“Okay, what?”
“Okay, I’ll have a sex experience.”
“But what kinds interest you?”
“Any. Doesn’t make any difference.”
The teacher handed Dr. E the basic list of thirty-six possible love roles.
“Are there any that particularly appeal to you or any that you would prefer not to have as possible options of the Die?” he asked.
Dr. E looked over the list: “You wish to be loved slavishly by a ——,” “You wish to love slavishly a ——,” “You wish to be courted sweetly by a ——,” “You wish to court sweetly ——,” “You wish to be raped by a ——,” “You wish to rape a ——,” “You wish to watch pornographic films,” “You wish to watch other people’s sexual activities,” “You wish to striptease,” “To watch a striptease,” “You wish to be someone’s mistress, a prostitute, a stud, a call girl, a male prostitute, happily married to—”
Most of the options gave the choice of alternatives for performing the sexual role with: a young woman, an older woman, a young man, an older man, a man and a woman, two men or two women.
“What’s all this?” Dr. Ecstein asked.
“Simply choose those you are willing to play, make a list and let the dice choose one for you to play.”
“Better scratch the ‘rape’ and the ‘be raped.’ Had enough of those in the marriage room.”
“All right. Any others, Phil?”
“Stop calling me names.”
“Sorry, Roger.”
“Better throw out the homosexual stuff. Might hurt my reputation outside.”
“But no one in here knows who you are or ever will know.”
“I’m Jake Ecstein, damn it! I’ve said that six times.”
“I know that, Elijah, but there are five other Jake Ecsteins in here this week as well, so I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“Five others!”
“Certainly. Would you like to meet some before you try your first random sex experience?”
“You’re Goddam right.”
The teacher took Dr. E into a room named Cocktail Party where a crowd milled and drinks were served. The teacher took a portly gentleman by the elbow and said to him:
“Jake, I’d like you to meet Roger. Roger, Jake Ecstein.”
“Goddam it,” Dr. Ecstein said. “I’m Jake Ecstein!”
“Oh are you really?” the portly gentleman said. “I am too. How nice. I’m very pleased to meet you, Jake.”
Dr. E permitted himself to shake hands.
“Have you met the tall thin Jake Ecstein yet?” the portly one asked. “Awfully pleasant chap.”
“No, I haven’t. And I don’t want to.”
“Well, he is a bit dull, but not the young-man-with-the-muscles Jake. Him you must meet, Jake.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I’m the real Jake Ecstein.”
“How extraordinary. I am too.”
“I mean in the outside world.”
“But that’s what I mean too. And so does the tall thin Jake and the young muscled Jake and the lovely young girl Jakie Ecstein. All of them.”
“But I’m really the real Jake Ecstein.”
“How extraordinary! I too am really …”
Jake passed up a love experience and got rid of his teacher and decided he needed to have a good dinner. He had read the center’s Game Rules and knew as he ate in the cafeteria that the waiters might not be real waiters, that the guy slinging hash behind the counter might be a bank president, that the cashier might be a famous actress, that the woman sitting opposite him might be a writer of children’s stories although she was apparently pretending, despite weighing close to two hundred pounds, to be Marlene Dietrich.
“You bore me, dahling,” she was saying, her chubby mouth manhandling a cigarette.
“You’re not exactly dynamite yourself, baby,” he replied eating rapidly.
“Where are all the men in this place,” she drawled. “I seem to meet only fruits.”
“And I meet only vegetables. So?” Jake answered.
“I beg your pardon. Who are you?”
“I’m Cassius Clay and I’ll slug you in the teeth if you don’t let me eat in peace.”
Marlene Dietrich relapsed into silence and Jake ate on, enjoying himself for the first time since his arrival. Suddenly he saw his wife enter the cafeteria, followed by a teenage boy.
“Arlene!” he cried, half-standing.
“George!” she cried back.
Marlene Dietrich left the table and Dr. E waited for Arlene to join him, but instead she sat down at a corner table with the teenage boy. Annoyed, he got up when he’d finished and went over to their table.
“Well, what do you think of it so far?” he asked her.
“George, I’d like you to meet my son, John. John, this is George Fleiss, a very successful used-car salesman.”
“How do you do,” the boy said, sticking out a thin hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Yeah, well, look, I’m really Cassius Clay,” he said.
“Oh I am sorry,” Arlene answered.
“You’ve gotten out of shape,” the boy said indifferently.
Dr. E sat down with them, feeling glum. He did so want to be recognized as Jake Ecstein, psychiatrist. He tried a new tack.
“What’s your name?” he asked his wife.
“Maria,” she answered with a smile. “And this is my boy, John.”
“Where’s Edgarina?”
“My daughter is at home.”
“And your husband?”
Arlene frowned.
“Unfortunately, he has passed away,” she said.
“Oh great,” said Dr. E.
“I beg your pardon!” said she, standing abruptly.
“Oh, ah, sorry. I was overcome with disturbance,” Dr. E said, motioning his wife to sit. “Look,” he went on, “I like you. I like you very much. Perhaps we could stay together a while.”
“I’m sorry,” Arlene said softly. “I’m afraid people would talk.”
“People would talk? How?”
“You are a colored man and I am white,” she said.
Dr. Ecstein let his mouth hang open and for the first time in his last nineteen years experienced something which he realized later may have been self-pity.
61
We were in someone’s photography lab; the patient was lying on a table being held by two friends and the lights were the extra bright ones used for portraits. I could see the wound quite clearly; it was wide and nasty, but it hadn’t been deep. I’d never extracted an object from someone’s side before, and I’d probably done a sloppy job of it, but the object—a fragment of metal almost an inch long and half an inch wide—was out, using aseptic technique, and the wound would be closed efficiently. And I could tell Eric Cannon and his friends what they wanted to know: that the fragment hadn’t struck a vital organ and that, assuming no infection, they could expect their friend to recuperate without further medical aid.
When I was done I’d lost about six pounds in sweat and felt that whatever establishment had granted me a medical degree and assumed that doctors were good at all medical problems was insane.
Eric had stood off to the side during the proceedings, and when I’d finished and wandered dazedly away from the table, he came up to me and steered me to a couch in the back of the room.
“Thanks,” he said, pulling up some sort of a stool and sitting opposite me. His long hair had been cut and, although he was dressed casually in dungarees, he looked surprisingly respectable.
“I’m a psychiatrist,” I said. “I treat people before they get bombed.”
“Yeah, but you know the difference between a man’s kidney and his heart.”
“Usually.”
“Are you thinking of reporting this?” He looked at me evenly, without either confidence or fear.
I dragged out a die.
“Only one-sixth of me believes in medical ethics.” I cast the die. “No report.�
��
He continued to stare at me.
“You’re absolutely untrustworthy.”
I didn’t reply. It had been four months since the Great Mental Hospital Escape and I’d given even odds to saying yes when Eric had phoned me suddenly asking for help. Although I’d received in the mail a revolutionary publication that his group was apparently producing, I’d had no idea they were into anything involving what I assumed was a grenade or a bomb.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun.”
“Ahh.”
“We use any old object we can find for bullets.”
“So I see.”
A young girl brought us cups of coffee and some guy a plate with sandwiches and cookies, and I confess I ate more than my share of the food. Eric just sipped his coffee, asked me a few questions about how “Ray” should be treated after I left and then stood up abruptly. And then sat down again. He leaned forward toward me.
“Look. You helped Arturo and me escape. You helped us with Ray.” He seemed to be trying to read in my eyes an answer to a question he hadn’t yet asked. “You believe in change. In your way I guess you’re working for it. In our way, we are too.” He hesitated again. “I want you to consider working consistently and reliably with us.”
“Ahhh.”
“When I say consistently and reliably I mean only that we can depend on your never betraying us: You’d be free to help us sometimes, not help us at others.”
“It’s possible.”
Our heads were only about six inches apart again, exactly as they’d been in the cafeteria at QSH a few months before.
“Then give it a flip.”
“An odd number I guarantee never to betray you; an even, I won’t.”
The die fell four.
He continued to look at the die beside me on the couch.
“I’m untrustworthy,” I said.
“Still, can we count on you sometimes?”
“Oh yes. In each case we’ll just have to see.”
“We could use someone in something we’d like to do next month. You might be able to help us.”
“Possibly.”
The die fell six.
“Nope.”
He stared at the die.
“I’m untrustworthy,” I said. “That much you can count on.”
62
Our Dice Centers. Ah, the memories, the memories. Those, those were the days: the gods played with each other on earth once more. Such freedom! Such creativity! Such triviality! Such utter chaos! All unguided by the hand of man, but guided by the great blind Die who loves us all. Once, just once in my life have I known what it means to live in a community, to feel part of a larger purpose shared by my friends and my enemies about me. Only in my CETREs have I experienced total liberation—complete, shattering, unforgettable, total enlightenment. In the last year I have never failed to recognize instantly those who have spent a month in one of the centers, whether I’d seen them before or not. We but glance at each other, our faces explode with light, our laughter flows and we embrace. The world will go steadily downhill again if they close all our CETREs.
I suppose you’ve all read in one place or another all the typical mass-media hysteria about them: the love room, the orgies, the violence, the drugs, the breakdowns into psychosis, the crime, the madness. Time magazine did a fine article about us, entitled objectively: “The CETRE Sewers.” It went as follows:
The dregs of mankind have found a new gimmick: motel madhouses where anything goes. Founded in 1969 by naive philanthropist Horace J. Wipple under the guise of therapy centers, the Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments (CETREs) have been from the first unabashed invitations to orgy, rapine and insanity. Based on the premises of dice theory first expounded by quack psychiatrist Lucius M. Rhinehart (Time, Oct. 26, 1970), the Centers’ purported purpose is to liberate their clients from the burdens of individual identity. Those arriving for a 30-day stay in a Center are asked to abandon consistent names, clothing, mannerisms, personality traits, sexual proclivities, religious feelings—in brief, to abandon themselves.
The inmates—called “students,”—wear masks much of the time and follow the “Commands” of dice to determine how they spend their time or who they pretend they are. Ostensible therapists often turn out to be students experimenting with a new role. Policemen ostensibly keeping order are almost always students playing the game of policemen. Pot, hash and acid are rampant. Orgies go on every hour on the hour in rooms fancifully called “The Love Room” and “The Pit”—the latter being a totally blackened room with mattressed floor into which students crawl nude at the whim of the dice and where anything goes.
The results of this are predictable: a few sick people feel they’re having a marvelous time; a few healthy people go insane; and the rest somehow survive, often trying to convince themselves they’ve had a “significant experience.”
In Los Altos Hills, California, last week “significant experience” meant arrest for Evelyn Richards and Mike O’Reilly. The two were having a dice-demanded love feast on the lawn of Stanford University’s Whitmore Chapel, and townsmen and police were not amused.
Stanford students, frequent visitors to the Hills’ CETRE, are bitterly divided on the Dice Center. Students Richards and O’Reilly claim their hangups have disappeared since their three-week trip in the local Center. But Student Association President Bob Orly probably spoke for most of the students when he said:
“Mankind has always disintegrated when he has followed the call of those who urge him to give up self, ego and identity. The people lured into the Centers are the same ones who get lured deeper and deeper into the drug scene. The dicelife business is just another way of slow suicide for those too weak to try a real way.”
At week’s end, Palo Alto Police staged their second raid of the year on the Los Altos Hills Center, but netted nothing but a box of pornographic films, possibly filmed at the Centers. Manager Lawrence Taylor maintains that the only reason he regrets the raids is the favorable publicity it gives the Center among the young. “We’re having to turn away a hundred applicants a week. We don’t want to seem exclusive, but we just don’t have the facilities.”
A team of Time reporters discovered that friends and relatives of CETRE survivors are uniformly upset with the changes which have occurred in their loved ones. “Irresponsible, erratic, destructive” was the way nineteen-year-old Jacob Bleiss of New Haven described his father after Mr. Bleiss returned from the Catskill (N.Y.) CETRE. “He can’t hold a job, he’s not home a lot of the time, he hits my mother and he seems stoned half the time, only on nothing. He’s always laughing like an idiot.”
Irrational laughter, a classic symptom of hysteria, is one of the most dramatic manifestations of what psychiatrists are beginning to label the “CETRE sickness.” Dr. Jerome Rochman of Chicago University’s Hope Medical Center stated in Peoria last week:
“If I had been asked by someone to create an institution which would totally destroy the human personality with all its integrated grandeur—the striving, the moral questioning, the compassion for others and the sense of specific individual identity—I might have created CETREs. The results are predictable: apathy, unreliability, indecisiveness, manic depressions, inability to relate, social destructiveness, hysteria.”
Santa Clara District Court Judge Hobart Button perhaps summed up best the feelings of many people when he said to students Richards and O’Reilly: “The illusions that lead people to throw away their lives are appalling. The rush to drugs and to CETREs is like the rush of lemmings to the sea.”
Or the rush of rats into sewers.
Time was, within the necessary limits set by fiction, totally accurate. Over the course of two years five of their reporters went through a month-long stay at a CETRE. The bitterness of the article may partly reflect that three of their hirelings did not report back to Time.
Ever since money contributed by W
ipple, myself and others to the DICELIFE Foundation permitted us to build out first Dice Center, our CETREs have changed people. They destroy people for normal functioning within the insane society. It all started that fall with Linda when I realized that dice therapy worked slowly with most students because they always knew that other people expected them to be consistent and “normal”; a lifetime of conditioning to respond to such expectation wasn’t being broken by the partial and temporary free environments of dicegroups. Only in a total environment in which nothing is expected does a student feel the freedom necessary to express his host of minority selves clawing for life. And then, only by making the gradual change from the totally random environment of a CETRE through our “Halfway Houses” to the patterned society outside can we make it possible for the student to carry over his dicelife of freedom into the patterned world.
The story of the development of the various centers and of our theory behind them will be told in detail in Joseph Fineman’s forthcoming book, The History and Theory of Dice Centers (Random Press, 1972). The best single rendering of how the centers work to change a man determined not to change can be found in “The Case of the Square Cubed,” an autobiographical account by Dr. Jacob Ecstein. Jake’s personal story was first printed in The See of Whim (April, 1971, vol. II, no. 4, pp. 17-33) but is to be reprinted in his forthcoming book Blow the Man Down (Random Press, 1972). But for a general background, the Die has suggested I quote from Fineman’s forthcoming book:
A student can enter only for a minimum of thirty days and must first pass an oral examination showing he understands the basic rules of the dicelife and the structures and procedures of the CETRE. He is told to come to the Center with absolutely no identifying personal possessions; he may use any names he wishes while at the Center but all names will be considered false… .
CETREs vary in their details. In the Creativity Rooms, the Die often commands a student to invent new and better features for our Random Environments and many procedures and facilities have been modified in this way, some changes remaining peculiar to a single Center and others being adopted by all. All CETREs are similar, however, to the original Corpus Die complex in Southern California.
Although each of the individual rooms in a Center has a student-invented name (e.g. the Pit, the God room, the Party room, the Room room, etc.) the names vary from Center to Center. There are work rooms (laundries, offices, therapy rooms, clinics, a jail, kitchens), playrooms (emotion rooms, marriage rooms, love rooms, God rooms, creativity rooms) and life rooms (restaurants, bars, living rooms, bedrooms, moviehouse, etc.). He must spend from two to five hours a day working at various dice-dictated jobs: he waits on tables, sweeps out rooms, makes beds, serves cocktails, acts as a policeman, therapist, clothing clerk, mask maker, prostitute, admissions officer, jailer, etc. In all of these the student is diceliving and playing roles.
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