My cab ride with Philip K. Dick
By: Leon Wolf
Tags: Psychedelics, New York City, New York, Philip K Dick, Cabbie

An unusual man entered the cab. Our interaction began with a few confusing moments. Without speaking, he investigated the interior. Examined my hack license picture, my face, the overhead light, and the inside of the ashtray on his door. He lowered the window and craned his head out to look forward, then behind us. Leaned over to check out the ashtray on the other door, out that window, finally back at me.

He gave me a destination, sounding to my practiced ears like a person tripping on good acid, “Kennedy Airport, United Terminal, but I wonder. Is this my true destination? Don’t we have an ultimate, more meaningful destination to consider?”

“In my role as a cabbie, only temporary, drivable destinations are of interest to me,” I replied.

“Yes, that does make sense when engaged in the practice of driving a taxi.”

During the ride to Kennedy, the passenger demonstrated brilliance, mild anxiety, occasional paranoia, and an extraordinary desire to communicate. He said he recently decided to talk to strangers, and found it good for him. The man was Philip K. Dick. Funny, Asimov in the cab and now Dick. I had read several of his unique books. Far-out, memorable ideas channeled from a dismal, inevitable future. Good stories that created a powerful, wired, disheartened mood. Often clunky, inartistic, odd writing. Endings that petered out. If my Newme ever writes I hope he–I? We?-can come up with more solid endings.

I’ll never have the imaginative power to come up with those ideas. Dick’s mind was so out there, and his perception of humanity’s plight so precise, his story telling suffered in comparison. I loved the creepy short story, Faith of Our Fathers. His alternate history masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle, and more with great names, the freaky Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the all too realistic, sorrowful, non-science fction Confessions of a Crap Artist, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, and In Milton Lumky Territory.

This was before Hollywood turned Dick’s books into movies, and Philip K. Dick became some kind of a prophet. The process began with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep morphing into Blade Runner. For years, Dick’s extreme ideas shaped our world, until the chip brought a more sanguine reality. Then that damn Schembekler [Note: See previous story, 2080]pulled a move worthy of the most dystopian plot twist.

Our present, deformed world appears to be in Dick’s image. Phil was appreciative when I said I knew his work. He showed more interest in the fact that Isaac Asimov once sat in my cab, in the seat he now occupied. I had to name-drop Asimov. “Did Asimov try to get any information about me from you? Oh wait, he wouldn’t have known I’m here now. It goes past, present, future around here, doesn’t it? If you have Robert Heinlein in the cab next week, tell him I said hello. He’s a great man.”

Phil wanted to converse. Once we determined our temporary, drivable destination, our conversation soared.

He said, “Often people claim to remember past lives, I claim to remember a different, very different, present life.”

Phil proceeded to tell me about a life. His own, or perhaps his different present life. I only know what he told me. Phil talked so steadily and hypnotically I couldn’t have caught it all if not for my diligent Cranial Nerve VIII practice making my ears work so well.

“I was born in Chicago in 1928, with my twin sister, Jane. Jane died, when she was a few weeks old, of malnutrition. Our mom didn’t produce enough milk for both of us, and I must have been a faster sucker. So, at a young age I experienced unchangeable tragedy and was introduced to the concept of unanswerable questions. Why did I survive and not Jane? Why be born to die so young? This has been a dominating force throughout my life.”

“That’s a tough way to start out. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It was a long time ago, but I appreciate your saying that.”

Phil continued, “I was an introverted kid with obsessive thoughts and strange panic attacks, enchanted by spaceships and monsters. I didn’t exactly fit in sunny California. I was a boy meant to read and write speculative stories. I read great ones and wrote lousy ones. Loser lousy. Writing was my worst subject in school, and I wanted to be a writer.”

“I’ve loved to read since second grade, but I’ve never written a thing.”

“I couldn’t help it, I had to. In my teens, I took a job at University Radio, a record store, in Berkeley.”

“Berkeley, yeah. I was there, it’s great.”

“Oh, what did you like about it?” Phil asked.

“The weather, parties, women, the pot, making mochi, hiking in the hills. I went to the library. Let’s see, what else?”

“Except for the library, we had different Berkeley experiences. The record store had a tremendous impact on my life and craft. Can you believe I popped my cherry there, with my co-worker Jeanette? Of course you can, you went to parties in Berkeley. Me? A week later I proposed. We were married and divorced in six months.”

“Whirlwind, Phil.”

“Ha, ha, yes. That’s what unreasonable mores and societal pressure do. We weren’t a good match but married to get laid. I did it again, when I worked with and married Kleo.”

“Did that turn out better?”

“Yes, we had a great rapport and stayed married a long time. In fact, she helped me immeasurably. She presented my stories to Anthony Boucher.”

“Why is that name familiar?”

Phil got excited. “He’s the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. For me, the magnetic polarity of the earth slipped when Boucher came into the store. To develop talent, he hosted creative writing classes in his home. I was so shy, Kleo attended the classes on my behalf. She took my stories with her, and he published my first short story in 1951.”

“Way to go Kleo.”

“She was great. After Boucher published that first story, Kleo took my rejection slips she kept magnetized to the refrigerator and ripped them up.”

In 1952, Phil sold four stories. In 1953, thirty.

“Two years later my first novel was published, then I wrote and wrote. More than forty novels, hundreds of short stories. I kept writing while I divorced Kleo and over time married three more women, had a few kids. I did every‐ thing for those children except change diapers.”

Phil’s writing had as many otherworldly themes as there are other worlds. He explored parallel universes, androids, hallucinogens, theology, mind programming, metaphysical possibilities, and the illusory nature of reality. His imagination took him everywhere.

“I can’t claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are ‘what is reality?’ and ‘what constitutes the authentic human being?’ Over the years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?”

Philosophical Phil was positive he didn’t write about ideas he invented; he wrote about the life he endured, and perhaps in his writing created the world as we know it.

Phil said, “In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband’s name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

“Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy — this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. One evening as we were entering a restaurant together, Kathy stopped short and said, ‘I can’t go in.’ Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. ‘I have to tell you the truth,’ Kathy said, ‘I have a relationship with him.’”

The border separating prophet and kook is indistinct and ever shifting, covered in mist. Phil the profound mystic was crazy as a loon. From childhood, Phil sought psychiatric help for serious concerns: agoraphobia, disturbing nightmares, religious hallucinations, anxiety attacks and paranoia. By adulthood, he periodically came unhinged, although in his telling this didn’t concern him.

“I’m lucid much of the time. My moments of madness intrigue me so much I welcome them. They give me the avenue to pry into my nature, to learn what lays underneath the surface of my brain.”

He picked at himself like a boy with a scab. Medical diagnosis proved elusive. Phil’s brain could not be pinned down. Full-blown schizophrenia? Temporal lobe epilepsy? Some psychiatrists were proponents of that one, confident this explained Phil’s many rare, intriguing symptoms. During his decades of prolific output, Phil tried to make sense of a changeable reality. What hides outside our peripheral vision, out on the edge? Was he even alive? Was he alive, and the rest of us dead?

Reality was a shapeshifter, with possibilities as astonishing as they were terrifying.

“In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real. I am convinced that identities are interchangeable, and a new one could be plugged into me at any minute. I can’t tell you how this might happen, or what force would have this power, but I believe it could or maybe already has happened.”

Phil didn’t freak me out, although he might have if I had never done acid. Or if I had taken a hit one hour before I picked him up. Our conversation confirmed my immediate impression of him. As one of my Stony Brook friends used to say, “He’s balls tripping.” But every day? Is that even possible?

Terrible paranoia plagued Phil. He said, “I don’t know who to trust. One of my wives was crazy, out to get me. I know she was, but I don’t know why. I was a good husband to that woman. At times, I spend the entire day peering through a slit in the blinds. Danger in the yard. The house is bugged, people listening in. It could be the FBI, the KGB, Nazis; I’m not sure who. I get terrified if someone follows me, like housewives pushing shopping carts down the same aisle as me. There are elaborate conspiracies I can’t discuss with you. In fact, it’s awfully clever for you and your cab to be where I needed you, at the precise moment I needed a cab.”

I wanted to keep Phil calm, “That’s okay, you don’t have to confide in me. Why don’t you tell me about writing? How do you do it all?”

“Amphetamines. I use speed to write books faster. I have wives, ex-wives, and children to support. Speed is my tool to tease out prolific output, no more harmful than a typewriter. It isn’t important to me in and of itself. I get no pleasure out of it. Combined, all my amphetamine usage has totaled at most one year, less than two percent of my life. In that short time, I wrote all of my books, on speed.”

My mind reeled. I thought but didn’t say: you wrote forty books and hundreds of short stories. Even on speed, how could anyone do that in one year? If he wrote his books that way, he had to be speeding for years.

For all of Phil’s genius and search for answers, he was fooling himself.

“I have never, ever taken hard drugs,” he told me. “I’ve seen the horrible effects they have on people, and steered clear.”

But speed is a hard drug, and Phil ate it like M&M’s. There were suicide attempts — a common side effect of speed abuse, when the paranoia runs wild and the bad reality opens. And what about those spiders?

In 1974, after dental treatments, while coming out of the anesthetic he had visions that lasted several months.

“I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly, I had become sane.”

These visions consisted of laser beams, Jesus, and ancient Rome. They’ve become famous as 2–3–74, for the dates they occurred, February and March of 1974. Phil has spent the years since trying to decipher them. He was convinced those specific hallucinations hold the answers he’s been seeking.

“I have an idea for my next book, based on that sometimes I’m convinced I’m a minor character in a pointless book no one will ever read,” Phil said, “I want to see if I can affect my life by consciously writing me into my book as the main character. I want to write about me as a guy who pushes his brain to its limit. He-me is aware he has reached his limit but decides to go on and pay the consequences. You know what I’m talking about? Have you ever felt like you were on the edge? What about you, friend? We don’t have much time remaining, give me something big.”

I let it fly. “What’s bigger than God? God creates all yet is needy enough to befriend a bunch of ants and need their praise? Oh, I love the way you pray to me. I’ll allow your tribe to prosper. You, anthill over there? Lookout buddy. There’s a hungry anteater in your future.

“Christian faith? Jesus existing as God and man? Son of God and Son of Man yet son of no man? Begotten of God and born of the Virgin. Through his suffering, he saved us from the original sin of Eve allowing herself to be persuaded by the serpent to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. With the bonus miracle of rising from the dead. As my Grandpa Izzie says so eloquently, oy gevalt.

“Not only don’t I accept what organized religion is putting out, I don’t see how any rational human does. I’m convinced make-believers hide their true opinion for social reasons. Also, lurking fear of hell. That whips them into shape. Make up hell, control the means to avoid it, and you have unlimited power.

“Most impressive con job ever, repeated with boundless confidence. Con, confidence, control.

“Faith in salvation through Jesus is a sweet metaphor. A charming parable to calm our fears and express the yearning in our hearts for goodness and a pleasant eternity to triumph. But true? The inerrant word of God? Without a wink? Not pretend-true, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Or patriotic-true, like believing the U.S. is benevolent and never picks on weaker nations or bosses them around. True-true. Like gravity, or the rising and setting of the sun, or people starting young and growing old. Impossible. Yet a billion people say they believe.

“If omnipotent God cared, why are helpless infants like your sister born to die? Why allow a demented genius to pervert a boon for mankind and command people to walk to their doom? Oh, God, how do you let billions of people die like that?”

Phil looked contemplative, working something out in his head. He coughed twice, looked out his window.

“It’s hard to fathom something so big, such a permanent change in the world occurring. I see that it’s not a dream or a play, this does happen, someday. I don’t think I’ll be around to see it, but apparently you will. You have my deepest sympathies. I hope it’s not because of anything I write. Go on with your thoughts please.”

“Okay, thanks Phil. I never liked the idea of God in the western sense. A serious intrusion into your most personal space, your thoughts. And as for us saying what God wants, how does any fool pretend that? An incomprehensibly powerful entity created the universe and its inhabitants or maybe is the universe and its inhabitants. Yet, we humans can interpret what this awesome force wants us to do from moment to moment? We can petition the Lord with prayer. Get Him to root for the Giants with me and crush the Cowboys. Doors fans have the answer to that one — ‘You cannot petiition the Lord with prayer.’

“Who?”

“The Doors? A famous rock band from the ’60s.”

“Oh, yes, ‘Light My Fire.’ Go on please. I like the part about God being an invasion of your personal space.”

I continued to spew, “It’s irrational to claim we understand the entities’ universe spanning mind well enough to say God wants us to eat meat only from animals with cloven hoofs, sliced through the throat and bled to death. Melt a nice slice of cheese into it and it’s no good. Forget the calamari altogether.”

“What are you engrossed in,” Phil asked me. “What replaces religion in your life?”

“What I love is the great outdoors. It doesn’t even have to be that great to make me happy. As long as I can feel the air on my skin. I get dazed when earth’s beauty is revealed by light. The beauty of the earth and its inhabitants is awe-inspiring, and my joy so encompassing, that I pray for God to exist to have someone to thank for such glory. I love the rush of realization. How beautiful the scenery or smile or mind is, how kind the heart of the person I talk to, how inspired their thoughts can be. To feel the power of nature in an ocean wave or a rainstorm, is as good as it gets. If I know anything, it’s that I was made to love the world.”

“Oh, so you’re a pagan, worshipping nature.”

I was rolling. “If you want a label, sure. I think one of the joys of human existence is also the curse. We have the opportunity to experience life on our own and make of it what we will. Private thoughts, convictions, motivations, conclusions.

“The other side of the coin means we’re alone in the world, unable to fully grasp the mind and heart of anyone else. The reason we love art, literature, dance, and storytelling is because these things bridge the gaps between us. Between us and the universe too, allowing us to feel the connections we intellectually understand exist. Sex or music can let us into the quantum world. Or feel God, as people before us have said.

“If heaven exists, and Kurt Vonnegut’s idea prevails and we all go, I know what I’d like. My idea of heaven is to be reunited with everyone I’ve happily known at the moment of peak mutual love and admiration. All at once, but without that crowded feeling you can get when too many people, even your loved ones, are around. And with a terrific soundtrack. The unheard ending of ‘Loan Me a Dime,’ which in heaven continues after the recording level on the song fades while the musicians are still jamming. Give me Duane Allman for eternity. And that crazy organ–piano thing and the horns.”

“Duane who?”

“Duane Allman? The Allman Brothers Band, Derek and The Dominos. ‘Layla?’”

“Thanks, please continue. Hearing other people’s ideas helps me. It gives me the hope of connection with others, something that has never been easy for me. Your ideas are simple and unoriginal, but I can tell you are passionate about them.”

I was out of even simple, unoriginal ideas but one more thing got me going. “Okay Phil, check this out. What I said about God and religion is my rational brain believing it knows best or more or at the least knows something. On the other hand, or other, intuitive half of the brain if you please, how does it explain this — One evening while on kibbutz in Israel, I was walking to my room after dinner. A sensation of intense pressure flooded through me from right to left. It came from the hills east of the kibbutz, past the Jordan River to the path I walked on. The sensation was what I had felt once in a California earthquake, a massive push through me, but far stronger. But tree branches never moved; there wasn’t even a breeze.

“With the otherworldly power came acceptance of perfection and permanence. No future, no past, and all would be well forever. The power of this force left me speechless in its wake. Although I possessed none of its power, this force and I were one. Even if I merely hung on by my fingernails to the feel of it as it moved through me and out.

“So, what am I saying here Phil? That I had a visitation from God? I imagined it? The combination of a long day of fieldwork, hot sun, good food, ambient temperature, and feeling peaceful convinced me this was more than ordinary life? How can I ever know?”

This animated Phil. He sat up straight and leaned so far forward he might have been able to see the lowered meter’s numbers hum along at highway speed. His face looked lit on fire. I heard wheels churning in his head. This was no suspicious passenger searching for the button, but an honest seeker of answers to the elemental questions of life. A man tormented by his inability to learn the ultimate truth and his sneaking suspicion the universe outside his peripheral vision is composed of sawdust and snail slime.

Phil said, “This intrigues me, that you had this occurrence. It’s a primitive version of the messages God beams to me. Like the difference between a silent, black and white movie and a full color film.”

This got me so hopped up I had to continue. “I can’t answer the questions that have fascinated and plagued mankind, since the first people wondered about that hot round yellow thing in the sky. There are big mysteries we can never understand, fine. I don’t even understand how supposedly primitive Peruvians created potatoes from a toxic plant. Or how my liver performs 500 crucial functions simultaneously.

“Yet potatoes are tasty and nutritious and without your liver you die in forty minutes. Thanks for listening Phil. Bad traffic ahead. Your turn now.”

Phil was a mad genius with a steel trap memory. He carried us the rest of the ride, through the horrendous traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway. He timed his discourse perfectly.

Leaving the cab at JFK, Phil said, “The last word, however, on the subject of God may have already been said in A.D. 840 by John Scotus Eriugena at the court of the Frankish King Charles the Bald. ‘We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally, God is not, because He transcends being.’ Such a penetrating, and Zen, mystical view, arrived at so long ago, will be hard to top. In my own experiences with psychedelic drugs I have had precious tiny illumination compared with Eriugena.”

Phil told me he had limited funds, as writers were routinely cheated and made no money. He gave me heartfelt advice in lieu of a cash tip.

“Never let them put a chip in your brain, no matter what it can do. They did it to me, and I’ve been having trouble since. And please, don’t forget to say hello to Heinlein and Asimov for me.”