr’s formula, according to which a new truth triumphs over its opponents not by persuading them but because the opponents die off, to be replaced by a generation that takes the new truth as a given. In a mansion lent to him by a patron, Leary brought the faithful together in a community that under his leadership—and to the accompaniment of Indian ragas and the wafting odors of incense—devoted itself to the methodic exploration of the new worlds that acid opened up to them. They had a guidebook for these voyages of discovery, the Bardo Thodol, also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This Baedeker of the inner spaces had been a farewell gift from Aldous Huxley to the rising generation; he had read it, it was said, on his deathbed and, several hours before the end, had asked for an injection of LSD, not out of cowardice but, on the contrary, so that he could fully experience his voyage to the beyond.
According to Leary and his friends, this ceremonial antecedent would soon be common currency. They saw themselves as twenty-first-century anthropologists living in a time capsule during the dark, waning years of the twentieth century, but they felt certain that a general conversion was at hand. They were counting on an exponential growth in the use of LSD: 25,000 users in 1961 meant 4 million in 1969—a critical mass that would force society to change. They convinced themselves that, as the drug-induced mental deconditioning worked its way through the ranks of the middle class, by the mid-1970s the president of the United States himself would be an acid user and leaders would drop a tab or two at international summits. And the world, of course, would be the better for it.
This messianic vision seemed plausible in 1964, more plausible at any rate than the idea that in thirty years’ time the man sitting in the Oval Office would admit that he had smoked marijuana but claim he hadn’t inhaled. Newspapers followed Leary’s activities and reported what he said. The word bardo was suddenly in vogue. People spoke of “bardo experiences” and of “bardo music” and “bardo films.” Lots of people who had no connection to the worlds of art, science, or high society, people who were not Cary Grant, who didn’t think of themselves as drug users were trying acid and acknowledging that it opened the doors of consciousness: one acid trip was worth about three years of psychoanalysis, according to one popular formulation. In Berkeley a standard dose of 250 micrograms could be legally obtained for about ten dollars. Phil’s friends dropped acid regularly and praised it to the skies.
Thus there was no way Phil could not try LSD—especially since he was now regarded as a seasoned trailblazer of this new frontier. When The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was published, readers it saw it as the great LSD novel, and the notion of Dick as acid guru did a lot for his reputation. As Phil hated to contradict people, he let himself be taken for an expert in psychedelia, offering sage advice to those who turned to him to glean the fruits of his experience. The truth was, he was frightened of the drug.
He was right to be, for the first time he took it, with a group of friends, things didn’t go well for him. After an hour, he seemed to have lost all contact with his friends and found himself “where you go when you’re given Chew-Z”: in the world of Palmer Eldritch. He made his way through a dark tunnel full of hostile shadows, traversed a frozen landscape with steep cliffs, catacombs, and then found himself in a Roman amphitheater in which he would suffer the fate of the early Christians. He felt certain he was lost and despaired of ever finding his way out. He tried to reassure himself: what was happening to him, he told himself, could be explained by the fact that he had ingested a psychotoxin. It would continue to act on him for a few hours—nine or ten hours, people said—and then its effects would wear off. The problem was, he was not at all convinced he would still be alive in nine or ten hours, and in any case hours could last centuries in the world in which he found himself. As a child, sitting in the dentist’s chair, he felt the ordeal was taking forever, and now he knew he had been right—it really had lasted an eternity. He had always been there. He would be there forever. Everything else was merely an illusion and, like Leo Bulero, he could only pray that, mercifully, the illusion would return. Those around him, whose presence Phil was no longer aware of, thought they heard him speak in Latin. No one understood Latin; all they could understand was the phrase “Libera me, domine,” which Phil repeated over and over, as sweat rolled down his neck, his face a mask of terror.
Eventually, having seriously worried his companions, Phil rejoined the koinos kosmos and slept for an entire day, and when he awoke he told his friends what the trip had been like. He had been in hell, he told them, and it had taken him two thousand years to crawl out.
They were surprised, naively perhaps. During these euphoric times bad trips were rare. People who took LSD invariably talked about swimming in iridescent oceans, about feeling capable of understanding everything, of doing anything. The drug had something for every taste and temperament: to contemplative souls, the world on acid seemed like a calm epiphany, a Vermeer painting quietly pulsing to the rhythm of their nervous system. To the more active, the world became a giant pinball machine, generous with its free games, its lights flashing up to the vaulted heavens. But for Phil it was different: he found himself in the nightmare world of his novels and afterward could never stop wondering whether he had encountered Ultimate Reality or merely a reflection of his own mind—hardly a comforting alternative.
Ever faithful to his binary logic, Phil concluded that there were but two kinds of minds: those for whom the reality of reality is light, life, and joy and those for whom it is death, entombment, and chaos; those who in the deepest, darkest depths behold the figure of Christ the savior and those, like Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov, who, when they think of eternity, imagine it as a dirty outhouse covered with cobwebs; those who, despite Auschwitz, believe in love and God’s infinite mercy and those who, in the presence of blue skies and life’s pleasures, still perceive the basic horror of the universe. Of course, a person’s mental makeup, which LSD exposes unmercifully, explains much of one or the other reaction. But such drastic differences cannot simply be a matter of opinion or temperament: the truth must necessarily belong in one of these two camps, Phil felt, not in both. Compromise was out of the question. In Christian terms, terms that Phil had recently embraced, only one of two things could be possible: either Christ was resurrected or he wasn’t.
He knew what he wanted to believe, but he also knew—and acid had confirmed it for him—what he believed in the depths of his psyche. Knowing which camp he belonged to, despite himself, he would have given anything to be wrong, or at least to be convinced that he was wrong.
It hadn’t been the best time for him to drop acid (as if for him there ever could have been a best time). Celibacy wasn’t good for him. Even when he lived with Grania, he couldn’t stop himself from hitting on any woman who came through the door. On his own, he lost all restraint, adding to his legend with pathetic anecdotes. Every woman he met he fell in love with, more or less platonically and never discreetly. With his social world as small as it was, most of these women were the wives or girlfriends of his friends. Some of these men took umbrage at Phil’s ardent attempts at courtship; others were amused, rightly persuaded they had little to fear from a rival the likes of Phil. As brilliant a writer and conversationalist as he was, this overgrown baby with his unkempt beard and premature middle-aged paunch made emotional demands too excessive to inspire anything more than tender curiosity. In the winter of 1964, at least four or five wives of science fiction writers he knew received passionate, hilarious, plaintive letters in which he told them about his sister Jane or copied out verses from the Metaphysical poets or lines from Schubert’s Winterreise so they would know the extent of his solitude and melancholy. He phoned them late at night, usually stoned, and was surprised at their lack of eagerness—not to mention that of their husbands when it was they who answered—to listen to his monologues. The transported romantic could then become a total boor, calling his ferne Geliebte a slut in public, dropping her for the most recent newcomer to the scene while letting his hand fondle the knee of yet a third. After such exhibitions, he would inevitably sober up and realize that he had made a fool of himself, that he had traded on his status as a stormy genius only to be regarded as a colorful crank. The only way he could think of to redeem himself was to write more letters and make more phone calls, which were as unwelcome as the earlier ones. Or else he played up his outlandishness and tried to project the image of a boisterous, randy old Falstaff, which could not have been further from the truth.
Realizing that he probably wouldn’t find a woman in his present circles, Phil figured he ought to spread his net wider and went through his address book. He ended up getting back in touch with Maren Hackett, the friend from his Point Reyes days who had introduced him to the writings of Saint Paul and to the Episcopal Church. Maren had been married to an alcoholic whose daughters from a previous marriage had remained with her after she and their father broke up. The older one, Nancy, had just returned from France, where she had studied psychology and been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. Nineteen, sweet, shy, with an almost inaudible voice, Nancy had a slender, graceful body and a face she kept hidden behind a curtain of long, straight hair. When no one was watching her, she would take a photo of herself out of her jeans pocket and stare at it, as if to reassure herself that she really and truly existed. Dick often went to see the three Hackett women, without anyone—including himself—really understanding why he went, whether it was for the pretty stepmother or for one of the two girls. Finally he settled his gaze on Nancy and not only told her of the love he had for her but also let her know how disastrous his life would be if she refused him. He would take more and more pills and wouldn’t eat, or sleep, or write; he would probably die. After numerous awkward silences and nervous smiles, Nancy gave in and agreed to be his muse. In the spring of 1965, she moved in with him.