Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  At first we kept most of the key positions filled with permanent, trained staff members. However, over our brief three-year history, there has been a gradual withering away of the staff. With carefully prepared structures and instructions we find that the third and fourth week students can handle most of the key roles as well as the permanent staff used to. The staff members vary their roles from week to week like the temporary students, who thus can’t be certain at any time who is a staff member and who isn’t. [In our Vermont Center we experimented by withdrawing our permanent dicepeople one by one until the center was functioning without a single trained staff member—only transient students. After two months we infiltrated permanent staff members back in, and they reported that everything was proceeding as chaotically as ever; only a small amount of rigidity and structure had crept in during the two months in which the “state” had totally withered away.]

  In our structured anarchy [writes Fineman] the authority rests with the therapists (called Referees in most Centers), and with the policemen, whoever they may be. There are rules (no weapons, no violence, no roles or actions inappropriate to the particular game room in which you are acting, etc.) and if the rules are broken, a “policeman” will take you to a “referee” to determine whether you must be sent to “jail.” About half our “criminals” are individuals who keep insisting that they are only one real person and want to go home. Since such role playing is inappropriate in many of the workrooms and playrooms, they must be sentenced to jail and to the hard labor of dice therapy—until they are better able to function in multiplicity. The other half of our criminals are students who must play out their roles of lawbreakers even if the laws they break are the strange ones of our Dice Centers.

  [After entering structured anarchy, the student proceeds from room to room, from role to role, from job to job: from cocktail party to a creativity room, from an orgy in the Pit to the God room, from the madhouse to the love room to the little French restaurant to working in the laundry to acting as jailer to male prostitute to President of the United States and so on at the whim of his imagination and of the Die.]

  … The Pit, although justly notorious, is mostly used by students in their first ten days at a Center. It is useful for persons with deep-seated inhibitions regarding sexual desires and activities; the total darkness and anonymity permit the inhibited student to follow dice decisions he could never follow otherwise.

  The Pit is also helpful in breaking down the normal inhibitions about sexual contact with members of the same sex. In a totally dark room, who is doing what to whom is often ambiguous, and one may be reveling in caresses which turn out to be by someone of the same sex. Since “anything goes” in the Pit one may be the unwilling participant in a sexual act which at first horrifies and disgusts but which, one often discovers, neither horrifies nor disgusts when one realizes no one will ever know.

  [In the Pit our students often learn that, in the immortal words of Milton in his great sonnet to his blind wife, “Those also serve who only lie and wait.”]

  At first there was no money in any of our CETREs but we soon relearned that money is more basic perhaps than sex as a source of unfulfilled selves in our society. We now arrange that upon entering, each student receives a certain amount of real money to play with, the amount chosen by the Die from among six options listed by the student. He begins with from zero to three thousand dollars, the median amount being about five hundred dollars. When he leaves he has to cast again from among the same six options he listed when entering to determine how much his bill for his month-long stay will be. When he leaves he can take out any money he has saved, earned or stolen, less, of course, our randomly determined bill… .

  Students receive wages for the work they do while in the Center and these wages are continually fluctuating so as to encourage students to work at certain jobs that need to be done.

  Students who begin broke have to beg or borrow money for their first meal or else sell themselves to play some role for someone at a price. Prostitution—the selling of the use of one’s body for the pleasure of someone else—is a common feature of all our Centers. This is not because it is the easiest way to obtain sex—sex is free in a variety of easily obtained forms—but because students enjoy selling themselves and enjoy being able to buy others. [It’s perhaps the very essence of the capitalist soul.]

  During the last ten days of his thirty-day stay the student is free to go out and eat and live in the Halfway House, a motel located near the CETRE and staffed partially by out CETREs, but mostly by the normal owner, a sympathizer, but not necessarily a diceperson. Until one of our students suggested such Halfway Houses, students were having trouble going from the freedom from expectation within the Center to the limitedness of expectation out in the society.

  The student has moved from a world in which everyone knows that everyone is acting to one in which only a few realize that everyone is role playing. The student feels much freer to experiment and develop his dicelife when he knows there are a few other students around [maybe] who will understand, than he could feel in the normal world of rigid expectations.

  We hope that a student comes to have two profound insights while staying at the motel. First, he suddenly realizes that perhaps he’s actually at a “normal” motel, that no other dicepeople are there. He laughs and laughs. Secondly, he realizes that all other humans are leading chance-dictated multiple lives even though they don’t know it and are always trying to fight it. He laughs and laughs. Joyfully he wanders back out onto the highway rubbing his dice together, barely aware that he has left the illusion of a totally random environment.

  63

  Being a normal, neurotic human it was in my bones to kill. Most of my adult life I had carried around like an instantaneously inflatable balloon a free-floating aggression which kept an imaginative array of murders, wars and plagues parading across my mind whenever my life got difficult: a cabbie tried to overcharge me, Lil criticized me, Jake published another brilliant article. In the year before I discovered the dice, Lil was killed by a steamroller, an airplane crash, a rare virus, cancer of the throat, a flash fire in her bed, under the wheels of the Lexington Avenue Express and by an inadvertent drinking of arsenic. Jake had succumbed to driving into the East River in a taxi, a brain tumor, a stock-market-crash-induced suicide and an insane attack with a samurai’s sword by one of his former cured patients. Dr. Mann succumbed to a heart attack, appendicitis, acute indigestion and a Negro rapist. The whole world itself had suffered at least a dozen full-scale nuclear wars, three plagues of unknown origin but universal effectiveness and an invasion from outer space by superior creatures who invisiblized everyone except a few geniuses. I had, of course, beaten to a bloody pulp President Nixon, six cab drivers, four pedestrians, six rival psychiatrists and several miscellaneous women. My mother had been buried in an avalanche and may still be alive there for all I know.

  Thus, no self-respecting Dice Man could honestly write down options day after day without including a murder or a real rape. I did, in fact, begin to include as a long shot the rape of some randomly selected female, but the dice ignored it. Reluctantly, timidly, with my old friend dread reborn and moiling in my guts, I also created a long-shot option of “murdering someone.” I gave it only one chance in thirty-six (snake eyes) and three, four times spread out over a year the Die ignored it, but then, one lovely Indian Summer day, with the birds twittering outside in the bushes of my newly rented Catskill farmhouse, the autumn leaves blowing and blinking in the sun and a little beagle puppy I’d just been given wagging his tail at my feet, the Die, given ten different options of varying probabilities, dropped double ones: snake eyes: “I will try to murder someone.”

  I felt acute anxiety and excitement combined, but not the slightest doubt in the world that I would do it. Leaving Lil had been hard (although I sneer at my anxieties now), but killing “someone” seemed no more difficult than holding up a drugstore or robbing a bank. There was a bit of anxiety because
my life was being put in jeopardy; there was the excitement of the chase; and there was curiosity: what person shall I kill?

  The great advantage of being brought up in a culture of violence is that it doesn’t really matter who you kill: Negroes, Vietnamese or your mother—as long as you can make a reason for it, the killing will feel good. As the Dice Man, however, I felt obligated to let the Die choose the victim. I flipped a die saying “odd” I would murder someone I knew, “even” it would be a stranger. I assumed for some reason that the Die would prefer a stranger, but the die showed a ‘one’; odd—someone I knew.

  I decided that in all fairness one of the people I might kill was myself and that my name should take its chances with the rest. Although I “knew” hundreds of people, I didn’t think the Die intended me to spend days trying to remember all my friends so that I wouldn’t deny any of them the option of being murdered. I created six lists, each with six places for the names of people I knew. I put Lil, Larry, Evie, Jake, my mother and myself at the top of each of the six different lists. For second names on each list I added Arlene, Fred Boyd, Terry Tracy, Joseph Fineman, Elaine Wright (a new friend of that period) and Dr. Mann. For number threes: Linda Reichman, Professor Boggles, Dr. Krum, Miss Reingold, Jim Frisby (my new landlord in the Catskills) and Frank Osterflood. And so on. I won’t give you the whole thirty-six, but to show I tried my best to include everyone, I should note that for the last six on each list I made six general categories: a business acquaintance, someone I had met first at a party, someone I knew only through letters or through reading (e.g. famous people), someone I haven’t seen in at least five years, a CETRE student or staff member not previously listed and someone wealthy enough to justify robbing and killing.

  I then casually cast a die to see from which of the six lists the die would choose a victim. The die chose list number two: Larry, Fred Boyd, Frank Osterflood, Miss Welish, H. J. Wipple (philanthropic benefactor of the Dice Centers) or someone I had first met at a party.

  Anxiety flushed through my system like a poison, primarily at the thought of killing my son. I had only seen him once since leaving so suddenly fifteen months before and he had been distant and embarrassed after a first leap into my arms of genuine affection. He was also the first diceboy in world history and it would be a shame … No, no, not Larry. Or at least let’s hope not. And Fred Boyd, my right arm, one of the leading practitioners and advocates of dice therapy and a man I liked very much. His in-and-out relationship with Lil made the murder of either him or Larry particularly unpleasant; to murder Fred seemed motivated and was thus doubly disturbing.

  Anxiety is a difficult emotion to describe. The colorful leaves outside the window no longer seemed vibrant; they seemed glossy as if being revealed in an overexposed technicolor film. The twitter of the birds sounded like a radio commercial. My new beagle puppy snored in a corner as if she were a debauched old bitch. The day seemed overcast even as the sun reflecting off a white tablecloth in the dining room blinded my eyes.

  Still, there was a Die to be served. I prayed:

  “Oh Holy Die,

  Thy hand is raised to fall and I thy simple sword. Wield me. Your Way is beyond our comprehension. If I must sacrifice my son in thy Name, my son shall die: lesser Gods than Thee have demanded thus of their followers. If I must cut off my right arm to show the Greatness of Thy Accidental Power, my arm shall fall. You have made me great by thy commands, you have made me joyful and free. You have chosen that I kill, I shall kill. Great Creator Cube, help me to kill. Choose thy victim that I may strike. Point the way that I thy sword may enter. He who is chosen will die smiling in the fulfillment of thy whim. Amen.”

  I dropped a die to the floor quickly, as if it were a snake: a three: it was my duty to try to kill Frank Osterflood.

  64

  From the Bhagavad-Gita

  To Arjuna, who was thus overcome by pity, whose eyes were filled with tears and who was troubled and much depressed in mind, the Lord Krishna said:

  Whence has come to thee this dejection of spirit in this hour of crisis? It is unknown to men of noble mind; it does not lead to heaven; on earth it causes disgrace, O Arjuna.

  Yield not to this unmanliness, for it does not become thee. Cast off this petty faintheartedness and arise, O Oppressor of the foes.

  Arjuna said:

  How can I strike, O Krishna? It is better to live in this world by begging than to slay another… . My very being is stricken with pity. With my mind bewildered about my duty, I ask thee to tell me that which I should do.

  Having thus addressed the Lord Krishna, the mighty Arjuna concluded: “I will not kill,” and became silent.

  To him thus depressed in the midst of two paths, Krishna spoke this word. The Blessed Lord said:

  Thou grievest for one whom thou shouldst not grieve for, and yet thou speakest words about wisdom. Wise men do not grieve for the dead or the living.

  Never was there a time when I was not, nor thou, nor these lords of men, nor will there ever be a time hereafter when we shall cease to be.

  As the soul passes in this body through childhood, youth and age, even so is its taking on of another body. The sage is not perplexed by this.

  Of the nonexistent there is no coming to be; of the existent there is no ceasing to be. Know thou that that by which all this is pervaded is indestructible. Of this immutable being, no one can bring about the destruction. Therefore, O Arjuna, thy duty shouldst be performed.

  He who thinks that he slays and he who thinks that he is slain; both of them fail to perceive the truth; no one slays, nor is one slain. Therefore, O Arjuna, thy duty shouldst be performed.

  He is never born, nor does he die at any time, nor having once come to be does he again cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, permanent and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain. Therefore, knowing him as such, thou shouldst not grieve and thy duty shouldst be performed.

  Pick up thy die, O Arjuna, and kill.

  (Edited for The Book of the Die)

  65

  I hadn’t heard of Frank Osterflood in close to a year, and I genuinely looked forward to seeing him again. He had responded pretty well for a while to dice therapy, first with me and then in a group with Fred Boyd. When he experienced the need to rape someone—boy or girl—as an arbitrary decision of the dice, it freed him from the great burden of guilt which had normally accompanied and magnified the act. And with the elimination of the guilt he discovered he had lost much of his desire to rape. I insisted, of course, that he had to try to carry through with any dice-dictated rape even though he didn’t feel like it. He succeeded, found it a disgusting experience. I praised him for following the will of the Die, and he cut back drastically on the possibility of rape among his options and then eliminated it.

  He enjoyed spending his money in random ways and then, much to my surprise, he married a woman as the result of a dice decision. Marriage turned out to be an apparent disaster. I had disappeared from the world at that time, but I heard from Fred Boyd that Frank had given up both his wife and the dicelife and was drifting again from job to job. Whether he was expressing his old aggressions in his old ways we didn’t know.

  I had no desire to limit my dicelife by spending it all in prison so advanced planning was called for. Interrupting my work at the Catskill CETRE for a week, I went on a “business trip” to New York. I discovered that Osterflood was living at his old apartment on the East Side—about four blocks from where I used to live. Ah, the memories. He seemed to be working for a brokerage firm on Wall Street and was gone for nine hours each day. The first night I trailed him he went out to dinner, a movie, a discotheque and returned home alone and presumably read or watched television and then slept.

  It’s a rather interesting experience to spend an evening trailing a man you’re planning to murder the next day; watching him yawn, become irritable when he can’t find the right change for a newspaper, smile at some thought he’s having. In general, Osterflood seemed rather nervous, I thou
ght, tensed up as if someone were trying to murder him.

  I began to realize that murder is not as easy as it’s cracked up to be. I couldn’t loiter outside Osterflood’s apartment a second consecutive night: my giant form was entirely too conspicuous. When and where to kill him? He was a big, muscular man, probably the only man on my original list of thirty-six that I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley after I’d just fired a shot at him and missed. I had brought my .38 revolver I still possessed from my pre-dice suicide-considering days, and I was pretty accurate at ten feet or less; I figured Big Frank would need a hole in the head to take him down. I also brought along some strychnine to help along in that way should the opportunity arise.

  My main problem was that if I killed him in his apartment I would have trouble escaping unnoticed. Gun shots in East Side apartments renting for four hundred dollars a month are not especially common. His apartment had a doorman, an elevator man, perhaps a hired security man, probably no stairwell. To shoot Osterflood in the street or in an alley was also dangerous since although gunshots were there much more frequent, nevertheless, people usually had enough curiosity to look over at what was happening. I was simply too big to be anonymous.

  I suddenly realized that living in New York City, Frank Osterflood—and every other New Yorker—lived year after year without once, ever, being more than twenty feet from some other human being. Usually he was within ten feet of a dozen people. He had no private, isolated life in which he might be totally by himself and meditate and commune with himself and take stock and be murdered. I resented it deeply.