Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  Another time the Die ordered me to sensitize myself to every moment, to live each moment fully awake. It seemed a marvelously aesthetic thing to do. I pictured myself as Walter Pater-John Ruskin-Oscar Wilde all rolled into one. What I first became aware of during Aesthetic Sensitivity Day was that I had the sniffles. I may have had them for months, years even, and never noticed it. In January, thanks to this random command of the Die, I became conscious of a periodic intake of air through my nostrils running through some accumulated mucus which produced a sound normally denoted as a “sniff.” Were it not for the dice I would have remained an insensitive clod.

  I became aware of other previously unrealized sense experiences during that Sensitivity Day. I went to the Museum of Modern Art and tried desperately to experience aesthetic bliss, decided after half an hour to shoot for simple pleasure and settled at the end of a footsore hour and a half for being content with a low level of pain. My visual sense must have atrophied at some point and even the mighty dice couldn’t resurrect it. The next day I was happy the dice killed off Walter Pater.

  In general, during that month in clothes I wore what I never wore; in words I swore what I never swore; in sex I whored what I never whored.

  Breaking sexual habits and values was the hardest of all. In rambling down the stairs to merge with Arlene I was not altering my sexual values; only fulfilling them. I assumed in my typical mechanical way that breaking sexual habits meant changing favorite sexual positions, changing women, changing from women to men, from men to boys, changing to total abstention and so on. My polymorphous perverse tendencies were vaguely thrilled by this prospect and I began one night, returning from a party, by trying to penetrate my wife’s anus at 2 A.M. in the apartment elevator. Lil, however, not so much indignant or inhibited as uninterested, insisted on getting out of the elevator and going to bed and going to sleep.

  When I turned for a new woman I realized that it was my duty according to the mandate to change my taste in women. Therefore my next conquest would have to be old, thin, gray-haired, wear glasses, have big feet and be fond of Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies. Although I’m sure many such women exist in New York, I soon realized that they were as difficult to locate and date as the equal number of women whose figures more or less matched that of Raquel Welch. I would have to lower my standards to old, thin and spiritual and let the other precise trivialities fall as they may.

  The image of Miss Reingold leapt to my mind and I shuddered. If I were to break my sexual values I would have to seduce her. When consulted, the die said yes.

  Seldom have I felt less respect for the die’s judgment. Miss Reingold was undoubtedly the antithesis of all my sexual appetites, the Brigitte Bardot of my netherworld. She wasn’t of course old; rather she had the remarkable ability to create at the age of thirty-six the impression she was sixty-three. The idea that she urinated was unthinkable, and I blush even to write about it here. In one thousand two hundred and six days with Ecstein and Rhinehart not once to our knowledge had she used the office bathroom. The only odor she gave off was the pervasive smell of baby powder. I didn’t know whether she was flatchested or not; one doesn’t speculate on the measurements of one’s mother or grandmother.

  Her speech was more chaste than that of a Dickensian heroine; she would read back a report on the sexual activities of a superhuman nymphomaniac as if it were a long, bullish announcement of a corporation’s phenomenal growth activities. At the end she would ask: “Would you like me to change the sentence about Miss Werner’s multiple intercourse into parallel structure?”

  Nevertheless, not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done, and with morbid fascination I took her out to dinner one evening about three weeks through National Habit-Breaking Month and, as the evening progressed, began to sense, much to my horror, that I might succeed. I went to the men’s room after dinner and consulted the die about several possible options, but all it told me to do was smoke two marijuana cigarettes: novocaine before the tooth pulling. Squirm as I might, I found myself later that evening sitting beside her on the couch discussing (I swear I didn’t introduce the subject) nymphomaniacs. Although I’d begun to note as the hours wore by that she had a pretty smile (when she kept her mouth fully closed), her low-cut black dress on her white body reminded me somehow of a black drape hung on a vertical coffin.

  “But do you think nymphomaniacs enjoy their lives?” I was saying with the spontaneous randomness and blissful indifference which pot smoking and Miss Reingold seemed to produce.

  “Oh no,” she said quickly, nudging her spectables up eighth of an inch. “They must be very unhappy.”

  “Yes, perhaps, but I can’t help wondering if the great pleasure they get from being loved by so many men doesn’t compensate for their unhappiness.”

  “Oh no. Dr. Ecstein told me that according to Rogers, Rogers and Hillsman, eighty-two point five percent receive no pleasure from copulation.” She was sitting so stiffly on the couch that periodically my pot-polluted vision made me believe I was talking to a dressmaker’s dummy.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But Rogers nor Rogers nor Hillsman have ever been nymphomaniacs. I doubt they’ve even been women.” I smiled triumphantly. “A theory I’m developing is that nymphomaniacs actually are joy-filled hedonists but lie to psychiatrists that they’re frigid in order to seduce the psychiatrist.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Who could ever seduce a psychiatrist?”

  For a moment we blinked incredulously at each other, and then she went through a kaleidoscope of colors, ending with typing-paper white.

  “You’re right,” I said finally. “The woman is a patient and our code of ethics prevents our giving in to them, but …” I trailed off, losing the thread of my argument.

  In her small voice, with her two hands wrestling with her handkerchief, she asked:

  “But … ?”

  “But?” I echoed.

  “You said your code prevents you from ever giving in to them but …”

  “Oh yeah. But it’s hard. We’re continually being excited but with no ethical way of satisfying ourselves.”

  “Oh, Dr. Rhinehart, you’re married.”

  “Married? Oh yes. That’s true. I’d forgotten.” I looked at her, my face a tragic mask. “But my wife practices yoga and consequently can only engage in sexual congress with a guru.”

  She stared back at me.

  “Are you certain?” she asked.

  “I can’t even do a modified headstand. I have come to doubt that I am a man.”

  “Oh no, Dr. Rhinehart.”

  “To make matters worse, it has always depressed me that you never seem to be sexually attracted to me.”

  Miss Reingold’s face went through its psychedelic color show and again ended in typing-paper white. Then she said in the smallest audible voice I’ve ever heard:

  “But I am.”

  “You … you …”

  “I am sexually attracted to you.”

  “Oh.”

  I paused, all the forces of the residual me mobilizing my body to run for the door; only religious discipline kept me on the couch.

  “Miss Reingold!” I shouted impulsively. “Will you make me a man?” I sat erect and leaned toward her.

  She stared at me, removed her glasses from her face and placed them on the rug beside the couch.

  “No, no,” she said softly, her eyes focusing vaguely on the couch between us. “I can’t.”

  At first, for the only time in my life not dictated by the die, I was impotent. I had to sit on the bed beside her, nude, in a modified lotus position, not touching, and for seven or eight minutes meditate with all the powers of a yogi on Arlene’s breasts, Linda Reichman’s behind and Lil’s innards, until, at last, with the power properly concentrated, I assumed the cat’s cradle position over Miss Reingold’s assumed corpse position and lowered myself into samadhi (emptiness).

  It is a frightening experience to make love to one’s mother, especially one’s mother as a corpse, and now
here near what Freud imagined it. That I looked upon her as a mother image and yet succeeded in assuming the proper positions and fulfilling all the appropriate exercises is a tribute to my budding abilities as a yogi. It was a great step forward in the breaking of psychological barriers, and I trembled all the next day thinking about it. Surprisingly also, I’ve felt much closer to Miss Reingold ever since.

  21

  But not that close.

  22

  It must be admitted that the thought of penetrating the hairy anus of a man or of being so penetrated held all the allure of giving and receiving an enema on the dais before the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. The thought of caressing, kissing and mouthing a male penis somehow dimly reminded me of being forced at the age of six or seven to eat baked macaroni.

  On the other hand, the occasional fantasy of being a woman writhing beneath some dim male was exciting—until the dim male grew a beard (shaven or not), a hairy chest, hairy buttocks and an ugly vein-bulging penis. Then I lost interest. Being a female could, in an occasional fantasy, be exciting. Being a male having “intercourse” with any precisely seen male seemed disgusting.

  All of this I knew long before that January day in my habit-breaking life that the Die definitely asked me to shoulder the burden of going out into the world and being had. I went to the Lower East Side, where a patient of mine (Linda Reichman in fact) had told me I could find several gay bars, one of whose names in particular I remembered: Gordo’s.

  At about 10:30 P.M. I entered Gordo’s, a perfectly harmless-looking bar, and was shocked to see men and women sitting together drinking. Moreover, there were only seven or eight people in the place. No one even looked at me. I ordered a beer and began doing research in my memory to see if I had in fact repressed or misheard the true name of the gay bar. Gordon’s? Sordo’s? Sodom’s? Gorki’s? Mordo’s? Gorgon’s? Gorgon’s! What a perfect name for a gay place! I went to a pay phone and searched for Gorgon in the Manhattan directory. I drew a blank. Surprised and dejected, I sat in the booth and brooded out at the ineptly normal bar. Four young men moved suddenly past the glass door of my booth toward the front of the bar. Where had they come from?

  I left the booth and wandered toward the back, where I saw some stairs leading to the upper floors; from above I heard music. I wandered up, met the steely gaze of some ex-Cleveland Brown defensive tackle who was sitting at the head of the stairs and moved past him into a small anteroom. From behind large double doors came the music. I opened them and walked in.

  Three feet from me rocked two young men engaged in a passionate, deep-throated kiss. I felt as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet cunts.

  I moved past them into a melee of dancing boys and men and made my way to a vacant table. It was about two inches by three and held the remains of three beer bottles, eleven cigarettes and a lipstick. After staring noncommittally and unseeingly into the chaos of noise, smoke and males for a minute or two, a young man asked me if I wanted a drink and I ordered a beer. Glancing around, I saw that at the two dozen tables only a few people were now sitting, all men except for one middle-aged couple immediately to my right. The man had a sickly smile on his face and the woman looked cool and amused. When I looked over, she stared at me as she might at an inmate in a mental hospital; her husband simply appeared nervous; I winked at him.

  My eyes couldn’t seem to focus on any single person or couple but only on the torsos of males dancing. Finally, I raised my eyes and looked at the two men dancing nearest to me. The man, or rather the tallest of the two men, was in his late twenties, rather ruggedly homely, with a crooked nose and bushy eyebrows. The other person was shorter, younger and very good-looking in a young Peter Fonda sort of way. They were dancing rather disinterestedly and looking past each other at other couples. As I was watching, the younger man suddenly turned his eyes on me, lowered his lashes and raised one shoulder and gave me a sensual feminine sexual parting of moist lips. It was a sexual shock. It was one of the most lecherous and exciting looks I had ever received.

  Ping! Did this mean that all my life I had secretly been a latent homosexual? Did my sexual responses to a female come-on in a male body imply healthy heterosexuality, debased perversion or healthy bisexuality?

  It was time to take stock. Was it the intention of the Die that I be active or passive: Zeus to Ganymede or Hart Crane to a sailor? Was I to be Socrates entering into the old dialogue with one of his boys, or Genêt supine and spread before the onslaught of some six-foot walking erection? The Die had been ambiguous, but it seemed more appropriate and habit breaking to be passive and feminine than aggressive and masculine. But where would I find a Zeus to my six-foot-four Ganymede? Where was the Great Cock that could split me in two? It would be much easier to find someone who saw in me the Awful Erection of his dreams. But ease was irrelevant. I needed to be a woman, to play the role of a woman.

  Even if I loomed over my husband like Mount Everest over a stunted shrub I must learn to spread myself supine before him. My femininity must be given freedom. The Dice Man could never be complete until he was a woman.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” the man asked, standing above me like Everest above a stunted shrub. It was the ex-Cleveland Brown defensive tackle, and he looked down at me with world-weary knowingness. And a smile.

  23

  You must never question the wisdom of the Die. His ways are inscrutable. He leads you by the hand into an abyss and, lo, it is a fertile plain. You stagger beneath the burden he places upon you and, behold, you soar. The Die never deviates from the Tao, nor do you.

  The desire to manipulate your surrender to the Die so that you may gain from it is futile. Such surrender never frees you from the pains of the ego. You must give up all your struggling, all your purposes, values and goals, and then, only then, when you have given up the belief that you can use the Die to gain some ego end, will you discover liberation from your burdens and your life flow free.

  There is no compromise: you must surrender everything.

  ——from The Book of the Die

  24

  “I’m a virgin,” I said in a thin, delicate voice. “Please be gentle.”

  25

  There are two paths: you use the die, or you let the Die use you.

  —from The Book of the Die

  26

  “Christ,” I said heavily, “am I going to be sore.”

  27

  Ego, my friends, ego. It’s a paradoxical thing. The more I sought to destroy it through the dice the greater it grew. Each tumble of a die chipped off another splinter of the old self to feed the growing tissues of the dice man ego. I was killing past pride in myself as analyst, as article writer, as good-looking masculine male, as loving husband, but every corpse was fed to the cannibalistic ego of that superhuman creature I felt I was becoming. How proud I am of being the Dice Man! Whose primary purpose is supposed to kill all sense of pride in self. The only options I never permitted were those which might challenge his power and glory. All values might be shat upon except that. Take away that identity from me and I am a trembling, dread-filled clod, alone in an empty universe. With determination and dice, I am God.

  Once I wrote down as an option that I could (for a month) disobey any of the dice decisions if I felt like it and if I shook a subsequent odd number. I was frightened by the possibility. Only the realization that the act of “disobedience” would in fact be an act of obedience removed my panic. The dice neglected the option. Another time I thought of writing that from then on all dice decisions would be recommendations and not commands. In effect, I would be changing the role of dice from commander-in-chief to advisory council. The threat of having “free will” again paralyzed me; I never wrote the option.

  The dice continually humbled me. They ordered me to get drunk one Saturday: an act which I had found to be inconsistent with my dignity. Being drunk meant an absence of self-control which was inconsistent also with the detached
, experimental creature I was becoming as the Dice Man. However, I enjoyed it. The letting go was not very different from the insanities I had been committing while sober. I spent the evening with Lil and the Ecsteins and at midnight began making paper airplanes out of the manuscript pages of my proposed book on sadism and flying them out the window onto 72nd Street. My drunken pawing of Arlene was interpreted as drunken pawing. The incident marked another piece of evidence of the slow disintegration of Lucius Rhinehart.

  For February the dice ordered me to experiment with the Felloni-Rhinehart sex investigation. Specifically: “Do something new and valuable.” I squared up the cubes in their little box and spent several days trying to see what. I became depressed.

  The limitations in experimenting with human beings were great. You could force them to answer anything, but force them to do nothing. With the other animals, of course, you could ask them nothing and make them do anything. You could castrate them, cut out half their brain, make them walk over hot coals to get their dinner or their mate, deprive them of food, water, sex or society for days or months, give them LSD in such massive dosages that they died of excess ecstasy, cut off their limbs one by one and study mobility and so on. Such experimentation tells us journalsful about castrated mice, brainless rats, schizophrenic hamsters, lonely rabbits, ecstatic sloths and legless chimpanzees, but unfortunately nothing about man.

  For ethical reasons we aren’t allowed to ask subjects to do anything which they or their society consider unethical. The problem to which I was devoting my life—how much a human being can be changed—could never be touched by scientists, since the bone ingredient of all men is their resistance to change; and it is unethical to insist that subjects do anything they don’t want to do.

  I decided to try to change some of the subjects of the Felloni-Rhinehart investigations. Since the research dealt with sexual behavior I would try to change sexual attitudes, proclivities and actions. Unfortunately, I knew that it took two years of analysis to change a homosexual to heterosexual, and that then such change rarely occurred. Could I convert virgins to nymphomania? Masturbators to rakehood? Faithful wives to adulteresses? Seducers to ascetics? Very doubtful. But possible.