Read Online Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin - Free Book Online

for Ubik instant coffee. Characters can be saintly, silly, lonely, horny, brilliant, and crazed all at once in the same story, and you can't prove it isn't true. Just look around you.

In June 1938 mother and son returned to Berkeley. Except for a few very brief forays, Phil would remain in California for the rest of his life.
Dorothy's decision to leave the capital was an impetuous one. Sent off by the Children's Bureau to a meeting in Kansas City, she took Phil along and fit in a vacation to California. Once back in the Bay Area, she resolved to stay and arranged a transfer to the U. S. Forestry Department office in Berkeley. Dorothy then took an apartment at 560 Colusa Avenue, where Meemaw and Marion were again regular visitors: Marion painted pictures that delighted Phil and gave him books-notably, the verse of Irish poet James Stephens-that fostered Phil's lifelong passion for lyric poetry.
The timing of Dorothy's return was likely influenced by Edgar's relocation to Pasadena, well to the south, where he seemed to pose less of a custody threat. But Phil took great joy in being able-however occasionally-to visit with his father for the first time in four years. Dorothy was uncomfortable with these visits, still fearing Edgar would steal the boy away. Father and son attended the 1938 World's Fair in San Francisco together-Phil going to the science exhibition recommended by Dorothy while Edgar eyed the performance of stripteaser Sally Rand. And there was a day of fishing along the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, during which Edgar taught him to clean fish. Despite the joy Phil took in these outings, Edgar emphasized that "you could see that a great change had taken place ... she [Dorothy] sort of ruled with an iron hand." Phil was a "lively" child, Edgar insisted, but "I want to use the right word ... he didn't seem to have that life in him, enjoyment of life. He had slowed down a lot, I thought.... I'll tell you the word I'd like to use. He gave me the feeling that he was trapped . . . that he couldn't break out."

Even with Edgar's threatening presence to the south, Dorothy must have found Berkeley a sort of haven after life in the socially conservative capital. Granted, Berkeley in the late thirties and forties was not yet the "Berserkeley" of the sixties and after. It was still a small town, but it had an outsized percentage of freethinking academics and bohemians who thrived within the U Cal radius. Dorothy's feminism and pacifism fit right in. Black-sheep refugees from respectable eastern families took up the artistic life in Berkeley-supported by their moneyed parents-in much the same manner as their counterparts had done in the Paris of the twenties. A trolley car passed up and down Telegraph Avenue, which was lined with elegant little shops and restaurants catering to the cosmopolitan tastes of the university intelligentsia.
But there was also a substantial working-class population, which had little to do with campus life. Down by the bay, in the vicinity of San Pablo Avenue, were the used-car lots, greasy-spoon cafes, repair shops, and bars where blue-collar workers (including black and Japanese populations) and their hard-pressed families passed their lives. It would be the Berkeley working-class milieu, not its academic circles, that provided the settings and characters for so many of Phil's stories and novels. The economic strata of Berkeley life were heightened by the city's topography: The poorer families lived on the flatlands, the more well-to-do in the Berkeley hills, with their terraces, parks, and creeks. Goats was young Phil's slang term for those wealthier students who lived in the hills and were able to coast on their bikes on the way to school.
In the autumn of 1938, Phil was enrolled in the high fourth grade of the Hillside School in Berkeley. He remained at Hillside through the spring of 1939, completing the lower fifth grade, and then moved on in the 1939-40 academic year to the Oxford School,