The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  It was the goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? Or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? Indeed men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.

  I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: `Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another'

  - why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be.

  The sense of a permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy.

  `Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bowel movement every morning after breakfast'

  `Billy just loves to read all the time...'

  `Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.'

  'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.'

  It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but . . . Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but ... And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn't have to worry but how she looked ...

  Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery.

  What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free even of `good' habits.

  `What, my boy, haven't told a lie yet today? Well, go to your room and stay there until you can think one up and learn to do better.'

  `Oh, my Johnny, he's so wonderful. Last year he got all "A"s an his report card and this year he's getting mostly "D"s and "F"s. We're so proud: `Our little Eileen still pees in her panties every now and then and she's almost twelve.'

  'Oh, that's marvelous! Your daughter must be so alive.'

  `Good boy, Roger, that was beautiful the way you walked off the field and went home to play Ping-Pong with the score tied and two out in the last of the eighth. Every dad in the stands wished his kid had thought of that.'

  `Donnie! Don't you dare brush your teeth again tonight! It's getting to be a regular habit.'

  `I'm sorry, Mom.'

  `Goddam son of mine. Hasn't goofed off in a week. If I don't find the lawn un-mowed or the wastebaskets overflowing one of these days, I'm going to blow my top at him.'

  `Larry, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You haven't bullied a single one of the little kids on the block all summer.'

  'I just don't feel like it, Mom.'

  `Well, at least you could try.'

  `What should I wear, Mother?'

  `Oh I don't know, Sylvia. Why don't you try the cardigan which makes you look flat-chested and that ugly skirt your grandmother gave you which always twists. I've got a pair of nylons I've been saving for a special occasion: they've each got a run.'

  `Sounds groovy.'

  Teachers, too, would have to alter.

  'Your drawings all tend to look like the thing you're draw, young man. You seem unable to let yourself go.'

  'This essay is too logical and well-organized. If you expect to develop as a writer you must learn to digress and be at times totally irrelevant.'

  `Your son's work shows much improvement. His papers on history have become nicely erratic again, and his comportment totally unreliable (A-). His math remains a little compulsively accurate, but his spelling is a delight. I particularly enjoyed his spelling of "stundent" for "student".'

  `We regret to inform you that your son behaves always like a man. He seems incapable of being a girl part of the time. He has been dating only girls and may need psychiatric treatment'

  `I'm afraid, George, that you're one of our few ninth graders who hasn't acted like a kindergarten child this week. You'll have to stay after school and work on it.'

  The child, we are informed, needs to see order and consistency in the world or he becomes insecure and afraid. But what order and consistency? The child doesn't have to have consistent consistency; it seemed to me he might grow equally well with consistent, dependable inconsistency. Life, in fact, is that way; if parents would only admit and praise inconsistency, children wouldn't be so frightened of their parents' hypocrisy or ignorance.

  `Sometimes I'll spank you for spilling your milk and sometimes I won't give a damn.' `Occasionally I like you when you rebel against me, son, and at other times I love to kick the shit out of you.'

  `I'm usually pleased with your good grades in school, but sometimes I think you're an awful grind.'

  Such is the way adults feel: such is the way children sense they feel. Why can't they acknowledge and praise their inconsistency? Because they think they have a `self.'

  Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.

  What if secretly before every agon or game the dice were thrown to determine whether the `winner' or the `loser' `wins'! The prize or the championship, with fifty-fifty being the odds for each? The loser of the game would thus end up half the time being congratulated for having been lucky enough to have lost, and thus won the prize. The man who won the game would be consoled for playing so well.

  `But!!! The loser of the game would still feel bad, the winner still feel 'good.'

  But I remembered reading in a widely acclaimed book on children's games something which made Larry's affinity for diceliving make sense. I dug out the book and read confirmation of my thoughts with joy. Children, it said ... rarely trouble to keep scores, little significance is attached to who wins or loses, they do not require the stimulus of prizes, it does not seem to worry them if the game is not finished. Indeed, children like games in which there is a s
izeable element of luck, so that individual abilities cannot be directly compared. They like games which restart automatically, so that everybody is given a new chance.

  It seemed to me that there were two quite different meanings of failure. The mind knows when it is blocked and when it has found a solution. A child trying to solve a maze knows when he fails and when he succeeds; no adult need tell him. A child building a house of blocks knows when the collapse of the house means failure (he wanted to build it higher) and when it means success (he wanted it to fall). Success and failure mean simply the satisfaction and frustration of desire. It is real; it is important; the child doesn't have, to be rewarded or punished by society in order to prefer success to failure.

  The, second meaning of failure is also simple: failure is failure to please an adult; success is pleasing an adult. Money, fame, winning a baseball game, looking pretty, having good clothes, car, house are' all types of success which primarily revolve around pleasing the adult world. There is nothing intrinsic to the human soul in any of these fears of failure.

  Becoming the dice man was difficult because it involved a continual risking of failure in the eyes of the adult world. As dice man I `failed' (in the second sense) again and again. I was rejected by Lil, by the children, by my esteemed colleagues, by my patients, by strangers, by the image of society's values branded into me by thirty years of living. In the second sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in the first sense I never failed. Every time I followed the dictates of the die I was successfully building a house or purposely knocking one down. My mazes were always being solved. I was continually opening myself to new problems and, enjoying solving them.

  From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

  Fail! Lose! Be bad! Play, risk, dare. Thus, I exulted that evening of Larry's first diceday. I became determined to make Larry and Evie fearless, frameless, egoless humans. Larry would be the first egoless man since Lao-Tzu. I would let him play the role of father of the household and Evie the mother. I'd let them reverse roles. Sometimes they would play parents as they perceive us to be and at other times as they think parents should be. We could all play television heroes and comic-strip characters. And Lil and I every conscientious parent - would change his personality every other day or week.

  `I am he who can play many games.'

  That is the essence of the happy child of foul, and he never feels he loses. `I am he who is x, y and z, and x, y and z only': that is the essence of the unhappy adult. I would try to extend in my children their childishness. In the immortal words of J. Edgar Hoover: `Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not see God.'

  Chapter Eighteen

  Larry's first day as dice-boy had been cut short by boredom with too much of the same thing. He liked the game; he was able to follow the commands of the dice even when they conflicted with his normal patterns, but after about three hours he simply wanted to play with his trucks and didn't want to risk this pleasure to the dice. Since I have often felt the same way (although not about trucks), I explained that the dice man game should only be played when he felt like it. I emphasized, however, that when he did play he must always follow the dice.

  Unfortunately, my efforts during the succeeding two days to turn Larry into Lao-Tzu were confounded by his child's good sense; he gave the dice only extremely pleasant alternatives - ice cream, movies, zoos, horsey, trucks, bikes, money. He began to use the dice as a treasure chest. I finally told him that the dice man game always had to provide risk, that slightly bad choices had to be there too. Surprisingly he agreed. I invented for him that week a dice game which has since become one of our classics: Russian roulette. The initial version of the game for Larry was simple: out of every six alternatives one had to be decidedly unpleasant.

  As a result, Larry had some interesting experiences over the next five or six days. (Evie returned to her dolls and to Mrs. Roberts.) He took a long hike in Harlem (I told him to keep an eye open for a big muscular white man with candy named Osterflood) and he was arrested as a runaway. It took me forty minutes to convince the 26th Precinct that I had encouraged my seven-year-old son to take a hike in Harlem.

  The dice sent him to sneak into the movie I Am Curious Yellow, a film involving a certain amount of naked sexual interplay, and he returned mildly curious and greatly bored. He crawled on all fours from our apartment down four flights of stairs and along Madison Avenue to Walgreen's and ordered an ice-cream sundae. Another time he had to throw away three of his toys, on the other hand the dice ordered him a new racing-car set. He twice had to let me beat him in chess and three times I had to let him beat me. He had a wonderful hour making ostentatiously stupid moves and thus making it difficult for me to lose.

  The dice ordered him to play Daddy and me little Evie for one hour one day and he was soon bored: my little Evie was too weak and too stupid. But he enjoyed greatly playing Daddy to my Lil two days later. I didn't realize at the time that the seeds of group dice therapy and my Centers far Experiments in Totally Random Environments were being planted while Larry and I gambolled about as Daddy and Lil or Superman and a crook or Lassie and a dangerous hippopotamus.

  The first and last crisis of this phase of Larry's dicelife occurred four days after Lil had returned from Florida. My contacts with Larry had decreased, and on his own he sometimes created such farfetched alternatives for the dice that when the dice chose them, he wasn't able to carry them out. For example, he told me just before the crisis that once he had given the die the option of his killing Evie (she had broken his racing-car set). When the die chose it, he said, he decided not to. I asked him why.

  `She would have tattled on me and you wouldn't have fixed my car.' `If she were dead how could she tattle on you?' I asked.

  `Don't worry, she'd find a way.'

  The crisis was simple: Larry's dice told him to steal three dollars from Lil's purse and he spent it on twenty-three comic books (a whim of the die which he told me he resented deeply, being quite fond of bubble gum, lollipops, dart guns and chocolate sundaes). Lil wondered where he got the money for all the comic books. He refused to tell her, insisting that she asked Daddy. She did.

  `It's very simple, Lil,' I said and while she was putting on Evie's shoes for the fifth time within the hour I consulted the die: I was ordered (one chance in six) to tell the truth.

  `I was playing a dice game with him and he lost and had to steal three dollars from your purse.'

  She stared at me, a strand of blonde hair dangling on her forehead and her blue eyes momentarily blank with bewilderment.

  `He had to steal three dollars from my purse?'

  I was seated in my easy chair puffing on a pipe and with a copy of the Times spread across my lap.

  `It's a stupid little game I invented while you were gone to help Larry learn self-discipline. Certain options are created by the player, some of them unpleasant, like stealing, and then the dice choose which one you have to do.'

  'Who has to do?'

  She shooed Evie off to the kitchen and advanced to the edge of the couch, where she lit a cigarette. She'd had a good time in Daytona and we'd enjoyed a nice reunion, but she was beginning to look less tanned and more flushed.

  `The player, or players.'

  `I don't know what you're talking about.'

  `It's simple,' I said (I love these two words: I always imagine Immanuel Kant pronouncing them before he set down the first sentence of The Critique of Pure Reason, or an American President before launching into an explanation of Vietnam War policy).

  `To encourage Larry to branch out into new areas of this young-'

  'Stealing!'

  `-new areas of his young life, I invented a game whereby you make up things to do'

  `But stealing, Luke, I mean-'

  `Which the dice then choose from among.'

 
`And stealing was one of the options.'

  `It's all in the family,' I said.

  She stared at me from near the edge of the couch, her arms folded across her chest, a cigarette between her fingers. She looked amazingly calm.

  `Luke,' she began speaking slowly. `I don't know what you think you're doing lately; I don't know whether you're sane or insane; I don't know if you're trying to destroy me or trying to destroy your children or trying to destroy yourself, but if you if you - once more involve Larry in any of your sick games - I -I'll..'

  Her amazingly calm face suddenly split like a broken mirror into dozens of cracks of tension, her eyes filled with tears and she twisted her face to the side and gasped a suppressed scream.

  `Don't. Please don't,' she whispered, and she sat abruptly on the arm of the couch, her face still averted. `Go tell him no more games. Never.'

  'I stood up, the Times fluttering to the floor.

  `I'm sorry, Lil. I didn't realize `Never - Larry - more games.'

  `I'll tell him.'

  I left the room and went to his bedroom and told him, and his career as dice-boy, after only eight days, ended.

  Until the Die resurrected it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  My childhood! My childhood! My God, I've now written over a hundred and ten pages and you don't even know whether I was bottle fed or breast fed! You don't know when I was first weaned and how; when I first discovered that girls don't have any weeny, how much I brooded because girls don't have any weeny, when I first decided to enjoy the fact that girls don't have any weeny. You don't know who my great-grandparents were, my grandparents; you don't even know about my mother and father? My siblings! My milieu! My socioeconomic background! My early traumas! My early joys!, The signs and portents surrounding my birth! Dear friends, you don't know any of that `David Copperfield kind of crap' (to quote Howard Hughes) which is the very essence of autobiography! Relax, my friends, I don't intend to tell you.