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

gangsters dare to oppose him; and when they do they are soon vanquished.
Future-Human lives in the year 3869. Using his super-science for the welfare of humanity, he pits his strength against the underworld of the future. Appearing each issue in:
THE TRUTH!
At thirteen, Truth editor Phil was pale, slightly overweight, and often coughing or snuffling due to his asthma. Necessarily, he was contemptuous of team sports. When, rarely, he played games with his friends, he was ungainly and even dangerous, once hitting Flannery with a dart and drawing blood, another time shoving him into a bramble bush. With Kohler, Phil did take rambling walks up the Berkeley hills to Tilden Park (passing the newly constructed cyclotron). But he was delighted when Garfield Junior High reduced phys ed class hours.
Dorothy came home late from work and was soon upstairs in bed reading from piles of books-mostly best sellers, but also works on nutrition and healing. Her nightstand was covered with prescription medications for kidney and other ailments. This home atmosphere of illness was difficult for Phil, who was coping with his own physical and phobic woes. He could be moody, but his outbursts of sharp anger were vanquished by Dorothy's calm. Most often, mother and son spoke formally, using "Philip" and "Dorothy." One can imagine them passing the nights reading fervently in separate bedrooms. But the bond between them was growing-and Edgar was far away. During this period Phil considered dropping "Dick" in favor of his mother's maiden name, Kindred.

Dorothy was polite but taciturn to Phil's chums, seldom engaging them in conversation or inviting them for supper. Those suppers seldom varied from night to night: ground round, peas, mashed potatoes. Phil welcomed dinner invitations from Kohler's grandmother, who provided decadent delights denied to Phil at home, such as chocolate milk and soda pop. He always left a tiny bit of food on his plate, in respect for the Depression custom of showing you'd been fed enough not to require seconds.
Dorothy's upstairs seclusion did allow Phil and visiting friends uninterrupted confidential talks, toy-soldier battles, classical music listening sessions, and chess matches (in which Phil invariably trounced his pals). Phil could fashion Rube Goldberg-like circuitry: a light switch to turn on the Victrola, tiny electrical boxes for show-and-tell that scared his teachers. His musical abilities surprised even close friends. Once he sat Kohler down and played first a Chopin funeral march and then what Kohler recalls as a "macabre kind of thing." When Phil asked which he preferred, Kohler chose the second. Phil played it over and over to make sure his friend really liked it-and only then confided that it was his own composition.
Phil's bedroom was a clutter: records, model airplanes, stamp albums, a microscope, a portrait of the German kaiser. There was also a secret compartment in his desk in which Phil kept a little Kodak camera, nudist magazines, and a teaser known as "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang." He invited Kohler to join him in masturbation sessions in the bedroom, with the blinds drawn. Kohler also slept over on occasion, and naturally they discussed sex. There were no overtures: Kohler recalls that Phil regarded "homosexual" as a derogatory term.
Dorothy offered freedom and privacy, which fostered the adoles- cent's intense existence. Some idea of it is afforded by his early (circa 1949) unpublished mainstream novel Gather Yourselves Together. One character, a young man named Carl, bears a striking resemblance to Phil-including a passionate interest in philosophy (Carl's lengthy journal writings on truth and reality prefigure the Exegesis) and in dark-haired girls. In the following passage Carl, secluded in his room, copies a picture he has torn from a magazine:
The original, the print torn from the magazine, fell from his lap, skidding into the corner. He did not notice or care. This girl, emerging on his drawing