Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  “A drink,” Osterflood was saying. “A drink, you fucking killer. One last drink.”

  Reluctantly, I tore my hands away from Gina and dream-walked over to the couch and got him the desired drink.

  71

  Dear Doctor Rhineheart,

  I love you. The Dice said I should love you and I do. They told me to give myself to you and I will. I am yours.

  Yours truly,

  Elaine Simpson (age 8)

  Dear Doc,

  The Die told me to write you. Can’t think of much to say.

  Die bless you,

  Fred Weedmuller,

  Porksnout, Texas

  72

  In modern times a great deal of nonsense is talked about Dicemasters and dieciples, and about the inheritance of a Dicemaster’s teaching by favorite dicestudents, entitling them to pass diceliving on to others. Of course, diceliving should be imparted in this way, from whim to whim, and in many cases it is really accomplished. Chance and nonsense reign rather than profession and assertion. Sometimes the one who receives such real teaching keeps the matter hidden even after twenty months. Not until another discovers through his own need that a real diceliver is at hand is it learned that the teaching has been imparted, and even then the occasion arises quite randomly and the teaching makes its way purely by chance. Such teachers only sporadically claim, “I’m the dieciple of So-and-so.” Such a claim, if consistently made, would prove quite the contrary.

  The Dicemaster Jake Ecstein had only dieciple. His name was Phipps. After Phipps had completed his study of diceliving, Jake Ecstein called him into his big office. “I’m getting old,” he said, “and so far as I know, Phipps, you’re the only one who’ll carry on from me as a Dicemaster. Here are some Xeroxed papers passed down from Dicemaster to Dicemaster for seven months. I myself have added a whole mess of valuable footnotes and an annotated bibliography according to my understanding. These papers are very significant, and I’m giving them to you to represent your Dicemastership.”

  “If the papers are so important, you’d better keep them,” Phipps said. “I got into diceliving without doing much reading and I like it the way it is.”

  “I know that,” said Jake. “Even so, these papers have been carried from Dicemaster to Dicemaster for seven months, so you should keep them as a symbol of having received the teaching. Here.”

  The two happened to be talking in front of a fire. The moment Phipps had the papers in his hand he threw them all on top of the burning logs.

  Jake, who had never been angry before in his life, dropped a die, and shouted:

  “What are you doing!”

  Phipps dropped a die and shouted back:

  “What are you saying!”

  Jake consulted his die a second time, sighed and then added quietly:

  “You might at least have saved a few pages for the next fire.”

  —from The Book of the Die

  73

  Osterflood was contorted on his hands and knees grunting incoherently and clutching at his stomach while the belt whacked! across his back twice more.

  Canned hilarious laughter from the TV flowed hilariously across the room along the rug bubbling hilariously over Osterflood’s twisted torso up Gina’s long, sweat and semen-stained legs, over taut, dripping breasts, over my wet mouth drooling on her neck down my moisture-streaked chest and belly, to bubble and reverberate hilariously at last in the endless sensuous roll and moil of my mighty oiled meat in the fold upon fold of Gina’s molten, honeyed, holy-motioned, slow-roiling holy bowl. She was moaning now, holding the belt lifelessly at her thigh; I was growing and flowing in that holy motion of creation, my open hands sliding around her weary arms to enclose again her moistened round rubbery taut-tipped mounds.

  A handsome, silly-looking man said:

  “But I don’t like sex!” and laughter roared out at us like the bray of an ass. Osterflood was mumbling about never doing it again and the little bitches and if only boys would something and beatmebeatme. He had drunk two-thirds of the glass of Scotch and strychnine I’d given him, but spit the rest out claiming it was poison.

  I felt Gina’s hand clutching at my balls and pressing herself back upon me and then she suddenly broke away, stepped over Osterflood as if he were a pool of vomit on the rug and got a straight-back chair, and placed it in the middle of the rug a few feet from him. I was tearing off the last of my clothes as fast as I could in a movie that always seemed to be in slow motion, but even before I’d finished or was even seated on the chair, Gina had guided the divine tool back into her, thrown her legs around me and, with a child’s contented sigh, begun moving her boiling meat on my stiff bone.

  One brief second she stared with wide brown eyes into mine and then her lips and mouth struck and we were engaged in two flowing worlds. Like midget octopi, my giant hands moiled and toiled at the great round rubber bowls of her buttocks and I squeezed and she churned and I pulled and she pressed and she rolled the folds of her vagina over me like waves and I tongued the back of her throat and she circled and I straightlined and she broke her mouth from mine and arched her head away from mine and said shrilly:

  “Suck me, suck me,” and cupped her breasts out toward me.

  I lowered my open mouth onto one and as I tongued and sucked and nibbled she moaned:

  “I’m a woman! I’m a woman!”

  “I know, I know,” I said as I moved from one mound of hot, salty honey to the next. She squeezed my head against her.

  “Hard, harder,” she moaned.

  I opened my mouth so wide I was afraid I’d never get it closed again and had a surrealistic vision of going through the rest of my life like a gaping fish and I drew all of one breast into my mouth as far as I could while I squeezed her other with both my hands pinching the nipple hard. Groaning, she pressed me tighter, shuddered, and began to pump her pelvis against me hard, and it flowed out of me at last, a molten roll of white womb-wetting foam, her fold opening and closing upon it swallowing with its honeyed tongues, her golden bowls rolling with my roll, filling where I rose, parting with my plunge, delirious, writhing, moaning, groaning done.

  Or mostly done. I unswallowed her breast and managed to half-close my mouth and drew her warm soft body to mine and we churned at half-speed with each other, still enjoying the feel of it, my chin in her hair now, her lips and tongue idly tasting of the sweat of my chest and Osterflood was talking about dying dying dying and someone else was saying we could get there faster in a Ford.

  We sat there for two or three minutes, Osterflood grunting, his face twisted occasionally into a horrible grin and the canned hilarious laughter blasting out at us from the television set like slop thrown out a tenement window.

  Then I lifted Gina off me and walked over and collapsed into a sprawled sitting position on the couch wondering vaguely what time it was Agatha Christie time and how the great, clean, graceful murder, without fuss, emotion or violence, done with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss was ever going to end. The handsome, silly husband was trying to explain to his pretty, silly wife why it was necessary to tell their teenage daughter about the facts of life.

  “If I thought it was bees, she can think it is bees,” the woman said and the actors paused to let the machine roar away its bubbled laughter.

  Gina stood again now over Osterflood, the belt still in her hand—she hadn’t released it from her hand since her first blow twenty minutes before. Osterflood was on his back, arcing it slightly, his feet toward the couch. He was grinning moronically, his eyes bulging and his cock stiff.

  “I never meant to …” he was muttering. “Nice boys nice girls … mistake … I’m sick, I’m sick … dying … see that now … NEVER AGAIN … be a good boy, Mommy, beat me BEAT ME.”

  Gina stepped over him with one leg so she straddled his head and shoulders and faced his feet. She leaned forward a few inches and let a gob of spit fall onto his belly.

  “Now, Joanie, there’s something I must tell you tonight,” the h
usband was saying.

  “Sure, Dad, but make it quick, Jack’s coming with his motorcycle.”

  Gina, smiling a child’s soft smile, raised her arm and swept it down thock! the belt tearing across his thighs. Again she raised it—fascinating to watch the coil of her wet flesh, semen streaking the inside of her spread thighs, the breasts trembling as she hesitated at the top of the arc—and then whack! across his belly and extended rod. He screamed and vaulted his back, the grin still there, laughter from the television set splitting into the room like froth from a mad dog.

  Osterflood’s moans and mumbles were mostly incoherent now, and Gina rose and struck twice more with all her force, he now totally vaulting his back as if raising his stomach and thighs to embrace the hissing belt.

  “Teenagers today are so violent,” the silly woman said to a silly woman friend as they walked their dogs.

  Gina came back toward the couch, large eyes smiling at me, and took into her warm mouth my now boneless meat and sucked and chewed at it with good appetite. I smiled and stared stupidly at the image of two men on the screen, unearnest, silly men, talking earnestly about the horsepower of their earnest cars and of drag racing against their son’s earnest motorcycles.

  Gina, her head bent back now, breasts trembling, had cupped my balls and buttocks with her hands and was forcing my now bulging, slimy, hottipped cock deeper into her mouth, pressing with her hands to force me deeper deeper plunging, a lady sword-swallower arching ever back deep to the throat moaning working me deeper, then out, gasping blowing licking open and down down again swallow whole the great worn weapon of the much beloved foe down—fascinating, will my whole body be sucked up into her like a cartoon ghost by a vacuum cleaner?—down, her finger now in my anus, then she pulling me out of her mouth breathing me, tonguing me, sliding a long hard kiss along the length of me and then in again deep deeper … and up for air.

  She twisted herself onto her back beside me on the couch, spread her legs and, curving her head back again, directed me back into her mouth and to the base of her throat. The last thing I heard before her slimy thighs closed around my ears was the roar of motorcycles from the screen.

  Gina was awash with semen and sweat and her own love juices and she used my head like a giant penis and pressed at her openings, squeezing with her thighs, writhing for something to enter her, burying me in the silken slime of her cunt until I felt I was drowning and broke myself free.

  “We did it, we did it!” some male voice was crying from the television screen until the roar of other motorcycles drowned him out. Lowering my lips only to her clitoris I lengthened my hold on her buttocks to ooze my fingers into her rich openings, her cunt like a deep silken pool of the finest lubricants, her other a smooth, tight-fitting glove. I could feel Gina’s hand around the base of my prick and occasionally enclosing my balls, and another hand around my buttocks and in my crack and another hand scratching hard at my back and shoulder until I wondered where she got her third hand and suddenly saw five inches from my eyes the twisted horrible grin of Osterflood, eyes bulging.

  “Drink, drink,” he said and clawed at my shoulder.

  I raised myself off Gina and tore my lower half out of her mouth and marched off to the liquor cabinet to get that glass of water. When I marched back again Gina was standing beside Osterflood; he was slumped against the couch. She held out the belt to me as I approached.

  “You want to try a few?” she said.

  “No, no, I’m a pacifist,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

  She stepped to his back and raised the belt, but I told her to wait until I had given him the glass of water. He turned to me and stretched out a trembly hand for the glass, took it, raised it to his lips and began gulping. Ssssst THACK! The belt tore across the hand and the glass and water spilled to the floor.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I said, wondering if Osterflood were immortal.

  She smiled brighteyed at me, like a schoolgirl who has just accomplished a particularly good trick with a jump rope.

  “Save me, Rhinehart, save me,” Osterflood mumbled and clawed at my knees. But without Gina’s striking him again he abruptly rolled onto the floor and vaulted his back. Gina smiled down at him, but he stayed in his vaulted position; he was in another convulsion. As I watched, the belt fell lightly across my hair to my shoulder and Gina looped it so that she had me around the neck with the belt as noose and led me to the chair and forced me down into it.

  She straddled me, lowering herself in little dips against the stiff cock which she maneuvered first against and slightly into one hole and then the other and then she slid over me, burying the cock deep within her. We rubbed now, and bit and clawed, and squeezed and pinched and sucked and laughter poured over us and Osterflood gurgled and choked and a voice said, “So it isn’t bees after all,” and I rose up and holding Gina tight to me by the buttocks I fell to a kneeling position on the rug and then forward on top of her she already coming in a frenzied pelvic pulsation sucking and biting at my shoulder and I rammed and Osterflood gurgled and I rammed at her rammed and rammed and rammed my mouth filled with breast and laughter flowing over us ramming ram and it ah flowed out hot ah molten wet lava pouring into her in ah in ah in and ram one more time GOOD AH ah ah good good good seeing Osterflood to my left beautiful grinning lying on his side knees drawn toward his belly his face beautiful twisted in its hideous grin his cock stiff his belly spilling his semen pools onto the rug his eyes open glassy, staring, fixed, unmoving, dead.

  74

  Dear Mr. Rhinehart and Company,

  We are deeply indebted to you here at Fedel’s for the fine catalytic effect your theory of the dice life has had on sales and profits and on our lives. My business life has been giving me less and less satisfaction over the years. I had the usual ulcer and mistress, and I divorced my wife and took a dose of LSD or something and went to discotheques, but nothing helped: my profits and my indifference remained steady. Then I read an article about you in The New Yorker which I detest and never read, and located a follower of yours here in Columbus and I and my business haven’t been the same since.

  The first thing the dice told me to do was raise wages across the board thirty percent and write commending personal letters to everyone. Efficiency jumped forty-three percent that month (it dropped back twenty-eight percent the next). Then the dice ordered me to stop manufacturing conventional hats (the family product for sixty-seven years), but to make experimental hats. My designers went out of their minds in ecstasy. Our first line of hats (you may have read about them in Ladies’ Wear) was the highly successful “Boat Sombrero,” essentially a cowboy hat with a rim that tapers flush to the peak at the sides but flows out four inches in front and back.

  Although our profits declined fifteen percent, our sales leapt twenty percent and I wasn’t bored anymore. Our second design was the rainhat that looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood and is made of brightly colored plastic suitable for both sexes. It’s not going well at all (except in the South) but all of us at Fedel’s think it’s great. My profits turned at this point into a loss, but the Die’s will be done.

  The Die then insisted we drop our number-one money-making line of cheap men’s expensive hats. Our retailers were appalled, but we were so engrossed in our third experimental design (the designer claims the Die made a key decision on it) that we didn’t care. The “pancake” or “halo” (we haven’t consulted the Die yet) is a disc-shaped headgear that works on the principle of the academic mortarboard, but comes in a variety of colors, materials and shapes, although it is usually elliptical or circular. Our retail outlets are very skeptical, but have ordered so many on the basis of the success of the “Boat Sombrero” that we’re months behind in orders all ready.

  We’re deeply in debt, but our top designers and management personnel have all voluntarily taken fifty percent wage cuts in exchange for a share of the profits of our “halo” line and we’re going to survive. The Die last week ordered a designer of ours to design a hat
that covers the whole body and although some of us are doubtful, he is going ahead with enthusiasm.

  To think I used to design and sell the same type of hat year after year! Please send us all your publications, and thank you for your help.

  Sincerely yours,

  Joseph Fedel, President

  Fedel’s Hats, Columbus, Ohio.

  75

  Inspector Putt was standing stiffly behind his desk when the detective, holding Rhinehart by the elbow, brought him into the office. The Inspector motioned Rhinehart to sit down on the couch, and the detective left, closing the door softly behind him. For several moments neither man said a word.

  “Do you know why I’ve called you in?” the Inspector finally asked.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. You lost some more mental patients?” Rhinehart smiled up awkwardly at the Inspector.

  “Do you know a man named Frank Osterflood?”

  “Yes, I do. He was a …”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “About a week ago.”

  “Describe your meeting with him.”

  “I … ah, I ran into him purely by chance on the street near his apartment. We decided to go to dinner together.”

  “Go on.”

  “After dinner, he suggested we go visit a girlfriend of his in Harlem. So we went.”

  “Go on.”

  “I spent a couple of hours with Osterflood and his girlfriend and then I left.”

  “What took place at this girlfriend’s place?”

  “We watched some television. And, well, Osterflood engaged the girl in sexual congress and then I engaged her in sexual congress. It was a joint session you might say.”