Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  In the fall the Die set up the assignment of infiltrating the numerous encounter groups in New York City. We were to try to introduce some of their group members into diceliving. We varied who we were from one encounter or sensitivity group to the next, sometimes acting as a couple, sometimes as strangers.

  I remember one time in particular: a weekend marathon we attended at the Fire Island Sensitivity Training Headquarters of Encounter Resources Society in late October, 1969.

  As with most psychotherapies, FISTH provided mental first aid by the prospective rich (the therapists) for the already rich (the patients), and the dozen people at this marathon were representative Americans: a magazine editor, a fashion designer, two corporation executives, a tax lawyer, three well-to-do housewives, one stockbroker, a freelance writer, a minor TV personality and a mod psychiatrist—seven men and five women, plus, I should add, two young hippies present tuition-free, as an extra added attraction for the two-hundred-dollar weekend paying clients. I was one of the two corporation executives and Linda a well-to-do housewife (divorced). The leaders were Scott (small, compact, athletic) and Marya (tall, lithe, ethereal), both of whom were fully qualified psychotherapists. Our main meeting place was the huge living room of a Victorian house on the ocean outside Quoquam, Fire Island.

  Friday evening and all day Saturday we did a few loosening-up exercises to get to know each other better: we played pitch and catch for a while with the hippie girl; we had a tug of war; we stared into each other’s eyes like used-car salesmen; we symbolically gangbanged the woman who had the first crying jag; shouted shitheads and cocksuckers at each other for an invigorating half hour; played musical chairs with half the group being sitters and the other half being chairs; played “get the guest” with the minor TV personality, by taking turns seeing who could be the most obnoxious to her; played blind man’s bluff with everybody blind—except for Marya, who stood by whispering hoarsely, “Really FEEL him, Joan, put your HANDS on him.”

  By Saturday evening we were exhausted, but felt very close to one another and very liberated for doing publicly with strangers what previously we had only done privately with friends: namely, feeling each other up and calling each other shitheads and cocksuckers. The more bizarre games reminded me pleasantly of life on a dull day in a Dice Center, but every time I’d begin to relax and enjoy some pattern-breaking event, one of our leaders would start getting us to talk honestly about our feelings and it would begin to rain clichés.

  So by close to midnight we were all lying in various informal states of decomposition against the walls of the bare living room watching the spontaneous light-show the firelight was making on our faces from the blazing logs, while Marya tried to get the other corporation executive, a balding little man named Henry Hopper, to open up about his true feelings. I’d just called him a “liberal fink,” Linda had called him a virile-looking hunk of man, and the hippie girl had called him a “capitalist pig.” For some reason Hopper was maintaining that he was confused in his feelings. Two or three of the group were trying to help Marya, assuming that we were beginning another round of “get the guest,” but many of the others looked tired and a bit bored. Nevertheless, Marya, a slender brighteyed fanatic on the subject of honesty, pressed onward—in a soft husky voice that reminded me of a bad actress doing a bedroom scene.

  “Just tell us, Hank,” she said. “Let it come out.”

  “Frankly, I don’t feel like saying anything right now.” He was nervously breaking open peanut shells and eating peanuts.

  “You’re chicken, Hank,” a big, beefy tax lawyer contributed.

  “I’m not chicken,” Mr. Hopper said in a quiet voice. “I’m just scared shitless.” Linda and I and Mr. Hopper were the only ones who laughed.

  “Humor is a defense mechanism, Hank,” leader Marya said. “Why are you scared?” she asked, her blue eyes blazing sincerely.

  “I guess I’m afraid the group won’t like me as much if I tell them I think we’re wasting our time.”

  “Right,” said Marya, smiling with encouragement.

  Mr. Hopper just looked at the floor and arranged the peanut shells on the rug in front of him.

  “You’re not sharing with us, Hank,” Marya said after a while. She smiled. “You don’t trust us.”

  Mr. Hopper just stared at the floor, the firelight reflecting brightly off his balding head.

  After another few minutes of unsuccessful sniping, coleader Scott suggested we try some trust exercises with Hank: namely, play pitch and catch with him to help him come to trust us. So we formed a circle and tossed him around among ourselves until he had a blissful smile on his face, and then Marya had him lowered to the floor, where she knelt by him and, smiling with half-closed eyes, suggested in a soft voice that he tell us the truth about everything. Before he could begin, though, Linda interrupted.

  “Lie,” she said.

  “Beg pardon,” he said, still smiling dreamily from the flowing caresses of being manipulated by a roomful of people.

  “Tell lies,” Linda said. “It’s much easier.” She was seated against the wall opposite the fire with her legs curled under her.

  “Why, Linda, what are you saying?” Marya asked.

  “I’m suggesting Hank really let go and just lie to us. Tell us whatever he feels like saying with no inhibiting effort to get at some illusion we call truth.”

  “Why are you afraid of truth, Linda?” Marya asked, smiling. Her smile had begun to remind me of Dr. Felloni’s nod.

  “I’m not afraid of truth,” Linda answered with a slow drawl, half imitating Marya’s. “I just find it far less fun and far less liberating than lies.”

  “You’re sick,” contributed the burly tax lawyer.

  “Oh I don’t know,” I said from my corner of the room. “Huck Finn was the greatest liar in American literature and he seemed to have a lot of fun and be pretty liberated.”

  The sudden appearance of two challengers to the godhead of honesty was unprecedented.

  “Let’s get back to Mr. Hopper,” said coleader Scott pleasantly. “Tell us now, Hank, why were you so scared before?”

  Mr. Hopper answered promptly:

  “I was scared because you wanted truth, and both the answers I felt like making seemed to me to be half-lies. I was confused.”

  “Confusion is only a symptom of repression,” Marya said, smiling. “You know there are unpleasant aspects to your true feelings which you’re ashamed of. But if you’d just share them with us, they’d no longer bug you.”

  “Lie about them,” Linda said, stretching her lovely legs into the middle of the room. “Exaggerate. Fantasize. Make up some junk that you think will entertain us.”

  “Why do you want the spotlight?” Marya, smiling and tense, asked Linda.

  “I enjoy lying,” Linda answered. “And if I can’t talk, I can’t lie.”

  “Ah come on,” said the magazine editor. “What’s so much fun about lying?”

  “What’s so much fun about pretending to be honest?” she replied.

  “We’re not aware that we’re pretending, Linda,” Scott said.

  “Maybe that’s why you’re all tense,” Linda countered.

  Since Linda was more relaxed at this point than either Marya or Scott, it was oneupmanship parfait, and several people smiled.

  “Lies are a way of covering up,” Marya said.

  “Being honest and truthful the way we do here is like cheap striptease, a lot of motion to reveal that there are boobs and pricks and asses in the world, something we all knew in the first place.”

  “Aren’t boobs and pricks beautiful, Linda?” asked Marya in her softest and most sincere voice.

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on which illusion I feel like supporting.”

  “Our genitalia are always beautiful,” Marya said.

  “You obviously haven’t looked lately,” Linda answered, yawning.

  “I doubt you’ve ever really faced your sexual shame and guilt,” Marya
said.

  “I have and they bore me,” replied Linda, smothering another yawn.

  “Boredom is—”

  “Are your breasts and cunt beautiful?” Linda asked Marya abruptly.

  “Yes, and so are yours.”

  “Then show us your beautiful genitalia.”

  No one was particularly bored now. Marya sat with her back to the fire and a fixed smile on her face, staring vaguely at Linda. Scott cleared his throat noisily and leaned forward to the rescue.

  “This isn’t a beauty contest, Linda,” he said. “You’re obviously trying—”

  “Marya has a beautiful cunt. She’s not ashamed of it. We’re not supposed to be ashamed of it. Let’s see it.”

  “I don’t think this is an appropriate occasion,” Marya said. She wasn’t smiling.

  “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Linda replied. “Don’t deny us.”

  “I partly feel that my role as leader—”

  “Partly!” Linda said, waking up. “Partly? You mean in fact that feelings and truth can be broken into parts?” Linda began taking off her blouse.

  “I don’t wish to cause embarrassment to anyone here,” Marya said. “Our purpose is to get at real attitudes, real feelings, to … ah … ah, to explore … ah …”

  But no one was paying much attention, since Linda, with serene concentration, had now removed her bra and her skirt and her panties and was sitting nude, legs apart, with her back to the wall. When she finished she had to smother another yawn. The firelight made a decidedly splendid effect on her white skin. For a while there was silence.

  “Are you embarrassed, Linda?” Marya asked quietly, her face again frozen in a smile.

  Linda sat silently with her back to the wall, looking at the rug between her legs. Tears began to form in her eyes. She suddenly drew up her knees, put her face into her hands and sobbed.

  “Oh yes yes,” she said. “I’m ashamed! I’m ashamed!” She was crying.

  No one spoke or moved.

  “You needn’t feel that way,” Marya said, getting on her knees and beginning to crawl toward Linda.

  “My body is ugly ugly ugly,” Linda sobbed. “I can’t stand it.”

  “I don’t think it’s ugly,” said Mr. Hopper, pushing his peanuts away from him off to the side.

  “It’s not ugly, Linda,” Marya said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “It is. It is. I’m a slut.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t really feel that.”

  “I can’t?” Linda asked, raising her head with a startled expression.

  “Your body is beautiful,” Marya added.

  “Yeah, I agree,” said Linda, abruptly sitting back and stretching out her legs again. “‘Good round teats, good firm ass, juicy cunt. Nothing to complain about. Anyone want a feel?”

  Everyone was caught leaning forward sympathetically with his mouth open and eyes bulging and nothing to say.

  “If it’s beautiful, touch it, Marya,” Linda added.

  “I’ll volunteer,” Mr. Hopper said.

  “Not yet, Hank,” Linda said, smiling affectionately at him. “Marya’s got a thing about beautiful genitalia.”

  We all looked at Marya, who hesitated, and then, with tight-lipped determination, put her hands delicately on Linda’s shoulders, then her breasts. Her face relaxed a bit and she slid her hands down to the tummy and across the pubic hair and onto the thighs.

  “You’re lovely, Linda,” she said, sitting back on her heels and smiling a relaxed, almost triumphant smile.

  “Would you like to suck me off?” Linda asked.

  “N … no thank you,” Marya answered, flushing.

  “Your love of beauty and all.”

  “Is it my turn?” asked Mr. Hopper.

  “What are you trying to prove?” Scott snapped out at Linda.

  Linda looked over at him and patted Marya on her bare knee.

  “Nothing,” she said to Scott. “I just feel like acting the way I’m acting.”

  “You admit you’re just acting?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she answered. Then she sat up and directed her sincere blue eyes at Mr. Hopper. “I’m afraid a part of you is embarrassed by all this, right, Hank?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he smiled nervously.

  “But part of you is enjoying it.”

  He laughed.

  “Part of you thinks I’m a nervy bitch.”

  He hesitated and then nodded.

  “And a part of you thinks I’m the most honest one here.”

  “You’re damn right,” he answered abruptly.

  “Which one is the real you?”

  He frowned and seemed to be concentrating on self-analysis.

  “I guess the real me is the one—”

  “Oh shit, Hank. You’re not being honest.”

  “I’m not? I didn’t even tell you which one—”

  “But is one any more real than the next?”

  “You sophist whore!” I blurted out.

  “What’s with you, Big Daddy?” Linda asked.

  “You’re a sick sophist hypocritical Communist nihilist slut.”

  “You’re a big, handsome brainless nobody.”

  “Just because you’re pretty, you seduce poor Hopper into liking you. But the real Hopper knows you for what you are: a cheap, neurotic two-bit sophist anti-American divorcée.”

  “Now just a minute—” Scott interrupted, leaning toward me.

  “But I know her type, Scott,” I went on. “Stagestruck since she first grew pubic hair, subverting her way into good men’s pants with cheap, five-and-dime-store sophist sex techniques, and ruining the lives of one hundred percent American men. We all know her: nothing but a diseased anarchist hippie uptight sophist bitch.”

  Linda’s mouth twisted grotesquely, tears formed again in her eyes and she finally burst into tears, rolling onto her stomach and flexing her buttock muscles impressively in grief. She sobbed and sobbed.

  “Oh I know I know,” she said finally between gasps. “I am a slut, I am. You’ve seen the real me. Take my body and do what you will.”

  “Jesus, the dame is nuts,” said the burly tax lawyer.

  “Should we comfort her?” asked Mr. Hopper.

  “Stop pretending!” snapped Scott. “We know you don’t really feel guilty.”

  But Linda, still crying, was getting back into her clothes. When dressed again, she curled up in a corner in the fetal position. The room was very quiet.

  “I know that type,” I said confidently. “A hot, slimy, ball-breaking one-time sophist feminist lay, but nervous as a vibrator.”

  “But which is the real Linda?” Mr. Hopper said dreamily to no one in particular.

  “Who cares?” I sneered.

  “Who cares?” echoed Linda, sitting up again and yawning. Then she leaned toward Mr. Hopper.

  “What are your true feelings now, Hank?”

  For a moment the question caught him off guard; then he smiled.

  “Happy confusion,” he said loudly.

  “And how do you feel now, Linda?” asked Marya, but the question was met by six or seven groans from group members seated around the room.

  Linda flipped a pair of green dice out onto the middle of the rug and, after looking mischievously at each of us in turn, asked quietly:

  “Anyone want to play some games?”

  Linda was marvelous. After we’d gotten most of the members of an encounter group to splinter off from the original leader and meet only with us (as happened on Fire Island that weekend), they came to see that with us truth and honesty were irrelevant; we approved good acting and bad, role playing and out-of-role playing, baddie roles and goodie roles, truth and lies.

  When one individual would try to pretend to be his “real” self and call the others back to “reality,” we would try to encourage our diceplayers to ignore him and go right on playing their dice-dictated roles. When someone else, as the result of playing out some role dammed up insid
e him for years, broke down and cried, the group would at first rally around the bawler to reassure him, as they’d gotten used to doing in traditional encounter groups. We tried to show them that this was the worst thing they could do; the crier should be ignored or be responded to solely within the roles that were already being played.

  We wanted them to come to realize that neither “immorality” nor “emotional breakdowns” earn either condemnation or pity except when the Die so dictates. We wanted them to come to see that in group diceplay they are free of the usual games, rules and behavior patterns. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. No one—least of all us, the leaders—is reliable. When a person becomes reassured that he lives in a totally valueless, unreal, unstable, inconsistent world, he becomes free to be fully all of his selves—as the dice dictate. In these cases when the other group members respond conventionally to someone’s breakdown, our work is undone: the sufferer feels frightened and ashamed. He believes that the “real world” and its conventional attitudes exist even in group diceplay.

  And it’s his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him. His “reality,” his “reason,” his “society”: these are what must be destroyed.

  All that fall Linda and I did our very best.

  In addition to our work with various groups, Linda went to work on H. J. Wipple, a philanthropist whom I’d gotten interested in building a Dice Center for us in southern California, and construction speeded up considerably soon thereafter. Work even began on renovating a boys’ camp in the Catskills for a second center. The world was getting ready for dicepeople.

  50

  The birth of the first dicebaby in the world was, I suppose, an event of some historical importance. It was just after Christmas that I got a phone-call from Arlene saying that she and Jake were rushing off to the hospital to have our dicebaby. They knew where I could be reached since I’d stopped off two days before to give them each a Christmas present: Arlene a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Jake a rakish bathing suit (Not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done).

  Arlene’s private room was a messy jumble from two opened suitcases filled, as far as I could see, entirely with baby clothes. I noticed at least thirty diapers with two green dice branded on each, and many pajamas, shirts, pants, and tiny baby socks seemed to be similarly monogrammed. Arlene was sitting up against some pillows, and the baby, which had apparently just been brought in to her to hold, squirmed a bit and hic-coughed, but didn’t seem to be saying much.