“I don’t like your games, Luke,” Lil said quietly.
“The Pittsburgh Pirates have won three games in a row but remain mired in third place.”
“Please come to bed and be yourself.”
“Which one?”
“Any one except this morning’s version.”
Habit pulled me toward the bed; the dice pulled back.
“I have to think about dinosaurs,” I said and, realizing I’d said it in my normal voice, I repeated it shouting. When I saw that I had used my habitual shout I started to emit a third version, but realized that three of anything approached habit and so half-shouted, half-mumbled, “Breakfast with dinosaurs in bed,” and went into the kitchen.
Halfway there I tried to vary my walk and ended up crawling the last fifteen feet.
“What are you doing, Daddy?”
Larry stood sleepy-eyed but fascinated in the entrance to the kitchen. I didn’t want to upset him. I had to watch my words carefully.
“I’m looking for mice.”
“Oh boy, can I look?”
“No, they’re dangerous.”
“Mice?”
“These mice are man-eaters.”
“Oh Daddy … [Scornfully].”
“I’m teasing [An habitual phrase; I shook my head].”
“Go back to be—[Another!]”
“Look under your mother’s bed, I think they may have gone under there.”
Not a great many seconds later Larry came back from our bedroom accompanied by a bathrobed Lil. I was on my knees at the stove about to heat a pot of water.
“Don’t you involve the children in your games.”
Since I never lose my temper at Lil I lost it.
“Shut your mouth! You’ll scare them all away.”
“Don’t you say shut up to me!”
“One more word out of you and I’ll ram a dinosaur down your throat.” I stood up and strode toward her, fists clenched.
They both looked terrified. I was impressed.
“Go back to bed, Larry,” Lil said, shielding him and backing away.
“Get down on your knees and pray for mercy, Lawrence, NOW!”
Larry ran for his bedroom, crying.
“My God, you’re insane,” Lil said.
“Fie upon you!”
“Don’t you dare hit me.”
I hit her, rather restrainedly, on the left shoulder.
She hit me, rather unrestrainedly, in the left eye.
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
“For breakfast is what?” I asked, at least reversing the syntax.
“Are you through?”
“I surrender everything.”
“Come back to bed.”
“Except my honor.”
“You can keep your honor in your underwear, but come back to bed and behave.”
I jogged back to bed ahead of Lil and lay as rigid as a board for forty minutes at which point Lil commanded me to get out of bed. Immediately and rigidly I obeyed. I stood like a robot beside the bed.
“Relax,” she commanded irritably from the dresser.
I collapsed to the floor, ending as painlessly as possible on my side and back. Lil came over and looked down at me for a moment and then kicked me in the thigh. “Act normal,” she said.
I rose, did six squats, arms extended, and went to the kitchen. For breakfast I had a hot dog, two pieces of uncooked carrot, coffee with lemon and maple syrup, and toast cooked twice until it was blackened, with peanut butter and radish. Lil was furious; primarily because both Larry and Evie wanted desperately to have for breakfast what I was having and ended up crying in frustration. Lil too.
I jogged down Fifth Avenue from my apartment to my office, attracting considerable attention since I was (1) jogging; (2) gasping like a fish drowning in air; and (3) dressed in a tuxedo over a red T-shirt with large white letters declaring The Big Red.
At the office Miss Reingold greeted me formally, neutrally and, I must admit, with secretarial aplomb. Her cold, ugly efficiency stimulated me to break new ground in our relationship.
“Mary Jane, baby,” I said. “I’ve got a surprise this morning. I’ve decided to fire you.”
Her mouth neatly opened, revealing two precisely parallel rows of crooked teeth.
“As of tomorrow morning.”
“But—but Dr. Rhinehart, I don’t under—”
“It’s simple, kneeknocker. I’ve been hornier in the last few weeks, want a receptionist who’s a good lay.”
“Dr. Rhinehart—”
“You’re efficient, but you’ve got a flat ass. Hired a 38-24-37 who knows all about fellatio, post hoc propter id, soixante-six, gesticulation and proper filing procedures.”
She was backing slowly toward Dr. Ecstein’s office, eyes bulging, teeth gleaming like two parallel armies in disarray.
“She starts tomorrow morning,” I went on. “Has her own contraceptive device, I understand. You’ll get full pay through the end of the century. Good-bye and good luck.”
I had begun jogging in place about halfway through my tirade and at its conclusion I sprinted neatly into my office. Miss Reingold was last seen sprinting not so neatly into Jake’s.
I assumed the traditional lotus position on my desk and wondered what Miss Reingold would do with my chaotic cruelties. After minimal investigation I concluded that she had been given something to fill her dull life. I pictured her years hence with two dozen nieces and nephews clustered around her bony knees telling them about the wicked doctor who stuck pins in patients and raped others and, under the influence of LSD and imported Scotch, fired good, hard-working people and replaced them with raving nymphomaniacs.
Feeling superior in my imaginative faculties and uncomfortable in my yoga position I stretched both arms upward. A knock on the door.
“Yo!” I answered, arms still outstretched, my tuxedo straining grotesquely. Jake stuck his head in.
“Say, Luke, baby, Miss Reingold was telling me som—” He saw me. Jake’s habitual piercing squint couldn’t quite negotiate the sight: he blinked twice.
“What’s up, Luke?” he asked tentatively.
I laughed. “Oh this,” I said, fingering the tuxedo. “Late party last night. I’m trying to wake myself up before Osterflood comes. Hope I didn’t upset Miss R.”
He hesitated, his chubby neck and round face still the only parts of him which had eased their way into the room.
“Well,” he said, “yeah. She says you fired her.”
“Nonsense,” I replied. “I was telling her a joke I heard at the party last night; it was a little raunchy perhaps, but nothing that would upset Mary Magdalen.”
“Yeah,” he said, his traditional squint gathering strength, his glasses like two flying saucers with slits concealing deadly ray guns. “Righto,” he said. “Sorry to bother you.”
His face vanished, the door eased shut. While meditating I was interrupted a few minutes later by the door opening and Jake’s glasses reappearing.
“She wants me to make sure she’s not fired.”
“Tell her to come to work tomorrow fully prepared.”
“Righto.”
When Osterflood strode in I was limping around the room trying to get the circulation back into my feet. He walked automatically to the couch but I stopped him.
“No you don’t, Mr. O. Today you sit over there and I’ll use the couch.”
I made myself comfortable while he lumbered uncertainly to the chair behind my desk.
“What’s the matter, Dr. Rhinehart, do you—”
“I feel elated today,” I began, noting in the corner of the ceiling an impressive cobweb. For how many years had my patients been staring at that? “I feel I’ve made a major breakthrough on the road to the New Man.”
“What new man?”
“The Random Man. The unpredictable man. I feel today I am demonstrating that habits can be broken. That man is free.”
“I wish I could break my habit of raping little
girls,” he said, trying to get the focus back on himself.
“There’s hope, O., there’s hope. Just do the opposite of everything you normally do. If you feel like raping them, shower them with candy and kindness and then leave. If you feel like beating a whore, have her beat you. If you feel like seeing me, go to a movie instead.”
“But that’s not easy. I like hurting people.”
“True, but you may find you’ll get a kick out of kindness, too. Today, for example, I found running to work much more meaningful than my usual cab ride. I also found my cruelty to Miss Reingold refreshing. I used to enjoy being nice to her.”
“I wondered why she was crying. What happened?”
“I accused her of bad breath and body odor.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes.”
“That was a horrible thing to do. I’d never do a thing like that.”
“I hope not. But the city health authorities had issued a formal complaint that the entire building was beginning to stink. I had no choice.”
In the ensuing silence I heard his chair squeak; he may have tipped back in it, but from where I lay I couldn’t tell. I could see only part of two walls, bookcases, books, my cobweb, and a single small portrait of Socrates draining the hemlock. My taste in soothing pictures for patients seemed dubious.
“I’ve been pretty cheerful lately too,” Osterflood said meditatively, and I realized I wanted to get the focus back on my problems.
“Of course, habit breaking can also be a chore,” I said. “For example, I’ll find it difficult to improvise new methods and places for urinating.”
“I think … I almost think you may have brought me toward a breakthrough,” Osterflood said, ignoring me.
“I’m particularly concerned with my next bowel movement,” I went on. “There seem to me definite limits as to what society will stand for. All sorts of eccentricity and nonsensical horrors can be permitted—wars, murder, marriage, slums—but that bowel movements should be made anywhere except in the toilet seems to be pretty universally considered despicable.”
“You know that if … I felt that if I could just kick my little-girl addiction, just … lose interest, I’d be all right. The big ones don’t mind, or can be bought.”
“Also locomotion. There are only a certain number of limited ways of moving from spot A to spot B. Tomorrow, for example, I won’t feel free to jog to work. What can I do? Walk backward?” I looked over at Osterflood with a serious frown, but he was immersed in his own thoughts.
“But now … lately … I got to admit it … I seem to be losing my interest in little girls.”
“Walking backward is a solution, of course, but only a temporary one. After that and crawling and running backward and hopping on one foot, I’ll feel confined, limited, repetitious, a robot.”
“And that’s good, I know it is. I mean I hate little girls and now that I’m less interested in fucking them I feel that’s … definitely an advance.” He looked down at me sincerely and I looked sincerely back.
“Conversations too are a problem,” I said. “Our syntax is habitual, our diction, our coherence. I have a habit of logical thought which clearly must be broken. And vocabulary. Why do I accept the limits of our habitual words. I’m a clod! A clod!”
“But … but … lately … I’m afraid … I’ve sensed … I’m almost afraid to say it …”
“Umpwillis. Art fodder. Wishmonger. Gladsull. Partminkson. Jombie. Blit. Why not? Man has limited himself artificially to the past. I feel myself breaking free.”
“… that I’m, I feel I’m beginning to want, to like … little boys.”
“A breakthrough. A definite breakthrough if I can continue to contradict my habitual patterns as I have this morning. And sex. Sexual patterns must be broken too.”
“I mean really like them,” he said emphatically. “Not want to rape them or hurt them or anything like that, just bugger them and have them suck me off.”
“Possibly this experiment could get me into dangerous ground. I suppose since I’ve habitually not been interested in raping little girls that theoretically I ought to try it.”
“And boys … little boys are easier to get at. They’re more trusting, less suspicious.”
“But really hurting someone frightens me. I suppose—No! It is a limitation. A limitation I must overcome. To be free from habitual inhibitions I will have to rape and kill.”
His chair squeaked, and I heard one of his feet hit the ground.
“No,” he said firmly. “No, Dr. Rhinehart. I’m trying to tell you, raping and killing aren’t necessary anymore. Even hitting may be out.”
“Raping, or at least killing, is absolutely necessary to the Random Man. To shirk that would be to shirk a clear duty.”
“Boys, little boys, even teenage boys, will do just as good, I’m sure. It’s dangerous with little girls, Doc, I warn you.”
“Danger is necessary. The whole concept of the Random Man is the most dangerous and revolutionary ever conceived by man. If total victory demands blood then blood it must be.”
“No, Dr. Rhinehart, no. You must find another way to work it out. A less dangerous way. These are human beings you’re talking about.”
“Only according to our habitual perceptive patterns. It may well be that little girls are actually fiends from another world sent to destroy us.”
He didn’t reply but I heard the chair give one small squeak.
“It’s quite clear,” I went on, “that without little girls we wouldn’t have women, and women—snorfu bock clisting rinnschauer.”
“No, no, Doc, you’re tempting me. I know it, I see it now. Women are human beings, they must be.”
“Call them what you will, they differ from us, Osterflood, and you can’t deny it.”
“I know, I know, and boys don’t. Boys are us. Boys are good. I think I could learn to love boys and not to have to worry so much about the police anymore.”
“Candy and kindness to girls, O., and a stiff prick to boys: you may be right. It would, for you, definitely be a habit breaker.”
“Yes, yes.”
Someone knocked on the door. The hour was up. As I dazedly rolled my feet onto the floor I felt Mr. Osterflood pumping my hand vigorously; his eyes were blazing with joy.
“This has been the greatest therapeutic hour of my life. You’re … you’re … you’re a boy, Dr. Rhinehart, a genuine boy.”
“Thank you, O. I hope you’re right.”
20
Slowly and steadily, my friends, I was beginning to go insane. I found that my residual self was changing. When I chose to let the sleeping dice lie and to be my “natural self” I discovered that I liked absurd comments, anecdotes, actions. I climbed trees in Central Park, assumed the yoga position of meditation during a cocktail party and oozed esoteric, oracular remarks every two minutes which confused and bored even me. I shouted, “I’m Batman,” at the top of my lungs at the end of a telephone conversation with Dr. Mann—all not because the dice said so, but because I felt like it.
I would break into laughter for no reason at all; I would overreact to situations, becoming angry, fearful or compassionate far in excess of that normally demanded. I wasn’t consistent. Sometimes I’d be gay, at others sad; sometimes I’d be articulate, serious, brilliant; at others, absurd, abstracted, dumb. Fortunately, after my initial absurdities with Miss Reingold that first morning, Jake had suggested I return to analysis with him and I accepted. My getting therapeutic help from him three times a week kept me free to walk the streets. As long as I did nothing violent, people could still feel relatively at ease. “Poor Dr. Rhinehart, but Dr. Ecstein is helping him.”
Lil was becoming increasingly worried about me, but since the die always rejected the option that I tell her the truth, I kept making semi-rational excuses for my absurdities. She talked with Jake and Arlene and Dr. Mann, and they all had perfectly rational and usually brilliant explanations of what was happening, but unfortunately no suggestions
as to how to end it.
“In a year or two …” said Dr. Mann benevolently to Lil, who told me she almost started screaming. I assured her that I’d try harder to control my whims.
National Habit-Breaking Month certainly didn’t help matters. How upset people become when confronting the breakdown of patterns, how upset or how joy-filled. My jogging into the office, my absurd speeches, my blasphemous efforts to seduce the sexless and incorruptible Miss Reingold, my drunkenness, my nonsensical behavior with my patients—all brought to those who witnessed them shock and dismay, but also, I began to notice, pleasure.
How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd. Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning, if only patterns would break down.
By the end of that month I was thinking if only Nixon would get drunk and say to someone, “Fuck you, buddy.” If only William Buckley or Billy Graham would say, “Some of my best friends are Communists”; if only a sportscaster would just once say, “Sure is a boring game, folks.” But they don’t. So each of us travels, to Fort Lauderdale, to Vietnam, to Morocco, or gets divorced, or has an affair, or tries a new job, a new neighborhood, a new drug, in a desperate effort to find something new. Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experiences.
But in most ways National Habit-Breaking Month turned out to be impractical; I ended up at one point letting the dice decide when I would go to bed and for how long I would sleep. My sleeping a random number of hours at randomly selected times quickly made me irritable, washed out and occasionally high, especially when kicked by drugs or alcohol. When and whether I ate, washed, shaved, brushed my teeth were also dice-determined for a three-day period. As a result, I once or twice found myself using my portable electric razor in the middle of a midtown crunch of people (passersby looking around for the camera crew), brushing my teeth in a nightclub lavatory, taking baths and getting a rubdown at Vic Tanny’s and eating my main meal at 4 A.M. at a Nedick’s.
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