Philip Dick: Confessions of a Crap Artist

Anyhow, Mr. Poity takes an interest, and I’ve loaned him a few of the Col. Churchward books on Mu.

My job with the One-Day Dealers’ Tire Service is an interesting one, and it makes some use of my skill with tools, although little use of my scientific training. I’m a tire regroover. What we do is pick up smoothies, that is, tires that are worn down so they have little or no tread left, and then I and the other regroovers take a hot point and groove right down to the casing, following the old tread pattern, so it looks as if there’s still rubber on the tire—whereas in actual fact there’s only the fabric of the casing left. And then we paint the regrooved tire with black rubbery paint, so it looks like a pretty darn good tire. Of course, if you have it on your car and you so much as back over a warm match, then boom! You have a flat. But usually a regrooved tire is good for a month or so. You can’t buy tires like I make, incidentally. We deal wholesale only, that is, with used car lots.

The job doesn’t pay much, but it’s sort of fun, figuring out the old tread pattern—sometimes you can scarcely see it. In fact, sometimes only an expert, a trained technician like myself, can see it and trace it. And you have to trace perfectly, because if you leave the old tread pattern, there’s a gouge mark that even an idiot can recognize as not having been made by the original machine. When I get done regrooving a tire, it doesn’t look hand-done by any means. It looks exactly the way it would look if a machine had done it, and, for a negroover, that’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.

Seville, California has a good public library. But the best thing about living in Seville is that in only a twenty-minute drive you’re over into Santa Cruz where the beach is and the amusement park is. And it’s four lanes all the way.

To me, though, the library has been important in forming my education and convictions. On Fridays, which is my day off, I go down around ten in the morning and read Life and the cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post , and then if the librarians aren’t watching me, I get the photography magazines from the rack and read them over for the purpose of finding those special ant poses that they have the girls doing. And if you look carefully in the front and back of the photography magazines, you find ads that nobody else notices, ads there for you. But you need to be familiar with the wording. Anyhow, what those ads get you, if you send in the dollar, is something different from what you see even in the best magazines; like Playboy or Esquire . You get photos of girls doing something else entirely, and in some ways they’re better, although usually the girls are older—sometimes even baggy old hags—and they’re never pretty, and, worst of all, they have big fat saggy breasts. But they are doing really unusual things, things that you’d never ordinarily expect to see girls do in pictures—not especially dirty things, because after all, these come through the Federal mails from Los Angeles and Glendale—but things such as one I remember in which one girl was lying down on the floor, wearing a black lace bra and black stockings and French heels, and this other girl was mopping her all over with a mop from a bucket of suds. That held my attention for months. And then there was another I remember, of a girl wearing the usual—as above—pushing another girl similarly attired down a ladder so that the victim-girl (if that’s what you call it; at least, that’s how I usually think of it) was all bent and lopsided, as if her arms and legs were broken—like a rag doll or something, as if she’s been run over.

And then always there’s the ones you get in which the stronger girl, the master, has the other tied up. Bondage pictures, they’re called. And better than that are the bondage drawings. They’re really competent artists who draw those… some are really worth seeing. Others, in fact most of them, are the run-of-the-mill junk, and really shouldn’t be allowed to go through the mails, they’re so crude.

For years I’ve had a strange feeling looking at these pictures, not a dirty feeling—nothing to do with sexuality or relations—but the same feeling you get when you’re high up on a mountain, breathing that pure air, the way it is over by Big Basin Park, where the redwoods are, and the mountain streams. We used to go hunting around in those redwoods, even though naturally it’s illegal to hunt in a state or Federal park. We’d get a couple of deer, now and then. The guns we used weren’t mine, though. I borrowed the one I used from Harvey St. James.

Usually when there’s anything worth doing, all three of us, myself and St. James and Bob Paddleford, do it together, using St. James’ ‘57 Ford convertible with the double pipes and twin spots and dropped rearend. It’s quite a car, known all around Seville and Santa Cruz; it’s gold-colored, that baked on enamel, with purple trim that we did by hand. And we used moulded fiber-glass to get those sleek lines. It looks more like a rocket ship than a can; it has that look of outer space and velocities nearing the speed of light.

For a really big time, where we go is across the Sierras to Reno; we leave late Friday, when St. James gets off from his job selling suits at Hapsberg’s Menswear, shoot over to San Jose and pick up Paddleford—he works for Shell Oil, down in the blueprint department—and then we’re off to Reno. We don’t sleep Friday night at all; we get up there late and go right to work playing the slots or blackjack. Then around ten o’clock Saturday morning we take a snooze in the car, find a washroom to shave and change our shirts and ties, and then we’re off looking for women. You can always find that kind of women around Reno; it’s a really filthy town.

I actually don’t enjoy that part too much. It plays no role in my life, any more than any other physical activity. Even to look at me you’d recognize that my main energies are in the mind.

When I was in the sixth grade I started wearing glasses because I read so many funny books. Tip Top Comics and King Comics and Popular Comics … . those were the first comic books to appear, back in the mid ‘thirties, and then there were a whole lot more. I read them all, in grammar school, and traded them around with other kids. Later on, in junior high, I started reading Astonishing Stories , which was a pseudo-science magazine, and Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder . In fact, I had an almost complete file of Thrilling Wonder , which was my favorite. It was from an ad in Thrilling that I got the lucky lodestone that I still carry around with me. That was back around 1939.

All my family have been thin, my mother excepted, and as soon as I put on those silver-framed glasses they always gave to boys in those days, I immediately looked scholarly, like a real book worm. I had a high forehead anyhow. Then later, in high school, I had dandruff to quite an extent, and this made my hair seem lighter than it actually was. Once in a while I had a stammer that bothered me, although I found that if I suddenly bent down, as if brushing something from my leg, I could speak the word okay, so I got in the habit of doing that. I had, and still have, an indentation on my cheek, by my nose, left over from having had the chicken pox. In high school I felt nervous a great deal of the time, and I used to pick at it until it became infected. Also, I had other skin troubles, of the acne type, although in my case the spots got a purple texture that the dermatologist said was due to some low-grade infection throughout my body. As a matter of fact, although I’m thirty-four, I still break out in boils once in a while, not on my face but on my butt or arm pits.