Dick was an old hand at marital dissolution. Tessa had reached her breaking point, and that evening marked the beginning of what would become his fifth divorce. The author could bounce in and out of love affairs, stints in rehab and drug overdoses -- all the while never losing his cool.
This time, though, the nonchalance wouldn't last. After Powers left, Dick took 49 tablets prescribed for a heart condition, along with other pills. He slashed his wrist and sat in his car, parked in his garage, so the carbon monoxide would finish him off.
But he threw up the pills and his car stalled. The blood from his wrist clotted. After a quick stay in the hospital and two weeks in a psychiatric ward, Dick went home.
These days, Dick is widely considered the science-fiction novelist who most accurately foresaw our contemporary world. [What? I'd say Orwell]
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-philip-k-dick24-2010jan24,0,3831068.story
The author's work, Lethem says, reveals a "very strong alienation from any real environment -- it's about Disneyland, about condos where you park your car under the building, where you barely get to know your neighbors. It's about Nixon. It's almost as if Dick was a spy in Orange County."
In his new cosmology, what looked like Orange County was actually 1st century Rome. "The Empire never ended," Dick wrote, realizing he was a fugitive Christian in 70 A.D.
"He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland," remembers Tessa, "and said it was plastic, wasn't real."
Happens all the time.
At times, he was reduced to eating horse meat. Dick -- who has been described, alternately, as paranoid, hilarious, childish and deeply empathetic -- wrote science fiction, he noted in 1969, because its "audience is not hamstrung by middle-class prejudices and will listen to genuinely new ideas."
"He would either be laughing hysterically or saying, 'This isn't real,' " she says. " 'This is just a figment of my imagination.' And he'd be totally paranoid about it
