The Need For Speed
Philip K. Dick, Adderall, and the Writing Life
Not all writers are speed freaks, strictly speaking — just the good ones. Propelled by frantic and unwholesome urges, they work their way to the truth, if they manage it at all, only through the most desperate exertions. Adrenaline helps; but adderall is better. It, and its sister stimulants, do more than put a hop in your step. There is a certain kind of writing that comes only via combustion. The words just come out, as if from somebody else, and you forget who wrote what, or why. Was it you? Did you do it on purpose? Where did it come from? These are good questions for a writer to be asking himself or herself, but only one writer I know of followed them all the way to their logical end, and it drove him crazy. That writer was Philip K. Dick, and he did a lot of speed.
I do it too, and am not a little embarrassed by the fact. Stimulants like adderall are not an accepted part part of the literary process. They lack even the romantic connotations of opium, brandy, and other traditional specifics. Since you get adderall from a doctor and can use it without losing all your teeth, non-speed freak society makes a distinction between it and the “crank” used by overworked criminals. But as creative Viagra, the use of drugs like provigil and adderall are, I believe, frowned upon by society. They always were. Freud never quite lived down his early essays advocating blow as an effective treatment for the blahs. It was considered a sign of intellectual corruption in Dylan Thomas to get hammered before pouring forth his mighty line. Johnson was said to drink thirty to forty cups of strong tea a day. Steven King wrote half of his books on sustained cocaine binges, to the point that he remembers less about the plot of Cujo than I do. Howl was composed by Alan Ginsberg behind a cloud of smoke. And then there’s Dick, a genius whose considerable corpus was written when he was out of his mind on amphetamines. I feel like I understand Dick, sharing his bad habits as I do, and with them a consequent existential unease.
It’s worth noting that writers from Dick onwards have turned to speed not for the pleasure of it, since there is none, but rather so that they could work harder, and better. Dutch courage! I need it too. In my drawer right now are sixteen generic Provigil mailed to me in brown envelopes from the Punjab; half a dozen vaguely ovoid, sky-blue Craigslist adderall; a single hoarded Nuvigil, the writerly equivalent of Super Soldier serum; a dugout filled to the brim with the kind of hydroponic sativa that is invariably described by its growers as “buzzy”and “cerebral”; and of course all these stimulants are buttressed and supported by mug after mug of potent Irving Farm coffee.
All these performance enhancers are necessary to the level of production the blog economy requires. In a given week I may be called upon to produce, on short notice and in fair copy, essays, features, blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets, interviews, how-to pieces, listicles, confessionals, city guides, recipes, slash fiction, memoirs, and whatever else will pay enough to cover my scrapple tab. Some of these are very good and others less so, but even my least inspired work hews to a fairly high professional standard. And in terms of sheer volume, I have everybody beat. As A.J. Liebling, another hero, once said, “I’m better than anybody faster, and faster than anybody better.” Of course, that kind of facility can’t completely be attributed to industry, poverty, or ability.
Forget the 10,000 hour rule. It’s the 10,000 miligram rule that makes the magic happen.
Dick understood this only too well. Writing pulp sci-fi novels in the 1950s and 1960s earned him barely enough to eat. He lived in poverty for most of his life, his mother paying his rent. He got his only big payday, for the movie rights to Blade Runner, and immediately dropped dead of heart failure before he could even see the movie. Dick had worked hard, too hard, and his work finally broke him. He produced 28 novels in 21 years, plus 132 short stories. That was only possible through superhuman stamina, and you don’t get that from doing pushups. He took amphetamines like M&Ms, to the point of actually keeping them in a bowl in his kitchen.
Dick was very up-front, then and later in life, about his use of drugs. He had no use for hallucinogens, although you would never know that from his books. His drug of choice, drab and unenlightening, harmed his mind in a way acid never would have. Dick was undoubtedly crazy, and I don’t see how anybody could say that all the drugs had nothing to do with it. His auditory and visual hallucinations, his hyperreligiosity, his delusions of persecution and grandeur, are all textbook symptoms of amphetamine abuse. He had frequent paranoid episodes, such as the time he told the FBI that the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem and his representatives were commie spies. Later, he went though an ecstatic period, which began when he experienced an epiphany delivered by a pink laser beamed at him from outer space.
These are all symptoms of being crazy, but they are also symptoms of being Philip K. Dick. Where does the one leave off and the other begin? No one could really be sure, including Dick himself. But then, that’s one of the things that is so intoxicating about being a writer. We are rewarded for dwelling on our most morbid preoccupations, and live so much inside our own heads that we might well wonder where we end and our blather begins. It can shake a man’s view of himself and his life. Dick, by working so hard and immersing himself so totally in that work, found himself living in one of his own novels, an irony that was not wasted on him.
How he would have loved adderall! I know I do. I first got into it a couple of years ago, on the day after Meatopia 2012. I got up that morning tens of thousands of dollars in the red, and with a wife and four Chinese restaurants to support. This meant an orgy of writing. And not the kind of writing done at a leisurely pace, with frequent crossouts and continuous reference to classical models. No, like Dick, I wrote with a clenched jaw and an overalert mind. I wrote fast and hard, with little regard for how the work might look to other people. Other people were, to my overheated mind, a vague concept; I was always one blog post or one Meatopia licensing payment from penury — a hack grinding out just enough facile, fatuous work as might keep the tax warrants of my desk. For such a predicament, speed is the only solution, and solipsism its sure result. My wife was in grad school; I had no family; and, having never done a day’s honest work in my life, no way to make money other than popping pills and extruding hamburger panegyrics. What was I supposed to do?
It’s not like I wasn’t already ripe for it. I am most myself when in gear, simultaneously writing, reading, listening to Sinatra and Steinman, cruising Amazon for clacky keyboards and Carter-era issues of Oui, riding a wave of aimless and obsessive energy as far as it will go. Also, let’s not forget, adderall is a potent appetite suppressant, and it began to relieve me, at long last, of the gross and bloated coat of perspiring flesh that had shamed me for my entire adult life. I was now a lean, mean, writing machine, a being of pure celestial energy like the Squire of Gothos.
Or was I? I couldn’t decide, and that too was a very Dickean predicament.
As a writer, I have a deep feeling for the madness, and the sadness, of Philip K. Dick. I think his experience of taking drugs was closely — too closely —bound up with his ability to do the only thing that mattered to him. “My writing falls into two degrees, the writing done under the influence of drugs and the writing I’ve done when I’m not under the influence of drugs,” he told an interviewer in 1977, adding, unhelpfully, “ but when I’m not under the influence of drugs I write about drugs.” In one sense, this is literally true: very many of Dick’s novels involve their characters ingesting some kind of weird designer drug that completely alters their reality. But those pills, such as Chew-Z, Substance D, Ubik, JJ-180, are all, I think, just stand-ins for speed. The mysterious appearance of creative power, whether it be via blue pills or pink laser beams, feels wonderful. And when it disappears, life without it seem dim and wan.
Think of the typical Dick hero. He is almost always some kind of shtummy, a passive milquetoast who hangs around at the far periphery of the action, feeling sorry for himself and wondering vaguely what’s going on. He is usually recently divorced and living in some kind of futuristic efficiency apartment, put-upon, resigned to being dominated by all-powerful entities. He usually has a thing for a dark-haired girl who, tellingly, barely acknowledges his existence. Devoid of any convictions, beliefs, goals, close friends, or for that matter even emotions, he’s a shadow, the least memorable character in his own stories. He knows it, too. There’s just nothing he can do about it.
In his novel A Scanner Darkly, the hero is so alienated from himself that one part of his brain rats out the other part to the police. Not surprisingly, the agent of his disassociation is an amphetamine-like drug, Substance D, to which he is helplessly addicted. By the end of the book, he’s little more than a vessel for the drug, a used-up husk, a ruined mind. Dick’s books abound with such figures, half dead zombies murmuring away in one kind of semiconscious limbo or another. The “precogs” floating in their tepid vat, the lost souls stored in cryogenic hell in UBIK, the catatonic TV audiences immersed in virtual reality sitcoms, the androids and avatars and unwitting puppets of unknowable alien powers: what are they but writers who have nothing to say and nowhere to go? Dick’s universe, and our own, abounds with such comic figures, sad clowns looking for quickie revelations in all the wrong places, and too often finding them.
