The Diceman

by Luke Rheinhart

  The Diceman

  Luke Rheinhart

  Luke Rheinhart

  The Diceman

  To A. J. M. Without any of whom, no Book.

  In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Chance and without him not anything made that was made. In Chance was life and the life was the light of men.

  There was a man sent by Chance, whose name was Luke. The sere came for a witness, to bear witness of Whim, that all men through him might believe. He was not Chance, but was sent to bear witness of Chance. That was the true Accident, that randomizes every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of Chance, even to them that believe accidentally, they which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of men, but of Chance. And Chance was made flesh (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Great Fickle Father), and he dwelt among us, full of chaos, and falsehood and whim.

  from The Book of the Die

  Preface

  `The style is the man,' once said Richard Nixon and devoted his life to boring his readers.

  What to do if there is no single man? No single style? Should the style vary as the man writing the autobiography varies, or as the past man he writes about varied? Literary critics would insist that the style of a chapter must correspond to the man whose life is being dramatized: a quite rational injunction, one that ought therefore to be repeatedly disobeyed. The comic life, portrayed as high tragedy, everyday events being described by a Madman, a man in love described by a scientist. So. Let us have no more quibbles about style. If style and subject matter happen to congeal in any of these chapters it is a lucky accident, not, we may hope, soon to be repeated.

  A cunning chaos: that is what my autobiography shall be. I shall make my order chronological; an innovation dared these days by few. But my style shall be random, with the wisdom of the Dice. I shall sulk and soar, extol and sneer. I shall shift from first person to third person: I shall use first-person omniscient, a mode of narrative generally reserved for Another. When distortions and digressions occur to me in my life's history I shall embrace them, for a well-told lie is a gift of the gods. But the realities of the Dice Man's life are more entertaining than my most inspired fictions: reality will dominate for its entertainment value.

  I tell my life's story for that humble reason which has inspired every user of the form: to prove to the world I am a great man. I shall fail, of course, like the others. `To be great is to be misunderstood,' Elvis Presley once said, and no one can refute him.

  I tell of a man's instinctive attempt to fulfil himself in a new way and I will be judged insane. So be it. Were it otherwise, I would know I had failed.

  We are not ourselves; actually there is nothing we can call a `self' any more; we are manifold, we have as many selves there are groups to which we belong. . The neurotic has overtly a disease from which everybody is suffering. J. H. VAN DEN Berg

  My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature - a state of fluidity change and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified. - CARL JUNG

  The torch of chaos and doubt - this is what the sage steers by. - CHUANG-TZU

  I am Zarathustra the godless: I still cook every chance in my pot. -NIETZSCHE

  Anybody can be anybody. - THE DICE MAN

  Chapter One

  I am a large man, with big butcher's hands, great oak thighs, rock-jawed head, and massive, thick-lens glasses. I'm six foot four and weigh close to two hundred and thirty pounds; I look like Clark Kent, except that when I take off my business suit I am barely faster than my wife, only slightly more powerful than men half my size, and leap buildings not at all, no matter how many leaps I'm given.

  As an athlete I am exceptionally mediocre in all major sports and in several minor ones. I play daring and disastrous poker and cautious and competent stock market. I married a pretty former cheerleader and rock-and-roll singer and have two lovely, non-neurotic and abnormal children. I am deeply religious, have written the lovely first-rate pornographic novel, Naked Before the World, and am not now nor have I ever been Jewish.

  I realize that it's your job as a reader to try to create a credible consistent pattern out of all this, but I'm afraid I must add that I am normally atheistic, have given away at random thousands of dollars, have been a sporadic revolutionary against the governments of the United States, New York City, the Bronx and Scarsdale, and am still a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. I am the creator, as most of you know, of those nefarious Dice Centers for experiments in human behavior which has been described by the Journal of Abnormal Psychology as `outrageous,' `unethical,' and `informative'; by The New York Times as `incredibly misguided and corrupt'; by Time magazine as `sewers'; and by the Evergreen Review as `brilliant and fun.'

  I have been a devoted husband, multiple adulterer and experimental homosexual; an able, highly praised analyst, and the only one ever dismissed from both the Psychiatrists Association of New York (PANY) and from the American Medical Association (for `ill-considered activities' and `probable incompetence'). I am admired and praised by thousands of dicepeople throughout the nation but have twice been a patient in a mental institution, once been in jail, and am currently a fugitive, which I hope to remain, Die willing, at least until I have completed this 430 page autobiography.

  My primary profession has been psychiatry. My passion, both as psychiatrist and as Dice Man, has been to human personality. Mine. Others. Everyone's. To give to men a sense of freedom, exhilaration, joy. To restore to life the same shock of experience we have when bare toes first feel the earth at dawn and we see the sun split through the mountain trees like horizontal lightning; when a girl first lifts her lips to be kissed; when an idea suddenly springs full-blown into the mind, reorganizing in an instant the experience of a lifetime.

  Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen. At best we wander from one much-worn sandbar to the next, soon familiar with each grain of sand we see.

  When I raised the `problem' with my colleagues, I was assured that the withering away of joy was as natural to normal man as the decaying of his flesh and based on much the same physiological changes. The purchase of psychology, they reminded me, was to decrease misery; increase productivity, relate the individual to his society, and help him to see and accept himself. Not to alter necessarily the habits, values and interests of the self, but to see them without idealization and to accept them as they are.

  It had always seemed to me a quite obvious and desirable goal for therapy but, after having been `successfully' analyzed and after having lived in moderate happiness with moderate success with an average wife and family for seven years, I found suddenly, around my thirty-second birthday, that I wanted to kill myself. And to kill several other people too.

  I took long walks over the Queensborough Bridge and brooded down at the water. I reread Camas on suicide as the logical choice in an absurd world. On subway platforms I always stood three inches from the edge, and swayed. On Monday mornings I would stare at the bottle of strychnine on my cabinet shelf. I would daydream for hours of nuclear holocausts searing the streets of Manhattan clean, of steamrollers accidentally flattening my wife, of taxis taking my rival Dr. Ecstein off into the East River, of a teen-age baby-sitter of ours shrieking in agony as I plowed away at her virgin soil.

  Now the desire to kill oneself and to assassinate, poison, obliterate or rape others is generally con
sidered in the psychiatric profession as `unhealthy.' Bad. Evil. More accurately, sin. When you have the desire to kill yourself, you are supposed to see and `accept it,' but not, for Christ's sake, to kill yourself. If you desire to have carnal knowledge of a helpless teenybopper, you are supposed to accept your lust, and not lay a finger on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine but don't slug the bastard with a bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.

  It is a conservative doctrine, guaranteed to help the patient avoid violent, passionate and unusual acts and to permit him a prolonged, respectable life of moderate misery. In fact, it is a doctrine aimed at making everyone live like a psychotherapist. The thought nauseated me.

  These trivial insights actually began to form in the weeks following my first unexplained plunge into depression, a depression ostensibly produced by a long writing block on my `book,' but actually part of a general constitution of the soul that had been a long time building up. I remember sitting at my big oak desk after breakfast each morning before my first appointment reviewing my past accomplishments and future hopes with a feeling of scorn. I would take off my glasses end, reacting to both my thoughts and the surrealistic haze which became my visual world without my glasses, I would intone dramatically, `Blind! Blind! Blind!' and bang my boxing glove-sized fist down on the desk with a dramatic crash.

  I had been a brilliant student throughout my educational career, piling up academic honors like my son Larry collects bubble-gum baseball cards. While still in medical school I published my first article on therapy, a well-received trifle called The Physiology of Neurotic Tension.'

  As I sat at my desk, all articles I had ever published seemed absolutely as good as other men's articles: blah. My successes with patients seemed identical to those of my colleagues: insignificant. The most I had come to hope for was to free a patient from anxiety and conflict: to alter him from a life of tormented stagnation to one of complacent stagnation. If my patients had untapped creativity or inventiveness or drive, my methods of analysis had failed to dig them out. Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight. The thought pleased me.

  In the midst of my cynicism I would occasionally daydream of the future. My hopes? To excel in all that I had been doing in the past: to write widely acclaimed articles and books; to raise my children so they might avoid the mistakes I had made; to meet some Technicolor woman with whom I would become soul-mate for life. Unfortunately, the thought that these dreams might all be fulfilled plunged me into despair.

  I was caught in a bind. On the one hand I was bored and dissatisfied with my life and myself as they had been for the past decade; on the other, no conceivable change seemed preferable. I was too old to believe that lounging on the shores of Tahiti, becoming a wealthy television personality, being buddy buddy with Erich Fromm, Teddy Kennedy or Bob Dylan, or entertaining Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch in the same bed for a month or so would change anything. No matter how I twisted or turned there seemed to be an anchor in my chest which held me fast, the long line leaning out against the slant of sea taut and trim, as if it were cleated fast into the rock of the earth's vast core. It held me locked, and when a storm of boredom and bitterness blew in I would plunge and- leap against the line's rough-clutching knot to be away, to fly before the wind, but the knot grew tight, the anchor, only dug the deeper in my chest; I stayed. The burden of my self seemed inevitable and eternal.

  My colleagues, and even myself, mumbling coyly by our couches, all asserted that my problem was absolutely normal I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis. The assumption is that a limited and bored self is the unavoidable, all-embracing norm. And I was beginning to agree until, after a few months of wallowing in depression (I furtively had purchased a .38 revolver and nine cartridges), I came washing up on the shore of Zen.

  For fifteen years I had been leading a rather ambitious, driving, driven sort of life; anyone who opts for medical school and psychiatry has to have a pretty healthy neurosis burning inside him to keep the motor going. My own analysis by Dr. Timothy Mann had made me understand why my motor was racing away but hadn't slowed it. I now cruised consistently at sixty miles per hour rather than oscillating erratically between fifteen and ninety-five, but if anything blocked my rapid progress along the speedway I became at irritable as a cabby waiting for a parade to pass. When Karen Homey led me to discover D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts and Zen, the world of the rat race, which I had assumed to be normal and healthy for an ambitious young man, seemed suddenly like the world of a rat race.

  I was stunned and converted - as only the utterly bored can be. Seeing drive, greed and intellectual aspiration as meaningless and sick in my colleagues, I was able to make the unusual generalization to myself; I too had the same symptoms of grasping after illusions. The secret, I seemed to learn, was in not caring, in accepting limitations, conflicts and ambiguities of life with joy and satisfaction, in effortless drifting with the flow of impulse. So life was meaningless? Who cares? So my ambitions are trivial? Pursue them anyway. Life seems boring? Yawn.

  I followed impulse. I drifted. I didn't care.

  Unfortunately, life seemed to get more boring. Admittedly I was cheerfully, even gaily bored, where before I had been depressedly bored, but life remained essentially uninteresting. My mood of happy boredom was theoretically preferable to my desire to rape and kill, but personally speaking, not much. It was along about this stage of my somewhat sordid road to truth that I discovered the Dice Man.

  Chapter Two

  My life before D-Day was routine, humdrum, repetitious, trivial, compulsive, disordered, irritable - the life of a typical successful married man. My new life began on a hot day in the middle of August, 1968. I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four or five minutes we both rolled over and she began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.

  `Nnnn, morning, sweetheart,' one of us would eventually say, `Nnnn,' would say the other.

  From that point on the day's dialogue would all be downhill, but with warm, languid hands and lips floating over the body's most sensitive surfaces the world was as near perfection as it ever gets. Freud called it a state of ego-less polymorphous perversity and frowned upon it, but I have little doubt that he never had Lil's hands gliding over him. Or his own wife's either for that matter. Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone every effectively stroked his penis.

  Lil and I were slowly advancing to the stage where play is replaced by passion when two, three, four thumps resounded from the hall, our bedroom door opened and sixty pounds of boy-energy exploded onto our bed in a graceless flop.

  `Time to wake up!' he shouted.

  Lil had instinctively turned away from me at the sound of the thumps and, although she arched her lovely behind against me and squirmed intelligently, I knew from long experience that the game was over. I had tried to convince her that in an ideal society parents would make love in front of their children as naturally as they would eat or talk, that ideally the children would caress, fondle and make love to the parent, or both parents but Lillian felt different. She liked to make love under sheets, alone with her partner, uninterrupted. I pointed out that this showed unconscious shame and she agreed and went on hiding our caresses from the kids. Our girl, a forty-five pound variety, was by this time announcing in slightly fonder tones than her older brother: `Cock-a-doodle-do! Time to get up.'

  Generally, we were up. Occasionally, when I don't
have a nine o'clock patient, we encourage him to fix himself and his sister some breakfast. This he is happy to do, but the curiosity aroused by the sound of shattering glassware or the lack of sound of anything from the kitchen makes our extra minutes in bed unrewarding: it is difficult to enjoy sensual bliss while certain that the kitchen is on fire. This particular morning Lil arose right away, modestly keeping her front parts turned away-from the children, slipped on a flimsy nightgown that may have left them in ignorance, but left nothing to my imagination, and slouched sleepily off to prepare breakfast.

  Lil, I should note here, is a tall, essentially slender woman with sharp and pointed elbows, ears, nose, teeth and (metaphorically) tongue, but soft and rounded breasts, buttocks and thighs. All agree she is a beautiful woman, with natural wavy blonde hair and statuesque dignity. However, her lovely face has a peculiarly pixyish expression which I'm tempted to describe as mousy except that then you'll picture her with beady red eyes, and they're actually beady blue. Also, mouses are rarely five feet ten and willowy, and rarely attack men, as Lil does. Nevertheless, her pretty face, in some perceivers, calls up the image of a mouse, a beautiful mouse to be sure, but a mouse. When during our courtship I remarked upon this phenomenon it cost me four weeks of total sexual abstinence. Suffice it to say, my friends, that this mouse analogy is strictly between you and me.

  Although young Evie had scrambled talkatively away to follow her mother toward the kitchen, Larry still lay sprawled next to me on the large-king-sized bed. It was his philosophical position that our bed was large enough for the whole family and he deeply resented Lil's obviously hypocritical argument that Mommy and Daddy were so big that they needed the entire area. His recent strategy was to plop on the bed until every last adult was out of it; only then would he triumphantly leave.