[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It’s like wanting dry soup or warm ice.I can’t be submissive.It’s not my nature.My idea of a relationship is an equal partnership.” I reproached him about the whole hospital-Stelazine episode.He replied emphatically, “The whole thing was a mistake.” But that didn’t change how I felt or what I had experienced.I wasn’t to forgive him for a very long time, maybe not ever.At Dr.J’s, Phil blamed me for a decision he had made.Earlier in the year we had discussed where Hatte would go to high school.Should she go to local Tomales High or make the long commute to one of the large suburban high schools in southern Marin County? Phil had made the decision that she should go to Tomales High.This topic came up at a therapy session with Dr.J, and Phil was bitter at me about it.I told him, “You decided, Phil.”He was startled and said, “Yes, I did, and that’s just typical of me to blame you.”Dr J said, “Put away your rusty old weapons.” Phil really liked this image and puts this idea into the hilariously funny The Zap Gun.In this novel, Lars Powderdry, weapons fashion designer for Wes-bloc, designs such items as a sixty-stage guidance system that is “plowshared” into a cigar lighter that will compose new Mozart string quartets when lit.Lars’ Peep-East counterpart, Lilo Topchev, designs similar fake weapons.The political balance between the two superpowers depends on public belief that each side has military superiority, and that these phony designs are real.On his way to neutral Iceland to collaborate with Lila on real weapons to repel real invaders from space, Lars Powderdry, terrified of failure, buys a copy of the Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan comic book at the airport magazine stand and finds that all his “original” designs had already been printed there.In the midst of some of the funniest writing Phil ever wrote, serious personal and theological tidbits and incredible political precognition surface.There is a Julian the Apostate satellite.Lars is almost killed by an overdose of drugs that Lilo gives him.Meanwhile, he is taking his own combination of Escalatium and Conjorizine in quantities that would kill an ordinary person but which only give him a post-nasal drip.Pete Freid, in this novel, is a dead ringer for Pete Stevens.In real life, Pete worked for Walter Landor.In the novel, Pete Freid works for Jack Lanferman.Walter Lanferman was a high school buddy of Phil’s.Pete Freid is the one who makes the actual weapons that Lars designs.Surly G.Febbs, typical man-of-the-times, dreams up a real weapon, a needle-eye converter that will turn an enemy into a bearskin rug.A fascist type, he has made the first real weapon in years and is planning to take over the government but falls victim to the hypnotic man-in-the-maze game, the prototype of Phil’s famous empathy box.There are endless secret police in this novel.Phil probably finished this novel in 1965 while he was living in Oakland and added a lot of drug information that I don’t think he would have known about when living in West Marin.He also added aspects of his new housemate Nancy Hackett to the portrait of Lilo Topchev.Almost simultaneously, Phil was writing a novel about a woman who was a drug addict.Kathy Sweetscent, in Now Wait for Last Year, is probably Phil’s most monstrous female character, a woman with malignant worms of the psyche.She is sadistic, self-destructive, and makes more money than her husband, dear, earnest Dr.Eric Sweetscent.She has whimsically addicted herself to a fatal hallucinogenic drug, an addiction that can’t be cured.She surreptitiously drops this drug into Sweetscent’s coffee.Good man that he is, he travels into the future and obtains a cure for both of them.In the future, he finds that she has deteriorated physically and mentally.In ten years, she will become unmanageable and violent and will have to be forcibly committed.Eric considers suicide, but in a touching conversation with an automatic taxi in Tijuana, decides to go back and care for her.Phil didn’t show either of these two novels to me.I didn’t read them until after his death.The checks for these novels didn’t go into our joint bank account, either.In the midst of all these unhappy events, a happy event occurred.Phil won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle.The Baywood Press sent a photographer to take a picture of Laura holding the Hugo and displayed it prominently in its next issue.We cooked a special celebration dinner.But that fall, one terrible thing after another happened.Our blue merle collie died.We bought a white borzoi, a living sculpture.Phil named him “Ollie,” after Kukla, Fran and Ollie.I came to love this dignified, intelligent dog more than any other pet I had ever owned, but in retrospect, I don’t think it was the right dog for a proletarian writer.Next, President Kennedy was shot [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]