Philip K. Dick

The Alliterates have long admired the works of Philip K. Dick, the fascinating premises upon which they are built, the moments of psychotic clarity they convey. So we were excited to receive an e-mail from Dick, asking if he could join our group. After a quick consultation among ourselves, we replied to his message, inviting the renowned sci-fi author to visit our next meeting as a guest. There we would size up how well his personality fit with the present members of the group, prior to making an official decision to induct him.

Dick never showed. Still, we didn’t let that bother us. After all, it was more his loss than ours. Better men than he had hoped to become an Alliterate. Now he had squandered his one chance. We all agreed that he would not receive another.

Strangely, the next day we received another e-mail from Dick, thanking us for our invitation, and expressing his enjoyment of the evening’s camaraderie. In the message, he mentioned details of the food, drink, and discussion that would be known only to someone who had attended the meeting. Privately, we each suspected one another of perpetrating a hoax upon the group at large, though each of us loudly protested his own innocence.

Over the days to come, there followed further e-mails from Dick, sometimes to the group en masse, sometimes to individual members. In each message, Dick thanked the recipients for some event or another, again citing details of which only the attendees would be aware. Tim was thanked for singing a duet of Margaritaville with him at a gig in Florida, Troy for demonstrating the finer points of Tae Bo, Dave for sharing his source of Blatz beer, Jeff for helping Dick with a Buck Rogers comic script, Doug for teaching him pond maintenance, Sully for posing for some photographs, Steve Winter for helping him to reenact Guys and Dolls with Napoleonic miniatures, and so on.

As time passed, the messages grew increasingly personal. Dick began to mention events occurring to individuals when they had thought themselves alone. The messages now revealed intimate details of our most private moments, secrets shared only with wives and doctors, if at all.

The Alliterates had had enough! We hired a private detective to track down Dick and discover just how he was accomplishing this violation of our privacy. Shockingly, the news returned that Dick was dead—and had been for some years!

Still the messages from Dick continued, each more personal than the last. Secrets of childhood, long forgotten, were exposed to us again. The emotional strain was becoming more than some members could bear. After receiving from Dick an issue of Popular Mechanics with instructions for building your own sailboat, Rob called an emergency Alliterates meeting, and we wrestled to devise some theory to account for the torture Dick was putting us through. Our best surmise was that Dick’s hallucinations had become so powerful toward the end of his life that they continued even into the author’s death.

We had to save ourselves from spiraling into a Dick-filled madness. Don proposed a plan. Drawing upon his time spent at “Canada’s West Point,” he prepared a course of Basic Training for the rest of the group, and Les donned his old sergeant stripes (from harrowing years as a National Guard medic) to serve as Drill Instructor. Between the two, they hammered the other members into shape. A few hundred push-up, sit-ups, and leg lifts later, followed by a 20-mile march in full field gear, then a savage session of bayonet practice, and the Alliterates had all developed a sufficiently hard-nosed attitude to shake off Dick’s mental onslaught.

Even better, this display of utter manliness in otherwise literary men now drew the attention of Hemingway’s ghost! Dick never had a chance after that. Hemingway soundly kicked his ass in a contest of both words and fists, and chased the madman howling into the darkness.

We have heard from neither dead author since.

[Ed.: If you think this ending seems rushed and lame, you don't know Dick.]