Free Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin Page A

admired the propaganda skills of Goebbels and speculated with friends as to similar Allied ploys. FDR in particular earned his suspicion. (Phil would later put these boyish fantasies and suspicions to hilarious use in The Zap Gun (1967), an expose of cold war neuroses set in the twenty-first century.)

It was relatively easy to figure out propaganda. How to get girls to notice him was the real mystery. Leon Rimov, a junior high friend, recalls that Phil had "fantasies of relating to all the girls in the room, wherever he was," but that the girls were "indifferent." At dances "Phil would line up on one side, the girls would line up on the other, he'd maybe ask for a dance or two and then go home and fantasize what was going to happen and then he'd want to talk to me about it." What attracted Phil to a girl? "Pure looks."
But George Kohler recalls a less inept young Phil whose awareness of realities testified to a liberal sex education policy on Dorothy's part. In eighth grade, Kohler and Phil saw a used condom while walking through a park. Kohler wanted to touch it, but Phil stopped him and proceeded to deliver a "discourse" on what the condom was and the health hazards it might pose. On another occasion, Phil explained to his friend what a homosexual was. On still another occasion, Phil enlightened his friend even more dramatically at a neighborhood party: "Phil was more advanced then the rest of us and was feeling the breasts of one of the girls."
Kohler also confirms that Phil tended to "moon after the neighborhood girls" from an adoring distance. But Phil did ask at least one junior high crush for a date, the memory of which endured. From a 1974 letter to his daughter Laura:
Laura, honey, did you know that (I never told anybody this before. Get ready. Be cool, baby). Laura, when you were born, neither your mother [Anne] nor I had a name for you. [... ] The nurse said to me, "What are you going to call her?" I admitted I didn't know. The nurse frowned at me; she was very pretty and I almost said, "What's your name?"-but wisely I didn't. I then remembered-it flashed into my mind-the name of the first girl I ever dated, back in junior high school, a really foxy chick named Lora Heims. So I called you Laura, after her, and never told anybody until now.
If you tell that, you die.
Phil's sexual fantasies-and occasional small triumphs-were part and parcel of the coming of age of most boys. But there was a darker side to his growing psychic self-awareness. During this period, Dorothy de cided that her son's academic apathy and anxieties might be dispelled by psychiatric therapy. Phil likely saw more than one psychiatrist during his late elementary and junior high years; little can be said as to the specifics of their treatments. But one thing is certain-the therapy left in Phil a deep sense of tragic difference between himself and his peers. Kohler recalls Phil discoursing on Rorschach tests as a seventh-grader: "Phil, in fact, made up his own and he and I played Rorschach test. Phil knew all about the Thematic Apperception Test too. He knew the names of various phobias. He told me, I have some I can't fight.'

But Phil did have one comforting means of breaking out of his introverted woes-writing. Kohler had a tiny printing press, which Phil commandeered for a second brief attempt-this time, in collaboration with Pat Flannery-at a self-published newspaper. The Truth made its debut in August 1943 and went for two cents. ("However, if we start to show a huge profit, we'll bring it down to one cent.") Its motto: "A Democratic Paper With A Democratic Principle." The writing was nearly all Phil's, including this fervid pronouncement: "This paper is sworn to print only that which is beyond doubt the TRUTH." It featured a serial story, "Stratosphere Betsy" (about a daring test pilot), and a comic strip hero, "Future-Human," who was Phil's first full-fledged SF creation:
Future-Human, champion of right, defender of the oppressed. Few