The Diceman

'Goddam it, man, I said get me out of here, not more talk. You said you wanted to help and you keep on rapping.'

I considered this. It was clear that nothing I would do for Jones inside the hospital would be anything but the act of a white doctor. Unless I broke through that stereotype my love would never touch him. Once released he might well consider me a stupid Charlie that he had fucked good, but that seemed an irrelevant consideration. Inside the hospital there could only be hate. Outside . . .

I stood up and walked over to the sooty window and looked out at a group of patients playing a listless game of

softball.

`I'll have you released right now. You can go home this afternoon, before supper. It will be slightly illegal and I may

get into trouble, but if freedom is all I can give you then that's what I'll give.'

`You puttin' me on?'

`You'll be back in the city within an hour if I have to drive you there myself.'

What's the catch? If I can go free today why couldn't I go free a month ago? I ain't changed none.'

He sneered at his own grammar.

`Yes, I know. But I have.'

I turned my back on him again and stared out across the lawn and past the softball game to watch a little boy trying to

fly a kite.

`I think this hospital is a prison and that the doctors are jailers,' I said, `and the city is hell and that our society acts to

kill the spirit of love which might exist between man and man. I'm lucky. I'm a jailer and not one of the jailed and thus I can help you. I will help you. But let me-ask one favor of you.' When I turned back to him he was leaning forward on the edge of the chair with concentrated animal tension. When I

paused, he frowned and whispered out a `How?'

That frown and whisper warned me that the two possible `favors' I had in mind would both fail: `Come and see me at

my office' and `be my friend: A man didn't befriend his jailer for giving him freedom since the freedom was deserved,

and the doctor-patient relation had failure built into it. I stood looking at him blankly.

'What do you want me to do?' he asked.

Outside I heard a boat's horn from the river groan twice, like warning snorts.

`Nothing, I said. `Nothing. I just remembered that I want to help you. Period. You don't have to do anything. You'll go

free. Outside, what you do is what you do. You'll be free of this hospital and free of me.'

He stared suspiciously and I stared back, feeling serious and ham actor noble. The urge to suggest verbally that I was

being great for doing this was strong, but humble Jesus won out.

`Come on,' I said. `Lets go and get your clothes end get out of here.'

As it turned out, it took more than an hour to get Arturo Toscanini Jones released and even then, as I had feared, it was

illegal. I got him released from the ward in my custody, but such a release did not give him permission to leave the hospital: That took formal action of one of the directors and was impossible for that afternoon. I'd talk to Dr. Mann at lunch on Friday, or maybe phone.

I drove Jones to Manhattan and then uptown to his mother's home at 142nd Street. Neither of us said a single word during the entire drive and when I let him out he said only: `Thanks for the ride.'

'That's okay,' I answered.

After a barely perceptible pause he slammed the door and strode away.

Strike up another scoreless innings for Jesus.

I was exhausted by the time I had gotten Arturo released from the hospital and my silence with him in the car was

partly fatigue. Trying minute after minute to be someone not totally natural to the personality, as Jesus was for me, was hard work. Impossible work, as a matter of fact. During that whole day I noticed that after about forty minutes of being a loving Jesus my system-would simply break down into apathy and in difference. If I continued the role past the forty-minute point it was purely mechanical rather than felt.

As I drove toward my rendezvous with Arlene my bleary mind tried to scrutinize my relations with her. Christianity frowns on adultery: this much I was able to come up with. Our relationship was a sin. Should Jesus simply avoid a rendezvous with his mistress? No. He would want to express his love for her. His agape. He would want to remind her of various relevant commandments.

Such was the intention of Jesus when he met Mrs. Jacob Ecstein that afternoon at the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem and drove to an obscure section of the parking lot at La Guardia Airport overlooking the bay. The woman was cheerful and relaxed and spoke during most of the drive about Portnoy's Complaint, a book which Jesus had not read. It was clear from her speaking, however, that the author of the novel had not discovered love, and that the effect upon Mrs. Ecstein was to increase her cynical, guiltless, shameless devil-may-care immersion in her gin. It seemed to Jesus precisely the wrong mood for his beginning to discuss Judao-Christian love.

'Arlene,' spoke Jesus, after he had parked, `do you ever feel great warmth and love toward people?'

`Only for you, lover,' she replied.

`Have you never felt a great rush of warmth and love toward some person or toward all humanity?'

The woman cocked her head and thought.

`Occasionally.'

`To what do you attribute it?'

`Alcohol.'

The woman unzipped the fly of Jesus and reached a hand in and enclosed the Sacred Tool. It was, all accounts agree,

filled only with agape.

`My daughter,' he said, `are you not concerned with causing unhappiness to your husband or to Lillian?'

She stared at him.

`Of course not. I love this.'

`Are your husband's feelings of no concern to you?'

`Jake's feelings!' she shouted. `Jake, is completely well-adjusted. He doesn't have any feelings.'

'Not even love?'

`Perhaps once a week he has that.'

`But Lillian has feelings. God has feelings.'

`I know, and I think what you're doing to her is cruel.'

`That is true, and you and Dr. Rhinehart must stop doing that which is so clearly sinful and which must hurt her.'

`We're not doing anything, it's you that makes her suffer.'

`Dr. Rhinehart will be a better man.'

`Good. I hate to see her so upset with you: She gave the Sacred Tool a little friendly squeeze and then lowered her

head to his lap and sucked in the Spiritual Spaghetti.

`But Arlene!' He said. `Dr. Rhinehart's making love to you is fornication, is what might hurt her.'

The woman tempted Jesus further with her serpent's tongue, but producing no measurable effect, raised herself. Denied

her sinful pleasure she looked peevish.

`What are you talking about? What's fornication, another of your perversions?'

`Physical intercourse with Dr. Rhinehart is a sin.'

`Who's this Dr. Rhinehart you keep talking about? What's the matter with you today?'

`What you have been doing is cruel and selfish and against the word of God. Your affair might have disastrous effects

upon Lillian and the children.'

`How?'

'If they found out'

'She'd only divorce you.' Jesus stared at the woman.

`We are speaking of human beings and of the Sacred Institution of Marriage,' He said.

`I don't know what you're talking about' Jesus became wrathful and thrust the woman's hand away and zipped up the

Holy Fly.

`You are so buried in your sin you cannot see what you do.'

The woman was angry too.

`You've been enjoying yourself for three months and now all of a sudden you discover sin and that I'm a sinner.'

`Dr. Rhinehart is a sinner too.'

The woman poked back at the Crotch.

'Not much of a one today,' she said.

Jesus stared out through the windshield of the car at a small cruiser plodding across the bay. Two gulls which had

been following it swerved away and spiraled up about fifty feet and then spiraled down and over toward Him,

wheeling out of sight past the car. A signal? A Sign? Jesus realized humbly that of course he was being insane, By fucking Mrs. Ecstein with great gusto for months in the body of Dr. Rhinehart He had confused her. It was difficult for her to recognize him in the -body of someone she had knows playing the role of a sinner. Looking over at her, he saw her staring crossly out over the water, her hands clasping a half-finished almond bar in her lap. Her bare knees suddenly appeared to Him as those of a little child, her emotions those of a little girl. He remembered His injunction about children.

`I'm very very sorry Arlene. I'm insane. I recognize this. I'm not always myself. I frequently lose myself. To cast you off by suddenly talking about sin and Lil and Jake must seem cruel hypocrisy.'

When she turned to face Him. He saw tears brimming at her eyes.

`I love your cock and you love my breasts and that's not sin.'

Jesus considered these words. They did seem reasonable.

`It is good,' He said. `But there are greater goods.'

`I know that, but I like yours.'

They stared at each other: two alien spiritual worlds.

`I have to go now,' He said. `I may return. My insanity is sending me away. My insanity says I will not be able to make love to you for a while.'

Jesus started the car.

`Boy,' she said and took a healthy bite from the almond bar, `you ought to be seeing a psychiatrist yourself five times a week if you ask me.'

Jesus drove them back to the city.

Chapter Sixteen

Ego, my friends, ego. The more I sought to destroy it through the dice the greater it grew. Each tumble of a die chipped off another splinter of the old self to feed the growing tissues of the dice man ego. I was killing past pride in myself as analyst, as article writer, as good-looking male, as loving husband, but every corpse was fed to the cannibalistic ego of that superhuman creature I felt I was becoming. How proud I am of being the Dice Man! Whose primary purpose is supposedly to kill all sense of pride in self. The only options I never permitted were those which might challenge his power and glory. All values might be shat upon except that. Take away that identity from me and I am a trembling dread-filled clod, alone in an empty universe. With determination and dice, I am God.

Once I wrote down as an option (one chance in six) that I could (for a month) disobey any of the dice decisions if I felt like it and if I shook a subsequent odd number. I was frightened by the possibility. Only the realization that the act of `disobedience' would in fact be an act of obedience removed my panic. The dice neglected the option. Another time I thought of writing that from then on all dice decisions would be recommendations and not commands. In effect, I would be changing the-role of dice from commander-in-chief to advisory council. The threat of having `free will' again paralyzed me. I never wrote the option.

The dice continually humbled me. They ordered me to get drunk one Saturday: an act which I had found to be inconsistent with my dignity. Being drunk meant an absence of self-control which was inconsistent also with the detached, experimental creature I was becoming as the Dice Man. However, I enjoyed it. The letting go was not very different from the insanities I had been committing while sober. I spent the evening with Lil and the Ecsteins and at midnight began making paper airplanes out of the manuscript pages of my proposed book on sadism and flying them out the window onto 72nd Street. My drunken pawing of Arlene was interpreted as drunken pawing. The incident marked another piece of evidence of the slow disintegration of Lucius Rhinehart.

I provided my friends with plenty of other pieces of evidence. I rarely ate lunch with my colleagues anymore since I usually was sent by the dice to other places whenever I had free time. When I did lunch with them the dice often had dictated some eccentric role or action which seemed to unsettle them. One-day during a forty-eight hour total fast (except for water) which the die had dealt me, I felt weak and decided not to let the die send me anyplace: I would share my fast with Tim, Jake and Renata.

They talked, as they had for several months, primarily to each other. Whenever they directed a question or comment to me they did it warily, like animal trainers feeding a wounded lion. This particular afternoon they were talking about the hospital's policy of releasing patients conditionally, and I, staring hysterically at Jake's sirloin steak, was drunk with hunger. Dr. Mann was slobbering his scallops all over the table and his napkin, and Dr. Felloni was delicately escorting each separate tiny piece of lamb (Lamb!) to her mouth and I was insane. Jake as usual managed to talk and eat faster than both the others together.

`Got to keep 'em in,' he said. `Harmful to us, the hospital, society, everybody, if a patient is prematurely released. Read Bowerly.'

Silence. (Actually chewing [I heard every nibble], other restaurant voices, laughter, dishes clattering, sizzling [I heard every single bubble explosion] and a loud voice which said, `Never again.') `You're-absolutely right, Jake,' I uttered unexpectedly. They were my first words of the afternoon.

`Remember that Negro released on probation who killed his parents? We were idiots. What if he'd only wounded them?'

`He's right, Tim,' I said.

Dr. Mann didn't deign to interrupt his eating, but Jake shot me a second piercing squint.

`I'll bet,' he went on, `that two-thirds of the patients released from QSH - and the other state hospitals - are released far too early, that is, when they're still a menace to themselves and society.'

`That's true,' I said.

`I know that the professional opinion in vogue is that hospitalization is at best a necessary evil, but it's a stupid vogue. If we've got anything to offer our patients, then our hospitals do too. There are three times as many doctor-hours for a patient as he gets in the best out-patient treatment. Read Hegalson, Potter and Busch, their revised edition.'

'And they don't miss appointments, either,' I added.

'That's right,' Jake went on, `there's no home life to mess up their lives.'

'No wives or husbands or children or home-cooked meals.'

'Yeah.'

Dr. Felloni interrupted: 'Isn't adjustment to the home environment what we're striving for though?'

"Adjustment to some environment,' Jake answered. `I try to get my Negro patients in group therapy to see the sickness of the white world so that they will end their resentment and find themselves satisfied with either their lives on the ward or their necessary ghetto existence.'

'And God knows,' I said, `that the white world is sick. Look at the starving millions in East Germany.'

This slowed Jake down for a moment: he lived the rhythm of agreement but wasn't certain that my statement here was entirely satisfactory. With that brilliance which was his essence he hedged: `Our job is to shoot psychological penicillin into the whole social fabric, white and black, and we're doing it.'

'But with regard to Mrs. Lansing,' Dr. Felloni said, `you do feel she should be released.'

'She's your baby, Renata, but remember, "When is doubt, don't let 'em out."

'Dr. Mann sent up a belch as an apparent warning signal that he was about to speak. We all looked at him respectfully.

`Jake,' he said. `You would have been at home as commander of a concentration camp.'

Silence.

Then I said: `What a lousy thing to say. Jake wants to help his patients not exterminate them. And besides, in

concentration camps the commander sometimes … didn't give them food: Silence. Dr. Mann seemed to be chewing a cud; Dr. Felloni was moving her head from side to side and up and down very slowly, like someone watching a tennis match consisting entirely of lobs. Jake, leaning forward intently and peering without fear into Dr. Mann's bland face, said with the rapidity of a typewriter `I don't know what you mean by that, Tim. I'll stack my patient record against yours any day. My policy on patient' release is the same as the director's. I think you should apologize.'

`Quite right,' Dr. Mann wiped his mouth with his napkin (or he may have been nibbling from it). `Apologize. I'd be at home as commander too. Only one who wouldn't is Luke, he'd let everyone go - on a whim.'

Dr. Mann had not been enthusiastic about the release of Arturo Toscanini Jones.

`No, I wouldn't,' I said. `If I were commander I'd increase food allotments two hundred percent and do experiments

with the inmates which would advance psychiatry a hundred years past Freud in twelve months.'

`Are you-talking about Jewish inmates?' Jake asked.

`Damn right. Jews make the best subjects for psychological experiments.'

I paused about one and a half seconds, but as Jake started to speak, I went on. `Because they're so intelligent,' sensitive

and flexible.'

That slowed Jake down. Somehow the racial stereotype I had created with my three adjectives didn't seem to leave him

much to shoot at.

`What do you mean by flexible?' he asked.

`Not rigid - open-minded, capable of change.'

`What experiments would you perform, Luke?'

Dr. Mann asked, watching a chubby waiter quiver past with a platter of lobsters.

`I wouldn't touch the inmates physically. No brain operations, sterilizations, that stuff. All I'd do is this: Turn all the

ascetics into hedonists; all the epicureans into flagellants; nymphomaniacs into nuns; homosexuals into heterosexuals, and vice versa. I'd train them all to eat non kosher food, give up their religion, change their professions, their styles of dress, grooming, walking and so on, and train them all to be unintelligent, insensitive and inflexible. I would prove that man can be changed: Dr. Felloni looked a little startled; she was nodding rather emphatically: `We're going to do this at Queensborough State, Hospital?'

`When I become director,' I answered.

`But I'm not certain it would be ethical,' she said.

`How would you do all this?' asked Dr. Mann.

`Drole therapy.'

`Drole therapy?'

Jake asked.

`Yes. Honker, Ronson and Gloop, APB Journal, August, 1958, pages sixteen to twenty-three, annotated bibliography.

It's short for drama-role therapy.'

'Dessert menu, please, waiter,' said Dr. Mann and seemed to lose interest.

'The same thing as Moreno?' Jake asked.

`No. Moreno has patients act out their fantasies in staged playlets. Drole therapy consists of forcing patients to live

their pressed latent impulses.'

'What's the APB Journal?' Jake asked.

`Jake, I agree with everything you say,' I said pleadingly. Don't challenge me. The whole thin tissue supporting our

argument will tear and collapse the whole thing on us.'

`I wasn't urging experimentation on patients.'

`Then what do you do during a typical hour?'

`Cure 'em.'

'Dr. Mann began what might have been a long rumbling laugh but was infected by food swallowed the wrong way and

ended as a fit of coughing.

But, Jake,' I said, `I thought it was our idea to gradually increase the facilities of and enrolment in mental hospitals one

percent a year until the whole nation was being cured.'

Silence.

`You'd have to be first, Luke,' Jake said quietly. ""Let me start now, today. I need help. I need food.'

`You mean analysis?'

`Yes. We all know I need it badly.'

`Dr. Mann was your analyst.'

'I've lost faith in him. He's got bad table manners. He wastes food.'

`You knew that before.'

`But I didn't know until now the importance of food:'

Silence. Then Dr. Felloni:

`I'm glad you mentioned Tim's table manners, Luke, because for some time now…'

'How about it, Tim,' Jake said. `Can I take on Luke?'

`Certainly. I only work with neurotics.'

That ambiguous remark (was I schizophrenic or mentally healthy?) essentially ended the conversation. A few minutes

later I staggered away from the table engaged to begin analysis with Dr. Jacob Ecstein on Friday in our mutual office.

Jake left the table like a man handed the Sonship of God on a silver platter; his greatest triumph was about to begin.

And, by Fromm, he was right.

As for myself, when I finally ate again eighteen hours later, it killed my appetite for therapy, but, as it turned out,

going back under analysis with Jake was a stroke of genius. Never question the Way of the Die: Even when you're starving to death.

Chapter Seventeen

Eventually, it had to happen; the dice decided that Dr. Rhinehart should spread their plague - he was ordered to corrupt his innocent children into the dicelife.

He easily maneuvered his wife to a long three-day visit to her, parents in Daytona Beach, employing the horrible premise that the nursemaid Mrs. Roberts and he would take perfect care of the children. He then maneuvered Mrs. Roberts to Radio City Music Hall. Rubbing his hands together and grinning hysterically, Dr. Rhinehart began to implement his hideous plan of drawing his innocent children into his web of sickness and depravity.

`My children,' he said to them from the living room couch in a fatherly tone of voice (Oh! the cloak which evil wears!)

`I have a special game for us to-play today.'

Lawrence and little Evie clustered close to their father like innocent moths to a deadly flame. He took from his pocket

and placed on the arm of the couch two dice: those awful seeds which had already borne such bitter fruit.

The children stared at the dice wide-eyed; they had never seen evil directly before, but the shimmering green light which the dice emitted sent through each of their hearts a deep convulsive shudder. Suppressing his fear, Lawrence said bravely `What's the game, Dad?'

`Me, too,' said Evie.

`It's called the dice man game.'

`What's that?' asked Lawrence. (Only seven years old, yet so soon to be aged in evil.) `The dice man game goes like

this: we write down six things we might do and then we shake a die to see which one we do.'

`Huh?'

`Or write down six persons you might be and then shake the dice and see which one you are.'

Lawrence and Evie stared at their father, stunned with the enormity of the perversion.

`Okay,' said Lawrence.

`Me too,' said Evie.

`How do we decide what to write down?' asked Lawrence.

`Just tell me any strange thing which you think might be .fun and I'll write it down.'

Lawrence thought, unaware of the downward spiral that this first step might mean.

`Go to the zoo,' he said.

`Go to the zoo,' said Dr. Rhinehart and walked nonchalantly to his desk for paper and pencil to record this infamous

game.

`Climb to the roof and throw paper,' Lawrence said. He and Evie had joined their father at the desk and watched as he

wrote.

`Go beat up Jerry Brass,' Lawrence went on.

Dr. Rhinehart nodded and wrote.

`That's number three,' he said.

`Play horsey with you.'

`Hooray,' said Evie.

`Number four.'

There was a silence.

`I can't think of anymore.'

`How about you, Evie?'

`Eat ice cream.'

'Yeah,' said Lawrence.

`That's number five. Just one more.'

`Go for a long hike in Harlem,' shouted Lawrence, and he ran back to the couch and got the dice. `Can I throw?'

`You can throw. Just one, remember.'

He cast across the floor of his fate a single die: a four horsey. Ah gods, in what nag's clothing comes the wolf.

They played, raucously, for twenty minutes and then Lawrence, already, Reader, I lament to say, hooked, asked to

play dice man again. His father, smiling and gasping for breath, wobbled to the desk to write another page of the book

of ruin. Lawrence added some new alternatives and left some old ones and the dice chose: `Go beat up Jerry Brass.'

Lawrence stared at his father.

`What do we do now?' he asked.

`You go downstairs and ring the Brass's doorbell and ask to see Jerry and then you try to beat him up.'

Lawrence looked down at the floor, the enormity of his folly beginning to sink into his little heart.

`What if he's not home?'

`Then you try again later.'

`What'll I say when I beat him up?'

`Why don't you ask the dice?'

He looked up quickly at his father.'

'What do you mean?'

`You've got to beat up Jerry, why not give the dice six voices of what you'll say?'

'That's great. What'll they be?'

`You're God,' his father said with that same horrible smile. `You name them.'

`I'll tell him my father told me to.'

Dr. Rhinehart coughed, hesitated. `That's .., um … number one.'

`I'll tell him my mother told me to.'

`Right'

'That I'm drunk.'

`Number three.'

"That . .. that I can't stand him'

He was deep in excited concentration.

`That I'm practicing my boxing…' He laughed and hopped up and down.

`And that the dice told me to.'

That's six and very good, Larry.'

`I throw, I throw.'

'That I'm practicing my boxing…'

He laughed and the living room rung and yelled its command back to his father: 'Three!'

`Okay, Larry, you're drunk. Go get him.'

Reader, Lawrence went. Lawrence struck Jerry Brass. Struck him several times, announced he was drunk and escaped

unpunished by the absent Brass parents or present Brass maid, but pursued already by the furies which will not leave

un-avenged such senseless evil. When he returned to his own apartment, Lawrence's first words were - I record them with shame:

`Where 'are the dice, Dad?'

Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never bad. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often weal cough before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety filled and diffused?

It was the goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? Or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? Indeed men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.

I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: `Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another'

- why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be.

The sense of a permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy.

`Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bowel movement every morning after breakfast'

`Billy just loves to read all the time…'

`Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.'

'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.'

It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but . . . Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but … And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn't have to worry but how she looked …

Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery.

What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free even of `good' habits.

`What, my boy, haven't told a lie yet today? Well, go to your room and stay there until you can think one up and learn to do better.'

`Oh, my Johnny, he's so wonderful. Last year he got all "A"s an his report card and this year he's getting mostly "D"s and "F"s. We're so proud: `Our little Eileen still pees in her panties every now and then and she's almost twelve.'

'Oh, that's marvelous! Your daughter must be so alive.'

`Good boy, Roger, that was beautiful the way you walked off the field and went home to play Ping-Pong with the

score tied and two out in the last of the eighth. Every dad in the stands wished his kid had thought of that.'

`Donnie! Don't you dare brush your teeth again tonight! It's getting to be a regular habit.'

`I'm sorry, Mom.'

`Goddam son of mine. Hasn't goofed off in a week. If I don't find the lawn un-mowed or the wastebaskets overflowing

one of these days, I'm going to blow my top at him.'

`Larry, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You haven't bullied a single one of the little kids on the block all

summer.'

'I just don't feel like it, Mom.'

`Well, at least you could try.'

`What should I wear, Mother?'

`Oh I don't know, Sylvia. Why don't you try the cardigan which makes you look flat-chested and that ugly skirt your

grandmother gave you which always twists. I've got a pair of nylons I've been saving for a special occasion: they've

each got a run.'

`Sounds groovy.'

Teachers, too, would have to alter.

'Your drawings all tend to look like the thing you're draw, young man. You seem unable to let yourself go.'

'This essay is too logical and well-organized. If you expect to develop as a writer you must learn to digress and be at

times totally irrelevant.'

`Your son's work shows much improvement. His papers on history have become nicely erratic again, and his comportment totally unreliable (A-). His math remains a little compulsively accurate, but his spelling is a delight. I particularly enjoyed his spelling of "stundent" for "student".'

`We regret to inform you that your son behaves always like a man. He seems incapable of being a girl part of the time.

He has been dating only girls and may need psychiatric treatment'

`I'm afraid, George, that you're one of our few ninth graders who hasn't acted like a kindergarten child this week.

You'll have to stay after school and work on it.'

The child, we are informed, needs to see order and consistency in the world or he becomes insecure and afraid. But what order and consistency? The child doesn't have to have consistent consistency; it seemed to me he might grow equally well with consistent, dependable inconsistency. Life, in fact, is that way; if parents would only admit and praise inconsistency, children wouldn't be so frightened of their parents' hypocrisy or ignorance.

`Sometimes I'll spank you for spilling your milk and sometimes I won't give a damn.'

`Occasionally I like you when you rebel against me, son, and at other times I love to kick the shit out of you.'

`I'm usually pleased with your good grades in school, but sometimes I think you're an awful grind.'

Such is the way adults feel: such is the way children sense they feel. Why can't they acknowledge and praise their inconsistency? Because they think they have a `self.'

Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self #161;a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.

What if secretly before every agon or game the dice were thrown to determine whether the `winner' or the `loser' `wins'! The prize or the championship, with fifty-fifty being the odds for each? The loser of the game would thus end up half the time being congratulated for having been lucky enough to have lost, and thus won the prize. The man who won the game would be consoled for playing so well.

`But!!! The loser of the game would still feel bad, the winner still feel 'good.'

But I remembered reading in a widely acclaimed book on children's games something which made Larry's affinity for diceliving make sense. I dug out the book and read confirmation of my thoughts with joy. Children, it said … rarely trouble to keep scores, little significance is attached to who wins or loses, they do not require the stimulus of prizes, it does not seem to worry them if the game is not finished. Indeed, children like games in which there is a sizeable element of luck, so that individual abilities cannot be directly compared. They like games which restart automatically, so that everybody is given a new chance.

It seemed to me that there were two quite different meanings of failure. The mind knows when it is blocked and when it has found a solution. A child trying to solve a maze knows when he fails and when he succeeds; no adult need tell him. A child building a house of blocks knows when the collapse of the house means failure (he wanted to build it higher) and when it means success (he wanted it to fall). Success and failure mean simply the satisfaction and frustration of desire. It is real; it is important; the child doesn't have, to be rewarded or punished by society in order to prefer success to failure.

The, second meaning of failure is also simple: failure is failure to please an adult; success is pleasing an adult. Money, fame, winning a baseball game, looking pretty, having good clothes, car, house are' all types of success which primarily revolve around pleasing the adult world. There is nothing intrinsic to the human soul in any of these fears of failure.

Becoming the dice man was difficult because it involved a continual risking of failure in the eyes of the adult world. As dice man I `failed' (in the second sense) again and again. I was rejected by Lil, by the children, by my esteemed colleagues, by my patients, by strangers, by the image of society's values branded into me by thirty years of living. In the second sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in the first sense I never failed. Every time I followed the dictates of the die I was successfully building a house or purposely knocking one down. My mazes were always being solved. I was continually opening myself to new problems and, enjoying solving them.

From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

Fail! Lose! Be bad! Play, risk, dare.

Thus, I exulted that evening of Larry's first diceday. I became determined to make Larry and Evie fearless, frameless, egoless humans. Larry would be the first egoless man since Lao-Tzu. I would let him play the role of father of the household and Evie the mother. I'd let them reverse roles. Sometimes they would play parents as they perceive us to be and at other times as they think parents should be. We could all play television heroes and comic-strip characters. And Lil and I every conscientious parent - would change his personality every other day or week.

`I am he who can play many games.'

That is the essence of the happy child of foul, and he never feels he loses. `I am he who is x, y and z, and x, y and z only': that is the essence of the unhappy adult. I would try to extend in my children their childishness. In the immortal words of J. Edgar Hoover: `Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not see God.'

Chapter Eighteen

Larry's first day as dice-boy had been cut short by boredom with too much of the same thing. He liked the game; he was able to follow the commands of the dice even when they conflicted with his normal patterns, but after about three hours he simply wanted to play with his trucks and didn't want to risk this pleasure to the dice. Since I have often felt the same way (although not about trucks), I explained that the dice man game should only be played when he felt like it. I emphasized, however, that when he did play he must always follow the dice.

Unfortunately, my efforts during the succeeding two days to turn Larry into Lao-Tzu were confounded by his child's good sense; he gave the dice only extremely pleasant alternatives - ice cream, movies, zoos, horsey, trucks, bikes, money. He began to use the dice as a treasure chest. I finally told him that the dice man game always had to provide risk, that slightly bad choices had to be there too. Surprisingly he agreed. I invented for him that week a dice game which has since become one of our classics: Russian roulette. The initial version of the game for Larry was simple: out of every six alternatives one had to be decidedly unpleasant.

As a result, Larry had some interesting experiences over the next five or six days. (Evie returned to her dolls and to Mrs. Roberts.) He took a long hike in Harlem (I told him to keep an eye open for a big muscular white man with candy named Osterflood) and he was arrested as a runaway. It took me forty minutes to convince the 26th Precinct that I had encouraged my seven-year-old son to take a hike in Harlem.

The dice sent him to sneak into the movie I Am Curious Yellow, a film involving a certain amount of naked sexual interplay, and he returned mildly curious and greatly bored. He crawled on all fours from our apartment down four flights of stairs and along Madison Avenue to Walgreen's and ordered an ice-cream sundae. Another time he had to throw away three of his toys, on the other hand the dice ordered him a new racing-car set. He twice had to let me beat him in chess and three times I had to let him beat me. He had a wonderful hour making ostentatiously stupid moves and thus making it difficult for me to lose.

The dice ordered him to play Daddy and me little Evie for one hour one day and he was soon bored: my little Evie was too weak and too stupid. But he enjoyed greatly playing Daddy to my Lil two days later. I didn't realize at the time that the seeds of group dice therapy and my Centers far Experiments in Totally Random Environments were being planted while Larry and I gambolled about as Daddy and Lil or Superman and a crook or Lassie and a dangerous hippopotamus.

The first and last crisis of this phase of Larry's dicelife occurred four days after Lil had returned from Florida. My contacts with Larry had decreased, and on his own he sometimes created such farfetched alternatives for the dice that when the dice chose them, he wasn't able to carry them out. For example, he told me just before the crisis that once he had given the die the option of his killing Evie (she had broken his racing-car set). When the die chose it, he said, he decided not to. I asked him why.

`She would have tattled on me and you wouldn't have fixed my car.'

`If she were dead how could she tattle on you?' I asked.

`Don't worry, she'd find a way.'

The crisis was simple: Larry's dice told him to steal three dollars from Lil's purse and he spent it on twenty-three comic

books (a whim of the die which he told me he resented deeply, being quite fond of bubble gum, lollipops, dart guns

and chocolate sundaes). Lil wondered where he got the money for all the comic books. He refused to tell her, insisting

that she asked Daddy. She did.

`It's very simple, Lil,' I said and while she was putting on Evie's shoes for the fifth time within the hour I consulted the die: I was ordered (one chance in six) to tell the truth.

`I was playing a dice game with him and he lost and had to steal three dollars from your purse.'

She stared at me, a strand of blonde hair dangling on her forehead and her blue eyes momentarily blank with

bewilderment.

`He had to steal three dollars from my purse?'

I was seated in my easy chair puffing on a pipe and with a copy of the Times spread across my lap.

`It's a stupid little game I invented while you were gone to help Larry learn self-discipline. Certain options are created

by the player, some of them unpleasant, like stealing, and then the dice choose which one you have to do.'

'Who has to do?'

She shooed Evie off to the kitchen and advanced to the edge of the couch, where she lit a cigarette. She'd had a good

time in Daytona and we'd enjoyed a nice reunion, but she was beginning to look less tanned and more flushed.

`The player, or players.'

`I don't know what you're talking about.'

`It's simple,' I said (I love these two words: I always imagine Immanuel Kant pronouncing them before he set down the

first sentence of The Critique of Pure Reason, or an American President before launching into an explanation of

Vietnam War policy).

`To encourage Larry to branch out into new areas of this young-'

'Stealing!'

`-new areas of his young life, I invented a game whereby you make up things to do'

`But stealing, Luke, I mean-'

`Which the dice then choose from among.'

`And stealing was one of the options.'

`It's all in the family,' I said.

She stared at me from near the edge of the couch, her arms folded across her chest, a cigarette between her fingers.

She looked amazingly calm.

`Luke,' she began speaking slowly. `I don't know what you think you're doing lately; I don't know whether you're sane or insane; I don't know if you're trying to destroy me or trying to destroy your children or trying to destroy yourself, but if you if you - once more involve Larry in any of your sick games - I -I'll..'

Her amazingly calm face suddenly split like a broken mirror into dozens of cracks of tension, her eyes filled with tears and she twisted her face to the side and gasped a suppressed scream.

`Don't. Please don't,' she whispered, and she sat abruptly on the arm of the couch, her face still averted. `Go tell him no more games. Never.'

'I stood up, the Times fluttering to the floor.

`I'm sorry, Lil. I didn't realize `Never - Larry - more games.'

`I'll tell him.'

I left the room and went to his bedroom and told him, and his career as dice-boy, after only eight days, ended.

Until the Die resurrected it.

Chapter Nineteen

My childhood! My childhood! My God, I've now written over a hundred and ten pages and you don't even know whether I was bottle fed or breast fed! You don't know when I was first weaned and how; when I first discovered that girls don't have any weeny, how much I brooded because girls don't have any weeny, when I first decided to enjoy the fact that girls don't have any weeny. You don't know who my great-grandparents were, my grandparents; you don't even know about my mother and father? My siblings! My milieu! My socioeconomic background! My early traumas! My early joys!, The signs and portents surrounding my birth! Dear friends, you don't know any of that `David Copperfield kind of crap' (to quote Howard Hughes) which is the very essence of autobiography! Relax, my friends, I don't intend to tell you.

Traditional autobiographers wish to help you understand how the adult was `formed.'

I suppose most human beings, like clay chamber pots, are 'formed'- and are used accordingly. But I? I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. Living flows, and the only possible justification of an autobiography is that it happened by chance to be written - like this one. Someday a higher creature will write the almost perfect and totally honest autobiography 'I live.'

I will acknowledge, however, that I did, in fact, have a human mother. This much I admit.

Chapter Twenty

In November I received a telephone call from Dr. Mann informing me that Eric Cannon had been acting up while I'd been away a week at a convention in Houston, that it had bees necessary to increased his medication (tranquilizers) and would I please make a special trip over as soon as possible and see him. Eric might have to be transferred to another institution. In my temporary office on the Island I read through Head Nurse Herbie Flamm's report on Eric Cannon.

It had a kind of novelistic power that Henry James sought for fifty years without finding:

It is necessary to report that Patient Eric Cannon is a troublemaker. There haven't been many patients in my lifetime that I would have to label that, but this is one. Cannon is a consciously evil troublemaker. He is disturbing the other patients. Although I have always kept this one of the quietest [sic] wards on the island, since he has been here it is noisy and a mess. Patients who haven't said a word in years now can't shut up. Patients that have stood always in the same corner now play pitch and catch with chairs. Many of the patients are now singing and laughing. This disturbs the patients who want peace and quiet to get better. Someone keeps destroying the television set. I think Mr. Cannon is schizophrenic. Sometimes he wanders around the ward nice and quiet like he was in a dreamworld and other times he sneaks around like a snake, hissing at me and the patients like he was the boss of the ward and not me.

Unfortunately he has followers. Many patients are now refusing sedation. Some do not go to the machine shop for factory therapy. Two patients confined to wheelchairs have pretended to walk. Patients are showing disrespect for the hospital food. When one man was ill to his stomach, another patient began eating the vomit, claiming it tasted much better that way. We do not have enough maximum security rooms on the ward. Also patients who are refusing or not swallowing their sedation will not stop singing and laughing when we politely ask. Disrespect is everywhere. I have sometimes had the feeling on the ward that I do not exist. I mean to say no one pays attention any more. My attendants are often tempted to treat the patients with physical force but I remind them of the Hypocratic Oath. Patients will not stay in their beds at night. Talking with each other is going on. Meetings I think. They whisper. I do not know if there is a rule against this, but I recommend that a rule is made. Whispering is worse than singing.

We have sent several of his followers to ward W [the violent ward] but patient Cannon is tricky. He never does anything himself. I think he is spreading illegal drugs on the ward but none have been found. He never does anything and everything is happening.

I have this to report. It is serious. On September 10, at 2.30 P.M. in the Main Room right in front of the destroyed and lifeless television set, a large group of patients began hugging each other. They had a circle with their arms around each other and they were humming or moaning and kept getting closer and humming and swaying or pulsating like a giant jellyfish or human heart and they were all men. They did this and attendant R. Smith attempted to break them up but their circle was very strong. I attempted to break their circle also as gently as I could but as I was so endeavoring the circle suddenly opened and two men physically clamped me with their arms and hands and I was drawn against my total will into the horrible circle. It was disgusting beyond my ability to say.

The patients showed no respect but continued their illegal hugging until four attendants from ward T plus R. Smith rescued me by breaking up the circle as gently as they could, unfortunately accidentally breaking my arm (the lower tibia minor, I believe).

This event is typical of the poor conditions which have developed on our ward since patient Cannon came. He was in the circle but since there were eight, Dr. Vener said we couldn't send them all to ward W. Hugging is also not technically against the rules which again shows the need for more thinking.

The boy never talks to me. But I hear. Among the patients I have friends. They say he is against mental hospitals. You should know that. They say he is the ringleader of all the trouble. That he is trying to make all the patients happy and not pay attention to us. They say he says that patients ought to take aver the hospital. That he says even if he leaves them he will come back. These patients, my friends, say this.

Because of the facts what I have written I must respectfully recommend to you;

(1)

That all sedation be given by needle to prevent patients from falsely swallowing their tranquilizers and remaining active and noisy during the day.

(2)

That all illegal drugs should be strictly forbidden.

(3)

That strict rules be developed and enforced regarding singing, laughing, whispering, and hugging.

(4)

That a special iron mesh cage be developed to protest the television set and that its cord go directly from the set which is ten feet off the floor to the ceiling to protect the wire from those who would deny the television set to those who want to watch it. This is freedom of speech. The iron mesh must form about inch wide squares, thick enough to prevent flying objects from entering and smashing the screen but letting people still see the TV screen although with a

waffle-griddle effect. The TV must go on.

(5)

Most important. That patient Eric Cannon be transferred respectfully someplace else. .

Head Nurse Flamm sent this report to myself, Dr. Varier, Dr. Mann, Chief Supervisor Hennings, State Mental Hospital Director Alfred Coles, Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. - I had seen Eric only three times since my Jesus session with him and he had been extremely tense each time and done very little talking, but when he walked into my office that afternoon he came as quietly as a lamb into a grassy meadow.

He moved to the window and stared out. He was wearing blue jeans, a rather soiled T-shirt, sneakers and a gray hospital shirt, unbuttoned. His hair was quiet long, but his skin was paler than it had been in September. After about a minute -he turned and lay down on the short couch to the left of the desk.

`Mr. Flamm,' I said, `reports that he believes that you are stirring up the patients to - improper behavior.'

To my surprise he answered right away.

'Yeah, improper. Bad. Lousy. That's me,' he said, staring at he green ceiling. `It took me a long time to realize what the bastards are up to, to realize that the good-game is their most effective method of keeping their fucking system going. When I did, it made me rage against the way I'd been fooled. All my kindness and forgiveness and meekness just let the system step on everybody all the more comfortably. Love is groovy if it's for good guys but to love the fuzz, love the army; love Nixon, love the church, whoa man, that is one lost trip.'

While he was speaking I took out my pipe and began filling it with marijuana. When he finally paused I said: `Dr. Mann indicates that if Flamm continues to complain you'll have to be transferred to Ward W.'

`Oh, boohoohoo,' he said, not looking at me. `It's all the same. It's a system, you see. A machine. You work hard to keep the machine going, you're a good guy; you goof off or try to stop the machine and you're a commie or a loony. The machine may be blowing blacks under like weeds, or scattering ten-ton bombs over Vietnam like firecrackers or overthrowing reform governments in Latin America every other month, but the old machine must be kept working. Oh man, when I saw this I vomited for a week. Locked myself in my room for six months.'

He paused and we both listened to the birds singing away among the maple trees outside the building. I lit the pipe and took a deep toke. I exhaled, the smoke drifting idly in his direction.

`And all that time I began slowly to feel that something important was going to happen to me, that I was chosen for some special mission. I had only to fast and to wait. When I bopped my father in the face and was sent here I knew even more certainly that something was going to happen. Knew it.' He stopped talking and sniffed twice. I took another drag on my pipe.

`Has anything happened yet?' I asked.

He watched me take another lungful and then settled back onto the couch. He reached into kiss hair and brought out a home made joint.

`Got a match?' he said.

'If you're going to smoke, share mine,' I said.

He leaned over to take the pipe, but it was out, so I handed him the matches too. He lit up and for the next three minutes we passed the pipe back and forth in silence: He was staring at the ceiling as if its green cracks contained like the back of a turtle's shell, portents of the future. By the time the pipe ovens out a second time, I was pleasantly high. I felt happy, as if I were embarking on a new voyage that for the first time, even in my dice man life, represented real, rather than superficial change.

My eyes were focused on his face, which, under the influence of his high perhaps, was glowing. He smiled with a peacefulness well within my understanding. His hands were folded across his belly, and he lay like a dead man, but glowing, glowing. His voice when he spoke was slow, thick and gentle, as if it came from way off in the clouds.

`About three weeks ago I got up in the middle of the night when all the attendants were asleep to take a piss, but I didn't have to take a piss. I was drawn into the day room as if by a magnet and there I stared out through the window at the Manhattan skyline. Manhattan: the central cog of the machine, or maybe just the sewage system. I knelt and I prayed. Yeah, I prayed. To the Spirit, which had lifted Christ above the mass of men to bring His Spirit to me, to give to me the light that could light the world. To let me become the way, the truth and the light. Yeah.'

He paused and I emptied the ashes out into an ashtray and began refilling the pipe.

`How long I prayed, I can't tell. Suddenly, wham! I was flooded by a light that made an acid trip seem like sniffing

glue. I couldn't see. My body seemed to swell, my spirit swelled, I seemed to expand until I filled the whole universe.

The world was me.'

He paused briefly, the sound of the Jefferson Airplane coming from someplace up, the hall.

'I hadn't smoked a thing for three days. I wasn't loony. I filled the whole universe.'

He paused again.

`I was crying. I was weeping for joy. I was on my feet I guess, and the whole world was all light and was all me and it

was good. I stood with my arms outstretched to embrace everything and then I was conscious of this terrific mad grin I had on my face and the vision kind of faded and I shrunk back to me. But I felt that, I knew that I had been given a job … a role, a mission … yeah. This gray-green hellhouse couldn't be left standing. The gray factories, the gray offices, the gray buildings, the gray people .. . everything without light. .. has to go. I saw it. I see it. What I'd been waiting for had happened. The Spirit I'd been looking for, I . . . had . . . I know, I'm not for all men. The mass of men will always see and live in the gray world. But a few will follow me, a few, and we'll change the world.'

I passed him the relit pipe when he'd finished talking and he took it and inhaled and passed it back to me. He didn't

look at me.

`And you, what's your game?' he said. `You're not smoking pot, with me just because you feel like smoking pot.'

`No' I said.

`Then why?'

`Just chance.'

He stared at the green ceiling until I passed him back the pipe. When he finally exhaled he said again as if from very

far away: `If you want to follow me you must give up everything.'

`I know.'

`Pot-smoking doctors who get stoned with mental patients don't stay doctors long.'

`I know.'

I felt like giggling.

`Wives and brothers and fathers and mothers don't usually like my way.'

`So I gather.'

`Someday you will help me.'

We were both staring at the ceiling now, the hot bowl of the pipe resting unused in the palm of my hand.

`Yes,' I said.

`It's a marvelous game we'll play - the best,' he said.

`For some reason I feel I'm yours,' I said. `Whatever you want me to do, I'll want to do.'

`Everything will happen.'

`Yes.'

`The blind bastards [his voice was quiet and serene and remote] will panic and kill, panic and kill, trying to control the

uncontrollable, trying to kill what can only live.'

`We will panic and kill.'

`And I'll,' he interrupted himself with a chuckle, `I'll try to save the whole fucking world'

`Yes.'

`I'm Divine, you know,' he said.

`Yes,' I said, believing it.

`I've come to wake the world to evil, to goose mankind to good.'

'We'll hate you-'

`To slash the mash-potato minds until their sirs is seen.

'We'll be blind-'

`Try to make the blind see, the lame walk, the dead live again.'

He laughed.

`And we'll try to make the seeing blind, the walking lame, the living dead.'

I smiled.

`I'll be the insane Savior of the world, and you'll kill me.'

`Whatever you want will be done.'

I eased out a slow motion bubbling of mirth.

`I'll be…'

He was chuckling too, in slow motion. `I'll be . . . the Savior . . . of the world . . . and do nothing, and you .. .'ll kill … me.'

`And I . .' Goddam it, it was funny! How beautiful it was `… I'll kill you.'

The room was a beautiful blur bouncing up and down on the bubbles of our laughter. Tears were in my eyes and I took of my glasses and put my face in my folded arms and laughed, my big body rumbling from cheeks to belly to knees, laughing, tears wetting my jacket, the soft cotton material caressing my wet face like bear's bristle, and crying with an ecstasy that I hadn't known before that moment, and looking up because I couldn't believe I was crying and Eric's face blurred, blurred bright but blurred and I looked for my glasses - such terror that I might never see again - and after groping for forty days I found them and put them on and looked at the blurred brightness and it was Eric's holy face flowing tears like mine and he wasn't laughing.

Chapter Twenty-one

[Being an edited tape from one of the early analytic sessions given by Dr. Jacob Ecstein to Dr. Lucius Rhinehart, neurotic. We are cutting into the tape about half way through the analytic hour. The first voice is that of Dr. Rhinehart.]

- I'm not sure why I entered into this affair but I think it may partially be aggression against the husband. How have your relations with Lillian been? - Fine. Or rather, about as usual, which means up and down but essentially

happy. I don't think it was or is aggression against Lil. At least I don't think it is.

But against the husband.

Yes. I won't use names or go into details because you know the people involved, but I find the husband too ambitious

and conceited. I experience him as a rival.

You don't need to hide the names. You know it would make no difference outside this office how I treated them.

Well, maybe. I suppose you're right, but I don't think the names should be necessary if I can present everything else

honestly. - The details.

Yes. Although I suppose you will know then immediately the people I'm talking about. But still, I'll omit the names. How did the affair start? - I followed . . . a whim one night and went to her place, found her alone, and raped her. Raped her?

Well, there was a good deal of cooperation. Actually, she enjoyed it more than I did. But the original idea was mine.

Mmm.

We've been seeing each other off and on now for about half a year.

Mmmm. I go to her place when her husband's away, or occasionally we meet in a room I rent in a Puerto Rican neighborhood.

Ahhh.

Sexually it's been rewarding. The woman seems totally without inhibitions. I've tried just about everything my

imagination can cook up and she seems to have more recipes than me.

I see. The husband doesn't seem to suspect a thing. He doesn't suspect a thing.

No. He seems completely wrapped up in his work. His wife says he pulls off a quick one about once every two weeks but with about as much passion or pleasure as when making an extended bowel movement. Mmmm. I once finished an orgasm in her while she was handing a towel in to her husband in the bathtub.

You what? I was pumping away from behind while she leaned into the bathroom and talked to her husband and handed him a towel.

Look here, Rhinehart, do you know what you're saying?

I thought I did.

How could you … How could you possibly…

What's the matter?

How could you possibly miss the significance of this affair?

I don't know. It seems just…

Free associate.

What?

I'll feed you words and you free associate.

Oh, okay.

Black.

White.

Moon.

Sun.

Father.

Mother.

Water. Ah. . . bathtub.

Road.

Roadway.

Green.

Yellow.

Fucking from rear.

- Ar . . . ah . . . ah . . . artificial.

Artificial?

Artificial.

How so? -How should I know? I'm just free associating.

Let's go on. Father.

Figure.

Lake.

Tahoe.

Thirst.

Water.

Love.

Women.

Mother.

Women.

Father.

Women.

White.

Women.

Black.

Negresses.

Well. That's enough. It was just as I expected.

What do you mean?

That was your father in the bathtub.

It was?

Obviously. Item number one: you associate father figure. You may consciously explain this as a result of the psychoanalytic phrase and it does refer to this, but the association also implies you associate a `figure' - naturally a female figure - with father.

Wow.

Item number two. You associate `fucking from rear' with artificial and you can blurt it out only after a significant

delay. I challenge you to tell me what first flashed through your mind.

Well …

Go ahead.

To be frank with you, I thought that the fucking was artificial, unnecessary, irrelevant. I was aiming to hurt someone

… someone bigger.

Precisely. Item number three: from the rear is obviously the position of sodomy, or male making love to male.

But Item number four: you associate lake with Tahoe. Tahoe, even if your conscious mind denies it, means in Cherokee `Big Father Chief.' Lake obviously means water and you associated water with bathtub. Ergo: Big Father Chief was in the bathtub.

Wow. Finally, although these are but trivial confirmations of what now is obvious to you, you associate with `thirst', `water.' You thirst not for women but for water, for bathtub, for your father. At the end, the free association seems to break

down as you associate both your mother and father with women, but in fact it is further confirmation of the whole significance of your extramarital affair and of this free association your incestuous, homosexual love for your father. That's incredible. That's absolutely … wham … [Long pause] . . But what… what does it all mean?

How so? I've told you.

I mean . . . what should I do about it? 'Ah so. Details. Your urge for this woman will probably evaporate now that you know the truth.

My father died when I was two.

Precisely. I need say no more.

He was six foot and blond. The husband is five feet eight and dark.

Displacement.

My father never took baths, only showers, or so my mother tells me.

Irrelevant.

When a woman is handing a towel in to her husband and chatting with him, it's inconvenient to penetrate her from the

front.

Nonsense.

I didn't know Tahoe meant Big Father Chief.

Repression.

I think I'm still going to enjoy making love to this woman.

I challenge you to examine your fantasies when you do.

I usually fantasize I'm doing it with my wife. ,

The hour's up.

Chapter Twenty-two

Days pass, Reader. So do weeks. Since I have a poor memory and kept no journal during these now-to-be-recorded days, the precise sequence of events is no clearer in my mind than it is in these pages. The dice didn't order me to write my autobiography until almost three years after my discovery, and the historic value of everything I did was not apparent to me at the time.

On the other hand, my selective defective memory presumably is hitting only the high points. Perhaps it is giving to my random life a pattern which total recall would blur. Let us assume, then, that what I forget is on a priori grounds insignificant, and what I remember is, in the same way, of great moment. It may not seem that way to either of us, but it makes a convenient theory of autobiography. Also, if the transitions from chapter to chapter or scene to scene seem particularly illogical, attribute it to either my arbitrary memory or the random fall of a die: it makes the trip more psychedelic.

In the evolution of the totally random man the next event worth noting is that on January 2, 1969 at 1 A.M. I determined to begin the new year (I'm a slow starter) by letting the dice determine my long-term fate.

I wrote with un-firm hand and dazed eyes the first option, for snake-eyes or double sixes: I would leave my wife and children and begin a separate life. I trembled (which is hard for a man with so much meat on him) and felt proud. Sooner or later the dice would roll a two or a twelve and the cast great test of the dice's ability to destroy the self would occur. If I left Lil there would be no turning back; it would be dice unto death.

But then I felt fatigued. The dice man seemed boring, unattractive, other. It seemed like too much work. Why not relax and enjoy everyday life, play around in minor ways with the dice as I had at the beginning, and forgo this senseless, theatrical challenge of killing the self? I had discovered an interesting tonic, more varied than alcohol, less dangerous that LSD, more challenging than stocks or sex. Why not accept it as tonic rather than try to make it a magic potion? I had but one life to lead, why sacrifice it to becoming locked in the cage of a rolling cube? For the first time in the six months since becoming the dice man, the thought of totally giving up -the dice appealed tome.

I wrote as the option for a 6, 7 or 8 that I return to a normal diceless life for six months. I felt pleased.

But immediately thereafter, my friends, I felt frightened, depressed. The realization that I might be without the dice produced precisely the same heavy depression, which the thought of being without Lil had produced. Erasing the 7 as a possibility for the option of giving up the dice, I felt a little better. I tore up the entire page and dropped it in the waste basket: I would abandon the whole conception of long-range dice decisions. I heaved myself up out of my chair and walked slowly off to the bathroom where I brushed my teeth and washed my face. I stared at myself in the mirror.

Clark Kent stared back at me, clean-cut and mediocre. Re moving my glasses helped, primarily because it blurred the image sufficiently so that my imagination was given leeway.

The blurred face was at first eyeless and mouthless; a faceless nobody. By concentrating I conjured up two gray slits and a toothless mouth; a death's head. With my glasses back on it was just me again. Luke Rhinehart, M.D., the Clark Kent of New York psychoanalysis. But where was Superman? Indeed, that was what this water-closet identity crisis was all about. Where indeed was Superman an if I went back to bed? Back at my desk I rewrote the first two options; leaving Lil and giving up the dice. I then gave one chance in five to the option that I decide at the beginning of each of the next seven months (until the birthday of D-day in mid-August) what each particular month was to be devoted to. I gave the same probability to the option that I try to write a novel for seven months. Slightly better odds went to the option that I spend three months touring Europe and the rest of the time traveling at the whim of the die. My last option was to turn my sex research with Dr. Felloni over to the imagination of the dice.

The first bi-annual fate-dealing day had arrived - a momentous occasion. I blessed the dice in the name of Nietzsche, Freud, Jake Ecstein and Norman Vincent Peale and shook them in the bowl of my hands, rattling them hard against my palms. I gurgled with anticipation: the next half-year of my life, perhaps even more, trembled in my hands. The dice tumbled across the desk; there was a six and there was a … three. Nine - survival, anticlimax, in-conclusion, even disappointment; the dice had ordered me to decide anew each month what my special fate was to be.

Chapter Twenty-three

National Habit-Breaking Month must have been dictated by the die in a fit of pique over my easy enjoyment of my dicelife; the month provided a hundred little blasts toward the breaking up of Lucius Rhinehart, M.D. Habit breaking had won out over (1) dedicated psychiatrist month, (2) begin-writing-a-novel month, (3) vacation-in-Italy month, (4) be-kind-to everybody month, and (5) help-Arturo-X month. The command was, to be precise, `I will attempt at every moment of every day of this month to alter my habitual behavior patterns.'

First of all it meant that when I rolled over to cuddle Lil at dawn I had to roll back again and stare at the wall. After staring a few minutes and then beginning to doze off, I realized that I never rose at dawn, so with effort and resentment, I got out of bed. Both feet were in my slippers and I was plodding toward the bathroom before I realized habit had me in his fist. I kicked off my slippers and plodded, then jogged into the living room. I still, however, felt like urinating. Triumphantly, I did so in a vase of artificial gladioli. (Three days later Dr. Felloni remarked on how well they seemed to be doing.) A few minutes later I woke up in the same standing position, conscious that I still had a silly proud smile on my face. Careful examination of my conscience revealed that I did not make a habit of falling asleep on my feet after urinating is the living room so I let myself doze off again.

`What are you doing?' a voice said through my sleep.

`Huh?'

`Luke, what are you doing?'

`Oh.'

I saw Lil standing nude with her arms folded across her chest looking at me.

`I'm thinking.'

`What about?'

`Dinosaurs.'

`Come back to bed.'

`All right.'

I started to follow her back to bed but remembered that following nude women into beds was habitual. When Lil had

plopped in and pulled the blankets over her I crawled under the bed.

'Luke???'

I didn't answer.

The squeak of springs and the wandering low-cloud ceiling above me implied that Lil was leaning over first on one

and then on the other side of the bed. The spread was lifted and her upside-down face peered into my sideways face.

We looked at each other for thirty seconds. Without a word her face disappeared and the bed above me became still.

`I want you,' I said. `I want to make love to you.'

(The prosaicness of the prose was compensated for by the poetry of my position.) When the silence continued I felt an

admiration for Lil. Any normal, mediocre woman would have (a) sworn, (b) looked under the bed again, or (c) shouted

at me. Only a woman of high intelligence and deep sensitivity would have remained silent.

`I'd love to have your prick inside me,' her voice suddenly said.

I was frightened: a contest of wills. I must not reply habitually.

`I want your left knee,' I said.

Silence.

`I want to come between your toes,' I went on.

`I want to feel your Adam's apple bob up and down,' she said.

Silence.

I began humming `The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'

I lifted the springs above me with all my might. She rolled off to one side. I changed my position to try to push her

off. She rolled back into the middle. My arms were exhausted. Although whatever I did from under the bed was, a

priori, a non-habitual act, my back was aching. I got out from under, stood up and stretched.

`I don't like your games, Luke,' Lil said quietly.

`The Pittsburgh Pirates have won three games in a row but remain mired in third place.'

`Please come to bed and be yourself.'

`Which one?'

`Any one except this morning's version.'

Habit pulled me toward the bed, the dice pulled back.

`I have to think about dinosaurs,' I said and, realizing I'd said it in my normal voice, I repeated it shouting. When I saw

that I had used my habitual shout I started to emit a third version, but-realized that three of anything approached habit

and so half-shouted, half-mumbled, `Breakfast with dinosaurs in bed,' and went into the kitchen.

Halfway there I tried to vary my walk and ended up crawling the last fifteen feet.

`What are you doing, Daddy?'

Larry stood sleepy-eyed but fascinated in the entrance to the kitchen. I didn't want to upset him. I had to watch my

words carefully.

`I'm looking for mice.'

`Oh boy, can I look?'

`No, they're dangerous.'

`Mice?'

`These mice are man-eaters.'

`Oh Daddy .. : [Scornfully].'

`I'm teasing [An habitual phrase; I shook my head].'

'Go back to be - [Another!]'

`Look under your mother's bed, I think they may have gone under there.'

Not a great many seconds later Larry came back from our bedroom accompanied by a bathrobed Lil. I was on my

knees at the stove about to heat a pot of water.

`Don't you involve the children in your games.'

Since I never lose my temper at Lil I lost it.

`Shut your mouth! You'll scare them all away.'

`Don't you say shut up to me!'

`One more word out of you and I'll ram a dinosaur down your throat.'

I stood up and strode toward her, fists clenched.

They both looked terrified. I was impressed.

`Go back to bed, Larry,' Lil said, shielding him and backing away.

`Get down on your knees and pray for mercy, Lawrence, NOW!' Larry ran for his bedroom, crying.

'Fie upon you!'

'Don't you dare hit me.'

`My God, you're insane,' Lil said.

I hit her, rather restrainedly; on the left shoulder.

She hit me, rather unrestrainedly, in the left eye.

I sat down on the kitchen floor.

`For breakfast is what?'

I asked, at least reversing the syntax.

`Are you through?'

`I surrender everything.'

`Come back to bed.'

`Except my honor.'

`You can keep your honor in your underwear; but come back to bed and behave.'

I jogged back to bed ahead of Lil and lay as rigid as a board for forty minutes at which point Lil commanded me to

get out of bed. Immediately and rigidly I obeyed. I stood like a robot beside the bed.

`Relax,' she commanded irritably from the dresser.

I collapsed to the floor, ending as painlessly as possible on my side and back. Lil came over and looked down at me

for a moment and then kicked me in the thigh. `Act normal,' she said.

I rose, did six squats arms extended and went to the kitchen.

For breakfast I had a hot dog, two pieces of uncooked carrot, coffee with lemon and maple syrup, and toast cooked

twice until it was blackened with peanut butter and radish. Lil was furious; primarily because both Larry and Evie wanted desperately to have for breakfast what I was having and ended up crying in frustration. Lil too. - I jogged down Fifth Avenue from my apartment to my office, attracting considerable attention since I was (1) jogging: (2) gasping like a fish drowning in air; and (3) dressed in a tuxedo over a red T-shirt with large white letters declaring The Big Red.

At the office Miss Reingold greeted me formally, neutrally and; I must admit, with secretarial aplomb. Her cold, ugly

efficiency stimulated me to break new ground in our relationship.

`Mary Jane, baby,' I said. `I've got a surprise this morning. I've decided to fire you.'

Her mouth neatly opened, revealing two precisely parallel rows of crooked teeth.

`As of tomorrow morning.'

`But - but Dr. Rhinehart, I don't under `It's simple, knee-knocker. I've been hornier in the last few weeks, want a

receptionist who's a good lay.'

`Dr. Rhinehart-'

`You're efficient, but you've got a flat ass. Hired a 38-24-37 who knows all about fellatio, post hoc propter id,

soixante-neuf, gesticulation and proper filing procedures.'

She was backing slowly towards Dr. Ecstein's office, eyes bulging, teeth gleaming like two parallel armies in disarray.

`She starts tomorrow morning,' I went on. `Has her own contraceptive device, I understand. You'll get full pay through

the end of the century. Good-bye and good luck.'

I had begun jogging in place about halfway through my tirade and at its conclusion I sprinted neatly into my office.

Miss Reingold was last seen sprinting not so neatly into Jake's.

I assumed the traditional lotus position on my desk and wondered what Miss Reingold would do with my chaotic

cruelties. After minimal investigation I concluded that she had been given something to fill her dull life. I pictured her years hence with two dozen nieces and nephews clustered around her chubby knees telling them about the wicked doctor who stuck pins in patients and raped others and, under the influence of LSD and imported Scotch, fired good, hard-working people and replaced them with raving nymphomaniacs.

Feeling superior in my imaginative faculties and uncomfortable in my yoga position I stretched both arms upward. A knock on the door. .

`Yo!' I answered, arms still outstretched, my tuxedo straining grotesquely. Jake stuck his head in.

`Say, Luke, baby, Miss Reingold was telling me som-' He saw me. Jake's habitual piercing squint couldn't quite

negotiate the sight: he blinked twice.

`What's up, Luke?' he asked tentatively.

I laughed. `Oh this,' I said, fingering the tuxedo. `Late party last night. I'm trying to wake myself up before Osterflood

comes. Hope I didn't upset Miss R: He hesitated, his chubby neck and round face still the only parts of him which had

eased their way into the room.

`Well,' he said, `yeah. She says you fired her.'

`Nonsense,' I replied. `I was telling her a joke I heard at the party last night; it was a little raunchy perhaps, but nothing

that would upset Mary Magdalen.'

`Yeah,' he said, his traditional squint gathering strength, his glasses like two flying saucers with slits concealing deadly ray guns. `Righto,' he said. `Sorry to bother you.' His face vanished, the door eased shut. While meditating I was interrupted a few minutes later by the door opening and

Jake's glasses reappearing.

`She wants me to make sure she's not fired.'

`Tell her to come to work tomorrow fully prepared.'

`Righto.'

When Osterflood strode in I was limping around the room trying to get the circulation back into my feet' He walked

automatically to the couch but I stopped him.

`No you don't, Mr. O. Today you sit over there and I'll use the couch.'

I made myself comfortable while he lumbered uncertainly to the chair behind my desk.

`What's the matter. Dr. Rhinehart, do you-'

`I feel elated today,' I began, noting in the corner of the ceiling an impressive cobweb. For how many years had my

patients been staring at that? `I feel I've made a major breakthrough on the road to the New Man.'

`What new man?'

`The Random Man. The unpredictable man. I feel today I am demonstrating that habits can be broken. That man is

free.'

`I wish I could break my habit of raping little girls,' he said, trying to get the focus back on himself.

`There's hope, Oh there's hope. Just do the opposite of everything you normally do. If you feel like raping them,

shower them with candy and kindness and then leave. If you feel like beating a whore, have her beat you. If you feel

like seeing me, go to a movie instead.'

`But that's not easy. I like hurting people.'

`True, but you may find you'll get a kick out of kindness, too. Today, for example, I found running to work much more

meaningful than my usual cab ride. I also found my cruelty to Miss Reingold, refreshing. I used to enjoy being nice to

her.'

`I wondered why she was crying. What happened?'

`I accused her of bad breath and body odor.'

`Jesus.'

`Yes.'

`That was a horrible thing to do. I'd never do a thing like that.'

`I hope not. But the city health authorities had issued a formal complaint that the entire building was beginning to

stink. I had no choice.'

In the ensuing silence I heard his chair squeak; he may have tipped back in it, but from where I lay I couldn't tell. I

could see only part of two walls, bookcases, books, my cobweb and a single small portrait of Socrates draining the

hemlock. My taste in soothing pictures for patients seemed dubious.

`I've been pretty cheerful lately too,' Osterflood said meditatively, and I realized I wanted to get the focus back on my

problems.

`Of course, habit breaking can also be a chore,' I said. 'For example, I find it difficult to improvise new methods and

places for urinating.'

`I think . . . I almost think you may have brought me toward a breakthrough,' Osterflood said, ignoring me.

`I'm particularly concerned with my next bowel movement,' I went on. `There seem to be definite limits as to what

society will stand for. All sorts of eccentricity and nonsensical horrors can be permitted - wars, murder, marriage, slums - but that bowel movements should be made anywhere except in the toilet seems to be pretty universally considered despicable.'

`You know that if . . . I felt that if I could just kick my little girl addiction, just … lose interest, I'd be all right. The big

ones don't mind, or can be bought'

`Also locomotion. There are only a certain number of limited ways of moving from spot A to spot B. Tomorrow, for

example, I won't feel free to jog to work. What can I do? Walk backward?'

I looked over to Osterflood with a serious frown, but he was immersed in his own thoughts.

`But now … lately … I got to admit it … I seem to be losing my interest in little girls.'

`Walking backwards a solution, of course, but only a temporary one. After that and crawling and running backward

and hopping on one foot, I'll feel confined, limited, repetitious, a robot'

`And that's good, I know it is. I mean I hate little girls and now that I'm less interested in fucking them I feel that's …

definitely an advance.'

He looked down at me sincerely and I looked sincerely back.

`Conversations too are a problem,' I said. `Our syntax is habitual, our diction, our coherence. I have a habit of logical

thought which clearly must be broken. And vocabulary. Why do I accept the limits of our habitual words. I'm a clod! A clod!'

`But … but … lately … I'm afraid … I've sensed … I'm almost afraid to say it…'

`Umpwillis. Art fodder. Wishmonger. Gladsull. Parminkson. Jombie. Blit. Why not? Man has limited himself

artificially to the past. I feel myself breaking free.'

`. . that I'm, I feel I'm beginning to want, to be like . . . little boys.'

`A breakthrough. A definite breakthrough if I can continue to contradict my habitual patterns as I have this morning.

And sex. Sexual patterns must be broken too . .

`I mean really like them,' he said emphatically; `Not want to rape them or hurt them or anything like that, just bugger

them and have them suck me off.'

`Possibly this experiment could get me into dangerous ground. I suppose since I've habitually not been interested in

raping little girls that theoretically I ought to try it.'

`And boys … little boys are easier to get at. They're more trusting, less suspicious.'

`But really hurting someone frightens me. I suppose - No! It is a limitation. A limitation I must overcome. To be free

from habitual inhibitions I will have to rape and kill: His chair squeaked, and I heard one of his feet hit the ground.

`No,' he said firmly. `No, Dr. Rhinehart. I'm trying to tell you, raping and killing aren't necessary anymore. Even

hitting may be out.'

`Raping, or at least killing, is absolutely necessary to the Random Man. To shirk that would be to shirk a clear duty.'

`Boys, little boys, even teen-age boys, will do just as good, I'm sure. It's dangerous with little girls, Doc, I warn you.'

`Danger is necessary. The whole concept of the Random Man is the most dangerous and revolutionary ever conceived

by man. If total victory demands blood then blood it must be.'

`No, Dr. Rhinehart, no. You must find another way to work it out. A less dangerous way. These are human beings

you're talking about.'

`Only according to our habitual perceptive patterns. It may well be that little girls are actually fiends from another

world sent to destroy us.

He didn't reply but I heard the chair give one small squeak.

`It's quite clear,' I went on, `that without little girls we wouldn't have women, and women - snorfu buck clisting rinnschauer.'

`No, no, Doc, you're tempting me. I know it, I see it now. Woman are human beings, they must be.'

`Call them what you will, they differ from us, Osterflood, and you can't deny it' `I know, I know, and boys don't. Boys are us. Boys are good.

I think I could learn to love boys and not to have to worry so much about the police anymore.'

`Candy and kindness to girls, O., and a stiff prick to boys you may be right. It would, for you, definitely be a habit breaker.'

`Yes, yes.'

Someone knocked on the door. The hour was, up. As I dazedly rolled my feet onto the floor I felt Mr. Osterflood pumping my hand vigorously: his eyes were blazing with joy.

"This has been the greatest therapeutic hour of my life. You're . . . you're … you're a boy, Dr. Rhinehart, a genuine boy.'

`Thank you, O. I hope you're right.'

Chapter Twenty-four

Slowly and steadily, my friends, I was beginning to go insane. I found that my residual self was changing. When I chose to let the sleeping dice lie and be my `natural self I discovered that I liked absurd comments, anecdotes, actions. I climbed trees in Central Park, assumed the yoga position of meditation during a cocktail party and oozed esoteric, oracular remarks every two minutes which confused and bored even me. I shouted, `I'm Batman,' at the top of my lungs at the end of a telephone conversation with Dr. Mann - all not because the dice said so, but because I felt like it.

I would break into laughter for no reason at all, I would overreact to situations, becoming angry, fearful or compassionate far in excess of that normally demanded. I wasn't consistent. Sometimes I'd be gay, at others sad; sometimes I'd be articulate, serious, brilliant; at others, absurd, abstracted, dumb. Only my being in the process of analysis with Jake kept me free to walk the streets. As long as I did nothing violent, people could still feel relatively at ease: `Poor Dr. Rhinehart, but Dr. Ecstein is helping him: Lil was becoming increasingly worried about me, but since the die always rejected the option that I tell her the truth, I kept making semi-rational excuses for my absurdities. She talked with Jake and Arlene and Dr. Mann, and they all had perfectly rational and usually brilliant explanations of what was happening, but unfortunately no suggestions as to how to end it.

`In a year or two…' said Dr. Mann benevolently to Lil, who told me she almost started screaming.

I assured her that I'd try harder to control my whims.

National Habit-Breaking Month certainly didn't help matters. How upset people become when confronting the breakdown of patterns, how upset or how joy-filled. My jogging into the office, my absurd speeches, my blasphemous efforts to seduce the sexless and incorruptible Miss Reingold, my drunkenness, my nonsensical behavior with my patients - all brought to those who witnessed them shock and dismay, but also, I began to notice, pleasure.

How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd: Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning, if only patterns would break down.

By the end of that month I was thinking if only Nixon would get drunk and say to someone, `Fuck you, buddy: If only William Buckley or Billy Graham would say, `Some of my best friends are Communists'; if only a sportscaster would just once say `Sure is a boring game, folks.'

But they don't. So each of us travels, to Fort Lauderdale, to Vietnam, to Morocco, or gets divorced, or has an affair, or tries a new job, a new neighborhood, a new drug, in a desperate effort to find something new. Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experience.

But in most ways National Habit-Breaking Month turned out to be impractical; I ended up at one point letting the die decide when I would go to bed and for haw, long I would sleep. My sleeping a random number of hours at randomly selected times quickly made me irritable, washed out and occasionally high, specially when kicked by drugs or alcohol. When and whether I ate, washed, shaved, brushed my teeth were also dice determined for a three-day period. As a result, I once or twice found myself using my portable electric razor in the middle of a midtown crunch of people (passers-by looking around for the camera crew), brushing my teeth in a night-club lavatory, taking baths and getting a rubdown at Vic Tanny's and eating my main meal at 4 A.M. at Nedick's.

Another time the Die ordered me to sensitize myself to every moment, to live each moment fully awake. It seemed a marvelously aesthetic thing to do. I pictured myself as Walter Pater John Ruskin Oscar Wilde all rolled into one. What I first became aware of during Aesthetic Sensitivity Day was that I had the sniffles. I may have had them for months, years even, and never noticed it. In January, thanks to this random command of the Die, I became conscious of a periodic intake of air through my nostrils running through some accumulated mucus which produced a sound normally denoted as a `sniff.'

Were it not for the dice I would have remained an insensitive clod.

I became aware of other previously unrealized sense experiences during that Sensitivity Week. Lying in bed with Lil is the early morning hours I would listen fascinated to the symphony of street noises from below, noises which previously I had named silence - meaning that Larry and Evie were not awake. Admittedly after about two days they became a quite monotonous and second-rate symphony, but for two mornings they - and I - lived again. Another day I went to the Museum of Modern Art and tried desperately to experience aesthetic bliss, decided after half an hour to shoot for simple pleasure and settled at the end of a footsore hour and a half for being content with a low level of pain. My visual sense must have atrophied at some point and even the mighty dice couldn't resurrect it. The next day I was happy the dice killed off Walter Pater.

In general, during that month in clothes I wore what I never wore; in words I swore what I never swore; in-sex I whored what I never whored.

Breaking sexual habits and values was the hardest of all. In rambling down the stairs to merge with Arlene I was not altering my sexual values: I was only fulfilling them. Adultery did break a habit of fidelity, but fidelity was the most trivial of my sexual habit-values. Mary, Mother of Jesus, once suggested that the nature of a person's sexuality defines his whole life, but she knew better than to assume that when one had defined an individual as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual one was done. I at first didn't know better. I assumed in my typical mechanical way that breaking sexual habits meant changing favorite sexual positions, changing women, changing from women to men, from men to boys, changing to total abstention and so on. My polymorphous perverse tendencies were vaguely thrilled by this prospect and I began one night, returning from a party, by trying to penetrate my wife's anus at 2 A.M. in the apartment elevator. Lil, however, not so much indignant or inhibited as uninterested, insisted on getting out of the elevator and going to bed and going to sleep.

Since Arlene and I seemed to have made love in most of the normal conceivable ways, the only way to break habits there, I concluded, was to abstain, or even better, feel guilty about our affair.

When I turned for a new woman I realized that it was my duty according to the mandate to change my taste in women. Therefore my next conquest would have to be old, thin, grey-haired, wear glasses, have big feet and be fond of Doris Day Rock Hudson movies. Although I'm sure many such women exist in New York, I soon realized that they were as difficult to locate and date as the equal number, of women whose figures more or less matched that of Raquel Welch. I would have to lower my standards to old, thin and spiritual and let the other precise trivialities fall as they may.

The image of Miss Reingold leapt to my mind and I shuddered. If I were to break my sexual values I would have to seduce her. When consulted, the die said yes.

Seldom have I felt less respect for the die's judgment. Miss Reingold was undoubtedly the antithesis of all my sexual appetites, the Brigitte Bardot of my netherworld. She wasn't of course old; rather she had the remarkable ability to create at the age of thirty-six the impression she was sixty-three. The idea that she urinated was unthinkable, and I blush even to write about it here. In one thousand two hundred and six days with Ecstein and Rhinehart not once to our knowledge had she used the office bathroom. The only odor she gave off was the pervasive smell of baby powder. I didn't know whether she was flat-chested or not; one doesn't speculate on the measurements of one's mother or grandmother.

Her speech was more chaste than that of a Dickensian heroine; she would read back a report on the sexual activities of a superhuman nymphomaniac as if it were a long, bullish announcement of a corporation's phenomenal growth activities.

At the end she would ask; `Would you like me to change the sentence about Miss Werner's multiple intercourse into parallel structure?'

Nevertheless, not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done, and with morbid fascination I took her out to dinner one evening about three weeks through National Habit-Breaking Month and, as the evening progressed, began to sense, much to my horror, that I might succeed: I went to the men's room after dinner and consulted the die about several possible options, but all it told me to do was smoke to marijuana cigarettes; no cocaine before the tooth-pulling. Squirm as I might, I found myself later that evening sitting beside her on the couch discussing (I swear I didn't introduce the subject) nymphomaniacs. Although I'd begun to note as the hours wore by that she had a pretty smile (when she kept her mouth fully closed), her lowcut black dress on her white body reminded me somehow of a black drape hung on a vertical coffin.

`But do you think nymphomaniacs enjoy their lives?'

I was saying with the spontaneous randomness and blissful indifference which pot smoking and Miss Reingold seemed to produce.

`Oh no,' she said quickly, nudging her spectacles up an eighth of an inch. `They must be very unhappy.'

`Yes, perhaps, but I can't help wondering if the great pleasure they get from being loved by so many men doesn't compensate for their unhappiness.'

'Oh no. Dr. Ecstein told me that according to Rogers, Rogers and Hillsman, eighty-two point five percent receive no pleasure from copulation.'

She was sitting so stiffly on the couch that periodically my pot-polluted vision made me believe I was talking to a dressmaker's dummy.

`Yeah,' I said. `But Rogers nor Rogers nor Hillsman have ever been nymphomaniacs. I doubt they've ever been women.'

I smiled triumphantly. `A theory I'm developing is that nymphomaniacs actually are joy-filled hedonists but lie to psychiatrists that they're frigid in order to seduce the psychiatrists.'

'Oh no;' she said. `Who could ever seduce a psychiatrist?'

For a moment we blinked incredulously at each other, and then she went through a kaleidoscope of colors, ending with

typing-paper white.

`You're right,' I said firmly. `The woman is a patient and our code of ethics prevents our giving in to them, but…'

I trailed off, losing the thread of my argument.

In her small voice, with her two hands wrestling with her handkerchief, she asked `But . . .?'

'But?' I echoed.

`You said your code prevents you from ever giving into them but…'

`Oh yeah. But it's hard. We're continually being excited but with no ethical way of satisfying ourselves.'

'Oh, Dr. Rhinehart, you're married.'

`Married? Oh Yes. That's true. I'd forgotten.'

I looked at her, my face a tragic mask. `But my wife practices yoga and consequently can only engage in sexual

congress with a guru.'

She stared back at me.

`Are you certain?' she asked.

`I can't even do a modified headstand. I have come to doubt that I am a man.'

`Oh no, Dr. Rhinehart.'

`To make matters worse, it has always depressed me that you never seem to be sexually attracted to me.'

Miss Reingold's face went through its psychedelic color show and again ended in typing-paper white. Then she said in

the smallest audible voice I've ever heard `But I am.'

`You . . . you . . .'

`I am sexually attracted to you.'

`Oh.'

I paused, all the forces of the residual me mobilizing my body to run for the door; only religious discipline kept me on

the couch.

`Miss Reingold!' I shouted impulsively. `Will you make me a man?'

I sat erect and leaned toward her.

She stared at me, removed her glasses from her face and placed them on the rug beside the, couch.

`No, no,' she said softly, her eyes focusing vaguely on the couch between us. `I can't'

At first, for the only time in my life not dictated by the die, I was impotent. I had to sit on the bed beside her, nude, in

a modified lotus position, not touching, and for seven or eight minutes meditate with all the powers of a yogi on

Arlene's breasts, Linda Reichman's behind and Lil's innards, until, at last, with the powers properly concentrated, I assumed the cat's cradle position over Miss Reingold's assumed corpse position and lowered myself into samadhi (emptiness).

It is a frightening experience to make love to one's mother, especially one's mother as a corpse, and nowhere near what Freud imagined it. That I looked upon her as a mother image and yet succeeded in assuming the proper positions and fulfilling all the appropriate exercises is a tribute to my budding abilities as a yogi. It was a great step forward in the breaking of psychological barriers, and I trembled all the next day thinking about it. Surprisingly also, I've felt much closer to Miss Reingold ever since.

Chapter Twenty-five

But not that close.

Chapter Twenty-six

My friends, it's time for confession. Amusing as I or you may have found some of the events of my early dice-life, I must admit that being the dice man was sometimes hard work. Depressing, lonely and hard. The fact is, I didn't want to go bowling. Or to break up with Arlene for a month. Or play an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers. Or seduce Miss Reingold. Or have sexual intercourse in one sexual position when Lil wanted it in another. Fulfilling these missions of fate was a chore. Fulfilling many others was a chore. Sometimes when the dice sent me rolling randomly to a bowling alley or vetoed my playing Romeo, I felt like the slave you take me to be, yoked to an unsympathetic and unintelligent master, one whose whims were getting increasingly on my nerves. The resistance of my residual self to certain dice decisions never ceased and always dragged at my desire to become the Random Man. I was attempting to permit that one desire, the desire to kill my old self and to learn something new about the nature of man, to dominate the vast majority of the rest of my desires. It was an ascetic, religious struggle.

Sometimes, of course, the dice discovered and permitted the expression of some of my deepest (and previously unrealized) impulses, and as time passed this occurred more and more frequently. But at other times the dice discovered that I hadn't gone bowling for fourteen years because I didn't like to bowl, and I hadn't slept with a fat slob because I was correct in sensing I wouldn't enjoy it. I suppose some suppressed one-thousandth of me may like bowling, clods, slobs and position twenty-three, but my level of perception wasn't able to record it.

And so you, my friends, when you've picked up a pencil and written a list of options and rolled the dice, you may be disappointed. You've gone through the motions a few tunes and then concluded that the dice-life is a fake and I a fraud.

One desire, my friends, one: to kill yourself. You must desire this. You must feel that a voyage of discovery is more important than all the little trips which the normal consumer self wants to buy.

The dice save only the lost. The normal, integrated personality resists variety, change. But the split, compulsive, unhappy neurotic is given release from the prison of- checks and balances. He becomes in a way an `authoritarian personality,' but obeys not God, father, church, dictator or philosopher but his own creative imagination - and the dice. `If the fool would but persist in his folly,' Yossarian once said, `he would become the dice man.'

But it isn't easy; only saints and the insane ever try it. And only the latter make it.

Chapter Twenty-seven

For February the dice ordered me to experiment with the Felloni-Rhinehart sex investigation. Specifically: `Do something new and valuable.'

I squared up the cubes in their little box and spent several days trying to see what. I became depressed.

The limitations in experimenting with human beings were great. You could force them to answer anything, but force them to do nothing. With the other animals, of course, you could ask them nothing and make them do anything. You could castrate them, cut out half their brain, make them walk over hot coals to get their dinner or their mate, deprive them of food, water, sex or society for days or months, give them LSD in such massive dosages that they died of excess ecstasy, cut off their limbs one by one and study mobility and so on. Such experimentation tells us journals full about castrated mice, brainless rats, schizophrenic hamsters, lonely rabbits, ecstatic sloths and legless chimpanzees, but unfortunately nothing about man.

For ethical reason we aren't allowed to ask subjects to do anything which they or their society consider unethical. The problem to which I was devoting my life - how much a human being can be changed - could never be touched by scientists, since the bone ingredient of all men is their resistance to change; and it is unethical to insist that subjects do anything they don't want to do.

I decided to try to change some of the subjects of the Felloni-Rhinehart investigation. Since the research dealt with sexual behavior I would try to change sexual attitudes, proclivities and actions. Unfortunately, I knew that it took two years of analysis to change a homosexual to heterosexual, and that then such change rarely occurred. Could I convert virgins to nymphomania? Masturbators to rakehood? Faithful wives to adulteresses? Seducers to ascetics? Very doubtful. But possible.

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. Major psychological disturbances, `identity crises,' are caused when an individual begins to change the audience for whom he plays: from parents to peers; from peers to the works of Albert Camas; from the Bible to Hugh Hefner. The-change from I-am-he-who-is-a-good-son to I-am-he-who-is-a-goodbuddy constitutes a revolution. On the other hand, if the man's buddies approve fidelity one year and infidelity the next, and the man changes from faithful husband to rake, no revolution has occurred. The class tale remains intact; only the policy on a minor matter has been altered.

In first becoming the dice man, my audience was changed from my peers in psychiatry to Blake, Nietzsche, Lao-Tzu. My goal was to destroy all sense of an audience; to become without values, evaluators, without desires: to be inhuman, all-inclusive. God.

In moving the dice man into sexual research, however, what I aspired to was a piece of ass. Zeus wished to disguise himself as beast and fornicate with a beautiful woman. But my equal desire, as strong as lust, was to become the audience for our subjects. As audience I might be able to create an atmosphere of all-embracing permissiveness, one in which the virgin would feel free to express her latest lech; the queer to express his latent desire for cunt. The dice man had discovered that the experimenting man was permitted almost everything. Could I create an experimental situation for the subjects which would be equally permissive? Such was my hope. Seduction is the art of making normal, desirable, good and rewarding what had previously seemed abnormal, undesirable, evil and unrewarding. Seduction was the art of changing another's audience and hence his personality. I refer, of course, to the classical seduction of the `innocent' and not to the mutual masturbation of promiscuous adults.

Dr. Felloni's dean-of-women dignity and my own rugged, professional look had convinced our subjects that we were the epitome of respectability. They had become more accustomed than the average person to discussing all sorts of outrageous sexuality with strange, non-condemning adults. All of this might ready them, so my thinking went, for any outrageous instructions we might give them.

`Now this afternoon, Mr. F., in the next room is a shy but promiscuous young woman your own age. She has been paid to make love to you. Be a gentleman with her, but insist that she fuck good. At the conclusion of your experience fill out the questionnaire in this sealed envelope. Be as honest as possible with your answers; they will be completely anonymous.'

`Miss F., in the next room is a shy young man your own age named F. Like yourself he is a virgin. He has been told that you are a prostitute hired to teach him the art of love. For this experiment we wish to see how well you can play this role by interacting with him sexually to permit us to collect as much data as possible. If you overcome your inhibitions about nudity and intimate sexual contact with a man you will receive a bonus of one hundred dollars. If you permit him to have sexual intercourse you will receive a bonus of two hundred dollars. For other possible bonuses read pages five and six of the enclosed instruction sheet and questionnaire. You need not fear pregnancy, since the other subject has been medically certified as sterile.'

`Tomorrow afternoon, Mr. J., you are to go to the address printed on this card. You will meet there a man who has been told you are a fellow homosexual. He will attempt to seduce you. You are to encourage him as much as possible, while noting your own feelings and reactions. If he achieves an orgasm you will receive a bonus of one hundred dollars for producing such significant data. If you also achieve orgasm you will receive an additional two-hundred #161;dollar bonus. We are interested in studying the social and sexual intercourse between normal men like yourself and homosexual men.. Within the enclosed…'

Instructions like these came parading through my mind. I might have to hire prostitutes and homosexuals, but in some cases I might have subjects playing both roles. (Two heterosexual men banging away at each other collecting data.) I began to believe that human beings are capable of anything. Our other-directed modern men are so accustomed to looking to the immediate social environment for approval or disapproval that, given the correct experimental leader, tone and situation, I should be able to get the subjects to alter their customary sexual roles.

It seemed a worthy project, worthy of the Marquis de Sade. Consciously, I wanted to confirm my theory of the malleability of man, but I seemed to be taking a rather fiendish non-rational delight in the prospect.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Hectic, hectic, hectic. The life of an experimenter is not easy. To set up mazes, find rats to run them, measure the results and to tabulate everything is hard. To set up sexual encounters, find people to run them, measure the results and believe everything is harder.

Nevertheless, in the next few weeks I completed the complicated task of setting up what was officially named the Rhinehart-Felloni Investigation of Amorality Tolerance, but which has become generally known among New York psychiatrists as `Fuck Without Fear for Fun and Profit,' and in the New York Daily News as `The Columbia Copulation Caper.'

I had some trouble convincing Dr. Felloni of the correctness of our joint venture, but I took her to lunch one day and just kept talking about `test of the stability of behavioral patterns and attitudes under experimental conditions' and `the Leiberwitz-Loom criteria for defining a homosexual,' and `heterosexuality as defined operationally by the maintenance of an erection in the presence of a woman for five or more minutes' and, as my clincher, `the complete quantification of all results.'

She finally agreed and laid great professional stress on the necessity of anonymity for all subjects.

The first two weeks of the experiment were incredibly confusing. Too many of our hired personnel - prostitutes male and female - were failing to show up or, more usually, failing to follow instructions. Women hired to play hard-to-get would bring along a friend and give our subject an orgy. Another woman hired to exhaust a Don Juan type sexually, fell asleep after fifteen minutes and couldn't be roused even by a gentle beating with a belt.

Many of our subjects, after seeming to agree to the experiment, disappeared. I was desperate for subjects, `lab assistants' (our `help' was so designated in our budget and foundation report) and data. I found myself tempted to hire my wife, Arlene, Miss Reingold even, to meet the various appointments. Dr. Felloni reported that she was having the same problem with the group of subjects she was dealing with. The confusion was further compounded by our having to use the same two apartments for all our `experimental sessions.'

I sent Arlene out to play the role of a lonely, prudish, love sick housewife for a sexually hard-up and inhibited college student who had been instructed to play the role of a Henry Miller; she came back exhilarated. She announced that the evening had been a total success, although she admitted that nothing much had happened for the first two hours and that she may not have stuck completely to her assigned role when she walked into the living room nude after taking a shower. She volunteered to assist in any way she could if needed further for the experiment and even agreed not to tell Jake.

Finally I decided that the old coach himself had to get off the bench and into the game. Someone had to get in there who could plug up the holes when they needed to be plugged or burst up the middle of a score. A hush fell over the crowd when I trotted onto the field.

Miss T. was required by the instructions to: `Spend the evening at the apartment of Mr. O., age thirty-five. Man will have paid one hundred dollars to spend the evening with you. Mr. O. is a lonely college professor whose wife died a year ago. He knows nothing about this experiment and believes a friend has provided him with a young, inexperienced call girl. You are to try to give yourself to him as completely as possible. Examine closely your own attitudes and emotions and fill out the questions contained in the enclosed envelope.'

According to her answers on our attitude questionnaires, Miss T. was nineteen years old, had never had sexual intercourse, had `necked heavily' with only two boys, had kissed `less than ten' boys and had never had any conscious lesbian inclinations or experiences. She believed that premarital sexual intercourse was wrong because `God punished it finitely,' it was `psychologically unhealthy' and there was `danger of pregnancy.'

She affirmed that as a positive attribute it procreated the race. According to her she had never masturbated because `God punished it finitely.'

She was vaguely intolerant of all sexual deviations from the heterosexual norm, extremely conventional in most other attitudes and indicated no close relationships with anyone except her mother, to whom she seemed quite close. She reported that she was a believing Catholic and hoped to be a social worker for emotionally disturbed children.

It seemed to me unlikely that Miss T. would even show up. Of the seven other subjects to whom I had given similar instructions (to meet each other or hired help), three had never appeared; and two of the desertees were quiet types like Miss T. The assigned time, was `around eight o'clock.'

I, in a generous act of self-employment arrived at seven-thirty, and, after fixing myself a small drink, was settling down for a long wait when the bell rang. At the door I found a young woman who announced that she was `Terry Tracy.'

It was five of eight.

Terry Tracy looked up at me brightly like a teenager arriving for a baby-sitting assignment. She was short and pert, with wane brown eyes, soft brown hair and a nervous grace which reminded me of Natalie Wood. She was wearing a skirt and loose turtleneck sweater and carrying her homework crooked in her left arm (it turned out to be her sealed manila folder with the questionnaire.) I awkwardly invited her in, feeling like a decrepit and obscenely lecherous old man.

`Can I fix you a drink?' I asked. It occurred to me that this girl might have misunderstood the instructions.

`Yes, please,' she said and, walking into the middle of the room, looked around at the absolutely conventional modern couch, chairs, bureau, bookcase and rugs as if they had been imported from the moon.

`My name is Robert O'Connor. I'm a professor of history at Long Island University.'

`I'm Terry Tracy,' she said brightly, looking at me for all the world as though I were an interesting uncle about to beguile her with sea yarns.

1 tried to meditate with pseudo-serenity upon my drink but felt ridiculous.

`Seen any good movies lately?' I asked.

`Oh no. I don't go to movies very much.'

`They're very expensive these days.'

`Oh yes. And a lot of them are … well . . . not very worthwhile.'

`That's true.'

She looked over at the fireplace. I looked at the fireplace. It had a little wood-burning grate that looked as though it

hadn't been used since the apartment had been built ninety years ago.

`Would you like to have a fire?' I asked.

`Oh no. It's warm enough, thank you.'

I sipped at my drink and licked the sweat off part of the outside of the cold glass. It occurred to me that this might be

the most sensuous thing I would do all evening.

`Come over and sit by me, why don't you.'

A hippopotamus eating a daisy.

`I'm very comfortable here, thank you.'

After looking nervously at the fireplace for a few moments she added `All right' Balancing her drink carefully like a

child with her first cup of milk, she came over and seated herself about a foot from me on the couch. She modestly

tugged down once on her miniskirt, which remained, however, a few feet above her knees. She seemed incredibly

small. At six four I was used to looking down at people, but looking down at Terry Tracy to my left all I could see was

her curly brown hair and her two seemingly nude legs.

`Hey,' I said.

She looked up-with a smile, but a certain vagueness seemed to have crept into her eyes, as if her yarn-spinning uncle

had just used the word bordello.

`May I kiss you?' I asked. At a hundred bucks a toss it didn't seem too much to ask.

Her eyes went vaguer and she said, `Oh yes.'

I pulled her little body to me and leaned down to meet her lips. Without premeditation I found myself kissing only

with my lips upon her lips. Her mouth was small, her lips dry. After a few seconds I straightened up.

`You're awfully pretty,' I said.

`Thank you.'

`Your lips are very nice'

`Yours are too,' she said.

`Now you kiss me.'

She looked up and waited for me to lower my head, but I remained upright and even leaned back against the couch

while still looking down at her, sexily. After a moment's uncertainty, she placed her drink on the coffee table and got up on her knees. Putting her hands on my neck she slowly leaned towards me. My arms circled her, one hand closed hard around a buttock and I pressed my mouth and tongue against hers. For ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds I kept my tongue in her mouth and moved my hands over her back, buttocks and thighs. Her body was small but firm, her little behind round and rubbery through the woolen skirt. Finally I pulled back and looked at her.

She smiled the smile of a straight-A student.

`That was awfully nice,' I said.

`Oh yes. It was good,' she replied.

`Put your tongue in my mouth,' I said, and as I slid sideways to a horizontal position on the couch, I pulled he her over

on top of me. She was remarkably light and her tongue came out of her small mouth in little tentative darts like a snake trying to frighten someone. I bought both my hands up under her skirt and panties and exploring between her legs, got lost. That is, of the two caves traditionally located in the underbrush, I was able to locate only one, and that, in the immortal words of Robert Frost, The one less traveled by.'

Had she been sewn up? I discovered and caressed a slippery crack, but it led not to the warm-cushioned opening of a

Lil or Arlene but to a dead-end: a virgin with a vengeance. She pulled up a few inches away from me.

`Please don't touch me there,' she said.

`I beg your pardon,' I said and delicately withdrew my hands and smoothed down her skirt.

She hesitated, a moment and then brought her little mouth down warmly on mine, her hands framing my face. Her

abdomen pressing down on my extended penis began to create climactic feelings so I broke our kiss and rolled us both

into sitting positions again. She looked up at me brightly, as if pleased by having brought home a good report card. Of

course it may have been the brightness of sexual excitement: certainly my gooey fingers didn't indicate scholarly

interests. Looking at her a bit drunkenly I asked in a husky voice; `Shall we go to the bedroom?'

`Oh no,' she said, `I have to finish my drink.'

Further straightening her skirt, she reached forward and took a healthier swig from her gin and tonic. I rediscovered

my glass on the floor at my feet and finished it off.

`Are you a professor?' she asked.

`Yes I am.'

`What of?'

'Of history.'

'Oh yes, you told me. That must be interesting. What history do you like best?'

`I'm a specialist in papal bulls of the Renaissance. Look, can't I get you another drink?'

`Oh really? I loved reading about Cesare Borgia and the Popes. I'd love another drink. Were the Popes really as bad as the books say?'

I walked liquor-ward a trifle aggressively but said over my shoulder: `It all depends on what you mean by bad.'

`I mean have children and all.'

`Alexander I had several children as did Pope John IX, but before they became popes.'

The Church is much purer today.'

I poured her a huge gin, added a trickle of tonic, gave myself a bathtub-glassful of Scotch and marched back toward

the couch.

`How much college have you finished?' I asked.

`This is my fourth semester at Hunter. I'm majoring in sociology I think. Oh! - Er.'

`What's the matter?'

For a moment I thought I must have spilled her drink as I handed it to her, but it wasn't that. My fly wasn't open. But she looked frightened. `Nothing,' she said and took a deep drink from her gin and tonic. `But. .. how did you … I mean why did you think I

went to college?'

'You seem intelligent,' I said. `You couldn't know all about the Renaissance just from high school.'

She looked away from me at the grimy, unused fireplace and didn't seem to be as cheerful as she had been.

`Doesn't it seem … strange that a college girl should be … here?'

'Ah. Her breach of role playing was bothering her.

`Certainly not,' I said firmly. 'According to my fried, almost all the call girls he knows are college students, many of

them straight 'A' students. Tuition costs being what they are, what can a girl do?'

This line of reasoning seemed to take some time to absorb. She blushed and turned away at the phrase call girl, but finally said quietly that's true.' `Also,' I said, `college girls learn how irrational all sexual inhibitions are. They learn how safe sexual intercourse can

be and how profitable.'

`But she said. `But - of course some girls still fear that God - that sex -'

'You're right there, of course. But even many deeply religious college girls have also become call girls.'

She now looked up at me questioningly.

'They realize,' I went on, `that God always examines the reasons we do anything. If a girl gives her body to a man to

give him pleasure and to earn money so that she may educate herself and thus increase her ability to serve God she is

actually performing a good act.'

She looked away nervously. - `But God says adultery is a sin,' she said.

'Ah, but the Hebrew word for adultery, fornication, actually means sexual intercourse had only for pleasure. The

Commandment actually should be translated: "Though shall not selfishly give yourself in adultery."

Many of the girls at LIU in Bible History 162 have been quite surprised and pleased to realize the true nature of God's

command.'

She was hunched over on the couch beside me drinking her gin with absentminded abandonment. She stared into her

glass as if it might hold the ultimate answers.

`But God says that…' she started. `Paul says that . . . the Church says that-'

`Only selfish pleasure. The Hebrew is absolutely explicit. In Second Corinthians, verse eight, the text reads: "She who

lets a man know her for the glory of God is blessed, but woe unto her who in selfishness commits adultery. Verily the

very earth will swallow her up."

Again hesitation. Then:

'The glory of God?' she asked.

`Saint Thomas Aquinas interprets this as meaning any act which is intended to further the individual's ability to glorify

God. He cites the case of Bathsheba's daughter who gave herself to the Aramite that she might convert him. He also cites the prostitute Magdalen of the New Testament who, according to tradition, continued to sell herself to men that she might better know them and testify to the Divinity of Christ.'

`Really?' she said sharply, as if at last Truth were being touched.

`In Dante's Paradisio, which you may have read, the religious prostitutes are placed in the third sphere of heaven, just

below the saints, but above the nuns and virgins. In the words of Beatrice, his guide, "A fugitive and cloistered virtue

can never reach as close to God as an active one. If the soul is pure the body cannot be soiled."

`Oh I read that. Was that Dante?'

`Paradisio, Canto Seventeen I think. Milton paraphrased this verse in his famous essay on divorce.'

`It's funny…' she said and jiggled the remaining ice cubes in her glass before taking another swallow.

`The Church has naturally played down this tradition,' I said, taking a satisfied swallow from my own drink. `It has

felt that young girls might be seduced unnecessarily in their dream of converting men, and although such an act would not be sinful, it was decided to create the impression that all sex was evil. The masses, of course, have thus lived in ignorance of God's true purpose.'

At last she looked up at me and smiled sadly.

`I'm going to take more history,' she said.

I turned to her, and with my right hand brushed away her hair from her cheek.

`I'd love to have a student like you in one of my classes. I get so lonely for someone with whom I can talk about

things.'

'Do you?'

`I feel spiritually lost, alone - since losing my wife. I've needed the warmth of a woman's mind and body, but until this

evening all I've ever met were dull, pedantic women that weren't able to . . . unselfishly give themselves to me.'

`I like you very much,' she said tentatively.

'Ah Terry, Terry…'

I took her in my arms, spilling the last of her drink onto the floor and couch. I hugged her tenderly, my eyes, well

above the level of her head, fixing idly on the manila folder on the bookcase. The radio was blaring, `Why Don't We

Do It in the Road?'

`Please, my darling,' I said, `come with me now to the bed room.'

She held herself still in my arms and didn't answer. The music stopped, and the radio announcer began running off at

the mouth about the incredible power of Gleem toothpaste: he followed that without pausing for breath with kind

words for Robert Hall's.

`You're so big,' she finally said.

`I have a great need for you.'

She remained still. I released my embrace and looked down at her. She looked up at me nervously and said: `Kiss me

first' She reached her arms up around my neck, and as we kissed I slid heavily forward on top of her. We writhed

together for more than a minute.

`Am I too heavy?' I asked.

`A little bit,' she said.

`Let's go to the bedroom.'

We disentangled and stood up.

`Where to?' she asked, as if we were about to begin a long hike.

This way,' I said, and after we had negotiated the ten paces into the bedroom I added: `That's the bathroom.'

We look at each other. `You undress there. I'll undress here.' `Thank you,' she said and walked into the bathroom, her shoulder just bumping the doorway as she entered. I undressed myself, dropping my clothes neatly in select piles between the bed and an old walnut dresser. Inside the king-size double bed, I but my hand behind my head and watched the ceiling swirl like cosmic nebulae. Five minutes later the nebulae were still providing the only active entertainment.

`Terry?' I called neutrally.

`I can't,' she said from inside the bathroom.

`What?'

I said loudly.

She came out fully dressed, her eyes red and the lipstick on her lower lip completely chewed away. Standing stiffly

halfway between the bathroom door and the bed she said: `It's been a mistake. I'm not who you think I am.' `Then who are you?'

`I'm - I'm nobody.'

`Oh no, Terry, you're wonderful, whoever you are.'

`I'm - but I can't go to bed with you.'

`Ah Terry,' I said and started to get out of bed when I saw by her facial expression that she might run. Sitting up, I

said: `Well then, who are you?'

'I'm - I was sent here as part of a - an experiment of the Columbia Medical School.'

`No!' I said; flabbergasted.

`Yes. I'm really just a college girl, a pretty innocent college girl, I guess. I wanted to do the experiment the best I

could, but I can't.'

`My God, Terry, that's incredible, that's wonderful. So was I.'

She looked at me blankly.

`So - were - you - what?'

'I was sent here as part of an investigation into the nature of human sexuality conducted by the Columbia Medical

School. I'm Father Forbes of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.'

She stared at my bulky, nude torso.

`I see,' she said.

`The quirks of fate have sent together two innocents!' I raised my eyes to the ceiling briefly; it responded with a swirl.

`I've got to go,' she answered.

`My child, you can't go. Don't you see there is the hand of God in this. Have you ever given yourself to a man?'

`No, Father, and I must go.'

`My child; you must stay. By everything that is holy you must stay.'

I rose with stately dignity from the bed and with a look of great fatherliness and agape; arms outstretched in welcome,

I approached Miss T.

`No,' she said and held up one arm limply.

I never hesitated, but embraced her fully and fatherly, stroking her hair with one hand and her back with the other.

`My sweet child you are my salvation. Had I sinned with a prostitute I would be forever damned; the woman would

have been acting selfishly and I would have been a cause of her sin. But sexual congress with a Catholic girl giving

herself against her will, and thus unselfishly, is to liberate you from sin and me from corruption.'

She stood stiffly and unyielding in my loose embrace. Then, she began crying.

`I don't believe you're a priest, I want to go home.'

She huddled and sobbed against my upper belly.

`In domine Pater incubus dolorarum; et filia spiritu grandus magnum est. Non solere sanctum raro punctilios insularum, noncuninglingus variorum delictim. Habere est cogitare.'

She looked up at me.

`But why are you here?'

`Manes Patri, manes Patri. For you, my child, that we may come together in a love spiritus delicti et corpus boner.'

`You're so strange,' she said.

`This is a sacred moment. Go, and come.'

When she came out of the bathroom a second time two minutes later she was modestly holding a towel against her belly, but exposing two cheerful, round little pink breasts.

I threw back the covers on her side and she hopped in, a ten year-old child hopping into bed with her teddy bears.

Terry Tracy fulfilled her spiritual duties, my friends, with admirable warmth, poise, obedience and skill: Too much skill. When I had difficulty penetrating her at first, I encouraged her to baptize the uncircumcised child with the sacred water of her mouth and this she proceeded to do so devotedly that it was some several minutes before I recalled my central quest. By that time I was too spiritually primed to exert any pressure without the likelihood of my achieving immediate and complete divine grace. She sympathetically consoled me with her hands and then lowered her sacred mouth over the trembling child, bathing it: she spoke in tongues. I was groaning with total incoherence and indignity as one gets during such emotional services when I felt the Holy Spirit ascending. I tried to withdraw the uncircumcised child from the holy temple and whispered `Stop!' but the angel did not cease her ministrations. The nebulae, the child and I all exploded at once in a divine fusion of feeling: I plunged away in her mouth. After ten or fifteen seconds during which I was completely out of the mere world of mortal men, I returned from my spiritual journey.

Her mouth and hands were still warmly engulfing my penis and balls as if nothing had happened. I lay still for another half-minute and then putting a hand on Terry's hand I said 'Terry.'

She raised her head from me for the first time in three or four minutes, but without even turning to me she swung her behind around much nearer me and said Touch me: Oh please touch me.'

When I put my hands between her legs and began to stroke and poke, she pressed back fiercely. This time I slid a finger inside the appropriate and proper opening. Her mouth was trying to swallow a relatively relaxed and thoroughly baptized member. She rolled over and for the first time made a groan. Of sorts: it sounded distinctly like one of disappointment.

I was feeling depressed, guilty, angry and inadequate, but being the dice man playing the professor-priest-customer I merely rolled away from her and told her that it had been delicious.

She didn't say anything. We lay in silence for ten minutes. I was determined to ram home to victory as soon as I could rally my red army back into the peninsula, but for the time being all I could do was lie there and feel inadequate. I didn't even wonder what she was thinking.

`Can you try again?' she said.

We turned toward each other and fell into a passionate half hate embrace, until she clawed at my shoulder to tell me I was squeezing too tight. After a few minutes of love play I lifted her up on to her hands and knees and invited myself to try to enter from the rear. We placed the dragon's head at the mouth of the cave and tried to encourage him to enter.

It was like pushing a dog down the cellar stairs for a bath. We pressed again. A marvelous thing happened: my dragon suddenly sprung past the outside barrier and plunged in a full three-quarter inch. She screamed and fell forward. I began to apologize, but she got immediately back on her knees and was groping back between her legs: a steering committee. After a few more charges, the dragon had disappeared deep into the cave and seemed to be nuzzling contentedly at her stomach. My big hands manipulating her easily at the waist, I felt the present experience was well worth the wait. It was magnificent. The apartment doorbell rang.

For a moment both of us were so intent on the pleasure of my filling her insides that the noise didn't register. When it

did, she raised her head like a deer smelling a rifle and said: `What's that?'

Stupidly: `The doorbell.'

She pulled herself down and away from me and rolled over. She was frightened.

`Who is it?'

Stupidly: `I don't know.'

Then, regaining my superman self: `It must be someone at the wrong apartment'

`No. You'd better go see.'

Standing at the door was a short, thickset young man wearing glasses. He seemed stunned to see me.

`Is this-' he glanced again at the door I was holding slightly ajar. `Is this apartment 4-G?'

Not remembering, I leaned my naked torso out and around to look at what he had just looked at. It was 4-G.

`Yes; it is,' I said helpfully. He stared at me.

`I thought - I was supposed - to meet someone here at nine o'clock.'

`Nine o'clock?'

I was beginning to understand.

`I guess I'm a little late … Maybe'

'Were you - were you supposed to meet a girl here who -'

`Yes,' he broke in. `I was supposed to meet a girl here.'

He smiled nervously and adjusted his blond-framed glasses. I noticed two pimples on his forehead.

`What's your name?'

I asked, still holding the door ajar.

'Er - Ray Smith.'

`I see.'

His real name as I remembered it was O'Reilly, and he was, according to his answers on the questionnaire, a smooth,

uninhibited young man with women. He was to meet a prostitute, one I had personally hired and instructed to make

him feel as inadequate as possible. He'd arrived ahead of schedule.

'Come in, Ray,' I said and swung open the door. 'My is Ned Petersen. I'm here to make sure Terry - that's our girl's'

name - gives you her money's worth.'

He looked at me - I was naked - and at the absolutely conventional furniture as if he were the first visitor to a Martian

living room.

`Terry's already in bed. I was warming her up. You want to give her a ride now?'

`No. No. You go ahead. I'll read a book,' and he stared toward the bookcase.

`Don't be silly,' I said. `She's here for you. I was just tuning her up, breaking her in.'

`But if you . . .' he looked at me conscientiously. There was egg or something near the shoulder of his sweater. Not too

smooth.

`Tell you what,' I said. `Let's both go in to her. It would be lonely for either of us alone out here.'

`No,' no. You go ahead.'

`Won't do it. Absolutely refuse to leave you alone in the living room. Now come. Come on.'

I took him by the elbow and led him into the bedroom. The bed was empty.

'Terry?'

`Yes,' came a highly affected voice from the bathroom.

`A young student of mine is here. Young divinity student. Very lonely young man. Desperately needs companionship.

Can he join us?'

What Ray Smith O'Reilly thought of that I didn't know. From the bathroom came silence.

`Who?' she finally asked.

I walked over close to the door.

`A very lonely young anchorite needs your attention. He has a deep need. He's almost crying. Can he join us in bed?'

`Oh yes,' she answered promptly.

Beside the bed where I had left him, Smith stood like an abandoned bulbless lamp. With great gentleness I helped him

undress and guided him to the location of the bed. He pulled the covers up to his chin like an eighty-year-old preparing for thirty below. Soon Terry, clutching the same towel at the same place, came modestly out of the bathroom. Smith stared at her as at another piece of Martian furniture.

`Terry Thrush, I'd like you to meet George Lovelace. George, this is Terry.'

`Oh, hi,' said Terry; with a bright smile.

`How do you do?' said George Ray Smith O'Reilly Lovelace, `How would you like to fuck her, George?'

I asked, my own penis lifting its head in more than idle curiosity.

`You first,' he blurted.

`Okay, me first, Terry. Give me your ass again.'

Terry looked a little surprised, but quickly hopped into bed beside our young man, and stuck her little behind plumply into the air. Her face on a pillow she turned, smiling brightly at George, whose head lay looking ceiling ward on the other pillow a foot away. George looked sick.

I place my penis; prodded and poked, and, with all deliberate speed, it plunged deep into Terry's warm, wet interior. My God, that was good. Terry had helped aim me with her hands but now as I began easing myself in and out she moved herself on her elbows over to silent George and - undoubtedly smiling brightly to the last - moved her face over his and began giving him her sexy, snakelike kisses.

George lay as rigid as a dried straw, except for his central limb, which was as limp as a wet straw. I pulled Tiny Terry's thighs against me and more or less picked her bodily up and deposited her face on Georgie's belly. Discovering a poor, lonely, unloved cock, she did her duty.

The long and the short of it, Reader - and that is the usual sequence in these affairs - was that I made a splendid splash in Terry's interior and Terry did enough favorable groaning and straining to please everyone, presumably including herself. When she finally let go of old Sir George his limb was just as limp as before. However, as Terry rolled onto her back away from him I saw that the rest of him was at last limp too. Sir George too had seen the Holy Grail.

`Terry has a very nice mouth, don't you think, George?'

'Er, yes, she does,' he said.

`You're exceptionally beautiful in the interior, Terry,' I went on.

'Thank you,' she said. My two young friends were lying on their backs side by side while I had settled back on my knees near the foot of the bed. I was feeling very tired and depressed, and my mood was manifesting itself by my heavy-handed irony.

'Is your ass as warm and juicy as your cunt, Terry?'

`I don't know,' she said and she giggled.

`Live and learn, or in the immortal words of Leonardo da Vinci: "Anus delictoris ante uturusi sec."

Tell me, George do you feel now that someone loves you, that life does have a meaning after all?'

`I - beg pardon?'

`I was telling Miss Truss that you came here tonight very unhappy and lonely and unloved. Has she given you the

spiritual nourishment which you needed?'

'A little bit, I guess.'

`Hear that, Terry, only a little bit. George must really be depressed. Don't you realize, George, that Terry kissed you

and caressed you without your even asking? She gave herself unrequested and unselfishly for your pleasure and

enlightenment. Now what do you say?'

His face contorted nervously; he looked at me. Finally he said: `Thank you, I guess.'

`You're welcome,' said Terry. `I like to help people.'

'Terry is unusually helpful, wouldn't you say, Ray?'

`Yes, she is.'

`Let's all have a drink. Scotch for you, Mr. Lovelace?'

`Yes, thank you.'

As I plodded off nude to the liquor cabinet, I found myself for the first time wondering about the reliability of our questionnaires. Little Miss T., the inhibited Catholic virgin, had showed all the juiciness and technique of a forty #161;three-year old nymphomaniac. And lover-boy O'Reilly … Well, back to the old data sheets.

After we'd finished our drinks, during which we had several sporadic conversations on (a) the weather (we need snow),

(b) Renaissance history (Rabelais was actually a serious thinker), and (c) religion (it's frequently misunderstood), I said firmly to George: `Your turn now, Lovelace.'

`Oh yes, thank you.'

Terry lay on her back to receive him, and after several youthful giggles, he seemed to enter the promised land. The doorbell rang.

For a moment I wondered if there weren't some electronic device deep in Miss Tracy's womb which triggered the apartment bell. It seemed unlikely, but…

I located a bathrobe this time, told the little ones to carry on without me and marched stoically to the door. There, as I leaned my slightly debauched face around the edge of the door, stood Dr. Felloni. We exchanged stares in total disbelief for five full seconds. Then she blushed so fully that I can only describe it by saying that her head, which was of course nodding vigorously, had a climax. She turned and ran down the hall. The next day her secretary phoned to say that she was attending a conference in Zurich and would be away for two weeks.

Chapter Twenty-nine

My experience with Terry Tracy and the results of the Columbia Copulation Caper in general were a revelation to me. After Dr. Felloni had left the apartment door that night and taken a taxi across the Atlantic to Zurich, I had returned to the bedroom to find Tracy and George moiling in the bed and as oblivious of my presence as they had apparently been of my absence. I stood there watching the sheet which covered George's behind rising and falling in regular rhythm and as the sheet shuddered I had something like a Religious Revelation. Other people also were capable of playing artificially imposed roles - and therefore dice-dictated roles. If Terry had in fact been even somewhat virginal, she was this evening demonstrating a remarkable ability to open herself to new experience. If she were in fact a nymphomaniac, she had earlier demonstrated a shyness and inhibition in marvelous contrast to her natural open-door policy. And George Lovelace seemed to be a good learner too; from clod to copulator in thirty minutes.

As I stood there I began to feel that I had only been playing at the dice man. It had been a jeu d'esprit of which I was proud but nothing more: a maladjusted man's way of epater les bourgeois without the bourgeoisie knowing about it. But had I innocently discovered gunpowder and then used it for firecrackers, when a larger man would have used it for explosives? Or a magnifying glass which I was using to create pleasant images but which might be used to see something new? Shouldn't I try to turn other people into dice men? If Arlene enjoyed housewife-with-a-lech for a day and Terry call-girl-for-a-day, might not each enjoy other roles the dice might fling her way, as I had? Shouldn't I be using dice games as dice therapy for my friends and patients? My dice life had become almost a joke; at that instant it seemed a mission - a quest I might pursue to lift my fellow men to new heights. I had cast the dice as a bitter game I'd played against the world; now I would cast them to build New Selves, Random Men. Boredom would be wiped out with the vaccine of the dice, like polio. I would create a New World, a better world, a Place of Joy and Variety and Spontaneity. I would become the Father of a new Race. Dicepeople.

'Could you please get us a towel?' Terry asked, most of her face and body hidden by the sheet and George's ample bulk. Even this rude interruption did not destroy my elevation. During these glorious minutes I was taking myself totally seriously. I went to the bathroom and got them a towel and after a giggle or two they lay together silently, again oblivious of my presence. As the sheet lay limp and still over their silent forms I tiptoed to the spot where my trousers were deposited on the floor and extricated from the pocket my dice.

`Odd,' I would begin dice therapy, with George and Terry tonight; 'even,' I would not. Confidently I flipped a die onto the foot of the bed: a six. Ummmm. Like the good fairy who his left a dime under the pillow, I picked up my clothes and stole away into the night, the immortal words of Christ echoing in my ears 'Physician, help yourself: thus you help your patients too. Let this be his best help that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.'

I was determined to rip from my body the undistinguished clothes of Dr. Lucius Rhinehart and stand forth before my patients naked and revealed: The Dice Man.

Chapter Thirty

The first adult human being to be introduced into the dicelife by Dr. Rhinehart was Arlene Ecstein, inconspicuous wife of Dr. Jacob Ecstein, noted analyst and writer. Mrs. Ecstein had been complaining for several years of various nervous ailments which she attributed to sexual frustration caused by the sporadic nature of her husband's attentions. Dr. Ecstein, who didn't have time, finally decided in mid January that she would enter analysis so that her problem might be treated in depth. With her husband's encouragement (`Give it to her, Luke, baby') she began analysis with Dr. Rhinehart. The first few sessions had been penetrating and Mrs. Ecstein found herself able to open up more frequently than before. Her husband noted that her nervous symptoms declined or disappeared and that her compulsive sexuality seemed relieved.

It was after a little over six weeks of this treatment (three times a week) that Dr. Rhinehart, following his Religious Revelation during the Rhinehart-Felloni Study of Amorality Tolerance, determined to begin dice therapy. He began with the quiet dignity which so marked this whole stage of his life.

`Don't take off your bra, Arlene, I want to talk to you about something important' `Can't it wait?'

`No.'

He took out two new silver dice, fresh from the factories of Taxco, Mexico, and placed them on his desk. He requested Mrs. Ecstein to seat herself in front of the desk.

`What is it, Lukie?'

'Those are dice.'

`I see.'

`We are going to begin dice therapy.'

'Dice therapy?'

Dr. Rhinehart explained with great clarity the practice and theory of casting dice to determine action. Mrs. Ecstein listened with close attention although she squirmed frequently on her chair. When it was clear that he had finished, she remained silent awhile and then heaved a deep sigh.

`But I still don't see why,' she said. `You say I might let the dice decide whether we fuck this morning or not. I think

that's silly. I want to fuck. You want to fuck. Why bring the dice into it?'

'Because many small parts of you don't want to fuck. A small part of you wants to hit me, or wants to run back to

Jake, or wants to talk to me about psychoanalysis. But these parts of you are never allowed to live. You suppress them because most of you just wants to fuck.' `If they're small parts of me, let them stay small.' Dr. Rhinehart tipped back in his chair and sighed. He took out a pipe

and began filling it. He took one of the silver dice and shook it in one hand and dropped it on his desk. He frowned.

'I'm going to tell you how a God was born: the birth of the Dice Man.'

Dr. Rhinehart then narrated the story, slightly edited, of his discovery of the dice and his initial rape of Mrs. Ecstein.

He concluded "had I not given a small part of myself a chance to be chosen by the die we wouldn't be sitting here

right now.'

`You only gave it one chance in six?'

'Yes. The point is that I gave a minority self a chance to be heard.'

'Only one chance in six?'

`We can never be full human beings until we develop all important aspects of ourselves.'

`Only one-sixth of you wanted me?'

'Arlene, that was an historical accident. We're talking theory. Don't you see how yielding to the dice opens whole new

areas of life?'

`I feel used.'

`If I seduced you out of cold-blooded lust you would feel pleased. Because I let chance intervene you feel used.'

'Don't you feel anything strongly enough so that you don't want to use the dice?'

`Of course, but I try to overcome it.'

Dr. Rhinehart and Mrs. Ecstein looked at each other for a full minute, Dr. Rhinehart smiling self-consciously and Mrs.

Ecstein looked awed. At last she pronounced judgment.

`You're insane,' she said.

`Absolutely. Look, I'll show you how it works. I write down two, say three options. A one or a two means we'll

continue his conversation, a three or a four means we'll end the hour right now and each let the dice decide something

else for us to do for the next forty minutes. A five and . .'

`And a five or a six means we'll fuck.'

`All right, yes.'

Dr. Rhinehart handed a die to Mrs. Ecstein and after shaking it vigorously in both hands for a few seconds she asked,

`Shouldn't I be mumbling some mumbo-jumbo as I do this?'

`You may say simply: "Not my will, Die, but Thy will be done.,, '

'Fuck us up good; Die,' she said and dropped it on the desk. It was a five.

`I don't feel like fucking anymore,' she said, but when she saw the frown on Dr. Rhinehart's face she smiled and felt

she was beginning to see the merits of a dicelife. But before she could begin to let the large part of herself go to work,

Dr. Rhinehart spoke.

`We may now toss the dice to determine how we will make love.'

She hesitated.

`What?' she said.

`There are innumerable ways to engage in sexual congress; parts of us are attracted to each of these ways. We must let

the dice decide.'

'I see.'

`First of all, which of us shall be the sexual aggressor, I or you? If the dice say odd '

`Wait a minute. I'm beginning to understand this game. I want to play too.'

`Go ahead.'

Mrs. Ecstein picked up both dice and said `A one means we'll make love that funny way you seem to like.'

`Fine.'

`A two means I'll lie down and you use your hands, mouth, and Johnny Appleseed over every part of my body until I

can't stand it and demand something else. A three-'

`Or rather we flip the die again.'

`A three …-let's see: you play with my breasts for five minutes.'

`Go on.'

Mrs. Ecstein hesitated and then a slow smile began to brighten her face.

`We must always let the dice decide, huh?' she asked.

`That's right.'

'But we control the options.'

'Very good.'

She was smiling happily as if she were a child who has just learned how to read.

`If the die is a four or a five or a six it means we have to try to make a baby.'

`Ahh,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`I've removed that rubber sort of plug Jake had a doctor put in me and I think I've just ovulated. I read a book and it's

told me the two best positions to make a baby.'

`I see. Arlene, I-'

`Shall I toss?'

`Just a minute.'

`What for?'

`I - I'm thinking.'

`Hand me the die.'

`I believe that you have loaded the odds a bit,' said Dr. Rhinehart with his accustomed professional coolness. `Let's say

if it's a six we'll try one sexual position after another as determined from a list of six we will give it. Two minutes on

each. Let the orgasms come where they may.'

`But the four and five still mean we make a baby?'

`Yes.'

`Okay. Do I flip?'

`All right.'

Mrs. Ecstein dropped the die. It read four.

`Ahh,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`Yippee,' said Mrs. Ecstein.

`Precisely what are these two medically recommended fucks?' Dr. Rhinehart asked a trifle irritably.

`I'll show you. And whoever has the most orgasms wins.'

`Wins what?'

`I don't know. Wins a free pair of dice.'

`I see.'

`Why didn't we begin this therapy a long time ago?' Mrs. Ecstein asked. She was rapidly undressing.

`You understand,' the doctor said, slowly preparing himself for the operation, `that after we have made love once, we

must consult the die again.'

`Sure, sure, come here,' said Mrs. Ecstein and she was soon hard at work with Dr. Rhinehart in concentrated dice therapy. At 11 A.M. Dr. Rhinehart buzzed his secretary to announce that because he was probing particularly deeply that morning and because his work might bear long-range fruit, it would be necessary to cancel the hour with Mr. Jenkins so that he and Mrs. Ecstein might continue.

At noon, Mrs. Ecstein, glowing, left the doctor's office. The history of dice therapy had begun.

Chapter Thirty-one

Professor Orville Boggles of Yale tried it; Arlene Ecstein found it productive; Terry Tracy rediscovered God through it; patient Joseph Spezio of QSH thought it was a plot to drive him insane: dice therapy slowly but surely, and unbeknownst to my wife and colleagues, grew; but the Great Columbia Copulation Caper climaxed and was spent.

Two Bernard College girls who had been instructed separately to enter into Lesbian relations with each other complained to their dean of women, who promptly began investigating. Although I assured her that Dr. Felloni and I were bona fide professionals, members of the American Medical Association, registered Republicans and in only moderato opposition to the war is Vietnam, she still fund the experiment to be `suspiciously outrageous' and I ended it.

Actually all our scheduled appointments had already been completed. Less than sixty percent had taken place as set up, and two graduate students and I were busy for weeks afterward flying to collect the manila folders with the completed questionnaires and trying to interview our lab assistants; but the experiment was finished. When I published an article on our work in the fall (Dr. Felloni. declined to be associated with the article or the experiment), it created a mild stir and was one of the pieces of evidence used by my enemies to have me exiled from the AMA.

Although most of our subjects seem to have derived pleasure from their participation in the study, a few were traumatized. About ten days after my own pas de trots my office received a request that I treat one of Dr. Felloni's subjects in our joint experiment. This Miss Vigliota maintained that she had become neurotic because of her participation in our experiment and she was requesting therapy. The appointment was set up and the next day I was seated in my office at the scheduled hour elaborating in writing upon new dice exercises I had been creating. My office door opened and closed, a small girl entered, and when I looked at her, she staggered forward and collapsed on the couch.

It was Terry `Tracy' Vigliota. It took me twenty minutes to assure her that I was really Dr. Rhinehart, a psychiatrist, and that nay participation with her in the experiment had been a perfectly natural extension of my data-gathering role. When she had become calm, she told me why she had come requesting therapy. She sat on the edge of the couch with her short legs dangling many inches from the floor. Dressed in a conservative grayish suit with short skirt, she seemed, as she discussed her problems, more slight, nervous and intense than she had less than two weeks before. I noticed as she talked and in subsequent sessions that she found it difficult to look at me and always entered or left the office with her soft brown eyes on the floor, as if absorbed in thought.

Terry had apparently undergone an identity crisis as a result of her unusual evening with me and George. Her conversation with the professor of history and with Father Fortes had given her new insights into her Catholic faith, but her sexual experience had not been related, she began to think, to the `greater glory of God.'

She found herself increasingly indifferent to the glory of God and increasingly interested in men. But lust and sex were evil, or so her whole previous life had told her. But Father Fortes had indicated that the Church enjoyed sex. But Father Fortes had turned out to be a psychiatrist, a scientist, a doctor; but they also enjoyed sex. She had felt fulfilled in relieving the loneliness of George X, but after Father Fortes had left it seems George permitted her to relieve his loneliness one more time and then began berating her as a whore and a slut. She found as a result of all this that she could no longer believe in anything. All of her desires and beliefs had been shattered by the emotions of her experimental evening: nothing new was taking its place. All seemed unreliable and meaningless.

Although anxious to begin dice therapy with her, I had to let her pour out her troubles uninterrupted over the first two analytic hours. In the third session - she was still sitting, her legs dangling, staring at the floor - she finally ran out of misery and began repeating that most human of refrains: `I don't know what to do.'

`You keep coming back to the same basic feeling,' I said. 'That all of your desires and beliefs are illusory and meaningless.'

`Yes. I asked for therapy because I can't stand the feeling of emptiness. After that evening I didn't know who I was. When I got you as my therapist last week I thought I must be going insane. Even my emptiness seemed empty.'

She smiled a sad, soft Natalie Wood smile, her eyes-down.

`What if you're right?' I said.

`Pardon?'

`What if your feeling that all desires are unreliable and all beliefs illusions is right, is the mature, valid vision of reality,

and the rest of men are living under illusions which your experience has permitted you to shed?'

`Of course, that's what I think,' she said.

`Then why not act upon your belief?'

The smile left her face and she frowned, still not looking at, me.

`What do you mean?'

`Treat all of your desires as if they had equal value and each of your beliefs as if it were as much an illusion as the

next.'

`How?'

`Stop trying to create a pattern, a personality; just do whatever you feel like.'

`But I don't feel like doing anything; that's the trouble.'

'That's because you're letting one desire, the desire to believe strongly and be a clearly defined person, inhibit the rest

of your various desires.'

'Maybe, but I don't see how I can change it.'

`Become a dice person.'

She lifted her head and looked up into my eyes slowly and without emotion.

`What?'

`Become a dice person,' I repeated.'

`What do you mean?'

`I,' I leaned forward with appropriate gravity, `am the Dice Man.'

She smiled slightly and looked away and to the side.

`I don't know what you're talking about.'

`You believe that each of your desires is as arbitrary, meaningless and trivial as the next?'

`Yes.'

`In some sense it makes absolutely no difference what you do or don't do?'

'That's exactly it.'

`Then why not let the flip of dice - chance - decide what you do?'

She looked up again.

Is that why you keep changing roles and acting so strangely?'

'Partly.'

'You let . . . chance . . , a pair of dice decide your life?'

`Within limits, yes.'

'How do you do it?'

For the first time her eyes brightened. Legs dangling, she listened intently as I explained briefly my option-creating,

dice deciding life.

`My God,' she said when I had finished. She stared some more. `That's wonderful.'

She paused. `First you were a professor of history; then Father Forbes, then a lover, a pander, a psychiatrist, and now

you're - the dice man.'

My face was aglow with triumph.

'Actually,' I said, `I work for "Candid Camera."

Terry paled: it took two minutes for me to reassure her that I'd been joking. When she'd recovered or seemed to have

recovered, she smiled her soft smile, looked up at me, grinned and then began giggling. She giggled for about two

more minutes and stopped. She took a handkerchief from a pocket in her suit jacket and wiped away the tears. Biting

at her lower lip but trying to look me in the eye, she said quietly: `I think I might like to try to be a - dice woman.'

`It will be good for you,' I said.

`It can't be any worse.'

`That's the spirit.'

As a matter of fact Terry and I got nowhere at first. She was too apathetic and skeptical to obey dice decisions except

in the most perfunctory way. Her apathy led her to create unimaginative options, or, when I pressed her to be more

daring, to disobey the die.

It was almost two weeks later that we finally had a session, which led to her breakthrough into belief in the dicelife.

She was the one who got to the core of the problem `I … I'm having trouble … believing. I have to have … faith, but I

don't…'

She trailed off.

`I know,' I said slowly. `The dice-life is related to having faith, to religion, to genuine religion.'

There was a silence.

`Yes, Father,' she said, and gave me a rare smile.

I smiled back at her and continued `A healthy skepticism is an essential ingredient of genuine religion.'

'Yes, Father,' she said, still smiling.

I leaned back is my chair. `Maybe I ought to preach to you.'

I flipped a die onto the desk between us. It said yes to the lecture. I frowned.

`I'm listening,' she said as I continued my pause.

`This may sound Father Forbesish, but who am I to question the will of the Die?'

I stared at her and we both looked solemn. `Christ's message is clear: you must lose yourself to save yourself. You

must give up personal, worldly desires, become poor in spirit. By surrendering your personal will to the whim of the

die you are practicing precisely that self-abnegation prescribed in the scriptures.'

She looked at me blankly as if listening but not understanding.

`Do you see,' I went on, `that the only selfless action is one not dictated by the self?'

She frowned.

`I can see that following the dice might be selfless, but I thought the Church wanted us to overcome sinfulness on our

own.'

I tipped forward and stretched forth an arm to take one of Terry's little hands in my own. I felt - and naturally looked

totally sincere in what I was saying.

`Listen carefully, Terry. What I'm about to say contains the wisdom of the world's great religions. If a man overcomes

what he calls sinfulness by his own willpower, he increases his ego-pride, which, according to even the Bible, is the

very foundation stone of sin. Only when sin is overcome by some external forces does the man realize his own

insignificance; only then is pride eliminated. As long as you strive as an individual self for the good, you will either

have failure - and an accompanying guilt - or pride, which is simply the basic form of evil. Guilt or pride: those are the

gifts of self. The only salvation lies in having faith.'

`But faith in what?' she asked.

`Faith in God,' I answered.

She looked puzzled.

`But what happened to the dice?' she asked.

`Look. I'm going to read a passage to you from a sacred book. Listen carefully.'

I reached into my desk and brought out some notes I'd been making lately in connection with my evolving dice theory

and, after browsing a half-minute to find what I was looking for, I began reading. ` "Verily it is not a blasphemy when I teach: Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven innocence, the heaven Prankishness, the heaven Chance. And Chance is the most ancient Divinity of the world, and behold, I come to deliver all things from their bondage under Purpose and to restore on the throne to reign over all things the heaven Chance. The mind is in bondage to Purpose and Will, but I shall free it to Divine Accident and Prankishness when I teach that in all, one thing is impossible: reason. A little wisdom is possible indeed, just enough to confuse things nicely, but this blessed certainty I have found in every atom, molecule, substance, plant, creature or star: they would

rather dance on the feet of Chance.

`Oh heaven over me pure and high! Now that I have learned that there is no purposeful eternal spider and no spider

web of reason, you have become for me a dance floor for divine accidents; you have become a divine table for divine

dice and dice players. But my listeners blush? Do I speak the unspeakable? Do I blaspheme, wishing to bless you?"

I ended my reading and after checking to see if there might be more related material I looked up.

`I didn't recognize it,' Terry said.

`It's Zarathustra. But did you understand it?'

`I don't know. I liked it. I liked something about it very much. But I don't - I don't see why I should have faith in the

dice. I guess that's the trouble.'

`Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not see.'

`I know.'

`Can a single die fall to the table unseen by God?'

`No, I guess not.'

`Do you remember the great ending to the Book of Job? God speaks from the whirlwind and asks Job how he can

presume to question the ways of God. For three long, beautiful chapters God indicts man's abysmal ignorance and

impotence. He says things like: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . ."

Or "Who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb?"

And "have you commanded the morning since your days began?"

"Have the gates of death been revealed to you?"

On and on God rubs it in to poor Job, but stylishly - in the most beautiful poetry in the world - and Job realizes that he

has been wrong in complaining and questioning. His last words to the Lord are "I know that thou canst do all things,

and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted . . .

Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."

I paused, and Terry and I looked silently at each other for several moments.

`God can do all things,' I went on. `No purpose of His can ever be thwarted. Never.'

`Yes,' she replied. .

`We must despise ourselves and lose ourselves if we are to be saved.'

`Yes.'

`God sees the tiniest sparrow fall.'

`Yes.'

`The tiniest die tumble upon the table.'

`Yes.

'He will always know what options you have given to the Die.'

`Yes.'

`Terry, the reason you must have faith in the Die is simple.'

`Yes.'

`The Die is God.'

`The Die is God,' she said.

Chapter Thirty-two

I was sitting at a board meeting of Queensborough State Hospital one Wednesday evening that spring, when the idea of Centers for Experiments in Total Random Environments came to me. Fifteen old men, all doctors, Ph.D's and millionaires, were seated around a huge, rectangular table discussing plumbing expansion, salary scales, medication charts and rights-of-way, while the patients in the square mile around us settled ever more comfortably into their various defined stupors. In the middle of doing a doodle of a multi-armed, multi-legged, multi-headed Shivt, whammo! It hit me; a Dice Center, an institution to convert people into random men. I suddenly saw a short-term total environment of such overwhelming impact that the principles and practices of the dicelife would be infused after a few weeks to the same degree that they had in me after many, many months. I saw a society of dicepeople. I saw a new world.

"Old man Cobblestone, our tall, dignified chairman, was speaking with great deliberation about the intricacies of Queensborough law regarding rights of appropriation; six pipes, three cigars and five cigarettes were giving the green-walled room a milky, underwater effect; a young doctor (forty-six) beside me had been wiggling his foot in the same motion for forty minutes without pause. Pens lay dormant by paper except for mine: the sole doodler. Yawns were smothered into coughs or hidden behind pipes. Cobblestone gave way to Dr. Wink on the inefficiency of bureaucratic systems in dealing with plumbing problems and suddenly, leaping at me from the seven arms, six legs and three heads of Shiva, was the idea of the Dice Center.

I took my green die from my vest pocket and gave it a fifty fifty chance that I would create such an institute. It said `yes.'

I stifled a scream. Whatever sound emerged slowed but did not stop the wiggling foot beside me. Four heads turned minutely toward me then back respectfully to Dr. Wink. I was ablaze with my idea. I cast the die a second time on the doodle pad.

`Gentlemen!' I said loudly and I shoved back my chair and stood. I towered over Dr. Wink, who stood just opposite me staring at me openmouthed. The others all turned to me respectfully foot-wiggler wiggled on.

`Gentlemen.'

I said again, groping for the right words. `Another sewer will only permit us to handle the shit better; it won't solve anything.'

`That's true,' a voice said encouragingly and several heads nodded.

`If we are to fulfill our duties as trustees we must have a vision of an institution which will change our patients and send them into the world as free men.'

I was speaking slowly and pompously and I earned two nods and a yawn.

`As Ezra Pound wrote in a late poem, a mental hospital is a total institution: it engulfs each patient with a consistency of rule, habit and attitude which effectively isolates him from the more unpredictable problems of life in the outside world. A patient can adjust successfully to hospital life because he can count on its limiting its horrors to certain predictable patterns. The outside world holds no such hope for him. He is thus often able to adjust to hospital life and yet be frightened foot less by the thought of having to leave. We have effectively prepared our patients to live-adequately in the mental hospital and no place else.'

`Is this to the point?' old Cobblestone asked from his seat at the head of the table.

`Oh it is, sir. It is,' I said a bit more quickly. Then with dignity: `I have a dream. A vision: we want to prepare our patients to fulfill themselves happily in all environments, to free the individual from the need to lock himself away from challenge and change. We-'

'This … but, Dr. Rhinehart,' Dr. Wink stammered uncertainly.

`We want to create a world of adult children without fear. We want the multiplicity built into each one of us by our anarchic and contradictory society to break free. We want people to greet each other on the street and not know who is who are not care. We want freedom from individual identity. Freedom from security and stability and coherence. We want a community of creators, a monastery for joy-filled madmen.'

`What are you talking about?' Old man Cobblestone said firmly. He was standing.

`For Christ's sake, Luke, sit down,' Dr. Mann said. Heads turned to each other and then back to me.

`Oh we've been fools! Fools!' I slammed my fist down on million years we've believed that -the choice lies only between control and discipline on the one hand and letting go on the other: we don't realize that both are equally methods of sustaining consistent-habit, attitude and personality. The Goddam personality!' I grit my teeth and shuddered. `We need disciplined anarchy, controlled letting go, queen for a day, Russian roulette, veto, eeny-meeny #161;miney-moe: a new way of life, a new world, a community of dice men.'

I made my appeal directly to old Cobblestone, and he didn't even blink.

`What are you talking about?' he asked again more gently.

`I'm talking about converting QSH into a Center in which patients will be systematically taught to play games with life, to act out all of their fantasies, to be dishonest and enjoy it, to lie and pretend and feel hate and rage and love and compassion as determined by the whim of the dice. I'm talking about creating an institution where the doctors periodically pretend to be patients, for days, for weeks, where the patients pretend to be doctors and give therapy sessions, where the attendants and nurses play the roles of patients and visitors and doctors and TV repairmen, where the whole fucking institution is one great stage upon which all walk free.'

`I rule you are out of order, Dr. Rhinehart. Please sit down.'

Dr. Cobblestone stood erect at the end of the table and his face was neutral as he spoke these words. As the heads all swung back to me there was a total silence. When I spoke it was almost to myself.

The great Goddam machine society has made us all into hamsters. We don't see the worlds within us waiting to be born. Actors only able to play one role: whoever heard of such nonsense. We must create random men, dicepeople. The world needs dicepeople. The world shall have dicepeople.'

Someone had a firm grip on one of my arms and was pulling at me to come away from the table. About half the other doctors seemed to be standing now and jabbering to each other. I resisted the tug and raised my right arm with clenched fist and boomed out to old Cobblestone: `One more thing!' A fearful silence followed. All stared at me. I lowered my clenched fist and released the green die onto the doodle pad in front of me: a five.

`All right,' I said. `I'll leave.'

I picked up the die, replaced it in my vest pocket and left. I learned later that an entirely new sewage disposal system was rejected by unanimous vote and a system of temporary stop-gap repairs initiated to the satisfaction of no one.

Chapter Thirty-three

As the normal, healthy, neurotic reader knows, one of the chief delights of life is daydreaming. After careful study of my own fantasies and those of hundreds of dice students met in dice therapy, I have noted that our dreams at any moment act as a block or a boost to our playing different roles. Moreover, I have discovered that about every four years from childhood until death the average man changes the goals of his daydreams and that these changes evolve in a remarkably predictable pattern. Since all the dreams are in a way related to power, I am modestly suggesting that the phenomena be called the Rhinehart Power Pattern for Men.

Daydreams begin sometime in the child's first decade, usually around the age of eight or nine. At this age the boy inevitably projects himself in terms of raw power. Frequently he is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and can leap buildings at a single bound. He becomes the Ghenghis Khan of the fourth grade, the Attila the Hun of the local shopping center, the General George Patton of Cub Scout Local 216. His parents are being tortured to death in a horribly creative way: for example, over some tremendous fire at the end of sharpened spears they are being fried as marshmallows. Sometimes the child arrives in time to save his parents; sometimes, in fact most times, he arrives just too late and, after demolishing the villains, concentrates his imagination on himself marching in the middle of a giant state funeral procession bathed in tears. The procession is attacked by the enemy and he leaps with his sword . . .

By the age of thirteen the scene has usually shifted to Yankee Stadium, where the boy, playing for the hopeless Yankees, with the bases loaded, two outs and his team trailing by three runs in the last half of the ninth inning in the seventh game of the World Series, manages to stroke a 495-foot drive off the highest part of the fence in right center field and, with a fantastic flash around the bases and an impossible headfirst slide, just touches home plate with the extended uncut fingernail of his left pinky. In December, late in the fourth quarter and his team trailing by five points he runs back an intercepted pass 109 yards, carrying fourteen men over the goal line on his back, eleven opposition players, one incompetent referee and two fans who are already trying to congratulate him. In the spring, with two seconds left to win the game he sinks a one handed jump shot from the foul line, his own foul line.

In the world of sports, girls are absent, but by the age of sixteen or seventeen the stroke of a baseball has been replaced by other strokes, and the only ones intercepting passes are female. The boy has become a man, and the man is commander-in-chief of a harem. Here things go on beyond the wildest imagination of anyone - except that of the boy doing the dreaming. A woman, panting helplessly, flings her nude body onto the hero, who, puffing nonchalantly on a Corsican cigarette and tastefully sipping a glass of rare New York State wine, and steering his Aston-Martin at 165 miles-per hour down a rarely used road in the Alps, manages to give the girl the most exciting love experience of her life. If a male at the age of seventeen is sometimes once again Attila the Hun it is in order to round up the conquered Roman women and, twirling his sword and his mustache, choose fifteen or sixteen to spend the night with him. If he once again scores the winning touchdown, it is in order to walk dramatically into the senior prom, limping badly and trailing blood along the floor behind him like a leaky oil truck, and watch the women melt into gooey syrup at the sight of him.

But by the age of twenty-one our male is either engaged, married or sated; the world he wants to rule is a new world he has become Horatio Alger. With grim determination and uncanny acuity he invests fifty-six dollars in the stock market and after buying and selling with cool nonchalance over a period of six months, finally sells out, pocketing a cool $4,862,927.33. When the board of General Motors is panicked by the threat of disarmament he calmly presents his invention of an inexpensive jet sportscar built in the shape of a Polaris missile and getting fifty miles per gallon of jet fuel. In three weeks he is on the covers of Time, Fortune and Success! But in the next few years he is earning a modest salary as second clerk at Pierce, Perkins and Poof and is upset at the injustice and hypocrisy that exist in the world: a world in which some men are athletic stars, James Bonds and millionaires and he is not; he is morally appalled. In his dreams he recreates the world, righting all wrongs, eliminating suffering, redistributing wealth, redistributing women, ending all wars. He becomes a reincarnation of Mahatma Buddha. Jesus Christ and Hugh Hefner. Evil governments topple, corrupt churches collapse, laws are revised, and Truth, written in Xeroxed tablets of stone by our hero, is presented to the world. Every one is happy.

Except our hero, whose income continues to be modest. At the age of twenty-five he has reached the first apex of the Rhinehart Power Pattern for Men: the dream of reforming the world. By the age of twenty-eight or nine regression has begun. His wife is reminding him that the world is still unreformed and that other men are earning … et cetera. He returns to his dreams of success. Only now they are more modest, more limited. Now he rules only Pierce, Perkins and Poof and not General Motors. Now his coup on the stock market is only a thousand dollars, not four million. Middle age, like rigor mortis, has set in.

The regression continues: in three or four years he reassumes his position as managing director of a harem, but it isn't what it used to be. It is populated with secretaries, receptionists and, on particularly good days, a famous movie star. Jane Fonda, while protest picketing at Pierce, Perkins and Poof, takes one glance at him and drags him off to a commune where - but it doesn't seem quite real, so he returns to the conquering of the little telephone operator Maggie Blemish.

At the age of thirty-seven he suddenly resigns from Pierce, Perkins and Poof to join the New York Football Giants. The prospect of running 109 yards or dragging fourteen men on his back no longer seems as jolly as it did at the age of thirteen, so he joins the Giants as head coach. Although his team has finished dead last for six consecutive seasons and still has the same incompetent men, our male introduces a new spread formation with three running quarterbacks separated by thirty yards and a center who can hike the ball to any one of them, and the Giants, running new quadruple reverses off fake-draw quick kicks, all season, win fourteen straight. He takes over as head coach of the New York Hockey Rangers at midseason and, thanks to a revolutionary introduction of six men into the forward line - but the pattern is familiar.

At the age of forty-one it is complete; the male, resigning his six head-coach-ships, once again dreams of conquering the world. The accumulated bitterness of the years asserts itself, he becomes as fast as a speeding bullet, as powerful as a locomotive and can leap buildings with three powerful strides. He becomes a General Curtis LeMay and bombs China back into the Stone Age. He becomes a Spiro Agnew and puts the blacks and hippies and liberals firmly in then places. His wife and children are being tortured to death in some horribly creative way: over a fire at the end of sharpened sticks they are being roasted as marshmallows. Sometimes he arrives in time to save his children, sometimes even his wife. But most times he arrives just too late. The giant state funeral procession in which, in tears, he is marching is attacked by the enemy, and leaping back into action with his tactical nuclear weapons . . .

The Rhinehart Power Pattern for Men should now be clear. In Dice Therapy we can predict with great precision the roles which a male student will most want to play by examining his age and relating it to our pattern. There exist variations, of course, some men mature late, and others, a few, are precocious. Eric Cannon, for example, at only nineteen, was saving the world, and I at the age of only thirty-five, am again, as at age eight, in the process of destroying it…

Chapter Thirty-four

I had only one session with Eric Cannon to try to introduce him to dice therapy, because he and his father had reached some kind of agreement whereby Eric was to be released three days later. He was naturally keyed up about leaving and didn't listen carefully as I began a Socratic dialogue to get him into dice therapy. Unfortunately, the Socratic method entails a second person at least willing to grunt periodically and since Eric remained absolutely mute I gave up and told him in a twenty-minute lecture what a dicelife was all about. He became quite alert. When I'd finished he shook his head from side to side slowly.

`How do you stay loose, Doc?' he asked. `How do you keep yourself on that side of the desk?'

`What do you mean?'

`How come they don't lock you up?'

I smiled.

`I am a professional man,' I answered.

`A professional loony. Giving psychotherapy.'

He shook his head again. `Poor Dad. He thought I was being cured.'

`The concept of the dicelife doesn't fascinate you?'

`Of course it does. You've turned yourself into a sort of computer like our air force use in Vietnam. Only instead of

trying to kill the maximum number of the enemy, you program yourself to drop your bombs at random.'

`You miss the point. Since there is no real enemy, all of life's wars are games, and the dicelife permits a variety of war games instead of the continual sluggish trench warfare of the typical life.' "`There is no enemy,"' he quoted quietly, looking at the floor in front of him. ` "There is no enemy." If there's one

thing that makes me want to puke more than anything else it's people who think there is no enemy. Your dicelife is a hundred times as sick as my father even. He's blind, so he's got an excuse, but you! "No enemy! "' And Eric writhed in his chair, his face distorted with tension. He twisted his muscular body upward until he was standing, his neck still rolling tensely, his eyes on the ceiling. Clenching his fists he finally held himself reasonably quiet.

`You big fool,' he said. `This world is a madhouse with killers loose, torturers, sick depraved sadists running churches,

corporations, countries. It could be different, could be better, and you sit on your lump of fat and toss dice.'

I didn't say anything since I was not in the mood for a wrestling match and was, as I listened, for some reason feeling

guilty.

`You know this hospital is a farce, but tragic suffering - a tragic farce. You know there are nuts running this place #161;nuts! - not even counting you! - that makes most inmates look like Ozzie and Marriat and David and Ricky. You know what American racism is. You know what the war in Vietnam is. And you toss dice! You toss dice!' He banged both fists down on the desk before me two, three, four times, his long hair falling forward at each blow like a black mantilla. Then he stopped.

`I'm leaving, Doc,' he said to me calmly. `I'm going out into the world and try to make it better. You can stay here and

drop your random bombs.'

`Just a minute, Eric.'

I stood up. `Before you go-'

`I'm leaving. Thanks for the pot, thanks for the silences, thanks even for the games, but don't say another word about

tossing your fucking dice, or I'll kill you.'

`Eric. . I'm . . . You're…' He left.

Chapter Thirty-five

Dr. Rhinehart should have known when Mr. Mann summoned him to his office at QSH that there was trouble. And

seeing old Cobblestone erect and solemn as he entered made Dr. Rhinehart certain there was trouble. Dr. Cobblestone

is tall and thin and gray-haired, and Dr. Mann is short and plump and balding, but their facial expressions were

identical: stern, firm, severe. Being called to a director's office at QSH reminded Rhinehart of being summoned to the

principal's office at age eight for winning money off sixth graders at craps. His problems hadn't changed much.

`What's this about dice, young man?' Dr. Cobblestone asked sharply, leaning forward in his chair and banging once

noisily on the floor the cane he held upright between his legs. He was the senior director of the hospital.

`Dice?' asked Dr. Rhinehart, a puzzled expression on his face. He was wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt and

sneakers, a dice decision which had made Dr. Mann pale when he had entered the office. Dr. Cobblestone had not

seemed to notice.

`I think we ought to take things in the order you suggested earlier,' Dr. Mann said to his co-director.

`Ah yes. Yes, indeed: Dr. Cobblestone banged his cane again as if it were some accepted signal for the restarting of a

game. `What's this we've heard about your using prostitutes and homosexuals in your sex research?'

Dr. Rhinehart didn't answer immediately but looked intently from one stern face to another. He said quietly: `The

research will be detailed in our report. Is there anything wrong?'

`Dr. Felloni says she has withdrawn entirely from the project,' said Dr. Mann.

'Ahh. She's back from Zurich?'

'She states she withdraw because subjects were being asked to commit immoral acts,' said Dr. Cobblestone.

`The subjects of the experiment was sexual change.'

`Were the subjects asked to commit immoral acts?' Dr. Cobblestone continued.

`The instructions made it clear that they didn't have to do anything they didn't want to.'

`Dr. Felloni reports that the project encouraged young people to fornicate,' said Dr. Mann neutrally.

`She should know. She helped me draw up the instructions.'

`Does the project encourage young people to fornicate?' asked Dr. Cobblestone.

`And old people t- Look, I think perhaps you ought to ask to have a copy of my research report when it's finished.'

The two stern faces had not relaxed, and Dr. Cobblestone went on `One of your subjects claims that he was raped.'

`That's true,' replied Dr. Rhinehart. `But our investigation indicated that he either fantasized or prevaricated the rape to

suppress his active unconscious participation in the act of which he complains.'

`What's that?' said Dr. Cobblestone, irritably cupping an ear at Dr. Rhinehart.

`He enjoyed being laid and is lying about the rape.'

`Oh. Thank you.'

`You realize, Luke,' said Dr. Mann, `that in letting you use some of our patients here at QSH for your research that we are legally and morally responsible for what occurs in that research.'

`I understand.'

`Certain attendants and nurses have reported that a large number of patients were volunteering for your sex research

project and have claimed that prostitutes were being supplied to the patients.'

`You can read my report when it's done.'

Dr. Cobblestone banged his cane a third time.

`A report has reached us that you yourself participated in . . . as . . . as . . . in this experiment.'

`Naturally.'

`Naturally?' asked Dr. Mann.

`I participated in the experiment'

'But our report stated that…' Dr. Cobblestone's face grew red with his exasperation at not finding the right words. `…

that you interacted with the subjects . . sexually.'

'Ahh,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`Well?' asked Dr. Mann.

`Some neurotic young person I presume is the author of this slander?' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`Yes, yes,' said Dr. Cobblestone quickly.

`Projecting his latent desires onto the dreaded authority figure?' Dr. Rhinehart went on.

`Precisely,' said Dr. Cobblestone, relaxing just a bit.

`Tragic. Is someone trying to help him?'

`Yes,' replied Dr. Cobblestone. `Yes. Dr. Vener has . . . How did you know it was a young man?'

'George Lovelace Ray O'Reilly. Projection, compensation, displacement, anal-cathexis.'

`Ah, yes.'

`Is there anything else?' said Dr. Rhinehart, making motions of rising to leave.

`I'm afraid there is, Luke,' said Dr. Mann.

`I see.'

Dr. Cobblestone gripped his cane carefully in both hands and, aiming, banged it a fourth time on the floor between his

legs.

`What's this about dice, young man?' he asked.

`Dice?'

'One of your patients has complained that you're making him play some strange game with dice.'

`The new one, Mr. Spezio?'

`Yes.'

`We have patients working with clay, cloth, paper, wood, leather, beads, cardboard, lathes, wire … I saw no reason not

to let a few select patients begin playing with dice.'

`I see,' said Dr. Cobblestone.'

`Why?' asked Dr. Mann blandly.

`You can read my report when it's done.'

No one spoke for a while.

`Anything else?' Dr. Rhinehart asked at last.

The two older men glanced uneasily at each other and Dr. Cobblestone cleared his throat.

`Your general behavior lately, Luke,' said Dr. Mann.

`Ahhh.'

'Your impolite and … unusual behavior in our last board meeting,' said Dr. Cobblestone.

`Yes.'

`Your erratic, socially upsetting eccentricities,' said Dr. Mann.

`Your interruption of Dr. Wink,' added Dr. Cobblestone.

`We've received complaints from a few nurses here at QSH, several board members naturally, from Mr. Spezio, and…'

`And?' suggested Dr. Rhinehart.