Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  “I love your big prick, Luke. Let’s go.”

  Miss Welish looked in awe from one to the other.

  “You too, baby,” Dr. Rhinehart said to her.

  “Come along, Joya,” Mrs. Ecstein said. “It’ll be fun.” She touched Miss Welish lightly on the breasts and went into the bathroom to her left. Miss. Welish watched Mrs. Ecstein leave and then found herself face to face with Dr. Rhinehart again.

  “Most beautiful body in the world, baby, except your knee. Let’s go.”

  She stared at him.

  “But here?” she said.

  “Here and now, baby, that’s all there is.”

  He moved around her to the bathroom, held the door open and waited. With a swift backward glance up the empty hallway she walked toward the bathroom.

  “You people are really amazing,” she said. “Are all psychiatrists’ parties like this?”

  “Only Dr. Mann’s,” Dr. Rhinehart said and followed her in.

  46

  [Being excerpts from Dr. Ecstein’s case history study entitled “The Case of the Six-Sided Man.”]

  After R had broken off his conversation and left them, the three psychiatrists were joined by Dr. M. After discussing the situation they decided that R ought to be taken immediately to a private clinic. M telephoned the—Clinic and then we went to locate R.

  He was not outside, nor was he in M’s office, but it was soon ascertained that he had locked himself in the bathroom. At first the doctors were concerned for R’s life, but were reassured by the sound of other voices from the room. We called to those inside, but received no answer. For two minutes M tried to talk rationally with the patient but we heard only grunts in reply. B wanted to break the door down and enter, but M and E urged caution considering R’s bulk and strength. An ambulance with attendants would soon arrive. Then female screams were heard from within the bathroom, and it was ascertained that the women with R were in all likelihood A and JW, female acquaintances of E and B.

  The door was broken down. It was disclosed that R had been in the process of raping the two females. The clothes of both were in extreme disarray and R’s genitals were exposed and tumescent. He stood in the center of the room slobbering lasciviously and grunting. He seemed to have regressed to the bestial state. He could answer none of our questions and resisted our efforts to separate him from the females only in the most clumsy and ineffectual way. He had become docile.

  The two females seemed in a state of shock and could not explain their delay in calling for help. Whether it was the threat of R’s great strength or some inexplicable hypnotic power occasionally exerted by the mentally imbalanced has never been determined. B had a different theory. Eventually, both females emerged from shock and burst into tears.

  “It was horrible,” said A.

  “The things he tried to make us do,” said JW.

  R only slobbered and grunted. The doctors had to dress him themselves, since he seemed incapable of it himself. B and M both advanced the hypothesis that the patient had subsided into a catatonic state. E, however even at this early date, was able to postulate that R’s breakdowns were random and sporadic and that a spontaneous remission of symptoms should be expected.

  Such was the case. Ten minutes later as all sat quietly and in great fatigue waiting for an ambulance, R began talking again. He apologized sincerely and realistically for his behavior, praised the doctors for the gentle and intelligent way they had handled a difficult situation, reassured them that he was now at last completely himself again, and after twenty minutes or so had most of those present laughing at the whole situation, when abruptly, just as the ambulance arrived, he threw himself on the only woman left in the room, Dr F, and seemed to be attempting coitus. The attendants and doctor arrived, he was pulled off, an injection was administered and the patient was taken to —Clinic… .

  When, the following day, E was able to visit him, it soon became apparent that R was under the illusion that he was a young hippie of extremely sarcastic bent. Although he related to E, it was in a negative, aggressive way. The patient, although in complete contact with reality and often extremely observant, was not himself, and thus was still insane.

  On July 17 it was reported by the clinic that the patient spent his time in total silence, staring into space and occasionally grunting. He had to be spoon-fed and was unable to control his excretory functions. It seemed that a permanent catatonic state might have been reached.

  But R’s recuperative powers continued to amaze. On the next day it was reported that he was talking again, relating well to the staff and physicians and requesting reading material, mostly of a religious nature. This last fact naturally worried E, so on July 20 he visited R again at the clinic.

  47

  While I bounced nicely from role to role in the Kolb Clinic, the rest of the world continued, I regret to say, to exist. Arlene wrote me that the dice had told her that I was the father of the baby-to-be and that she had told Lil and Jake and most of the rest of the world the truth, or most of it, and thus Jake knew of our affair and of the dicelife. She said she couldn’t come to my therapy for a while.

  Lil came to visit me just once to congratulate me on my future father-hood and to announce that she had initiated divorce proceedings by taking out the necessary separation papers and that her lawyer would be visiting me shortly. (He did, but I was in the state of catatonia at the time.) She stated that separation and divorce were clearly best for both of us especially since I would undoubtedly be spending much of the rest of my life in mental institutions.

  Dr. Vener of QSH told me that my former patient Eric Cannon had, after two months of leading a growing herd of hippies in Brooklyn and in the East Village, been recommitted to the hospital by his father. He also noted that Arturo Toscanini Jones had been recommitted—on a technicality unearthed by diligent police—and was not asking to see me.

  In fact, the only good news I was getting from the rest of the world was from my patients in dice therapy. All took my being locked up perfectly in their stride, continued to try to develop their dicelife on their own and waited patiently and confidently for my return to them. Terry Tracy visited me twice at the clinic and spent two and a half hours trying to convert me to the Ultimate Truth of the Religion of the Die. I was deeply moved.

  Professor Boggles wrote me a long letter about a mystical experience he had had in Central Park after following the Die and writing a particularly nonsensical article on Theodore Dreiser and the Lyrical Impulse. Two of my new patients visited me regularly during my second week at the clinic and had me continue therapy there with them.

  Arlene’s letter explaining what was happening on the home front made me quite proud of her and prepared me for my interviews with Jake. She told me that Jake had taken her confession of infidelity quite calmly but had bawled her out for keeping valuable scientific material all to herself. He had ordered her to limit her dicelife to the socially conventional until he had an opportunity to study the situation. She had then suggested that it might help him understand my problems better if he experimented with some of the dice games with her. He agreed, and they had had the best night together they’d had since high school days. Jake said he found it interesting.

  When he visited me on July 20 in the early evening I apologized to him immediately for any of my actions in the past which might have hurt him. It so fell that I was in the first day of The Old Pre-D-Day Luke Rhinehart Week—a role I found very hard to play. I told him that by all conventional standards what I had done in seducing his wife was unforgivable, but that I hoped he understood my philosophical aims in following the dice.

  “Yeah, Luke,” he said, sitting down in a chair opposite my bed and in front of a lovely barred window overlooking a wall. “But you’re a strange one, got to admit. Tough nut to crack, so to speak.” He took out a small note pad and pen. “Like to know more about this dice man life of yours.”

  “You’re sure, Jake,” I said, “that there’s no, well, no resen
tment over any of the ways which I may have betrayed you, lied to you or humiliated you?”

  “Can’t humiliate me, Luke; a man’s mind should be above emotion.” He was looking down at his pad writing. “Tell me about this dice man stuff.”

  I was sitting up in my bed and I leaned back comfortably into the four pillows I had had piled behind me and prepared to tell Jake what I had learned.

  “It’s really amazing, Jake. It’s shown me emotions in myself I never knew existed.” I paused. “I think I’ve stumbled onto something important, something psychotherapy has been looking for for centuries. Arlene told you I’ve got a small group of students in dice therapy. There are other doctors trying it as well. It’s … well, maybe I’d better give you the whole background theory and history …”

  With much dignity, I summarized in about half an hour the Dice Man in theory and practice. I thought a lot of what I had to say was quite funny, but Jake never smiled, except professionally: to give me confidence to go on.

  Finally I concluded: “And thus my eccentricities, inconsistencies, absurdities, and breakdowns of the last year have all been the logical consequence of a highly original but highly rational approach to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

  There was a silence.

  “I realized that in developing dice theory I have done things which have caused suffering to others as well as myself, but insofar as all was necessary to bring me to my present spiritual state, it may be justified.”

  Again there was a silence until at last Jake raised his head.

  “Well?” I asked. With my arms folded on my chest I awaited with incredible tension Jake’s evaluation of my theory and my life.

  “So?” he said.

  “So?” I replied.

  “You want I should cheer?”

  “But why not? I … aren’t I developing a facet of man too long impressed in the jail of personality?”

  “You’ve just described to me in great detail the classic symptoms of schizophrenia: multiple selves, detachment, elation-depression; you want I should cheer?”

  “But the schizophrenic becomes split and multiple against his will; he longs for unity. I have consciously created my schizophrenia.”

  “You show a total inability to relate to anyone personally.”

  “But if the dice tell me to I can.”

  “If it can be turned on and off it’s not normal human relatedness.” He was looking at me calmly and without expression, whereas I was getting excited.

  “But how do you know that normal, uncontrollable human relatedness is more desirable than my switch-button variety?”

  He didn’t answer. After a while he said:

  “Did the dice tell you to tell me?”

  “They told Arlene.”

  “Did they tell you both to throw some lies in too?”

  “No, that was our personal contribution.”

  “The dice are wrecking your career.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “They’ve ruined your marriage.”

  “Naturally.”

  “They make it impossible for me or anyone else to rely on anything you say or do from now on.”

  “True.”

  “They mean that anything you begin may be abandoned right at the point of fruition by a whim of a die.”

  “Yes.”

  “Including the investigations of the dice man.”

  “Ah, Jake, you understand perfectly.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Why don’t you try it too?” I asked warmly.

  “It’s possible.”

  “We could become the Dynamic Dice Duo, dealing dreams and destruction to the pattern-plagued world of modern man.”

  “Yes, that’s interesting.”

  “You’re about the only one I know intelligent enough to understand what the Dice Man is really all about.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Well?”

  “Have to think it over, Luke. It’s a big step.”

  “Sure, I understand.”

  “It’s got to be Oedipal; that damn father of yours.”

  “Wha—what?”

  “That time when you were three and your mother—”

  “Jake! What are you talking about?” I asked loudly and with irritation. “I’ve just unfolded the most imaginative new life system in the history of man and you start talking old Freudian mythology.”

  “Huh? Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, smiling his professional smile. “Go ahead.”

  But I laughed, bitterly I’m afraid.

  “No, never mind. I’m tired of talking today,” I said.

  Jake leaned forward and stared at me intently.

  “I’ll cure you,” he said. “I’ll tie you back into the old Luke or my name isn’t Jake Ecstein. Don’t you worry.”

  I sighed.

  “Yeah,” I said dully. “I won’t worry.”

  48

  Freedom, Reader, is an awful thing: so Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus, and dictators throughout the world continually tell us. I spent many days that summer thinking about what I would do with my life, oscillating hour to hour from joy to gloom, madness to boredom. They probably would have kept me locked up in the Kolb Clinic forever, but Jake Ecstein was my psychiatrist and unlike most other ambitious, successful doctors, Jake listened only to Jake. Thus, when I seemed perfectly normal for the first two weeks of August (it was a “Back to Normalcy” period) he ordered them to let me out. It seemed an unreasonable thing to do, even to me.

  I went to a dingy hotel in the East Village that made the geriatrics ward at QSH seem like a plush retirement villa. I sweated and sulked and wandered out to play a few dice roles and dice games and sometimes I enjoyed myself thoroughly, but those nights alone in that hotel room were not among the high points of my life.

  I was lonely. There was no one to whom I could go and say: “Aren’t I wonderful; I left my wife and my job in order to toss dice and become a random man. If you’re lucky the dice may let me finish this conversation.”

  I had thought at first that nothing should be impossible to the Dice Man at any given moment: that I could become that elusive Totally Random Man. It was an elevating aspiration. I might not be more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but in terms of being free at any given moment to do whatever the dice or the spontaneous “I” might dictate, I would be, compared to all known past human beings, a superman.

  But I was lonely. Superman at least had a regular job and Lois Lane. But being a real superbeing, one capable of marvels and miracles compared to the mechanical and repetitious acrobatics of Superman and Batman, was lonely. I’m sorry, fans, but that’s how I felt.

  The problem of boredom which the Die had so successfully solved seemed, now that I was approaching the totally free state, to be reappearing. My own family and friends had been boring enough, but I began to feel that the average humans I was encountering in the streets and bars and hotels of Fun City were far worse. The dice had introduced me already to such variety that I was beginning to find, like Solomon, that it was difficult to find anything new under the sun.

  As a wealthy southern aristocrat I had seduced a young, reasonably presentable typist and kept her two nights (“Y’all shore do have a nice boahdy”) before the dice reincarnated me as a Bowery bum. I stored all my cash and some new clothes I had bought in a locker, stopped shaving and for two days and nights panhandled and got drunk on the Lower East Side. I didn’t get much sleep and felt lonelier than ever, my only friends being an occasional stray derelict who would hang around until he was sure I was really broke. I got so hungry that I finally straightened up my clothes as best I could and stole a box of crackers and two cans of tuna fish from a small supermarket. A young clerk looked very suspicious but after I’d finished my “browsing” I asked him if they sold amoratycemate and that shut him up while I left.

  As a life-insurance salesman lookin
g for a fresh lay, I failed to get anywhere and spent another lonely night. I spent two days playing with a thousand dollars in a Wall Street brokerage house, letting the Die buy and sell or hold at its discretion, and I only lost two hundred dollars but I was still bored.

  The dice continued to refuse to permit me to see my patients in dice therapy and cut back my analytic hours with Jake to a haphazard once a week. Dr. Mann was trying to veto any further work for me at QSH and didn’t seem to be inviting me to any more of his parties. Miss Reingold greeted me any morning I happened to come to the office with the cool aplomb of someone letting Jack the Ripper into her bedroom. The only one who treated me more or less as usual was Jake, but he probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelash if I’d turned into Grandma Moses right before his eyes.

  About nine o’clock one hot August evening, sitting crowded and lonely at one end of a packed Village bar and having crumpled up in the course of the previous two days at least four separate lists of options, I had to face the fact that now that I was free to be absolutely anything, I was rapidly becoming interested in absolutely nothing: a somewhat distressing development. It was such an original experience, however, that I began to laugh happily to myself, my big belly shaking like an old engine warming up. With a tart, evil-tasting beer awash in my tummy and unfinished in my glass, I thought of telephoning Jake and pretending to be Erich Fromm calling from Mexico City. I dismissed it as a symptom of loneliness. I thought of yelling, “Drinks on me!” but my organic frugality vetoed the impulse. I daydreamed about buying a yacht and circling the globe.

  “Well, if it isn’t old Coitus Interruptus himself.”

  The voice, sharp and feminine, was followed by the fact, soft and feminine, and the recognition, hard and masculine, of the half-smiling face of Linda Reichman.

  “Er, hello, Linda,” I said, not too suavely. I found myself instinctively trying to remember what role I was supposed to be playing.

  “What brings you here?” she asked.

  “Oh. I … don’t know. I sort of drifted here.”

  She edged between my neighbor and me and placed her drink on the bar. Her eyes were heavily made up, her hair a more deeply bleached blond than I remembered it, her body—no need to speculate about her measurements; her breasts swayed bralessly against a tight-fitting multicolored T-shirt. She looked very sexy in a debauched sort of way and she eyed me with curiosity.