Literary Maps

VANCOUVER , CANADA: On March 23, 1972, Dick injested 700 mg of potassium bromide in an attempt to end his life. He changed his mind at the last moment and called a suicide prevention hotline. He was checked-in to X-Kalay Foundation Society, a live-in drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. Unable to return home to San Fransisco having severed ties with his latest ex-wife and step-daughters, Dick began to write letters to friends and acquaintances asking if there was anywhere he could stay. He sent one such letter to Professor Willy McNelly of California State University, Fullerton. McNelly read Dick's desperate note to one of his classes, and of his two female students offered to take Dick in as a roommate.

University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley Campus Berkeley, CA 94720:
"Originally Berkeley, at the time of the Red Trains and the street cars, was quiet and underpopulated except for the University, with its illustrious frat houses and fine football team." (3) “Although he lived in Berkeley for ever and ever, Nicholas attended the University for only two months, which made him different from everyone else.” (4)

Vandenberg Air Force Base
747 Nebraska Ave Vandenberg AFB, CA 93437 :
"'The arsenal they are talking about at Vandenberg is probably the OSI Arsenal.' Hank reached for the phone. To himself, aloud, he said, 'Lets see—who’s the guy at OSI I talked to that time…he was in on Wednesday with some pictures . . . 'Hank shook his head and turned away from the phone to confront Fred. 'I’ll wait. It can wait for the prelim spurious report.'" (232)

Valencia High School
27801 Dickason Dr Santa Clarita, CA 91355:
"Valentia High," Vivian said. "I’m a senior. I graduate this June." (72)

Ennis House Foundation
2607 Glendower Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027:
The Frank-Lloyd Wright designed Ennis House, now closed to the public, served as the location for Deckard's apartment. (BladeRunner)

Union Station
800 N Alameda St, Los Angeles, CA 90012 :
Union Station serves as police headquarters where Deckard, a retired blade runner, is brought to reinstated for one last job.

2nd Street Tunnel
West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA:
Due to its length (1,500 ft) and futuristic white tiled texture, 2nd Street Tunnel has appeared in numerous movies including Terminator, Gattaca and Independence Day. Deckard drives home through the tunnel after finishing his interview with Tyrell and Rachel at Tyrell headquarters.

Pan American Loft Community
253 South Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012:
The Pan American Loft Community, once known as the historic Irvine Byrne building, became the Yukon for the film, a run-down hotel that the replicant Leon lived in. Deckard visits the hotel in hopes of finding clues to the other replicants' whereabouts.

Million Dollar Theater
307 South Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013 :
Deckard passes also passes the iconic Million Dollar Theater on his way to the Bradbury Building.

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
World Way Los Angeles, CA:
In mid April, 1972, Philp K Dick arrived at LAX with only a King James Bible and a make-shift suitcase made out of cardboard and an extension cord. He was picked up by Professor McNelly's two students, his future friend and colleague Tim Powers, and their friend Linda Levy—with whom Dick would shortly fall desperately yet unrequitedly in love with before meeting his next wife, Tessa Bubsy—and brought to the apartment they had been willing to share with him at 3028 Quartz Lane, Fullerton, CA.

Torrance Drive-In (Closed in 1988)
5501 Torrance Boulevard Torrance, CA 90503:
"'What I really genuinely want to do tonight,' Donna said as she shifted down and swiveled the car onto her own street and into her driveway, 'is go to a drive-in movie. I bought a paper and read what’s on, but I couldn’t find anything good except the Torrance Drive-in, but it’s already started. It started at five-thirty. Bummer.'" (151)

Thrifty (now a Rite-Aid)
3029 Harbor Blvd Costa Mesa, CA 92626:
"But in actuality the Thrifty usually had a display of nothing: combs, bottles of mineral oil, spray cans of deodorant, always crap like that. But I bet the pharmacy in the back has slow death under lock and key in an unstepped-on, pure, unadulterated, uncut form, he thought as he drove from the parking lot onto Harbor Boulevard, into the afternoon traffic." (6)

La Habra Drive-in Theater (closed 1990)
1000 W. Imperial Hwy. La Habra, CA 90631:
"'They burned me by vending that ham sandwich, so what I did—don’t rat on me—the last time we went to the drive-in, the one in La Habra, I stuck a bent coin in the slot and a couple more in other vending machines for good measure.'" (152)

St Jude Medical Center
101 E Valencia Mesa Dr Fullerton, CA 92835:
‎ "Johnny needs immediate surgery; go to the phone, pick it up, and dial Dr. Evenston. Tell him you’re bringing Johnny into the emergency room at St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton." (38)

PKD's First and Second OC Home (1972-1973)
3028 Quartz Lane Fullerton, CA:
Dick moved into apartment #4 with the Cal State Fullerton students who had been willing to take him in on March 14th, 1972. He met the woman who would become his fifth wife, Tessa Bugsly, at a party only three months later. The two moved in to apartment #2 together and Tessa became pregnant. The two planned to get married after Dick finalized the divorce with his previous wife, Nancy. The divorce was finalized October of 1972 and Dick married Tessa the following April. While Living in here, Dick published the novel "We Can Build You.

California State University, Fullerton
800 N State College Blvd Fullerton, CA 92831:
When Dick arrived in Fullerton, Professor McNelly offered Cal State Fullerton's library as a possible repository for the manuscripts and other materials that remained after the Dick's Bay Area home had been ransacked. Dick agreed and put his manuscripts and correspondence on loan at Cal State Fullerton's Pollak Library. His surviving family has since taken back the manuscripts and they are no longer available to the public. However, there are many first editions of Dick's work and copies of his correspondence still in the special collections at Pollak Library. http://www.library.fullerton.edu/visiting/philip-k-dick-collection.pdf

PKD's Fourth OC Home (1975)
2461 Santa Ysabel Ave Fullerton, CA 92831:
On March 1975, Dick and Tessa rented a house. They lived here together until February 1976 when Dick's depression and mood swings finally became too much. Tessa left, taking Christopher with her. Whether the split was her idea of Dick's is unclear, as they both blamed the other for the split. Dick tried to kill himself again by ingesting pills, slitting his wrist and sitting in his car while it ran and filled the garage with carbon monoxide. All three methods failed, and Dick was taken to Orange County Medical Center. When he was released, he stayed in the house with Tessa until May when he moved in with his friend Doris Sauter in Santa Ana to care for her while she battled cancer.

Yorba Linda Veterinary Hospital
3700 Prospect Ave Yorba Linda, CA 92886:
"I drove him to the Yorba Linda Veterinary Hospital, and the doctors there decided that he had a tumor." (179)

St Jude Medical Center
101 E Valencia Mesa Dr Fullerton, CA 92835:
‎ "Johnny needs immediate surgery; go to the phone, pick it up, and dial Dr. Evenston. Tell him you’re bringing Johnny into the emergency room at St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton." (38)

Disneyland
1313 Disneyland Drive Anaheim, CA 92802:
Disneyland fascinated Dick, and he visited it often during his time in Orange County. He used the themepark extensively in his essay "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days." "Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not . . . Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is true." --Philip K Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days"

Santa Ana College
1530 West 17th Street Santa Ana, CA 92706:
"I can copyedit your blurb copy for you; I worked on the school publications at Santa Ana College." (129)

Anaheim Stadium
2000 East Gene Autry Way Anaheim, CA 92806:
"The Angels won the ball game, and Nicholas and I left the stadium together. We got into his green Maverick and joined the mass of cars maneuvering out onto State College. Presently we were driving toward Placentia."(4)
"'Hey,' Donna said with enthusiasm, 'could you take me to a rock concert? At the Anaheim Stadium next week? Could you?'" (150)

St Joseph Hospital
1100 West Stewert Drive Orange, CA 92868:
After Doris moved out of their Santa Ana aprtment, Dick became more depressed. On October 19, 1975, he asked her to drive him to St Joseph's Hospital so he could have himself committed to the mental ward.

Orange County Coroner
1071 W Santa Ana Blvd Santa Ana, CA 92703:
"I went with them, slowly, painfully, down a corridor, having trouble walking. They led me down hall after hall, until, ahead, I saw a double set of doors marked MORGUE." (201)

Orange County Sheriff's Department Headquarters
550 N Flower St Santa Ana, CA 92703:
" 'we have a wonderful opportunity this afternoon, for, you see, the County of Orange has provided us with the chance to hear from--and then put questions to and of--an undercover narcotics agent from the Orange County Sheriff's Department.'" (19)

Orange County Sheriff's Department Central Jail Complex
550 N. Flower St. Santa Ana, Ca. 92702:
"I cooperated or I went to the Orange County Jail. And people died—were clubbed to death—at the Orange County Jail." (72)

PKD's Fifth OC Home (1976-1982)
408 E Civic Center Dr #C1 Box 264 Santa Ana, CA 92701:
The building Dick moved into with Doris was originally an apartment, though it was later converted into condominiums. When this happened, Dick bought his unit so he would not have to move. Tension developed between Doris and Dick, and when the unit next to theirs became vacant, Doris moved into it to preserve their friendship. He lived in unit C1 until he suffered a fatal stroke on March 2, 1982. While living here, Dick published the novels "Deus Irae," "A Scanner Darkly," "Valis," "The Divine Invasion," and "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer."

Episcopal Church of the Messiah
614 N Bush St Santa Ana, CA 92701:
"In Santa Ana. Near my church, the Church of the Messiah. I’m a lay reader there." (133)

Drug Rehabilitation in the 1970s in SoCal

PKD had himself been in one of the drug rehabilitation centers mentioned in the text, X-Kalay. He left the center in Vancouver and moved to Fullerton in 1972. New-Path is imaginary, but Synanon was big and had a large facility in Santa Monica, now a hotel, Casa del Mar. The link below describes the sometimes frightening cultish methods used by such places, methods glimpsed in the New-Path in the book, a place which even the police have trouble penetrating. You can also see pictures of the imposing facility itself. http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/synanons-sober-utopia-how-a-drug-rehab-program-became-1562665776

Thrifty Drugstore, CHAPTER 1

Thrifty Drugstore, Costa Mesa, on Harbor Boulevard... in Orange County, 17 years in the book’s future: “in June of 1994. In California; in a tract area of cheap but durable plastic houses, long ago vacated by the straights” (4). Only the dopers, the non-white and the poor live there: the well-off live in walled communities. Cheap brand-name stores and products dominate. Jerry works at “the Handy Brake and Tire place relining people’s brake drums” and feels he is infested with invisible aphids: “At the 7-11 grocery store, part of a chain spread out over most of California, he bought spray cans of Raid and Black Flag and Yard Guard” (1), but nothing helps. Meanwhile, his friend Charles B. Freck joneses for Substance D or “slow death,” going from pay phone to pay phone in a paranoid effort to score without being monitored: “In his fantasy number he was driving past the Thrifty Drugstore and they had a huge window display; bottles of slow death, cans of slow death, jars and bathtubs and vats and bowls[…]mixed with speed and junk and barbiturates and psychedelics, everything” as he “drove from the parking lot onto Harbor Boulevard” (5-6). Later, “in downtown L.A., the Westwood section,” unable to get into “one of those giant shopping malls surrounded by a wall that you bounced off like a rubber ball—unless you had a credit card on you and passed in through the electronic hoop” (8), he runs into Donna, the “girl” of his friend Robert Arctor, and sets up a score for D.

Anaheim Lion's Club, CHAPTER 2

Robert Arctor, “an undercover narcotics agent from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department,” gives a speech to “the Anaheim Lion’s Club” while wearing his "scramble suit" which protects his identity by blurring him to all viewers. He goes off script from his “prepared speech" by "the PR boys back at the Orange County Civic Center” (24) and gets in trouble with his superiors. He is ordered (via a mic in his suit) to return for a reprimand to Room 430. Instead, out of his suit, “he wandered down one of the commercial streets in Anaheim, inspecting the McDonaldburger stands and car washes and gas stations and Pizza Huts and other marvels” (27). He thought: “In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And when you finally got hungry and went into the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald’s hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth, back to before you were born[…]. They had by now, according to the sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze” (28-29). Robert talks on the phone to Donna who “worked behind the counter of a little perfume shop in Gateside Mall in Costa Mesa” (32) and agrees to meet up with her later. Below is a 1959 postcard of the Anaheim Lion's Club statue and a fill-in for Gateside, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa in the 1980s:

Interstate 5 in Northern San Diego County, CHAPTERS 5-6

In order to get himself and his roommates Luckman and Barris out of his house so the authorities can set up surveillance equipment, Bob Arctor reports he “overheard the three men deciding to cruise down all the way to San Diego in search of a cheap, ripped-off cephscope” (73) to replace a sabotaged device that is Arctor’s prized possession (though whatever it is is never really explained). They drive “along the San Diego Freeway South” (74), on the drive back north the car suddenly accelerates and only when the ignition is turned off, “the car slowed, and he braked it down, moved into the right-hand lane and then, with the engine finally dead and the transmission out of gear, rolled off onto the emergency strip and came by degrees to a stop” (81). Bob suspects that Barris sabotaged his car, and the cephscope, because Barris is on to him as a narc. When the car is finally repaired they “started north toward Orange County” (89). They arrive at Bob’s house where Barris suspects they are being watched, as Bob knows they are. They find a still warm joint in the ashtray, but that turns out to be left by Donna who emerges from a back room. A link to a photo of work on the San Diego freeway in the 1970s is below: http://framework.latimes.com/2011/07/13/the-405-a-repeating-history-of-construction/#/7

Trader Joe's in North Orange County, CHAPTER 11

Robert is having trouble remembering who he is: called by the cover name Fred in his scramble suit to avoid detection, he begins to forget that Fred and Bob are the same person. Beginning to suspect Bob himself, he thinks: “What the hell am I talking about? I must be nuts. I know Bob Arctor; he’s a good person. He’s up to nothing. At least nothing unsavory. In fact, he thought, he works for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, covertly” (190). He wonders “why the Orange County Sheriff’s office is after him—especially to the extent of installing those holos and assigning a full-time agent to watch and report on him” (191). Things are becoming clouded: “What does a scanner see? He asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too” (192-3) In this state he “set off on one last drive, over to Trader Joe’s, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, which set him back almost thirty dollars—all he had” (195).

Orange County Civic Center, Anaheim (again), CHAPTERS 12-13

Increasingly paranoid, Fred notes that Bob is becoming “more and more strange. I can see now what that informant who phoned in about him meant" (198). Realizing things are going wrong, his superior brings him back into the Civic Center building for “the full standard battery of precept tests” in “Room 203” (203) by “two medical officers—not the same two” (210); Bob also gives blood at the “Pathology Lab” (212). The two officers explain his deteriorating condition and he realizes: “The two hemispheres of my brain are competing” (218). He is seeing all through “A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner” (220): “Through a glass darkly” (223). He realizes bitterly that he's failing: “They’re fucking going to pull me off Arctor, he decided. I’ll be in Synanon or New-Path or some place like that withdrawing and they’ll station someone else to watch him and evaluate him. Some asshole who doesn’t know jack shit about Arctor—they’ll have to start from the beginning” (225). Before he leaves, still in his scramble suit, he meets Barris who had first phoned in the tip on Arctor and who now makes outlandish claims about him: “The Air Force Arsenal at Vandenberg AFB will be hit for automatic and semiautomatic weapons—” (230). Barris is arrested and Bob is first told by his superior “to get six bottles of bourbon, I.W. Harper, and go up into the hills, up into the San Bernardino Mountains near one of the lakes[…]and just stay there all alone until it’s over” (233). But it’s too late: “‘I’m who?’ he said, staring[…]. ‘I’m Bob Arctor?’ He could not believe it. It made no sense to him. It did not fit anything he had done or thought, it was grotesque” (237). He is remanded to New-Path for treatment.

Napa Valley, CHAPTER 17

Finally, Bob is set to New-Path’s “farm facility in the Napa Valley, which is located in Northern California. It is the wine country, where many fine California vineyards exist” (281), and where he can see “Mountains. No snow, but mountains. Santa Rosa is to the left” (282). A blue flower that is Substance D is grown there; the patients work there, returning to their old residences only on holidays like Thanksgiving. Bob ends the novel ambiguously, when he “picked one of the stubbed blue plants, then placed it in his right shoe, slipping it down out of sight. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving” (285).