TDH Exclusive! Interview with Bev Davies

Gentle readers, these past few weeks have been especially trying. In addition to the regular end-of-the-semester grading , there was a whole students-will-be-forced-to-live-underground ala-Flow-My-Tears vibe happening where I work. Don't believe me, check out the video. Your patience is greatly appreciated and will now be richly rewarded. I was contacted recently by Bev Davies, a woman Phil courted in Vancouver in 1972. Her name may sound familiar to those of you who have read The Dark Haired Girl which contains a long letter from Phil to Bev (you can read it on her website here). Anyway, what follows is an email interview, about PKD and his time in Vancouver.

Q: How did you meet Phil?

I heard him on the radio being interviewed, the interview was very interesting, he said "If you took the book Stranger in a Strange Land and rolled it up and smoked you still couldn't get off." I had, I felt, wasted many days reading that book. It was an open line show, so I called in and asked a question or something, and Phil asked the DJ to get my number. I knew the DJ so a few minutes after the show he called me.

Q: What kinds of things was Phil talking about?

When he sat around my house and talked he would just be part of the conversation, but then sometimes he would restate the conversation and bend it into an amazing story from the basic conversation. I need to add it was not like talking to a mentally ill person who also does this but bends it into the rant they do. I have heard others thought that of him but at the time I met him they were just interesting stories, yes the cops were bad and the hippies were good, but that was my world going out of the Vancouver Yippies as I had.

Q: Do you remember any funny stories, good lines, or interesting anecdotes about your friendship?

Sadly no, I do remember him in my bathroom reading the soup ad poster on my wall; I still have that poster. He was howling with laughter, saying "what is cream of yerlec?" The ad had cans of soup with the names mixed up. He also took me out to dinner one night into the west end; I think we took the bus and he knew the owner, and it seemed a strange thing to me, to be taken to a nice place to sit and eat. It was nice, but after reading his letter I understood that was what he was used to. Me, I just sat around the living with my friend Bob, and my son and ate kraft dinner, well I could cook in those days also. Out to dinner was something that was done when Mom and Dad came but it was nice.

Phil showed me a cover of one of his books and said how dreadful they were (the covers) and he was sure the artist had not even read the book. I was at art school at the time. I asked him how I could get to do covers for his books. He said move to New York City. He said the publisher would not deal with anyone who could not walk into the publishing house for corrections etc.
Q: Based on my research, this was a dark time in Dick's life. Did you see any evidence of this?

There was a mystery to where he was staying (though I understood it was west of where I lived) and why he had stayed past the Science Fiction Convention; he said he had a curfew.
I never found him depressing, wishing to share his moods in a negative, or needy way. Yet when you read his letter you hear a man that just wants one word to return to Vancouver, to a possible friendship/relationship and I never opened that door, I do not really know why.

Q: Did Phil talk about his future plans, or past events?

No, he told me about relationships and past wive(s) and a child I think. We talked about his returning to LA. I told him of my ongoing fear that I had machines inside of myself, that vision was from my NYC acid days. We talked about the revolution and the USA.

Q: Did you tell you about the break in at his last house in San Raphael that happened right before he came to Vancouver?

I do not think so, what I seem to remember, we tried to make each other laugh, today it feels as if we were in the air rather than on the ground, a story like that would have brought us down.


Thanks Bev for your time!! This is exciting!

A Letter From the Dark Haired Girl

Photo by Philip K Dick 1972.

Linda Levy has placed her entire correspondence with PKD for sale on ebay. She's also written up a very extensive recollection of her times with Phil. Her unflinching portrayal of PKD in the early 1970s is incredibly detailed and she writes extensively about both his charm and the deep psychic pain he seemed to be in.

Check out the lot here and read the .pdf file here.

One of the most interesting items in the lot is the letter Linda wrote to PKD before they met, when he was still in X-Kalay in Vancouver. Linda was a student at Cal State Fullerton and in her Chaucer class, Professor Will McNelly read a letter he received from PKD, which basically stated he had no where to live, and no one to talk to. Linda took it upon herself to write Phil.

While it's impossible to ever really 'know' Philip K Dick from this vantage point 26 years after his death, after much study I am starting to get a sense for the guy. And I know this letter must have totally blown his mind (click images to enlarge):



Can you imagine PKD's mood upon reading that letter? After he read it, he asked McNelly to have Linda pick him up at the airport (natch). He later described Linda waiting for him at the terminal in LAX as 'destiny in a mini-skirt.'

For those of you that are surprised by the price Linda is asking for these letters, check out this paragraph in a December 2007 Vanity Fair article about artist and collector Richard Prince:

"Prince is quite happy to discuss the prices of his exotic acquisitions, revealing that he recently paid “a little bit over $100 grand” for the only known first edition of Hammett’s The Glass Key in a dust jacket. Then there was the copy of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, inscribed to Dick’s fellow science-fiction writer Tim Powers. “I paid $150,000 for that,” says Prince. “I was more than happy to pony up—it’s an important book for me.”"

Lunch with Powers

Yesterday, Linda Levy and I drove an hour south to San Jose to spend the day at BayCon 2008 - yeah, a science fiction convention. But we weren't there merely to ogle the busty goth girls in corsets and Frankenstein boots (yes, I realize 'Frankenstein' refers to Victor Frankenstein and he probably didn't wear that style of boot - his monster creation did. I'm not ignorant of the way people conflate the two, I'm a victim of it) or the guys in their Columbine-shooter-chic outfits of combat boots, trench coats, and vaguely fascist haircuts - we were there to meet Tim Powers, one of the con's guests of honor.

Linda and I had a wonderful lunch with Tim and Serena Powers, talking about old times and of course PKD. Tim and Serena are lovely people and Tim really seems to have a heart of gold. It's not hard to see why PKD thought of him as such a good friend. I found him to be smart, funny, and very kind.

Tim told a great story about the time late one night after a bottle when PKD told him and Jim Blaylock that a race of one-eyed, two-nosed Neanderthals had been discovered to have lived in the LA area in prehistoric times. Tim and Jim left PKD's absolutely convinced this ancient race of dual-nosed cyclops lay waiting to pounce on them around every corner. Tim told me that PKD could convince anyone of anything, and he had me convinced. Anyway, Powers noted in his journal the exact date that PKD had told him and Blaylock this story. Later when Powers read PKD's published letters he found one, dated exactly one week before PKD lay this number of Powers and Blaylock, in which Phil tells a correspondent that the article about the ancient race of cyclops with two noses that this person had sent him was the most ridiculous thing ever and NOBODY would ever believe such a stupid story. I guess he wanted to test that theory.

Linda and I watched Powers speak on a panel for aspiring authors about how to manage detail in your fictional universe - you don't want your orcs using spears during the bronze age, er, uh, maybe you do, what the hell do I know?! Then Powers was part of an hour-long panel on PKD, which was a little disappointing - mostly because I wasn't on it, while other members of the panel admitted that Sutin's biography was the extent of their knowledge of Dick. As you can imagine, I didn't learn any new stuff from them. Finally, Powers did a one-on-one interview as the guest of honor.

Powers (he refers to himself in the third person using his last name) certainly does have a huge fanbase, all of whom enthusiastically lined up to have their books signed by him. Phil would be very proud to see how Tim's made a name for himself.

Linda and I drove home talking about PKD and old times. OK so it's not the best picture of me and Powers, but, on the bright side, I managed to resist buying Spock ears for an entire day!

My Date With 'Destiny in a Mini-Skirt'

Above: Linda Levy in 1972. Photo by Philip K Dick

2008 is shaping up to be pretty good for me. First I get invited to speak at Harvard, then I end up having coffee this afternoon with the most famous of Dick's dark haired girls, Linda Levy. I started wondering today if perhaps I've died and gone to Dick-head heaven, but I was on my way to the CHP to take care of a fix-it ticket, so I decided I'm still here in the Black Iron Prison.

I know you're asking yourself, 'How the HELL did he get to meet the dark haired girl?'.

Well let me tell you: A few weeks ago Linda emailed me after she stumbled onto my blog and learned that we lived near each other. Linda's interested in selling the absolutely amazing letters she received during PKD's infatuation with her along with several signed PKD books personally inscribed to her. So if you have some serious scratch and are interested in a one-of-a-kind collection of personal correspondence, email me. Even better for those of us in the higher numbered con-apts, I think Linda's going to let me post some of these amazing letters here on the blog in the coming weeks!

Don't know who Linda Levy is? Check out PKD's story "Goodbye Vincent" in The Dark Haired Girl.

So what's she like? Instantly likeable, funny, smart, and warm. She's got a million amazing stories, everything from sitting next to some guy at a SF convention who's wearing a name tag that reads 'Beowulf' (turns out it was Larry Niven), to seeing Clockwork Orange with Tim Powers. Like close friends who have somehow never met, we had lots of catching up to do: Linda hadn't heard about PKD's Library of America editions; I learned she and PKD used to joke about "Do It Yourself Lobotomy Kits"; she never knew the "Linda" doll in PKD's story "Goodbye Vincent" is also an allusion to Perky Pat; I didn't know she liked to bring PKD to class with her on days when she wasn't prepared because she could always count on him to expound at length on whatever subject they happened to be discussing.

In short, it was a blast to get to talk to someone who had that kind of connection with PKD (but perhaps it is more accurate to say talk to someone who PKD felt such an intense connection with).

Linda sent me another picture from 1972. In this one she's in Europe. PKD characterized her departure as "dropping acid and wandering off to Paris." Here it is:



One thing I've discovered in studying PKD is that he had a lot of amazing people in his life. I am honored to have met another one.