Excerpt from Firebright

Here's a selection from my memoir Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright.

Phil had been renting a room from a student at Cal State Fullerton, but when I agreed to move in with him, he rented an apartment for us. We had two bedrooms furnished in 1960s maple with several shades of orange upholstery. The furniture, which came with the apartment, didn’t matter to us, except for the lumpy mattresses on the beds. We were happy, and visitors came almost every evening to sit around and talk over coffee and wine. Phil was constantly trying to figure out who had “hit” his house in San Rafael on November 17, 1971. I met a woman who had seen the devastation after the bizarre burglary, and she showed me a photograph of Phil’s office with a mess of papers all over the floor. She also confirmed that somebody had used explosives to open his fireproof file cabinet, even though it wasn’t locked. Somebody had broken into the house while Phil was stuck on the side of the road with a broken-down car that had been sabotaged. This became a scene in his novel A Scanner Darkly, with some modifications.

Phil also wanted to know what motivated the Nazis. In particular, he speculated about Hitler’s madness – was it caused by drugs, or demons, or what? He was struggling to write the sequel to his Hugo Award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle, which would present an alternate universe in which Nazi Germany had conquered the East Coast of the United States, while Japan ruled the West Coast and a no-man’s land spread across the Midwest. He never wrote that sequel because the Nazis horrified him so much. The more he learned about them, the more he balked at writing the book.

He feared and suspected that the United States was becoming too much like Nazi Germany. We could see signs of the growing police state all around us, fed by the War on Drugs and fueled by racist attitudes against African Americans and Mexican Americans. He was convinced that the hit on his house, no matter who had done it, was motivated by illegal drugs. That is, somebody thought that he had illegal drugs in his house and was trying to retrieve them. Around that time, someone had stolen a hazardous substance from a nearby military base, and rumor had it that the substance was a form of biological warfare that caused hallucinations. A strange drug called “mellow jello”, a gelatin-like mind altering substance that had to be kept refrigerated, was circulating in the Bay Area. The heroin sold on the street had been contaminated, and junkies were dying. Rumor had it that the CIA had deliberately distributed the contaminated heroin. And Phil suspected that a bitter ex-wife might have told somebody that he had lots of drugs in his house.

So perhaps the authorities were trying to retrieve a hazardous substance, or to arrest Phil as a major drug dealer. Alternatively, drug addicts or dealers might have hoped to “score” by breaking into Phil’s house. They had dumped out the contents of his refrigerator, taken stacks of bank statements and boxes of blank checks, and made a mess throughout the house by spreading some kind of white powder all over the carpet. It looked like the work of insane people.