The All American

"Homage to Phillip K. Dick" - Norman Dubie

"The illegal ditch riders of the previous night
Will deliver ice today.
The barbers up in the trees are Chinese.
They climb with bright cleats, bearing machetes—
It’s a season
Of low self-esteem for date palms on the street.

My visitor was at the door yesterday.
In a blue sere of a sucker suit.
An I Like Ike button
On the lapel. Holding a cup of sawdust.
He breathed through his eyes, crusted
With pollen.

I was not confused. It was God
Come to straighten my thoughts.
Whole celestial vacuums
In the trunk of his pink Studebaker.
We would smoke and cough.
I sat very still, almost at peace with myself.

He had shot a deer in the mountains. He thought
Last year’s winterkill was worse than usual.
I told him I didn’t know about guns.
Something forming on his forehead—a gloriole
Of splattered sun over snow.
We drank our lemonade in silence.

He asked if he could go. He joked
About his wife’s tuna casserole. As a gift
I signed for him my last paperback.
He left the book of matches. I’ll not enroll
In the correspondence course it offers
For commercial artists. What a relief

That the barbers in the trees are Chinese.
Green fronds are dropping in twos and threes
Around the bungalow, lessons
In the etiquette of diseased parrots. Bill Cody
Said it first, “If there is no God, then I am
His prophet.” Stop it. Please stop it."

Amidst the extensive research and discussion, the only thing I found out for sure about Philip K. Dick was that a myriad of people were sure quick to label the man as insane. For me, however, Philip K. Dick does not conjure up an image of illicit drug use and vivid hallucination, but rather represents the quintessential American. I see a man who suffered immensely in his lifetime, a man who endured great hardship, just like his country. Philip K. Dick witnessed the pain of three major wars, felt the commingling of fear and fascination as the atom bomb fell, and sensed the urgency of civil rights. Dick's life is synonymous to American life, and not just through the events that all Americans share through a strained and collective memory, but through the more personal encounters that Philip K. Dick endured as well. Philip K. Dick's only sibling and twin sister died six weeks after their birth where both of their names were inscribed on the same tombstone; a morbid reminder of the fate that awaited the one who survived. At the age of five his parents had divorced; an event that would set an example for his future love life, as he would marry and divorce five wives throughout his lifetime. As a writer, Dick would be incredibly prolific, but only marginally successful. Philip K. Dick would be diagnosed both as a schizophrenic and as a sane man, depending on the psychiatrist. Eventually Philip K. Dick would die at the young age of 53, not from a stroke, as many believe, but rather the arbitrary decision to turn off his life support system after a series of strokes. All of these events that occurred in his life helped to characterize him as a person, but not necessarily an atypical person. American society and history is wrought with mental illness and social woes. Dick's parents certainly were not the first to divorce each other. Philip's sister Jane, was not the first of a pair of twins to die, while the other survived. No one event in Philip's life was unusual or uncharacteristic of American life. In fact, one of the first purely American religious sects, Mormonism, came about as a result of hallucinations that were, in some respect, similar to those Philip K. Dick experienced. Ultimately, America was founded on the strange and the weird, the Kafkaesque and the obscene. From the Puritans to the Boston Tea Party to The Three-Fifths Compromise to the Civil War, Philip K. Dick is certainly no more unusual than the United States of America, or the rest of the world for that matter. Classic Americana consists of the moon landing, and the Twilight Zone, Coney Island, and the 49ers. So why are people so quick to judge and undermine the genius of this man? Like other American attributes, Philip K. Dick also showed a great talent for imagination and ingenuity. In many ways, Philip K. Dick was a prophet and a doctor of the modern world. He envisioned where society was headed, and identified contemporary problems that would need to be addressed. Through his writing he confronted the issues that faced America and the ideologies of the modern world. He asked confounding questions, and sometimes the illusive answers would wear his mind to the boundaries of sanity. Perhaps, people cannot come to terms with his inescapable inquiries or his unparalleled intellect, perhaps, his familiar lifestyle seems disquieting to those who seek the semblance of normalcy, or maybe they forget what it means to be American; which is a little surreal, a little odd, a little dysfunctional, and certainly imaginative.