Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  “What’ll I say when I beat him up?”

  “Why don’t you ask the dice?”

  He looked up quickly at his father.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got to beat up Jerry, why not give the dice six choices of what you’ll say?”

  “That’s great. What’ll they be?”

  “You’re God,” his father said with that same horrible smile. “You name them.”

  “I’ll tell him my father told me to.”

  Dr. Rhinehart coughed, hesitated. “That’s … um … number one.”

  “I’ll tell him my mother told me to.”

  “Right.”

  “That I’m drunk.”

  “Number three.”

  “That … that I can’t stand him.”

  He was deep in excited concentration.

  “That I’m practicing my boxing …” He laughed and hopped up and down.

  “And that the dice told me to.”

  “That’s six and very good, Larry.”

  “I throw, I throw.”

  Young, innocent, sinking Lawrence threw a die across the living room rug and yelled its command back to his father: “Three!”

  “Okay, Larry, you’re drunk. Go get him.”

  Reader, Lawrence went. Lawrence struck Jerry Brass. Struck him several times, announced he was drunk and escaped unpunished by the absent Brass parents or present Brass maid, but pursued already by the furies which will not leave unavenged such senseless evil. When he returned to his own apartment Lawrence’s first words were—I record them with shame:

  “Where are the dice, Dad?”

  Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never had. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often went through before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused?

  It was the goddam sense of having a self. 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 an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell of snails or turtles.

  I became tremendously excited: men should be comfortable in flowing from one role to another;—why aren’t we?

  We develop a 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 about 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 on 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.”

  “Goddam son of mine. Hasn’t goofed off in a week. If I don’t find the lawn unmowed 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 flatchested and that ugly skirt your grandmother gave you.”

  Teachers, too, would have to alter.

  “Your drawings all tend to look like the thing you’re drawing, young man. You seem unable to let yourself go.”

  “This essay is too logical and well-organized. You must learn to digress and be 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 of ‘stuntent’ for ‘student’ was a delight.”

  “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 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 we feel. Why can’t we acknowledge and praise our inconsistency? Because we think we have a “self”; a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.

  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 one 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 one sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in another 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 my self 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.

  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 could play parents as they peceive 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 four, 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.”

  15

  Larry’s first day as diceboy had ended after about two hours because 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.

  Unfortunately, my efforts during the succeeding two days to turn Larry into Lao-Tzu were confounded by his using the dice as a treasure chest: he created only extremely pleasant options—ice cream, movies, zoos, horsey, trucks, bikes, money. 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: out of every six alternatives at least 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.

  The first and last crisis of this phase of Larry’s dicelife occurred four days after Lil had returned from Florida. Larry’s dice had told him to steal three dollars from Lil’s purse and he’d 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 ask Daddy. She did.

  “It’s very simple, Lil,” I said and while she was putting on Evie’s shoe for the fifth time within the hour I sneaked a peek at a die; I was ordered (one chance in six) to tell the truth.

  “I was playing a dicegame with him and he lost and had to steal three dollars from your purse.”

  She stared at me, a strand of blond 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 those 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 his 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 I thought.

  “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 diceboy, after only eight days, ended.

  Until the Die resurrected it.

  16

  My childhood! My childhood! My God, I’ve written over a hundred and one 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.

  Traditional autobiographers wish to help you understand how the adult was “formed.” I suppose most human beings, like clay chamber pots, are “formed”—and are used accordingly. But I? I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past—paste, pus, piss—is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. Living flows, and the only possible justification of an autobiography is that it happened by chance to be written—like this one. Someday a higher creature will write the almost perfect and totally honest autobiography:

  “I live.”

  I will acknowledge, however, that I did, in fact, have a human mother. This much I admit.

  17

  In November I received a telephone call from Dr. Mann informing me that Eric Cannon had been acting up while I’d been away a week at a convention in Houston, that it had been necessary to increase his medication (tranquilizers) and would I please make a special trip over as soon as possible and see him. Eric might have to be transferred to another institution. In my temporary office on the Island I read through Head Nurse Herbie Flamm’s report on Eric Cannon. It had a kind of novelistic power that Henry James sought for fifty years without finding:r />
  It is necessary to report that Patient Eric Cannon is a consciously evil troublemaker. He is disturbing the other patients. Although I have always kept this one of the quietist [sic] wards on the island, since he has been here it is noisy and a mess. Patients who haven’t said a word in years now can’t shut up. Patients that have stood always in the same corner now play pitch and catch with chairs. Many of the patients are now singing and laughing. This disturbs the patients who want peace and quiet to get better. Someone keeps destroying the television set. I think Mr. Cannon is schizophrenic. Sometimes he wanders around the ward nice and quiet like he was in a dream world and other times he sneaks around like a snake, hissing at me and the patients like he was the boss of the ward and not me.

  Unfortunately he has followers. Many patients are now refusing sedation. Some do not go to the machine shop for factory therapy. Two patients confined to wheelchairs have pretended to walk. Patients are showing disrespect for the hospital food. We do not have enough maximum security rooms on the ward. Also patients who are refusing or not swallowing their sedation will not stop singing and laughing when we politely ask. Disrespect is everywhere. I have sometimes had the feeling on the ward that I do not exist. I mean to say no one pays attention anymore. My attendants are often tempted to treat the patients with physical force but I remind them of the Hypocritic Oath. Patients will not stay in their beds at night. Talking with each other is going on. Meetings I think. They whisper. I do not know if there is a rule against this, but I recommended that a rule be made. Whispering is worse than singing.

  We have sent several of his followers to Ward W [the violent ward] but patient Cannon is tricky. He never does anything himself. I think he is spreading illegal drugs on the ward but none has been found. He never does anything and everything is happening.

  I have this to report. It is serious. On September 10, at 2:30 P.M. in the Main Room right in front of the destroyed and lifeless television set, a large group of patients began hugging each other. They had a circle with their arms around each other and they were humming or moaning and kept getting closer and closer and humming and swaying or pulsating like a giant jellyfish or human heart and they were all men. They did this and attendant R. Smith attempted to break them up but their circle was very strong. I attempted to break their circle also as gently as I could but as I was so endeavoring the circle suddenly opened and two men physically clasped me with their arms and hands and I was drawn against my total will into the horrible circle. It was disgusting beyond my ability to say.