The Diceman

`I said play with yourself.'

Linda must have been under the impression that masturbation was primarily a case of self-caresses. In the immortal

words of General MacArthur: `Nothing could be further from the truth.'

Nevertheless, I began fondling myself. It was difficult to maintain a sense of dignity and therefore stared hard at the floor at Linda's feet.

'Look at me while you're doing it,' she said.

I looked at her. Her cold, tense, bitter face immediately stirred me: I imagined myself sexually revenging myself on her

in the month ahead. My cannon bobbed upward, my mind concentrated hard for several minutes on my imaginary

encounter, and with careful manual manipulation of the firing mechanism, I blasted off onto the floor. I tried hard to

maintain a neutral, dignified expression throughout.

`Lick it up,' she said.

A great weariness flowed through me; I'm sure my face sagged. But I slowly got down on my knees and began licking

at the tiny pools of semen.

`Look at me,' she said.

Somewhat awkwardly I tried to look at her and accomplish her command at the same time. I noted that the floor

between the rugs was shiny and that someone had abandoned a male slipper under an easy chair. I didn't feel too

superman-ish.

`All right, get up: I stood up, still looking at her neutrally, or so I hoped.

`You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Doctor,' she said with a smile.

I became ashamed of myself and my head and shoulders sagged.

`Are these the sort of things you plan to do with me?' she asked.

`No.' I hesitated. `I imagine men have treated you sadistically before.'

`So I'm not doing too well, huh?'

`Oh no, I think you are. I think you've chosen well, beyond what I'd expected. You've given me a new experience, one

I won't forget' She stared at me, puffing sporadically on a cigarette; she'd finished her drink.

`What if I were to phone a friend of mine, a queer, and order you to perform sexually with him. Could you do it?'

`Your command is my wish,' I said.

`Does the thought interest or frighten you?'

I introspected obediently.

`It bores and depresses me.'

`Good.'

She had me fix her another drink and went to a telephone and dialed two numbers, asking at both for Jed and hanging

up each time disappointed.

`Lie down on the floor, on your face, while I think.'

As I presented myself I began to look back with pleasure at being just old Luke. After a while she said: `All right, let's

go to bed.'

I followed her into a bedroom, neutrally removed her clothes piece by piece at her command and followed her into a narrow double bed. We both lay quietly not touching for a few minutes. I was conscientiously trying not to do a thing unless she commanded me. I felt her hand run down my chest across my belly and come to rest a few inches from my pubic hair. She turned to me and nibbled at my ear, licked my neck, kissed me slowly, wetly, languorously on the mouth and throat. And neck. And chest. And belly. And et cetera. Her maneuvers had a predictable effect despite my recent shameful behavior. She noted the effect, rolled over to the other side of the bed and said nothing else. She tossed and turned a long time and then I guess I must have fallen asleep.

Sometime later I was dreaming that I was going to take a bath and as I sank into the tub I paused to feel the delicious warmth on my balls and penis and awoke to realize that Linda had ward and stiffened my cock with her mouth. When I touched her hair and groped for her body, she gave one last farewell lick and nibble and came up over me and spread herself and placed me inside her and put her lips to mine and began to churn.

The state of semi-sleep is sometimes like that of being lightly stoned and I let Linda do all the work, which consisted mainly of making waves of wanton wiggles with her hips and her insides, and streams of wanton licks and nibbles on my chest, shoulders and neck, and when she said, `Pump,' I pumped, clasping in my hands her perfect buttocks like two hot firm grapefruit, and she groaned and became tense and grinding, tense and grinding, grinding and then relaxed.

She lay on me and I dozed off and then was awakened to feel her moving again, I stiff within her, her mouth on my throat and her insides caressing me like waves of hot eels wrapped around me and she moved but I dozed off again to awaken to her hard mouth enclosing my prick in her hands caressing and pinching and generally 'laying waste the lower erogenous zones and when I touched her hair she groaned and rolled over and took me on top of her and ground away at me and told me to move but not to come so I pumped and swirled and tried to think about Willy May's batting average statistics for the 1950s and after a while her body went limp and she nudged me to roll off her and I did and I dozed off and slept and awakened again already inside her, and she again on top of me moving easily and gently and it must have been near dawn because now I was more awake and began to move too but she said no and tongued and bit my ears, and neck and moved three directions at once down below and when she said okay I dug my fingers into her crack around her buttocks and tried to ram her right over my head and she made a lot of nice noises and I emptied a lake inside her lake and we both moved on a while and then fell apart into another sleep.

I awoke on my stomach with a knee touching her body someplace; it was well into the morning and I felt hungry. Linda was staring wide-awake at the ceiling.

`I command you,' she said slowly, `to give me any commands you wish, I will obey them until I cease to feel like it and order you to do something.'

`I'm to be your temporary master?'

`That's right. And I want you to give me orders that you really want me to do.'

'Look at me,' I said. .

She looked over at me.

`What we're doing is very important. The commands . . '

'I don't want lectures.'

'I command you to listen to me.'

`You can order me to do a lot of other things, but no lectures. Not in these twenty-four hours.'

`I see,' I said. I paused. `Return my kiss tenderly, with affection but without lust.'

She sat up beside me, looked coldly into my eyes for a moment and then, softening, brought her lips gently to mine.

I lay back onto the pillow and said: `Kiss my face with the tenderness you'd feel … if my face were the white rose.'

A brief tautness crossed her face before, eyes closed, she framed my face with her hands and lowered her lips to begin

gently kissing it.

'Thank you, Linda, that was beautiful. You are beautiful.'

She didn't open her eyes or interrupt her delicate kissing but after a while I said: `Lie back now on the bed and close

your eyes.'

She obeyed. Her face looked more relaxed than I had ever seen it.

`Pretend that I am a prince who loves you with a spiritual devotion beyond anything known outside of the most

overdone fairy tale. You are worshipped by him. Your beauty exceeds that of any creature that God has ever created. And you are a perfect perfect person, without spiritual or physical flaw. And the prince, your husband, comes to you now on your wedding night to express at last the pure, religious, sacred, holy passion he has for you. Receive his love with joy: I had spoken slowly and hypnotically and began with what I hoped was appropriate delicacy and religiosity to caress her body and touch it with the most spiritual kisses. Spiritual kisses, for the average reader's information, are relatively dry, 'gentle and poorly aimed: that is, they approach central target zones but always manage to just miss. I was proceeding with increasing devotion and pleasure when her body suddenly disappeared: she had leapt out of bed.

`Stop touching me,' she yelled.

I felt as embarrassed and undignified as I had the night before. `Are you taking away my power already?'

I said.

`Yes, yes!' She was trembling.

I remained on my hands and knees looking up at her.

`Get dressed,' she said. `Get out' `But Linda The deal is over. Off. Get out.'

`Our deal was-'

`Out!' she shouted.

`Okay,' I said, getting down off the bed. `I'll leave. But at nine forty-five tonight I'll be back. The deal is on.'

`No. No no no. It's off. You're insane. I don't know what you want, but no, never, it's off.'

I slowly dressed and, receiving no new command from a sitting, face-averted Linda, I left.

I remained outside the apartment building, trailed her downtown when she left about an hour later, remained outside

an apartment in the Village until five thirty in the afternoon and then followed her to a restaurant, where she ate. She didn't seem to be aware that I was following her or even that I might be following. Organic chemistry picked her up after supper and starting with him, she wandered from bar to bar, picking up friends, losing them, gaining others, drinking heavily and generally doing nothing interesting. At nine forty-five on the dot I moved in. Linda was seated at a table with three men I'd sever seen before; she looked drowsy and drunk. One of the men had his hand way up under

her skirt. I came to the table, looked hypnotically into her eyes and said: `it's a quarter of ten now, Linda. Come with

me.'

Her blurred eyes cleared briefly, she coughed sad wobbled to her feet.

`Hey, where you going, baby?' one of the men asked. Another took hold of her arm.

`Linda is following me,' I said and took a step nearer the guy who had taken her arm and loomed over him and stared

down with what I tried to make seem suppressed fury. He released her.

I glared once briefly at each of the other two men and turned and left. With what must have been considerably less dignity than Peter or Matthew following Jesus, Linda followed.

Chapter Fifty-nine

[Being a questioning of Dr. Lucius Rhinehart by Inspector Nathaniel Putt of the New York City police regarding the unfortunate escape of thirty-three mental patients from a performance of Hair. Six of the patients are still at large.]

`Mr. Rhinehart, I-' `It's Dr. Rhinehart,' interrupted Dr. Mann irritably.

`Ah, excuse me,' said Inspector Putt, ceasing his pacing briefly to. stare back at Dr. Mann seated beside Dr. Rhinehart

on a low, ancient couch in the inspector's office. `Dr. Rhinehart, first, I must inform you that you are entitled to have a

lawyer present to rep-'

`Lawyers make me nervous.'

`- resent you. I see. All right. Let's proceed. Did you or did you not meet with Eric Cannon in the cafeteria of QSH

between the hours of ten thirty and eleven fifteen on August 12?'

`I did.'

`You did?'

`I did.'

`I see. For what purpose?'

`He invited me to see him. Since he was a distinguished former patient of mine, I went' `What did you talk about?'

`We talked about his desire to see the musical Hair. He informed me that many of the patients wanted to see Hair.'

`Anything else?'

'I shook the dice and determined that I would do everything is my power to take Eric and thirty-seven others to see

Hair.'

`But, Luke,' interrupted Dr. Mann. `You must have realized the incred -'

'Steady, Dr. Mann,' said Inspector Putt. `I'll handle this.'

He came and stood directly in front of Dr. Rhinehart, his tall, slender body leaning forward, his sharp gray eyes falling

coldly on his suspect. `After you decided to help Cannon and others to leave the hospital, what did you do?'

`I forged Dr. Mann's signature on letters to me and to several others and proceeded to effect the temporary release of

the patients.'

`You admit this?'

`Of course I admit this. The patients wanted to see Hair.'

`But,' but said Dr. Mann.

`Steady, sir,' interrupted the inspector. `If I understand your position now correctly, Dr. Rhinehart, you are now

confessing that you did, in fact, forge Dr. Mann's signature, and on your own initiative obtain the release to go to

Manhattan of thirty seven mental patients.'

`Thirty-eight. Absolutely. To see Hair.'

`Why did you lie to us before?'

'The Die told me to.'

'The…'

The inspector stopped and stared at Dr. Rhinehart. 'The die . . . .yes. Please describe your motivation in taking the

patients to Hair.'

'The Die told me to.'

`And why did you cover up your trail by forging Dr. Mann's signature and pretending to try to see Dr. Mann?'

'The Die told me to.'

`Your subsequent lying was 'The Die told me to.'

`And now you say-'

'The Die told me to.'

There was a very long silence, during which the inspector stared neutrally at the wall above Dr. Rhinehart's head.

`Dr. Mann, sir, perhaps you could explain to me precisely what Dr. Rhinehart means: `He means,' said Dr. Mann in a

small, tired voice, `that the dice told him to.'

`A cast of the dice?'

'The dice.'

`Told him to?'

`Told him to.'

`And thus,' said Dr. Rhinehart, `I had no intention of permitting any patients to escape. I plead guilty to forging Dr.

Mann's signature on trivial letters which, as I understand it, is of misdemeanor, and to showing poor judgment in the handling of mental patients, which, since it is universally practiced by everyone else associated with mental hospitals, is nowhere considered a crime of any sort.'

Inspector Putt looked down on Dr. Rhinehart with a cold smile.

`How do we know that you did not agree to help Cannon and Jones and their followers escape?'

'I will give my statements and, when you get close enough to talk to him again, you will have Mr. Cannon's statements,

which, however, will be inadmissible as evidence no matter what he says.'

`Thanks a lot,' the inspector said ironically.

`Does it not occur to you, Inspector, that in telling you that I forged Dr. Mann's signature, I may be lying because the

Die has told me to?'

'What-'

`That in fact my original statements of innocence may be the true ones?'

`What? What are you suggesting?'

`Simply that yesterday when I heard that you wished to question me again, I created three options for the Die to

choose from: that I tell you I had nothing to do with the order to go to Hair; that I tell you that I initiated the excursion

and forged the orders; and thirdly, that I tell you I conspired with Eric Cannon to help him escape. The Die chose the

second. But which is the truth seems to me to be still an open question.'

`But, but.'

`Steady, Inspector,' said Dr. Mann.

`But - What are you saying?'

'The Die told me to tell you that the Die told me to take the patients on an excursion to Hair.'

`But is that story the truth?' asked Inspector Putt, his face somewhat flushed.

Dr. Rhinehart shook a die onto the little coffee table in front of him. He examined the result.

`Yes,' he announced.

The inspector's face became redder.

`But how do I know that what you have just said `Precisely,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

The inspector moved in a daze back behind his desk and sat down.

`Luke, you're relieved of all your duties at QSH as of today,' said Dr. Mann.

`Thank you, Tim.'

`I suppose you're still on our board of management for the simple reason that I don't have the authority to fire you

from that, but in our October meeting -'

'You could forge Dr. Cobblestone's signature, Tim.'

There was a silence.

`Are there any more questions, Inspector?' Dr. Rhinehart asked.

`Do you wish to initiate criminal proceedings against Dr. Rhinehart for forgery, sir?' the Inspector asked Dr. Mann.

Dr. Mann turned and looked a long time into the black, sincere eyes of Dr. Rhinehart, who returned his gaze steadily.

`No, Inspector, I'm afraid I can't. For the good of the hospital, for the good of everyone, I wish you'd keep this whole

conversation confidential. The public thinks the escape was a conspiracy of hippies and blacks. For all we know; as Dr.

Rhinehart so kindly points out, it still may be a conspiracy of hippies and blacks. They also wouldn't understand why

all Dr. Rhinehart has done only constitutes a misdemeanor.'

`It confuses me, sir.'

`Precisely. There are some things we must protect the common man from knowing as long as we can.'

`I think you're right.'

`May I go now, fellows?' asked Dr. Rhinehart

Chapter Sixty

The Die is our refuge and strength,

A very present help in trouble.

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed,

And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,

Though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.

I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Die

Than to dwell in the tents of consistency.

For the Lord Chance is a sun and a shield

Chance will give grace and glory and folly and shame:

Nothing will be withheld from them that walk randomly.

Q Lord of Chance, My Die, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee. .

from The Book of the Die

Chapter Sixty-one

`Your free will has made a mess of things,' I told Linda after explaining at length my dice theory. `Give the Die a try.'

`You sound like a TV commercial,' she said.

Nevertheless, Linda and I began living a dicelife together, the first full dice-couple in history. She knew she'd reached

a dead end with her `real' self and enjoyed trying to express a variety of others. Her sexual and social promiscuity was

a good preparation for the dicelife; it dis-inhibited her in an area which often blocks the whole life system. On the

other-hand, she had repressed the whole spiritual side of herself: she was as ashamed of having to pray in front of me

as would be most other people of having to perform soixante-neuf at the communion rail. But she could do it (and

probably the other too). She prayed.

I was tender and warm with her and - when the Die so chose - I treated her like a cheap slut, using her body to satisfy

the most perverse desires whim could create and Whim choose. I insisted that her reactions to my tenderness and to

my sadism be determined by the Die - whether she responded to my tender love with a bitchy self or with a sweet,

giving self, or whether she was a bitter, cynical whore, half-enjoying being abased by me sexually, or a flower deeply

crushed by cruelty.

She followed the Die's commands with the intense fanaticism of the new convert to any religion. Together we prayed, wrote poems and prayers, discussed dice therapy and practiced our randoming lives. Although she wanted to give up her sexual promiscuity, I insisted that it was a part of her and must be given a chance to be expressed. One night the Die commanded her to go out and pick up a man and bring him back to the apartment and she did and the Die ordered me to join them and the two of us worked with her diligently for two hours. I shook the Die next morning to see how I was to treat her and it said `in a surly fashion,' but the Die told her `not to worry about last night' and to `love me' no matter how I acted, and she did.

In the fall the Die set us the assignment of infiltrating the numerous encounter groups in New York City. We were trying to introduce some of their group members into diceliving.

We varied who we were from one encounter or sensitivity group to the next, sometimes acting as a couple, sometimes acting as a couple, sometimes as strangers.

I remember one time in particular: a weekend marathon we attended at the Fire Island Sensitivity Training Headquarters of Encounter Resources Society in late October, 1969.

As with most psychotherapies, FISTH provided mental first aid by the prospective rich (the therapists) for the already rich (the patients), and the dozen people at this marathon were representative Americans: a magazine editor, a fashion designer, two corporation executives, a tax lawyer, three well-to-do housewives, one stockbroker, a freelance. writer, a minor TV personality and a mad psychiatrist - seven men and five women, plus I should add, two young hippies present tuition free, as an extra added attraction for the two-hundred-dollar weekend paying clients. I was one of the two corporation executives and Lil a well-to-do housewife (divorced). The leaders were Scott (small, compact, athletic) and Marya (tall, lithe, ethereal), both of whom were fully qualified psychotherapists. Our main meeting place was the huge living room of a huge Victorian house on the ocean outside Quoquam, Fire Island.

Friday evening and all day Saturday we did a few loosening up exercises to get to know each other better: we played pitch and catch for a while with the hippie girl; we had a tug of war; we stared into each other's eyes like used-car salesmen; we symbolically gang banged the woman who had the first crying jag; shouted shitheads and cocksuckers at each other for an invigorating half hour; played musical chairs with half the group being sitters and the other half being chairs; played `get the guest' with the minor TV personality, by taking turns seeing who could be the most obnoxious to her; played blind man's buff with everybody blind - except for Marya, who stood by whispering hoarsely, `Really FEEL him, Joan, put your HANDS on him.'

By Saturday evening we were exhausted, but felt very close to one another and very liberated for doing publicly with strangers what previously we had only done privately with friends: namely, feeling each other up and calling each other shitheads and cocksuckers. The more bizarre games reminded me pleasantly of life on a dull day in a Dice Center, but every time I'd begin to relax and enjoy some pattern-breaking event, one Of our leaders would start getting us to talk honestly about and it would begin to rain cliches.

So by close to midnight we were all lying in various informal states of decomposition against the walls of the bare living room watching the spontaneous light-show the firelight was making on our faces from the blazing logs, while Marya tried to get the other corporation executive, a balding little man named Henry Hopper, to open up about his true feelings. I'd just called him a `liberal fink,' Linda had called him a `virile looking hunk of man,' and the hippie girl had called him a `capitalist pig.'

For some reason Hopper was maintaining that he was confused in his feelings. Two or three of the group were trying to help Marya, assuming that we were beginning another round of `get the guest,' but many of the others looked tired and a bit bored. Nonetheless, Marya, a slender, bright-eyed fanatic on the subject of honesty, pressed onward in a soft husky voice that reminded me of a bad actress doing a bedroom scene.

`Just tell us, Hank,' she said. `Let it come out.'

`Frankly, I don't feel like saying anything right now.'

He was nervously breaking open peanut shells and eating peanuts.

`You're chicken, Hank,' a big, beefy tax lawyer contributed.

`I'm not chicken,' Mr. Hopper said in a quiet voice. `I'm just scared shitless.'

Linda and I and Mr. Hopper were the only ones who laughed.

`Humor is a defense mechanism, Hank,' leader Marya said. `Why are you scared?' she asked, her blue eyes blazing

sincerely.

`I guess I'm afraid the group won't like me as much if I tell them I think we're wasting our time.'

`Right,' said Marya, smiling with encouragement.

Mr. Hopper just looked at the floor and arranged the peanut shells on the rug in front of him.

`You're not sharing with us, Hank,' Marya said after a while. She smiled. `You don't trust us.'

Mr. Hopper just stared at the floor, the firelight reflecting brightly off his balding head.

After another few minutes of unsuccessful sniping, co-leader Scott suggested we try some trust exercises with Hank

namely, play pitch and catch with him to help him come to trust us. So we formed a circle and tossed him around

among ourselves until he had a blissful smile on his face, and then Marya had him towered to the floor, where she

knelt by him and, smiling with half closed eyes, suggested in a soft voice that he tell us the truth about everything.

Before he could begin, though, Linda interrupted.

`Lie,' she said..

Beg pardon,' he said, still smiling dreamily from the flowing caresses of being manipulated by a roomful of people:

'Tell lies,' Linda said. `It's much easier.'

She was seated against the wall opposite the fire with her feet tucked under her.

`Why, Linda, what are you saying?' Marya asked.

`I'm suggesting Hank really let go and just lie to us. Tell us whatever he feels like saying with no inhibiting effort to

get at some illusion we call truth.'

`Why are you afraid of truth, Linda?'

Marya asked, smiling. Her smile had begun to remind me of Dr. Felloni's nod.

`I'm not afraid of truth,' Linda answered with a slow drawl, half imitating Marya's. `I just find it far less fun and far

less liberating than lies.'

`You're sick,' contributed the burly tax sawyer.

'Oh I don't know,' I said from my corner of the room. 'Huck Finn was the greatest liar in American literature and he

seemed to have a lot of fun and be pretty liberated.'

The sudden appearance of two challengers to the godhead of honesty was unprecedented.

`Let's get back to Mr. Hopper,' said co-leader Scott pleasantly. `Tell us now, Hank, why were you so scared before.'

Mr. Hopper answered promptly: `I was scared because you wasted truth, and both the answers I felt like making seemed to me to be half-lies. I was confused.' `Confusion is only a symptom of repression,' Marya said, smiling. `You know there are unpleasant aspects to your true

feelings which you're ashamed of. But if you'd just share them with us, they'd no longer bug you.'

`Lie about them,' Linda said, stretching her lovely legs into the middle of the room. `Exaggerate. Fantasize. Make up

some junk that you think will entertain us.'

`Why do you want the spotlight?' Marya, smiling and tense, asked Linda.

`I enjoy lying,' Linda answered. `And if I can't talk, I can't lie.'

'Ah come on,' said the magazine editor. `What's so much about lying?'

'What's so much fun about pretending to be honest?' she replied.

'We're not aware that we're pretending, Linda,' Scott said.

`Maybe that's why you're all tense,' Linda countered.

Since Linda was more relaxed at this point than either Marya or Scott, it was one-upmanship parfait, and several

people smiled.

`Lies are a way of covering up,' Marya said.

`Being honest and truthful the way we do here is like cheap striptease, a lot of motion to reveal that there are boobs

and pricks and asses in the world, something we all knew in the first place.'

`Aren't boobs and pricks beautiful, Linda?' asked Marya in her softest and most sincere voice.

`Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on which illusion I feel like supporting.'

`Our genitalia are always beautiful,' Marya said.

`You obviously haven't looked lately,' Linda answered, yawning.

`I doubt you've ever really faced your sexual shame and guilt,' Marya said.

`I have and they bore me,' replied Linda, smothering another yawn.

`Boredom is-'

`Are your breasts and cunt beautiful?'

Linda asked Marya abruptly.

`Yes, and so are yours.'

'Then show us your beautiful genitalia.'

No one was particularly bored now. Marya sat with her back to the fire and a fixed smile on her face, staring vaguely

at Linda. Scott cleared his throat noisily and leaned forward to the rescue.

`This isn't a beauty contest, Linda,' he said. `You're obviously trying -' `Marya has a beautiful cunt. She's not ashamed of it. We're not supposed to be ashamed of it. Let's see it.'

'I don't think this is an appropriate occasion,' Marya said. She wasn't smiling.

`A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' Linda replied. `Don't deny us.'

`I partly feel that my role as leader-'

`Partly!' Linda said, waking up. `Partly? You mean in fact that feelings and truth can be broken into parts?'

Linda began taking off her blouse.

`I don't wish to cause embarrassment to anyone here,' Marya said. `Our purpose is to get at real attitudes, real feelings,

to . . . ah, to explore . . . ah . . ' But no one was paying much attention, since Linda, with serene, concentration, had

now removed her bra and her skirt and her panties and was sitting nude, legs apart, with her back to the wall. When

she finished she had to smother another yawn. The firelight made a decidedly splendid effect on her white skin. For a

while there was silence.

'Are you embarrassed, Linda?' Marya asked quietly, her face again frozen in a smile.

`Linda sat silently with her back to the wall, looking at the rug between her legs. Tears began to form in her eyes. She

suddenly drew up her knees, put her face into her hands and sobbed.

`Oh yes, yes,' she said. `I'm ashamed I'm ashamed!' She was crying.

No one spoke or moved.

`You needn't feel that way,' Marya said, getting on her knees and beginning to crawl toward Linda.

`My body is ugly ugly ugly,' Linda sobbed. `I can't stand it.'

`I don't think it's ugly,' said Mr. Hopper, pushing his peanuts away from him off to the side.

`It's not ugly, Linda,' Marya said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

`It is. It is. I'm a slut.'

`Don't be silly. You can't really feel that.'

`I can't?'

Linda asked, raising her head with a startled expression.

`Your body is beautiful,' Marya added.

`Yeah, I agree,' said Linda, abruptly sitting back and stretching out her legs again. `Good round teats, good firm ass,

juicy cunt. Nothing to complain about. Anyone want a feel?'

Everyone was caught leaning forward sympathetically with his mouth open and eyes bulging and nothing to say.

`If it's beautiful, touch it, Marya,' Linda added.

`I'll volunteer,' Mr. Hopper said.

`Not yet, Hank,' Linda said, smiling affectionately at him. 'Marya's got a thing about beautiful genitalia.'

We all looked at Marya, who hesitated, and, then, with tightlipped determination, put her hands delicately on Linda's

shoulders, then her breasts. Her face relaxed a bit and she slid her bands down to the tummy and across the pubic hair

and onto the thighs.

`You're lovely, Linda,' she said, sitting back on her heels and smiling a relaxed, almost triumphant smile.

`Would you like to suck me off?' Linda asked.

`No … no thank you,' Marya answered, flushing.

`Your love of beauty and all.'

`Is it my turn?' asked Mr. Hopper.

`What are you trying to prove?'

Scott snapped out at Linda. Linda looked over at him and patted Marya on her bare knee.

`Nothing,' she said to Scott. `I just feel like acting the way I'm acting.'

`You admit you're just acting?' he asked.

`Of course,' she answered. Then she sat up and directed her sincere blue eyes at Mr. Hopper. `I'm afraid a part of you

is embarrassed by all this, right Hank?'

`Yes,' he said, and he smiled nervously.

`But part of you is enjoying it.'

He laughed.

`Part of you thinks I'm a nervy bitch.'

He hesitated and then nodded.

`And part of you thinks I'm the most honest one here.'

`You're damn right,' he answered abruptly.

`Which one is the real you?'

He frowned and seemed to be concentrating on self-analysis. `I guess the real me is the one-'

`Oh shit, Hank. You're not being honest.'

`I'm not? I didn't even tell you which one'

`But is one any more real than the next?'

`You sophist whore!' I blurted out.

`What's with you, Big Daddy?' Linda asked.

`You're a sick sophist hypocritical Communist nihilist slut.'

'You're a big handsome brainless nobody.'

`Just because you're pretty, you seduce poor Hopper into liking you. But the real Hopper knows you for what you are a

cheap, neurotic two-bit sophist anti-American divorcee.'

`Now just a minute' Scott interrupted, leaning toward me.

`But I know her type, Scott,' I went on. `Stage struck since she first grew pubic hair, subverting her way into good

men's pants with cheap, five-and-dime-store sophist sex techniques, and ruining the lives of one hundred percent

American men. We all know her: nothing but a diseased anarchist hippie uptight sophist bitch.'

Linda's mouth twisted grotesquely, tears formed again in her eyes and she finally burst into tears, rolling onto her

stomach and flexing her buttock muscles impressively in grief. She sobbed and sobbed.

`Oh I know, I know,' she said finally between gasps. `I am a slut, I am. You've seen the real me. Take my body and do

what you will.'

`Jesus, the dame is nuts,' said the burly tax lawyer.

`Should we comfort her?' asked Mr. Hopper.

`Stop pretending!' snapped Scott. `We know you don't really feel guilty.'

But Linda, still crying, was getting back into her clothes. When dressed again, she curled up in a corner in the fetal

position. The room was very quiet.

`I know that type,' I said confidently. `A hot, slimy, ball breaking one-time sophist feminist lay, but nervous as a

vibrator.'

'But which is the real Linda?' Mr. Hopper said dreamily to no one in particular.

`Who cares?' I sneered.

`Who cares?' echoed Linda, sitting up again and yawning. Then she leaned toward Mr. Hopper.

`What are your true feelings now, Hank?' she asked him.

For a moment the question caught him off guard; then he smiled.

`Happy confusion,' he said loudly.

`And how do you feel now, Linda?' asked Marya, but the question was met by six or seven groans from group

members seated around the room.

Linda flipped a pair of green dice out onto the middle of the rug and, after looking mischievously at each of us in turn, asked quietly `Anyone want to play some games?'

Linda was marvelous. What people needed in these groups was someone to let himself go so completely that inhibitions were knocked away. Linda could strip, simulate all kinds of love, could rage, cry, could argue convincingly, all in such rapid succession that she soon made everyone experience existence inside the group as a game; nothing seemed to matter. After we'd gotten most of the members of an encounter group to splinter off the original leader and meet only with us (as happened on Fire Island that weekend), they came to see that with us truth and honesty were irrelevant; we approved good acting and bad, role playing and out-of-role playing, baddie roles and goodie roles, truth and lies.

When one individual would try to pretend to be his `real' self and call the others back to `reality,' we would try to encourage our dice players to ignore him and go right on playing their dice-dictated roles. When someone else, as the result of playing out some role dammed up inside him for years, broke down and cried, the group would at first rally round the bawler to reassure him, as they'd gotten used to doing in traditional encounter groups. We tried to show them that this was the worst thing they could do; the crier should be ignored or be responded to solely within the roles that were already being played.

We wanted them to come to realize that neither `immorality' nor `emotional breakdowns' earn either condemnation or pity except when the Die so dictates. We wanted them to come to see that in group dice play they are free of the usual games, rules and behavior patterns. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. No one - least of all us, the leaders - is reliable. When a person becomes reassured that he lives in a totally valueless, unreal, unstable, inconsistent world, he becomes free to be fully all of his selves - as the dice dictate. In those cases when the other group members respond conventionally to someone's breakdown, our work is undone: the sufferer feels frightened and ashamed. He believes that the `real world' and its conventional attitudes exist even in group dice play.

And it's his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him. His `reality,' his `reason,' his 'society': these are what must be destroyed.

All that fall Linda and I did our very best.

In addition to our work with various groups, Linda went to work on H. J. Wipple, a philanthropist whom I'd gotten interested in building a Dice Center for us in Southern California, and construction soon speeded up considerably. Work even began in renovating a boys' camp in the Catskills for a second Center. The world was getting ready for dicepeople.

Chapter Sixty-two

Naturally Dr. Rhinehart felt a little guilty about leaving his wife and children without the slightest hint of when he'd return, but he consulted the Die, which advised him to forget about it. Then four months after he'd left home, a random Whim chose one of his random whims and ordered him to return to his apartment and try to seduce his wife.

Mrs. Rhinehart greeted him at two o'clock in the afternoon in a stylish new pants suit he'd never seen before and a cocktail in her hand.

`I've got a visitor now, Luke,' she said quietly. `If you want to see me come back about four.'

It was not precisely the greeting Dr. Rhinehart had expected after four months of mysterious disappearance, and while he was rallying his mental faculties for a suitable riposte he discovered the door had gently been closed in his face.

Two hours later he tried again.

`Oh, it's you,' said Mrs. Rhinehart as she might have greeted a plumber just back with a fresh tool. `Come on in.'

`Thank you,' said Dr. Rhinehart with dignity.

His wife walked ahead of him into the living room and offered him a seat, herself leaning against a new desk covered

with papers and books. Dr. Rhinehart stood dramatically in the middle of the room and looked intently at his wife.

`Where you been?' she asked, with a tone of bored interest discouragingly close to what she might have used asking

her son Larry the same question after he'd been out of the house for twenty minutes.

`The dice told me to leave you, Lil, and . . . well, I left.'

`Yes. I figured as much. What are you doing these days?'

Speechless for a few seconds, Dr. Rhinehart nevertheless managed to look intently at his wife.

`I'm doing a lot of work these days with group dice therapy.'

'How nice,' Mrs. Rhinehart said. She moved away from the desk over in front of a new painting Dr. Rhinehart had

never seen before and glanced at some mail which was lying on a table beneath the painting. Then she turned back to

him.

`Part of me has missed you, Luke.' She smiled warmly at him. `And part of me hasn't.'

`Yeah, me too.'

`Part of me was mad mad mad,' she went on, frowning. `And part of me, she smiled again, `was glad glad glad.'

`Really?'

`Yes. Fred Boyd helped me let go of the mad mad mad business and that's just left me with . . . the other.'

`How'd Fred do it?'

`After I'd cried and complained and raged for an hour or so two days after you'd left, he said to me: "You ought to

consider suicide, Lil."

'Lil paused to smile at the memory. 'That sort of caught my attention so to speak, and he went on to say: "Shake the

dice also to see whether you should try to kill Luke."

'Good friend, old Fred,' Dr. Rhinehart interjected, and began pacing nervously back and forth in front of his wife.

`Another option he suggested was that I divorce you and try to marry him.'

`One of my real pals.'

`Or also, that I not divorce you but begin sleeping with him.'

`Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his best friend's wife `He than gave me a sincere impassioned

lecture on how I had let my compulsive tie to you limit me in every way, let it starve all the creative and imaginative

selves that would otherwise live.'

`My own theories turned against me.'

`So I shook a Die and Fred and I have been enjoying each other ever since.'

Dr. Rhinehart stopped his pacing and stared.

`Exactly what does that mean?' he asked.

`I'm trying to state the matter delicately so you won't be upset.'

'Thanks a lot. Are you serious?'

`I consulted the Die and It told me to be serious with you.'

`You and Fred are now… lovers?'

`That's what the novels call it.'

Dr. Rhinehart looked at the floor for a while (the realization that it was a new rug registered dimly on his

consciousness), then back up at his wife.

`How about that?' he said.

`It's pretty good, as a matter of fact,' Lil replied, lust the other night 'Er no, Lil, the details really aren't necessary. I'm …

hmmm. I'm . . . well, what else is new?'

I'm enrolled this fall at Columbia Law School.'

`You're what?'

`I gave the dice a choice of several of my lifelong daydreams and they chose that I become a lawyer. Don't you want

me to broaden myself?'

`But law school!' Dr. Rhinehart said.

`Oh Luke, for all your supposed liberation you've still got an image of me as a helpless beautiful female.'

`But you know I can't stand lawyers.'

'True, but have you ever slept with one?'

Dr. Rhinehart shook his head dazedly.

`You're supposed to be heartbroken, distraught, anxiety tilled, helpless, desperate, incompet-'

`Oh stuff that shit,' Mrs. Rhinehart said.

`Did Fred teach you such language?'

`Don't be a child.'

`True,' Dr. Rhinehart said, suddenly collapsing in a heap on the couch - it, he was glad to note, remained the same as

from his old life. `I'm proud of you, Lil.'

`You can stuff that too.'

`You're showing real independence.'

`Don't bother, Luke,' Mrs. Rhinehart said. `If I needed your praise I wouldn't be independent.'

`Are you wearing a bra?'

`If you have to ask, it's not worth asking.'

'The Die told me to re-seduce you, but I can't see even where to begin.'

He looked up at her as she leaned again against her new desk. She was smoking and her elbows stuck out sharply and

she didn't look too mousy. `I'm not in the mood for a knee in the groin.'

Mrs. Rhinehart dropped a Die onto the desk beside her and after looking at it said quietly to her husband: `Out you go,

Luke.'

`Where am I going?'

`Just out.'

`But I haven't seduced you yet.'

`You've tried and failed. Now you're leaving.'

`I haven't seen my children. How is my diceboy Larry?'

`Your diceboy Larry is fine. I told him when he came home from school this afternoon that you might be dropping by,

but he had an important touch-football game and had to rush away.'

`Is he practicing the dicelife, like a good boy?'

`Not very much. He says his teachers won't recognize dice decisions as a legitimate excuse for not doing homework.

Now out, Luke, you've got to go.'

Dr. Rhinehart looked away out the window and sighed. Then he dropped a die on the couch beside him and looked at

it `I refuse to leave,' he said.

Mrs. Rhinehart walked out of the room and returned with a pistol.

`The Die told me to make you leave. Since you deserted me, legally you have no right to be in this room without my

permission.` 'ah, but my Die told me to try to stay.'

Mrs. Rhinehart consulted a Die on the desk beside her.

`I'm counting to five and if you're not out of here I'm going to fire.'

`Don't be silly, Lil,' Dr. Rhinehart replied, smiling.

`I'm not `Two, three…'

`Doing anything which merits such extreme measures. It seems to me'

BAM!! The noise from the gun shook the whole room.

Dr. Rhinehart snapped up from the couch without undue delay and began moving toward the door. `A hole in the

couch is-' he began, trying to smile, but Mrs. Rhinehart had consulted the Die again and was counting to five and,

having only a limited desire to hear her reach the end of the recitation, Dr. Rhinehart sprinted with all deliberate speed

to the door and left.

Chapter Sixty-three

It must be admitted that the thought of penetrating the hairy anus of a man or of being so penetrated held all the allure of giving or receiving an enema on the dais before the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists. The thought of caressing, kissing and mouthing a male penis somehow dimly reminded me of being forced at the age of six or seven to eat baked macaroni.

On the other hand, the occasional fantasy of being a woman writhing beneath some dim male was exciting - until the dim male grew a beard (shaven or not), a hairy chest, hairy buttocks and an ugly vein-bulging penis. Then I lost interest. Being a female could, in an occasional fantasy, be exciting. Being a male having `intercourse' with any precisely seen male seemed disgusting.

All of this I knew long before that November day in my habit-breaking life that the Die definitely asked me to shoulder the burden of going out into the world and being had. I went to the Lower East Side, where Linda told me I could find several gay bars, one of whose names in particular I remembered Gordo's.

At about 10.30 P.M. I entered Gordo's, a perfectly harmless looking bar, and was shocked to see men and women sitting together drinking. Moreover, there were only seven or eight people in the place. No one even looked at me. I ordered a beer and began doing research in my memory to see if I had in fact repressed or misheard the true name of the gay bar. Gordon's? Sordo's? Sodom's? Gorki's? Mordo's? Gorgon's? Gorgon's! What a perfect name for a gay place! I went to a pay phone and searched for Gorgon in the Manhattan directory. I drew a blank. Surprised and dejected, I sat in the booth and brooded out at the ineptly normal bar, Four young men moved suddenly past the glass door of my booth toward the front of the bar. Where had they come from? I left the booth and wandered toward the back, where I saw some stairs leading to the upper floors; from above I heard music. I wandered up, met the steely gaze of some ex-Cleveland Brown defensive tackle who was sitting at the head of the stairs and moved past him into a small anteroom. From behind large double doors came the music. I opened thin and walked in.

Three feet from me rocked two young men engaged in a passionate, deep-throated kiss. I felt as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet cunts.

I moved past them into a melee of dancing boys and men and made my way to a vacant table. It was about two inches by three and held the remains of three beer bottles, eleven cigarettes and a lipstick. After staring noncommittally and unseeingly into the chaos of noise, smoke and males for a minute or two, a young man asked me if I wanted a drink and I ordered a beer. Glancing around, I saw that at the two dozen tables only a few people were now sitting, all men except for one middle-aged couple immediately to my right. The man had a sickly smile on his face and the woman looked cool, and amused. When I looked over, she stared at me as she might at an inmate in a mental hospital, her husband simply appeared nervous; I winked at him.

My eyes couldn't seem to focus on any single person or couple but only on the torsos of males dancing. Finally, I raised my eyes and looked at the two men dancing nearest to me. The man, or rather the tallest of the two men, was in his late twenties, rather ruggedly homely, with a crooked nose and bushy eyebrows. The other person was shorter, younger and very good-looking in a young Peter Fonda sort of way. They were dancing rather disinterestedly and looking past each other at other couples. As I was watching, the younger man suddenly turned his eyes on me, lowered his lashes and raised one shoulder and gave me a sensual feminine sexual parting of moist lips. It was a sexual shock. It was one of the most lecherous and exciting looks I had ever received.

Ping! Did this mean that all my life I had secretly been a latent homosexual? Did my sexual response to a female come on in a male body imply healthy heterosexuality, debased perversion or healthy bisexuality? It was time to take stock. Was it the intention of the Die that I be active or passive: Zeus to Ganymede or Hart Crane to a sailor? Was I to be Socrates entering into the old dialogue with one of his boys, or Genet supine and spread before the onslaught of some six-foot walking erection? The Die had been ambiguous, but it seemed more appropriate and habit breaking to be passive arid feminine than aggressive and masculine. But where would I find a Zeus to my six-foot-four Ganymede? Where was the Great Cock that could split me in two? It would be much easier to find someone who saw in me the Awful Erection of his dreams. But ease was irrelevant. I needed to be a woman, to play the role of a woman. Even if I

loomed over my husband like Mount Everest over a stunted shrub I must learn to spread myself supine before him. My

femininity must be given freedom. The dice man could never be complete until he was a woman.

`Can I buy you a drink?' the man asked, standing above me like Everest above a stunted shrub. It was the ex-

Cleveland Brown defensive tackle, and he looked down at me with world weary knowingness. And a smile.

Chapter Sixty-four

You must never question the wisdom of the Die. His ways are inscrutable. He leads you by the hand into an abyss and,

lo, it is a fertile plain. You stagger beneath the burden he places upon you and, behold, you soar. The Die never deviates from the Tao, nor do you. The desire to manipulate your surrender to the Die so that you may gain from it is futile. Such surrender never frees

you from the pains of the ego. You must give up all your struggling, all your purposes, values and goals, and then, only then, when you have given up the belief that you can use the Die to gain some ego end, will you discover liberation from your burdens and your life flow free.

There is no compromise: you must surrender everything. from The Book of the Die

Chapter Sixty-five

`I'm a virgin,' I said in a thin, delicate voice. `Please be gentle.'

Chapter Sixty-six

There are two paths: you use the Die, or you let the Die use you. from The Book of the Die Chapter

Sixty-seven

`Christ,' I said heavily, `am I going to be sore.'

Chapter Sixty-eight

Dear Dr. Rhinehart, I admire your work so much. My husband and I do our dice exercises every morning after breakfast and again before

bedtime and we feel years younger. When are you going to have your own TV show? Before we began playing with emotional roulette and Exercise K we almost never spoke to each other, but now we're always shouting or laughing even when we're not playing dice games. Could you please give us some advice as to how we might better bring up our daughter Ginny to serve the Die? She's a willful girl and doesn't say her prayers to It regular and is almost always the same sweet shy girl and frankly we're worried. We've tried to get her to do the dice exercises with us in the morning or by herself, but nothing seems to work. My husband beats her every now and then when the Die says to but it doesn't help much either. The only dicedoctor in these parts left for Antarctica three months ago so we have no one to turn to but you.

Yours by Chance, Mrs. A. J. Kempton, (Missouri)

Dear Dr. Rhinehart,

I discovered my sixteen-year-old daughter on our living room couch with the postman this afternoon, and she referred

me to you. What the hell is this all about? Sincerely Yours, John Rush

Chapter Sixty-nine

The birth of the first dicebaby in the world was I suppose, an event of some historical importance. It was just after

Christmas in 1969 that I got a phone call from Arlene announcing that she and Jake were rushing off to the hospital to have our dicebaby. They knew where I could be reached, since I'd stopped off two days before to give them each a Christmas present: Arlene a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and Jake a rakish bathing suit (Not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done).

When I arrived, Arlene was still in labor, and her private room was something of a messy jumble from two huge opened suitcases, filled, as far as I could see, entirely with baby clothes. I noticed at least thirty diapers with two green dice branded on each, and many of the pajamas, shirts, pants and tiny baby socks seemed to be similarly monogrammed. I found this to be in bad taste and told Arlene so while she was in the middle of a labor pain, but when she stopped groaning (she claimed it was mostly pleasurable), she assured me the Die had picked a one-in-three shot and ordered the monograms.

The three of us chatted about our hopes for the baby, with Arlene doing most of the talking. She told us that she had given 215 chances in 216 that she practice natural childbirth and breast-feed the child and that much to her delight the Die had chosen that she should do both. But most of her talk was about when the child should be potty trained and when it should be dicetrained.

`We've got to start early,' Arlene kept saying. `I don't want our baby corrupted by society the way I was for thirty-five

years.'

'Still, Arlene,' I said, `for the first two or three years I think the child can develop randomly without using the dice.'

`No, Luke, it wouldn't be fair to him,' she replied: `It would be like keeping candy away from him.'

`But a child tends to express all his minority impulses - at least until he gets to school. They may batten down the

hatches there.'

`Perhaps, Lukie,' she said, `but he'll see me casting dice to see which breast he gets or whether we go for a walk or

whether he naps, and he'll feel left out. What I'd like to do .is …'

But she went into such a long labor pain and it came so soon after the previous one that Jake buzzed for the nurse and

they wheeled her off to the delivery room. Jake and I trailed after her down the hall.

`I don't know, Luke,' Jake said after a while, squinting up at hopefully. `I think this dice business may be getting out of

hand.'

`I think so too,' I said.

`The dice may be good for us uptight adults, but I'm not sure about two-year-olds.'

`I agree.'

`She could confuse the poor kid before he developed any patterns to break.'

`Right.'

`It's possible the kid might grow up to be something of a weirdie.'

`True. Or worse yet, he might end up rebelling against diceliving and opt for permanent conformity to the dominant

social norm.'

`Hey, that's a possibility. You think he might?'

`Sure,' I said. `Boys always rebel against their mothers.'

Jake paused in his pacing and I stopped beside him and looked down; he was staring at the floor.

`I suppose a little dice-throwing won't hurt him,' he said slowly.

`And in any case, who cares?'

Jake looked sharply up at me.

`Aren't you concerned about your baby?' he asked.

`Now, remember. Jake, it's our baby, not mine. Just because the dice told Arlene to tell you that I'm the father doesn't

mean necessarily that I am.'

`Hey, that's right.'

`You may actually be the father but the dice told Arlene to lie.'

`That's a good point, Luke.'

`Or she may have been sleeping with dozens of guys that month and not know who the actual father is.' He looked

down at the floor again.

`Thanks for the reassurance,' he said.

`So let's just call it our baby.'

`Let's just call it hers.'

Chapter Seventy

Dear Dr. Rhinehart I have been a fan of yours ever since I read that interview in Playboy. I-have been trying to

practice the dicelife now for almost a year but have run into several problems which I hoped you might be able to help me with. First, I was wondering if it were really necessary or important to follow the Die no matter what it says. I mean sometimes it vetoes something I really want to do or chooses the most absurd of the options I've created for it. I've found that disobeying the Die in such cases makes me feel real good, as if I were getting something for free. I find the Die most helpful in doing the things I want to do, mostly making girls. It's a big help there, since I never feel guilty when I try something that doesn't work since the die told me to do it. And I don't feel guilty when it does work since if the girl gets knocked up, it was the Die that did it. But why do you keep saying one should always follow the Die? And why bother to expand the areas it makes decisions in? I've got a good thing going and find a lot of your stuff distracts me from my end if you know what I mean.

Also I must warn you that when my girl took up using the dice and we tried some of those dice sex exercises some real problems developed. The sex exercises were fine, but my girl keeps telling me the Die won't let her see me anymore for a while. Sometimes she makes a date and then breaks it, blaming the Die. Aren't there some sort of rules I can impose on her? Do you have a code of dice ethics for girls I could show her? Also another girl I introduced to the dicelife began insisting that I ought to include as an option that I marry her. I only give it one chance in thirty-six, but she insists I cast the dice about it every time I go out with her. What is the probability of my losing if I date her ten more times? Twenty? Please include a table or graph if possible.

You've got some good ideas, but I hope you do more thinking about how special rules might be developed for girl

dicepeople. I'm getting worried.

Sincerely, George Doog

Chapter Seventy-one

`It's a girl,' Jake said, smiling dazedly.

`I know, Jake. Congratulations.'

`Edgarina,' he went on. `Edgarina Ecstein.'

He looked up at me. `Who named her that?'

'Don't ask silly questions. The baby's healthy, Arlene's healthy, I'm healthy: that's what counts.'

`You're right,' he said. `But do daughters rebel against their mothers too?'

`Here she comes,' I said.

Two nurses wheeled Arlene down the hall and past us into her room and, after she'd settled back into bed, they brought

the baby in for her to hold. Jake and I watched benevolently. The baby squirmed a bit and hissed, but didn't say much.

`How'd it go, Arlene?' I asked.

`It was a snap,' she said, cuddling the child against her swollen breasts and smiling ecstatically. She stared at her infant

and smiled and smiled.

`Doesn't she look just like Eleanor Roosevelt as a baby?' she said.

Jake and I looked; I think we both concluded it might be true.

`Edgarina has dignity,' I said.

`She's born for greatness,' Arlene said, kissing the top of the baby's head. 'Die willing.'

`Or nothingness,' I said. `You don't want to force any patterns on her, Arlene.'

`Except for making her cast the dice about everything she does, I plan to let her be entirely free.'

`Oh Jesus, Jesus,' said Jake.

`Cheer up, Jake,' I said, putting my arm around him. `Don't you realize that as a scientist you're getting in on the

ground floor of something which is of immense scientific importance?'

'Maybe,' he said.

`No matter how Edgarina turns out under Arlene's regime, it's scientifically significant. Genius or psychotic, something

new has been demonstrated.'

Jake perked up a bit.

`I suppose you're right,' he said.

`This may be your greatest case study since "The Case of the Six-Sided man."

'Jake looked up at me, beaming.

`Maybe I ought to do some more experimenting with the dicelife,' he said.

`You'll need a title, of course,' I went on.

`You certainly should,' Arlene snapped at Jake. `Any father of Edgarina Ecstein had better be a full-fledged diceperson

or I'll disown and discredit him.'

Jake sighed.

`That won't be necessary, honey,' he said.

` "A Case of Random Rearing,"' I suggested. `Or perhaps, "Dieper Training."

'Jake shook his head slowly and then squinted aggressively up at me.

`Don't bother trying, Luke. It's beyond your depth. The title has already been made: "The Case of the Child of Whim."'

He sighed. `The book may take a little longer.'

Chapter Seventy-two

The sun dazzled down and warmed and softened my mountain of flesh. I writhed myself deeper into the hot sand,

feeling the rays above like long-range caresses on my skin. Linda lay beside me, bikinied and beautiful, her lovely breasts breathing skyward against the strip of cloth that was theoretically a bikini top like two fruit growing and shrinking in a speeded-up biological film of the growing process. She had been reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and we had been talking about group dice therapy, but for the last fifteen minutes we had both lain silently, enjoying the solitude of the vast expanse of the Bahamas beach and the love-making of the hot touch of the sun. It was February in New York, but summer bare.

`What do you really want, Luke?' Linda suddenly asked. From the smudge at the corner of my half-closed eyes I

gathered she had sat up or raised herself on an elbow.

`Want?' I said, thinking. The rhythmic thud of the surf thirty yards away made me long for a swim, but we'd only been

out of the water for fifteen minutes and were only just now dry.

`Everything I guess,' I finally said. `To be everybody and do everything.'

She tossed her hair back away from her face with one hand and said `That's modest of you.'

`Probably.'

A sea gull careered into my reduced field of vision and then out again.

'You've been sort of quiet today. Just another dice-decision?'

`I've just been sleepy all the time.'

`My ass. Is it a dice decision?'

`What difference does it make?'

She was definitely sitting up, her legs spread, leaning back on her upright arms. `I sometimes wonder what you want, not the dice.' `Who's me?' `That's what I want to know.' I sat up, blinking my eyes and looking toward the ocean past the rise of sand in front of me. Without my glasses it was

a tan blur and blue blur.

`But don't you see,' I said. `To know "me" that way is to limit me, cement me into something stonelike and predictable.' `Diceshit! I just want to know a you that's soft and predictable. How am I supposed to enjoy being with you if I feel

you can go "goof" any minute from some random fall of a die?'

I sighed and lowered myself back onto my elbows.

`Were I a healthy, normal neurotic human lover, my love might evaporate any moment in just as haphazard a fashion.'

`But then I could see it coming; I could run out on you first.' She smiled.

I sat abruptly up.

`Everything may evaporate at any instant. Everything!' I said with surprising vehemence. `You, me, the most rocklike

personality since Calvin Coolidge: death, destruction, despair may strike. To live your life assuming otherwise is

insanity.'

`But Luke,' she said putting a warm hand on my shoulder. `Life's going to go on more or less the same and ourselves

too. If -'

`Never!'

She didn't speak. She slid her hand gently from my shoulder to the back of my neck and it played there with my hair.

After a few moments I said quietly: `I love you, Linda. The "I" that loves you will always love you. Nothing is more

certain than that.'

`But how long will this "I" last?'

'Forever,' I said.

Her hand became motionless.

`Forever?' she said in a very low voice.

`Forever. Maybe even longer.'

I turned on to my side and took her hand and kissed the palm. I looked into her eyes with a playful smile.

Staring seriously back at me, she said `But that "I" which loves me may be replaced by a different, unloving "I" and be

forced to live forever underground and unexpressed?'

I nodded, still smiling.

"The "I" that loves you would like to arrange things so that the whole rest of my life is fixed to guarantee the continued fulfillment of himself. But it would mean the permanent burial of most of the other "I's.' `But ego or no ego, there are natural desires and imposed actions: To come over on top of me and fuck would be a

natural act; to follow the fall of a die and kneel in the sand to jerk off wouldn't.'

I maneuvered myself clumsily into a kneeling position in the sand and began to lower my swim-trunks.

`O Jesus,' Linda said. `Me and my big mouth.'

But I smiled and pulled up my trunks. `You're right,' I said, and moved myself over and lay my head naturally onto her

warm, soft thigh.

`So what are your natural desires? What do you really want?'

Silence.

`I want being with you. I want sunshine. Love, caresses, kisses. [Pause] Water. Good books. Opportunities to practice

the dicelife with people.'

`But whose kisses, whose caresses?'

`Yours,' I answered, blinking into the sun. `Terry's, Arlene's, Lil's, Gregg's. A few others. Women I meet in the street.'

She didn't respond.

`Good music, a chance to write,' I went on. `Good film occasionally, the sea.'

`I feel . . . Huh! You're not even as romantic as I used not to be, are you?'

`Not this particular me.'

`You love me deeply though,' she said, and I looked up to catch her smiling down at me.

`I love you,' I said holding her eyes with mine. We looked deeply and warmly at each other for more than a minute.

Then she said softly: 'Up yours.'

We watched a gull circling and swooping, and she started to ask something but stopped. I turned my head to press my

mouth against the inside of one thigh. It was hot and salty.

She sighed and pushed my head away.

`Then don't spread your legs,' I said.

`I want to spread my legs.'

`Well,' I said, and buried my head between them and sucked in a firm hot fold of the other thigh. She pushed medium

hard at my head, but I had one arm around her now and held fast.

Letting her fingers relax in my hair, she said `Some things are naturally good and others aren't'

`Mmmmmm,' I said.

'The dicelife sometimes takes us away from what's naturally good.'

`Mmmmmm' `I think that's too bad.'

I broke my mouth hold and hauled myself up on an elbow alongside her.

`Was that crazy slavery deal I created with you a natural and good thing?' I asked.

She smiled at me.

`It must have been,' she said.

`Everybody is always doing what seems to them to be naturally good. Why is everybody miserable?'

I unhooked her bikini top and slid it off her onto the blanket. A ridge of sand lay across the upper half of each breast. I

brushed it off.

`Everybody's not miserable,' she said. `I'm not miserable.'

`You were before you discovered the dicelife.'

`But that's because before I had a sex hang-up. Now I don't'

`Mmmmmm,' I said, my mouth filled with her left breast and my right hand holding the warmth of the other.

`The Die is good for getting you over certain hang-ups,' she said, `but then I think maybe it isn't so necessary any

more.'

I un-swallowed her breast, licked the taut nipple a few seconds and said `Personally, I think you may be right'

`You do?'

`Certainly.'

I untied the near side of her bikini bottom. `I don't consult it about a lot of things,' I said. `But when I'm in doubt, I

find it nice to consult the Die.'

I untied the far side of the bikini.

`Bur why bother?' Linda said. She had a hand now under my trunks and was pushing them down with the other.

`In consult the Die at dawn every day about whether I should consult it about everything during the day, about only

the big things or not consult it at all under any circumstances. Today, for example, it told me not to consult it about

anything.'

'so even your dicelessness is filled with the Die?'

`Mmmmmmnnnrui.'

`So you're acting naturally today, huh?'

`MmmmmmMmmmmm., 'I hope you're enjoying eating the sand down there.'

'Mmmmmm.'

'That's nice,' she said. `I like that I'm glad you told me. I like 'to know that what you're doing is natural.'

I came up for air and said: `Most things people do aren't natural the first time they do them. That's what learning is all

about. That's what the dicelife is all about.'

'Mmmmmm,' she said.

`If we always limited ourselves to what was natural to us, we would be midget dwarfs compared to our potential. We

must always be incorporating new areas of human action which we can make natural.'

'Mmmmmm,' she said.

`Say that again,' I said.

'Mmmmmm,' she said. The vibrations were delicious.

`I hope the dice keep me with you a long time, Linda.'

`Mmmmmmetoommmm.'

'Ahhhhh,' I said, and burying my head, `mmmmmm.'

`Mmmmmm,' she said.

`MmmmMmmmmNnnnn.'

`Uhnn.'

Chapter Seventy-three

Our Dice Centers. Ah, the memories, the memories. Those, those were the days: the gods played with each other on

earth once more. Such freedom! Such creativity! Such triviality l Such utter chaos! All unguided by the hand of man, but guided by the great blind Die who loves us all. Once, just once in my life have I known what it means to live in a community, to feel part of a larger purpose shared by my friends and my enemies about me. Only in my CETREs have I experienced total liberation - complete, shattering, unforgettable, total enlightenment. In the last year I have never failed to recognize instantly those who have spent a month in one of the centers, whether I'd seen them before or not. We but glance at each other, our faces explode with light, our laughter flows and we embrace. The world will go steadily downhill again if they close all our CETREs.

I suppose you've all read in one place or another all the typical mass-media hysteria about them: the love room, the orgies, the violence, the drugs, the breakdowns into psychosis, the crime, the madness. Time magazine did a fine article about us entitled objectively: `The CETRE Sewers.'

It went as follows: The dregs of mankind have found a new gimmick: motel madhouses where anything goes. Founded in 1969 by naive philanthropist Horace L. Wipple under the guise of therapy centers, the Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments (CETREs) have been from the first unabashed invitations to orgy, rapine and insanity. Based on the premises of dice theory first expounded by quack psychiatrist Lucius M. Rhinehart (Time, October 26, 1970), the Center's purpose is to liberate their clients from the burdens of individual identity. Those arriving for a 30-day stay in a

Center are asked to abandon consistent names, clothing, mannerisms, personality traits, sexual proclivities, religious feelings - in brief, to abandon themselves.

The inmates - called `students' - wear masks much of the time and follow the `Commands' of dice to determine how they spend their time or who they pretend they are. Ostensible therapists often turn out to be students experimenting with a new role. Policemen ostensibly keeping order are almost always students playing the game of policemen. Pot, hash and acid are rampant. Orgies go on every hour on the hour in rooms fancifully called `The Love Room' and `The Pit' - the latter being a totally blackened room with mattressed floor- into which students crawl nude at the whim of the dice and where anything goes.

The results of this are predictable: a few sick people feel they're having a marvelous time; a few healthy people go insane; and the rest somehow survive, often trying to convince themselves they've had a `significant experience.'

In Los Altos Hills, California, last week `significant experience' meant arrest for Evelyn Richards and Mike O'Reilly. The two were having a dice-demanded love feast on the lawn of Stanford University's Whitmore Chapel, and townsmen and police were not amused.

Stanford students, frequent visitors to the Hills' CETRE, are bitterly divided on the Dice Center. Students Richards and O'Reilly claim their hang-ups have disappeared since their three-week trip in the local Center. But Student Association President Bob Orly probably spoke for most of the students when he said: 'The desire to rid yourself of your personal identity is a symptom of weakness. Mankind has always disintegrated when he has followed the call of those who urge him to give up self, ego and identity. The people lured into the Centers are the same ones who get lured deeper and deeper into the drug scene. The dicelife business is just another way of slow suicide for those too weak to try a real way.'

At week's end, Palo Alto Police staged their second raid of the year on the Los Altos Hills Center, but netted nothing but a box of pornographic films, possibly filmed at the Centers. Manager Lawrence Taylor maintains that the only reason he regrets the raids is the favorable publicity it gives the Center among the young. 'We're having to turn away a hundred applicants a week. We don't want to seem exclusive, but we just don't have the facilities.'

A team of Time reporters discovered that friends and relatives of CETRE survivors are uniformly upset with the changes which have occurred in their loved ones. `Irresponsible, erratic, destructive' was the way nineteen-year old Jacob Bleiss of New Haven described his father after Mr. Bleiss returned from the Catskill (ICY.) CETRE.

`He can't hold a job, he's not home a lot of the time, he hits my mother and he seems stoned half the time only on nothing. He's always laughing like an idiot.'

Irrational laughter, a classic symptom of hysteria, is one of the most dramatic manifestations of what psychiatrists are beginning to label the 'CETRE sickness.'

Dr. Jerome Rochman of Chicago University's Hope Medical Center stated in Peoria last week: `If I had been asked by someone to create an institution which would totally destroy the human personality with all its integrated grandeur #161;the striving, the moral questioning, the compassion for others and the sense of specific individual identity - I might have created CETREs. The results are predictable: apathy, unreliability, indecisiveness, manic depressions, inability to relate, social destructiveness, hysteria.'

Dr Paul Bulber of Oxford, Mississippi, goes even further: 'The theory and practice of dice therapy both in and out of CETREs is a greater threat to our civilization than Communism. They subvert everything which American society, indeed, any society, stands for. They should be wiped from the face of the earth: Santa Clara District Court Judge Hobart Button perhaps summed up best the feelings of many people when he said to students Richards and O'Reilly: `The illusions that lead people to throw away their lives are appalling. The rush to drugs and to CETREs is like the rush of lemmings to the sea.'

Or the rush of rats into sewers.

Time was, within the necessary limits set by fiction, totally accurate. Over the course of two years five of their reporters went through a month-long stay at a CETRE. The bitterness of the article may partly reflect that three of their hirelings did not report back to Time.

Ever since money contributed by Wipple, myself and others to the DICELIFE Foundation permitted us to build our first Dice Center, our CETREs have changed people. They destroy people for normal functioning within this insane society. It all started when I realized that dice therapy worked slowly with most students because they always knew that other people expected them to be consistent and `normal'; a lifetime of conditioning to respond to such expectation wasn't being broken by the partial and temporary free environments of dicegroups. Only in a total environment in which nothing is expected does a student feel the freedom necessary to express his host of minority selves clawing for life. And then, only by making the gradual change from the totally random environment of a-CETRE through our `Halfway Houses' to the patterned society outside can we make it possible for the student to carry over his dicelife of freedom into the patterned world.

The story of the development of the various centers and of our theory behind them will be told in detail in Joseph Fineman's forthcoming book The History and Theory of Dice Centers (Random Press, 1972). The best single rendering of how the centers work to change a man determined not to change can be found in `The Case of the Square Cubed,' an autobiographical account by Dr. Jacob Ecstein. Jake's personal story was first printed in The See of Whim (April, 1971, vol. II, no. 4, pp. 17-33) but it is to be reprinted in his forthcoming book Blow the Man Down (Random Press, 1972). But for a general background, the Die has suggested I quote from Fineman's forthcoming book.

A student can enter only for a minimum of thirty days and must first pass an oral examination showing he understands the basic rules of the dicelife and the structures and procedures of the CETRE. He is told to come to the Center with absolutely no identifying personal possessions; he may use any names he wishes while at the Center but all names will be considered false ….

CETREs vary in their details. In the Creativity Rooms, the Die often commands a student to invent new and better features for our Random Environments and many procedures and facilities have been modified in this way, some changes remaining peculiar to a single Center and others being adopted by all. All CETREs are similar, however, to the original Corpus Die complex inn Southern California.

Although each of the individual rooms in a Center has a student-invented name (e.g. the Pit, the God room, the Party room, the Room room, etc.) the names vary from Center to Center. There are workrooms (laundries, offices, espy rooms, clinics, a jail, kitchens), playrooms (emotion rooms, marriage rooms, love rooms, God rooms, creativity rooms), and life rooms (restaurants, bars, living rooms, bedrooms, movie house, etc) He must spend from two to five hours a day working at various dice-dictated jobs: he waits on table, sweeps out rooms, makes beds, serves cocktails, acts as a policeman, therapist, clothing clerk, mask maker, prostitute, admissions officer, jailer, etc. In all of these the student is diceliving and playing roles.

At first we kept most of the key positions filled with permanent, trained staff members: at least half the `therapists' were real therapists; half the policemen were real staff members; our `admissions officers' were real and so on.

However, over our brief three-year history, there has been a gradual withering away of the staff. With carefully prepared structures and instructions we find that the third and fourth week students can handle most of the key roles as well as the permanent staff used to. The staff members vary their roles from week to week like the temporary students, who thus can't be certain at any time who is a staff member and who isn't. The staff members know, but they can't prove it, since anyone can claim to be a staff member. Whatever usefulness there is in having permanent, trained personnel in a CETRE rests in their having ability, not in their having `authority.'

[In our Vermont Center we experimented by withdrawing our permanent. dicepeople one by one until the center was functioning without a single trained staff member - only transient students. After two months we infiltrate permanent staff members back in, and they reported that everything was proceeding as chaotically as ever; only a small amount of rigidity and structure had crept in during the two months in which the `state' had totally withered away.]

In our structured anarchy [writes Fineman] the authority rests with the therapists (called Referees in most Centers), and with the policemen, whoever they may be. There are rules (no weapons, no violence, no roles or actions inappropriate to the particular game room in which you are acting, etc.) and if the rules are broken, a `policeman' will hake you to a `referee' to determine whether you must be sent to `jail.'

About half our `criminals' are individuals who keep insisting that they are only one real person and want to go home. Since such role playing is inappropriate in many of the workrooms and playrooms, they must be sentenced to jail and to the hard labor of dice therapy - until they are better able to function in multiplicity. The other half of our criminals are students who must play out their roles of lawbreakers even if the laws they break are the strange ones of our Dice Centers.

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

The Pit, although justly notorious, is mostly used by students in their first ten days at a Center. It is useful for persons with deep-seated inhibitions regarding sexual desires and activities; the total darkness and anonymity permit the inhibited student to follow dice decisions he could never follow otherwise. One woman, fat and ugly, spent three straight days in the Pit, coming out only to eat, wash and use the bathroom. Was she different at the end of her three days? She was unrecognizable. Instead of a slump-shouldered, eye-avoiding lump, she carried herself proudly, looked at everyone electrically and oozed sexuality.

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

[in the Pit our students often learn that, in the immortal words of Milton in his great sonnet to his blind wife, `They also serve who only lie and wait']

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

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

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

[It's perhaps the very essence of the capitalist soul.]

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

[Living in a motel in which a sexy wench is maybe a dice student who knows she is roleplaying and maybe a normal one-role girl who only partly knows it, has proven to be an excellent method of transition. The surly waiter is maybe `real,' the great writer is maybe a writer and so on.]

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

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

Chapter Seventy-four

The writing of any autobiography involves numerous arbitrary decisions about the importance of events, and the writing about a dicelife by a diceperson involves arbitrariness multiplied to the nth degree. What should be included? To the creator of the Dice Centers - the Die determined that I devote all of 1970 to their development - nothing is more important than the long, hard, complicated series of acts which resulted in the formation of Dice Censers in the Catskills; in Holby, Vermont; in Corpus Die, California: and, in the last year, elsewhere. At other times the sexual, love and writing adventurers of my previous dicelife seem much more worth writing about.

In all cases, however, I faithfully consult the Die about how to proceed with each major section or event of my life. The Die chose that I devote thirty pages to my efforts to follow its November, 1970, decision that I try to murder someone, rather than that I write thirty pages about my efforts of that year to create the Dice Centers.

I asked the Die if I could throw in some letters from my fans and It said fine. Some dicestudents' experiences at the centers? Okay. An article I wrote for Playboy entitled 'The Potential Promiscuity of Man'? No, said the Die. Can I write in detail about my long, chaotic, unpredictable and often joyous relationship with Linda Reichman? Nope, not this book. Can I write about my ludicrous efforts to be revolutionary? No, said the Die. About the dice decision that I write a four-hundred page comic novel about sex? Nope. Can I dramatize my troubles with the law, my experiences as a patient in the upstate mental hospital, my trial, my experience in jail? Yes, said the Die, if there's room. And so on.

One thing I've learned in my miscellaneous career is that any good creating that gets done gets done despite my efforts at controlling the writing, not because of them. In so far as I'm the Dice Man I can write easily in almost any form the Die chooses, but as serious, old, ambitious Luke, I run into as many blocks as a rat in an insoluble maze. Obedience of the Die implies with every fall that rational, purposive man doesn't know what he's doing so he might as well relax and enjoy the fumbling Die. `The medium is the message,' once said the noted psychic Edgar Cayce, and so is mine.

Walk on, I've learned. I let my pen and the Die do what my mind boggles at doing. The falling Die and moving pen think for themselves and the interposition of ego, artistic conscience, style or organization usually weighs things down. These inhibiting forces removed, the ink flows freely, space is filled, words are formed; ideas spring full-blown on the page like giants from dragons' teeth.

Of course, continuity is sometimes tenuous, content thin. Digressions proliferate like weapons in a peace-loving country. I may have to rewrite the think seven or eight times. But words are written. To a writer this is fulfillment. Creativity or crap, it counts.

During my early dice writing days I would often overcome a long writing block of three or four minutes by letting the dice choose from among a selection of random writing assignments: Every writer has a message which can be gotten said around any subject. Ask me to write about democracy, apples, garbage men or teeth, and I'll give you the Dice Man. So if the flow is dammed in the mainstream of my writing, I pick a creek, a pond, a puddle. With luck I have a flash flood in no time and am back in my Mississippi.

Even if my dice-determined flow is exceptionally good I may brood that it nevertheless isn't what 1 should have written that particular day. But we must come to realize that every word is perfect, including those we scratch out. As my pen moves across this page the whole world writes. All of human history combines at this mere moment now to produce in the flow of this hand a single dot:. Who are you and I, dear friends, to contradict the whole past of the universe? Let us then in our wisdom say yes to the flow of the pen. Or, indeed, should that great-granddaddy diceplayer of us all, History, so dictate, say no. But let us say yes to our no.

I've obviously got several thousand pages of life to report, just counting my life since D-Day, but the best I can do, my friends, is random bits and pieces.

I should note finally that since my life is one devoted to disintegration, those periods when the Die had me doing long range conventional things like founding Dice Centers are less full diceliving than others. To develop my CETREs I had to be as square as the cube of a die; I had to hang my M.D. around my neck and bulldoze millionaires and mayors and town planning boards and other doctors every second of every day. Except for brief, anonymous sidetrips to various places to commit murder or rape or larceny or buy dope or help a revolution, I had to be straight as John Lindsay.

However, I sometimes enjoyed it. There is a bourgeois businessman in me that loves being given freedom to buy and sell, to practice public relations, to chair committees, to answer questions of reporters or public officials. The work of developing the CETREs went on too long for my residual self's taste, but I farmed out more and more of the control and the work to Fred Boyd and Joe Fineman and Linda (my God, without her dieing, we'd never have gotten any of the centers and our DICELIFE, Foundation would be broke).

But though I've enjoyed living most of my roles, and enjoy writing about them all, they simply won't all fit in one book. Fortunately, I have faith that the Die will choose a good selection of events, and if It doesn't;' the bored reader can simply flip dice a few times and let the Die choose a new book for the night.

Not my will, Die, but Thy will be done.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Dr, Jacob Ecstein reports that his owe initial reaction to. 1m is of the Corpus Die Dice Center, was one of profound disgust. He could see no sense whatsoever in the required emoting of rage, love, and self-pity. He found himself unable to perform, the exercises. For rage he emitted a slight peevishness, for love a hearty bonhomie and for self-pity a blank expression. He indicated that he didn't understand what self-pity could possibly mean. To help Dr. Ecstein a teacher (an actual, as contrasted to an acting, dice teacher) spat in his face and urinated on his freshly shined shoes.

Dr. Ecstein's response was instantaneous `What's your, problem, buddy?' he asked quietly. . . - . . The teacher then went and obtained Miss Marie Z, noted television and screen actress who was in her third week of random life, to come and try to help Dr. Ecstein express love. Dressed in a lovely, soft white evening gown and looking even younger than her twenty-three years, Miss Z, eyes glistening, heads held demurely before her, said to Dr. E in her softest voice 'Please love me. I need someone to feel love for me. Will you please love me?'

Dr. E squinted at her briefly and then replied `How long you felt this way?'

'Please,' Marie begged. `I need your love. I want you to love me, to need me. Please.'

A tear glistened at the corner of one.

'Who do I remind you of?' Dr. E asked.'

'Of only yourself. I have needed your love all my life.'

`But I'm a psychiatrist.'

'Please don't be a psychiatrist anymore. For one minute, no, for ten seconds, for only ten seconds, I beg of you, give

me love. I need so much, to feel your strong arms around me, to feel your love ..'

Marie was close to Dr. E, her beautifully formed bosom heaving with her passionate need to be loved, tears now

wetting both her cheeks . .. .

`Ten seconds?' Dr. Ecstein asked.

`Seven seconds. Five. Three seconds, just three seconds please oh please give me your love.'

Dr. Ecstein stood squat and tense and his facial muscles moiled and twitched. His face began to get red. Then,

gradually, the moiling stopped and, white-faced, he said:- 'Can't do it, Honesty, Trust. Don't know what love is.'

'Love me, please love me, please I'm-'

'The teacher pulled Marie away, and informed: her that there was a request for her presence in one of the love rooms

and she skipped off, leaving Dr.. E still unloving.

Since self-pity is the hardest emotion of all for emotionless people to feel, the teacher made no further efforts with the

basic emotions and took Dr: E to the marriage playroom.

`You, have been unfaithful to your-wife-' the teacher said.

`What for?' he asked.

`I was only suggesting options. Let us say then you have been faithful to her, but-'

The teacher was interrupted by a short, slightly-fat, middle-aged woman coming in and marching up to Dr. Ecstein

and screaming is his face 'You viper! You swine! You beast! You betrayed me!'

'- wait a minute,' Dr. E stammered. '

`You and that trollop! How could you?'

She hit Dr. E a vicious blow on the side of the faces, almost breaking his glasses.

`Are you sure?' he said, backing away. `Why are you so upset?'

'Upset? The wholetown talking about you and that cesspool behind my back.'

`But how can anyone know what never-'

`If I know about it, the whole world knows about it.' She hit Dr. E again less strenuously and collapsed on the couch in

tears.

`It's nothing to cry about,' Dr. E said, coming over to comfort her. `Infidelity is a minor matter, really nothing -'

`Ahhhhhggg!!!!' she erupted from the couch, plowed her head into Dr. E's stomach and sent him crashing over an easy

chair onto a telephone table and wastebasket.

'I'm sorry !' Dr. E. screamed. The woman on top of him was scratching at his face and he rolled desperately away.'

'You bastard!' the woman shouted. `Cold-hearted killer. You've never loved me.'

'Of course not,' Dr. E said, scrambling to his feet. `So -what's all the fuss about?' 'Ahhhhgggg!!' she screamed - and came at-

Later the teacher tried to suggest other possible option to Dr. E. `Your wife has been unfaithful, your best friend

betrayed you, your-'

'So what else is new?' Dr. Ecstein asked.

`Well, let's say your money has all been lost in foolish investment.'

`Never.'

`Never what?'

`I'd never lose all my money in any way.'

`Try to use your imagination, Jim. The-'

`The name is Jake Ecstein. Why use my imagination? If I'm in touch with reality, why leave it?'

`How, do you know it's reality?'

'How do you know it's not?' Dr. E asked.

`But if there's any doubt, then you should experiment with other realities.'

`No doubt in my mind.'

`I see.'

`Look, buddy, I'm here as an observer. I like Luke Rhinehart and want to look over his plant.'

'You can't understand CETRE without living it'

`Okay, I'm trying, but don't expect me to use my imagination.'

Later Dr. Ecstein was taken to the love rooms.

`What kind of love experiences would you like to have?'

`Huh? ?'

`What kind of sex experience would you like to have?'

`Oh,' Dr. Ecstein said. `Okay.'

`Okay, what?'

'Okay, I'll have a sex experience.'

`But what kinds interest you?'

`Any. Doesn't make any difference.'

The teacher handed Dr. E the basic list of thirty-six possible love roles.

`Are there any that particularly appeal to you or any that you would prefer not to have as possible options of the Die?'

he asked.

Dr. E looked over the list: 'You wish to be loved slavishly by a . `You-wish to love slavishly a ' `You wish to be courted sweetly by a . . : 'You wish to court sweetly…' `'You wish to be raped by a . . : 'You wish to rape a : . : 'You wish to watch pornographic films,' 'You wish to watch

other people's sexual activities,' 'You wish to striptease,' `To watch a striptease,' 'You wish to be someone's mistress, a

prostitute, a stud, a call girl, a male prostitute, happily married to Most of the options gave the choice of alternatives

for performing the sexual role with: a young woman, an older woman, a young man, an older man, a man and a

woman, two men or two women.

`What's all this?' Dr. Ecstein asked.

`Simply choose those you are willing to play, make a list and let the dice choose one for you to play.'

`Better scratch the "rape" and the "be raped." Had enough of those in the marriage room.'

`All right. Any others, Phil?'

`Stop calling me names.'

`Sorry, Roger.'

`Better throw out the homosexual stuff. Might hurt my reputation outside.'

`But no one in here knows who you are or ever will know.'

`I'm Jake Ecstein, damn it! I've said that six times.'

`I know that, Elijah, but there are five other Jake Ecsteins in here this week as well, so I don't see what difference it

makes.

'Five others!' `Certainly. Would you like to meet some before you try your first random sex experience?'

`You're Goddam-right.'

The teacher took Dr. E into a room named Cocktail Party where a crowd milled and drinks were served. The teacher

took a portly gentleman by the elbow and said to him `Jake, I'd like you to meet Roger. Roger, Jake Ecstein.'

'Goddam it,' Dr. Ecstein said, `I'm Jake Ecstein!'

`Oh are you really?' the portly gentleman said. `I am too. How nice. I'm very pleased to meet you, Jake.'

Dr. E permitted himself to shake hands.

`Have you met the tall thin Jake Ecstein yet?' the portly one asked. `Awfully pleasant chap.'

`No, I haven't. And I don't want to.'

`Well, he is a bit dull, but not a young-man-with-the-muscles Jake. Him you must meet, Jake.'

`Yeah, maybe. But I'm the real Jake Ecstein.'

`How extraordinary. I am too.'

`I mean in the outside world.'

`But that's what I mean too. And so does the tall thin Jake and the young muscled Jake and the lovely young girl Jakie

Ecstein. All of them.'

'But I'm really the real Jake Ecstein.'

`How extraordinary! I too am really…'

Jake passed up a love experience and got rid of his teacher and decided he needed to have a good dinner. He had read

the center's Game Rules and knew as he ate in the cafeteria that the waiters might not be real waiters, that the guy

slinging hash behind the counter might be a bank president, that the cashier might be a famous actress, that the woman

sitting opposite him might be a writer of children's stories although she was apparently pretending, despite weighing

close to two hundred founds, to be Marlene Dietrich.

`You bore me, dahling,' she was saying, her chubby mouth manhandling a cigarette.

`You're not exactly dynamite yourself, baby,' he replied eating rapidly.

`Where are all the men in this place,' she drawled. `I seem to meet only fruits.'

`And I meet only vegetables. So?' Jake answered.

`I beg your pardon. Who are you?'

`I'm Cassius Clay and I'll slug you in the teeth if you don't let me eat in peace.'

Marlene Dietrich relapsed into silence and Jake ate on, enjoying himself for the first time since his arrival. Suddenly he

saw his wife enter the cafeteria, followed by a teenage boy.

'Arlene!' he cried, half-standing.

`George?' she cried back.

Marlene Dietrich left the table and Dr. E waited for Arlene to join him, but instead she sat down at a corner table with

the teenage boy. Annoyed, he got up when he'd finished and went over to their table.

`Well what do you think of it so far?' he asked her.

`George, I'd like you to meet my son, John. John, this is George Fleiss, a very successful used-car salesman.'

`How do you do,' the boy said, sticking out a thin hand. `Pleased to meet you.'

`Yeah, well, look, I'm really Cassius Clay,' he said.

`Oh I am sorry,' Arlene answered.

`You've gotten out of shape,' the boy said indifferently.

Dr. E sat down with them, feeling glum. He did so want to be recognized as Jake Ecstein, psychiatrist. He tried a new

tack.

`What's your name?' he asked his wife.

`Maria,' she answered with a smile. `And this is my boy, John.'

`Where's Edgarina?'

`My daughter is at home.'

`And your husband?' Arlene frowned.

`Unfortunately, he has passed away,' she said.

`Oh great,' said Dr. E.

I beg your pardon!' said she, standing abruptly.

`Oh, ah, sorry. I was overcome with disturbance,' Dr. E said, motioning his wife to sit, `Look,' he went on, `I like you.

I like you very much. Perhaps we could stay together a while.'

`I'm sorry,' Arlene said softly, `I'm afraid people would talk.'

`People would talk? How?'

`You are a colored man and I am white,' she said.

Dr. Ecstein let his mouth hang open and for the first time in his last nineteen years experienced something which ha

realized later may have been self-pity.

Chapter Seventy-six

Being an American born and bred, it was in my bones to kill. Most of my adult life I had carried around like an

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

Being an American I had to kill. No self-respecting Dice Man could honestly write down options day after day without including a murder or a real rape. I did, in fact, begin to include as a long shot the rape of some randomly selected female, but the dice ignored it. Reluctantly, timidly, with my old friend dread reborn and moiling in my guts, I

also created a long-shot option of `murdering someone.'

I gave it only one chance in thirty-six (snake eyes) and three, four times spread out over a year the Die ignored it, but

then, one lovely Indian Summer day, with the birds twittering outside in the bushes of my newly rented Catskill

farmhouse, the autumn leaves blowing and blinding in the sun and a little beagle puppy I'd just been given wagging

his tail at my feet, the Die, given ten different options of varying probabilities dropped double ones snake eyes: `I will

try to murder someone.'

I felt acute anxiety and excitement combined, but not the doubt in the world that I would do it. Leaving Lil had been

hard (although I sneer at my anxieties now), but killing 'someone' seemed no more difficult than holding up a drugstore

or robbing a bank. There was a bit of anxiety because my life was being put in jeopardy; there was the excitement of

the chase; and there was curiosity: what person shall I kill? The great advantage of being brought up in a culture of

violence is that it doesn't really matter who you kill: Negroes, Vietnamese or your mother - as long as you can make a

reason for it, the killing will feel good. As the Dice Man, however, I felt obligated to let the Die choose the victim. I

flipped a die saying `odd' I would murder someone I knew, `even' it would be a stranger. I assumed for some reason

that the Die would prefer a stranger, but the die showed a `one'; odd - someone I knew.

I decided that in all fairness one of the people I might kill was myself and that my name should take its chances with

the rest. Although I `knew' hundreds of people, I didn't think the Die intended me to spend days trying to remember all

my friends so that I wouldn't deny any of them the option of being murdered. I created six lists each with six places for

the names of people I knew, I put Lil, Larry, Evie, Jake, my mother and myself at the top of each of the six different

lists. For second names on each list I added Arlene, Fred Boyd, Terry Tracy, Joseph Fineman, Elaine Wright (a new

friend of that period) and Dr. Mann. For number threes: Linda Reichman, Professor Boggles, Dr. Krum, Miss

Reingold, Jim Frisby (my new landlord in the Catskills) and Frank Osterflood. And so on. I won't give you the whole

thirty-six, but to show I tried my best to include everyone, I should note that for the last six on each list I made six

general categories: a business acquaintance, someone I had met first at a party, someone I knew only through letters or

through reading (e.g. famous people), someone I haven't seen in at least five years, a CETRE student or staff member

not previously listed and someone wealthy enough to justify robbing and killing.

I then casually cast a die to see from which of the six lists the die would choose a victim. The die chose list number

two: Larry, Fred Boyd, Frank Osterflood, Miss Welish, H. J. Wipple (philanthropic benefactor of the Dice Centers) or

someone I had first met at a party.

Anxiety flushed through my system like a poison, primarily at the thought of killing my son. I had only seen him once

since leaving so suddenly fifteen months before and he had been distant and embarrassed after a first leap into my

arms of genuine affection. He was also the first dice-boy in world history and it would be a shame .. . No, no, not

Larry. Or at least let's hope not. And Fred Boyd, my right arm, one of the leading practitioners and advocates of dice

therapy and a man I liked very much. His in-and-out relationship with Lil made the murder of either him or Larry

particularly unpleasant; to murder Fred seemed motivated and was thus doubly disturbing.

Anxiety is a difficult emotion to describe. The colorful leaves outside the window no longer seemed vibrant; they

seemed glossy as if being revealed in an overexposed Technicolor film. The twitter of the birds sounded like a radio

commercial. My new beagle puppy snored in a corner as if she were a debauched old bitch. The day seemed overcast

even as the sun reflecting off a white tablecloth in the dining room blinded my eyes.

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

`Oh Holy Die,

Thy hand is raised to fall and I thy simple sword.

Wield me.

Your Way is beyond our comprehension.

If I must sacrifice my son in thy Name, my son shall die:

lesser Gods than Thee have demanded thus of their followers.

If I must cut off my right arm to show the

Greatness of Thy Accidental Power, my arm shall fall.

You have made me great by thy commands, you have made me joyful and free. You have chosen that I kill, I shall

kill.

Great Creator Cube, help me to kill.

Choose thy victim that I may strike.

Point the way that I thy sword may enter.

He who is chosen will die smiling in the fulfillment of thy Whim.

Amen.'

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

Chapter Seventy-seven

From the Bhagavad-Gita To Arjuna, who was thus overcome by pity, whose eyes were filled with tears and who was

troubled and much depressed in mind, the Lord Krishna said Whence has come to thee this dejection of spirit in this

hour of crisis? It is unknown to men of noble mind; it does not lead to heaven; on earth it causes disgrace, O Arjuna.

Yield not to this unmanliness, O Arjuna, for it does not become thee. Cast off this petty faintheartedness and arise, O

Oppressor of the foes.

Arjuna said How can I strike, O Krishna, O slayer of foes? It is better to live in this world by begging than to slay

another … My very being 'is stricken with pity. With my mind bewildered about my duty, I ask Thee to tell me that

which I should do.

Having thus addressed the Lord Krishna, the mighty Arjuna said to Krishna: `I will not kill,' and become silent.

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

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

grieve for the dead or the living.

Never was there a time when I was not, nor thou, nor these lords of men, nor will there ever be a time hereafter when

we shall cease to be.

As the soul passes in this body through childhood, youth and age, even so it its taking on of another body. The sage is

not perplexed by this.

Of the nonexistent there is no coming to be; of the existent there is no ceasing to be. Know thou that that by which all

this is pervaded is indestructible. Of this immutable being, no one can bring about the destruction. Therefore, O

Arjuna, thy duty shouldst be performed.

He who thinks that he slays and he who thinks that he is slain; both of them fail to perceive the truth; no one slays, nor

is one slain. Therefore, O Arjuna, thy duty shouldst be performed.

He is never born, nor does he die at any time, nor having once come to be does he again cease to. be. He is unborn,

eternal, permanent and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain. Therefore, knowing him as such, thou shouldst

not grieve and thy duty shouldst be performed. Pick up thy die, O Arjuna, and kill.

(Edited for The Book of the Die)

Chapter Seventy-eight

I hadn't heard of Frank Osterflood in close to a year, and I genuinely looked forward to seeing him again. He had

responded pretty well for a while to dice therapy first with me and then in a group with Fred Boyd. When he

experienced the need to rape someone - boy or girl - as an arbitrary decision of the dice, it freed him from the great

burden of guilt, which had normally accompanied and magnified the act. And with the elimination of the guilt he discovered he had lost much of his desire to rape. I insisted, of course, that he had to try to carry through with any dice-dictated rape even though he didn't feel like it. He succeeded, found it a disgusting experience. I praised him for following the will of the Die, and he cut back drastically on the possibility of rape among his options and then eliminated it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn't afford to wait around; I wanted to hurry back to Catskill to continue developing the Catskill Dice Center, there to make people happy and joy-filled and free again.

Somehow I had to lure him away from the warren of Manhattan. But how? Was he interested in boys these days? Or girls? Or men? Or women? Or money? Or what? What was the hook that would drag him out of the cesspool of the city into the lovely, lonely autumn of the woods? How would I prevent his telling someone that he had seen me again, that he was going someplace with me? The only method that I could dimly see was to accost him as he returned from work, invite him to dinner and then lure him out of the city on some spontaneously combusted pretext and, on some isolated country road, miles from the nearest other human being communing with himself, shoot him. It seemed very messy and haphazard, and I was determined to commit a nice clean crime - without any sick emotions, without fuss, with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss. I wanted to murder in such a way that Agatha Christie would be pleased and not offended. I wanted to commit a crime so perfect that no one would suspect anything, not the murdered, not the police, not even me.

Of course, such a crime would be impossible, so I retreated to my earlier ideal-that I should murder without fuss,

emotion or violence arid with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss. It was the very least I owed the victim.

But how! The Die only knows. I certainly couldn't see how. I would have to have faith. I would have to get myself

with Osterflood and see what turned up. I'd never read of an Agatha Christie murderer proceeding in quite this way,

but it was all I could do on twenty-four hours' notice.

`Frank, baby,' I said the next evening as he emerged from his taxi. `Long time, no see. It's your old buddy Lou Smith;

you must remember me. Good to see you again.'

I pumped his hand as the taxi pulled away and, still hoping to prevent him from uttering my. name within earshot of

the doorman, I threw my arm around his shoulder and whispered that we were being trailed and began marching him

away.

`But Dr-'

`Had to see you. They're trying to get you,' I whispered as we moved up the block.

`But who's trying `Tell you all about it at dinner.'

He stopped about thirty feet from his apartment.

`Look, Dr. Rhinehart, I . . . I've got an important . . . appointment this evening. I'm sorry, but-'

I had hailed another taxi and it careered over to our curb lusting after our East Side money.

`Dinner first. Got to talk first. Someone's trying to murder you.'

`What?'

`Get in, quick.'

Inside the taxi I got my first good look at Frank Osterflood; he was a bit heavier about the jowls than he had been

before and seemed more nervous and tense, but it might have been his concern about dying. His hair was nicely trimmed and brushed, his expensive suit fit flawlessly, and he gave off the pleasant odor of some heroic after-shave lotion. He looked like a highly successful, well-paid, socially placed thug.

'- To murder me?' he said, staring into my face is search of a jocular smile. I had glanced at my watch; it was six

thirty-seven.

`I'm afraid so,' I said. `I learned from some of my dicepeople that they're planning to murder you.'

I stared sincerely into his face. `Maybe tonight even.'

`I don't understand,' he said, looking away. `And where are we going now?'

`Restaurant in Queens. Very good hors d'oeuvres.'

`But why? Who? What have I done?'

I shook my head slowly from side to side, while Osterflood stared nervously out at the passing traffic and seemed to

flinch every time a car drew up alongside us.

`Ah, Frank, you don't have to hide things from me. You know you've done some things that . . . well, might upset some

people. Someone, someone has found it's you. They plan to kill you. I'm here to help.'

He glanced back at me nervously.

`I don't need any help. I've got to go someplace at - at eight-thirty. Don't need help.'

Tight-jawed, he stared straight ahead at the somewhat un-artistic photograph of Antonio Rosco Fellini, driver of the

cab.

`Ah, but you do, Frank. Your little appointment at eight-thirty may be your rendezvous with death. You'd better let me come along.' `I don't understand,' he said. `Since dice therapy with you and Dr. Boyd I haven't, I haven't . . . done anything I haven't

paid for.'

`Ahhhh,' I said vaguely, searching for my next line.

`Except my wife.'

`Where's this place again?' shouted back Antonio Rosco Fellini. I told him.

`And my wife has left me and is suing me and if I die she won't get a cent.'

`But those early days in Harlem, Frank. They may know.'

He hesitated and stared over at me wide-eyed in fear.

`But I'm leaving my money partly to the NAACP,' he said.

`Maybe they don't know that,' I said.

`Probably no one knows,' he said sadly. `I just recently decided.'

'Ah, and when did you decide?'

'Just now, a minute ago.'

We drove on in silence for a while, Osterflood twice looking mind us to see if we were being followed. He reported

that we were.

`What's this appointment about tonight, Frank?'

'None of your business,' he answered quickly.

`Frank, I'm trying to help you. Someone may be trying to murder you tonight.'

He looked back at me uncertainly.

`I … I've got a date,' he said.

`Ahhhh,' I said. `But it's a woman that I . . . that . . . she likes money.'

`Where are you to meet her?'

'In … er … Harlem.'

His eyes flickered off hopefully at a bus stopped beside us, as if it might contain a plainclothesman or CIA man or FBI

man. There were undoubtedly a few of each, but they were out of his reach.

`Does she live alone?' I asked. It was six forty-eight.

`Uh . . . Well, yes.'

`What is she like?'

`She's disgusting!' he spit out emphatically. `Flesh, flesh, flesh - a woman,' he added.

'Ahh,' I said, disappointed. `Do you think there's any chance at all that she might be involved in a plot?'

`I've known her three months. She thinks I'm a professional wrestler. No. No. She's horrible, but she's not - it's not her.'

`Look,' I said impulsively. `Tonight the place for you to be is away from your apartment and out of public places.

We'll have dinner in this out-of-the-way restaurant I know of and then we can all stay with this lady of yours.'

`Are you sure…?'

`if anyone is going to try to kill you tonight, you can depend on me.'

Chapter Seventy-nine

When Jake Ecstein was walking through a Dice Center one day he overheard a conversation between two people.

`Show me the best role you have,' said the first person.

`All my roles are the best,' replied the second. `You can't find in me any piece of behavior which isn't the best.'

`That's conceited,' said the first.

`That's diceliving,' replied the second.

At these words Jake Ecstein became enlightened.

from The Book of the Die

Chapter Eighty

It occurred to me on my drive to Harlem with Frank Osterflood after our uneventful dinner at an obscure restaurant in Queens that I might try to `take him for a ride' to some dimly lit nowheres where mobsters drive to put other less successful mobsters away, but I didn't know any dimly lit nowheres, and besides, I was beginning to worry that Osterflood might turn his paranoiac tendencies toward me and attack.

We arrived at the apartment house of Osterflood's `date' at a little after eight thirty-four that evening. We seemed to be somewhere near Lenox Avenue on 143rd Street or 145th Street - I never did find out which. My victim paid the cabby, Who looked resentful at being stuck in the middle of no-man's land when he might be at the Hilton or Park Avenue. No one came close to us when we walked the thirty feet or so from the sidewalk to the door of the elegant and crumbling apartment building, although I sensed dozens of dark faces glaring at us in the deep dusk.

We clumped up the three flights of stairs together like a man and his shadow, I fingering my gun and Osterflood telling me to be careful of my footing. The sound of galloping horses and shouts came out of a first-floor apartment, high-pitched hysterical female laughter from the second floor, but from the third, silence. As Osterflood knocked, I reminded him firmly that my name was Lou Smith. I was a fellow professional wrestler. The incongruity of two professional wrestlers showing up to court a lady, one of them dressed with Brooks Brothers immaculateness and the other like a down-and-out hood escaped me at the time.

The woman who came to the door was a middle-aged fat-lady with stringy hair, a double chin and jolly smile. She

barely seemed a Negress.

`I'm Lou Smith, professional wrestler,' I said quickly, offering my hand.

`Good for you,' she said and walked out past us and waddled on down the stairs.

`Is Gina here?' Osterflood called after her, but she stomped on down unheeding.

I followed him inside, through a small entranceway and into a fairly large living room, dominated by a huge television

set squatting against one wall directly opposite a long, Danish-modern couch. There was wall-to-wall carpeting, thick

and soft and a pretty tan color, but badly spotted is front of the television set and the couch. The splash of running

water came from a room off to the right, which, from the bulk of white I could make out, seemed to be a kitchen.

Osterflood called in that direction `Gina?'

`Yeahhh,' came a high-pitched feminine voice.

While I was squinting at two photo portraits on one wall they looked, so help me, like Sugar Ray Robinson and Al

Capone - the woman came to the living room and confronted us. She was a young, full-figured, dark-haired woman,

with the face of a child. Big, brown eyes exuded innocence, and her dark complexion was flawlessly smooth.

`What's this?' she said shrilly and coldly in a voice that, while high-pitched like a child's, had a `what's-in-it-for-me?'

cynicism that was totally incongruous with the child's face.

'Ah, this is Dr. Luke Rh-'

`SMITH!' I shouted, 'Lou Smith, professional wrestler.'

I advanced and stuck out a hand.

`Gina,' she said coldly; her hand was lifeless in mine.

She moved past us into the living room and said over her shoulder `You guys want a drink?'

We both asked for Scotch and while she was kneeling and then standing before an abundantly supplied liquor cabinet

in the corner to the left of the television set, Osterflood and I sat down on opposite ends of the couch, he staring at the

gray lifeless screen of the television set and I at the brown leather miniskirt and tan, creamy legs of Gina.

She came and handed each of us a nice stiff Scotch on the rocks, staring into my eyes with that same incongruous

innocent child's face and saying coldly: `You want the same as him?'

I looked over at Osterflood, who was staring down at the rug. He seemed sullen.

`What do you mean?'

I asked, looking back up at her. She was wearing a tan, v-neck sweater that buttoned down the front and her breasts

ballooned out at me distractingly.

`What are you here for?' she asked, not taking her eyes off me.

`I'm just an old friend,' I said. `Just here to watch.'

'That type,' she said. `Fifty bucks.'

'50 bucks?'

'You heard me.'

'I see. It must be quite a show: I looked back at Osterflood, he still stared at the subliminal floor show on the rug. `I'll

need to think about it.'

`I'd like another drink,' Osterflood said and, head lowered, reached out his long, nicely tailored arm with his glass and

two ice cubes.

'The money,' she said to him without moving.

He pulled out his wallet and peeled out four bills of undetermined denomination. She ambled over to him, took the

bills, fingered each of them carefully, then took his glass and disappeared back into the kitchen. She moved like a

sleepy leopardess.

Osterflood said without looking over at me: 'can't you stand guard outside?'

`Can't take the chance. The killer might already be inside the apartment.'

He glanced up and around nervously.

`I thought you said your date was disgusting?' I said.

`She is,' he said, and shuddered.

The disgusting flesh flesh flesh returned and fixed Osterflood his second drink and freshened her own. I was only

sipping at mine, determined to keep my mind alert for the clean, aesthetic moment of truth. It was eight forty-eight by

my watch.

`Look, mister,' Gina was saying in front of me again. `Fifty bucks or out. This isn't a waiting room.'

Her voice! If only she would never say a word.

`I see.'

I turned to my friend. `Better give her a fifty, Frank.'

He took out his wallet a second time and pulled off a single bill. She fingered it and stuffed it into a tiny pocket in her

tiny leather skirt.

`Okay,' she said. `Let's go.'

She walked over and turned on the television set, fiddling carefully with the dials and adjusting the volume quite high.

When she moved away from the screen three young men were twitching away and playing loudly some rhythmic tune

which was world-famous and which I almost recognized.

I was paying fifty dollars for this? No. Osterflood was paying. I relaxed. - `You want some hash tonight?' she asked

Osterflood. He was brooding into his half-finished drink.

`Yes,' he said.

When Gina returned from the kitchen this time she had a small pipe, apparently fully loaded, since she handed it to Osterflood and he lit up right away.

He passed it up to her and she took a long toke and then sat down on the couch between us, leaning back and reaching out an arm to hand the pipe to me. I'd read someplace that the United States Marines found marijuana and hashish excellent aids to the performance of their duties, so I took a healthy puff and passed the pipe back to her.

After only about three or four puffs by each of us, the pipe seemed to have gone out, but after a few minutes, as I was watching a handsome, sincere American clobber a greasy Latin American type on the TV screen, the pipe appeared under my nose again nicely lit. As I passed the pipe back to Gina, holding the smoke in my lungs, I smiled at her, and her soft baby face and large brown eyes looked sorrowfully and innocently into mine. If only she doesn't talk. Was she Negro or Italian? By the fourth toke of the second series I was really enjoying the rhythm of the deep inhale, the earnest American talking, frowning, driving his jet-powered jeep, then the blossoming beneath my nose of the gem-studded pipe, the inhale … As I passed the pipe back to her this time, I felt like smiling at her again, hoping she was enjoying the show too, and I watched with interest as she put the pipe in her mouth and Osterflood's hand bloomed into view just below her chin, clutched like an octopus onto one side of the v of Gina's sweater and then in slow motion flew away, sending the buttons in front popping off onto the living room rug like machine-gun pellets. Gins continued her inhale and handed the pipe back to me, her eyes focused on the ceiling. I looked at the pipe pleasurably, examining the lacework of fake gems around the outside of the bowl, looked at the small, black, charcoal-looking lump inside, and took a pleasant, long toke. ABC, I now noticed, was presenting `CIA in Action' a new adventure series, and when the commercial for Johnson's Baby Powder ended, two earnest Americans, one of whom I remembered seeing earlier, began talking about a Red plot in front of a backdrop of toiling peasants.

When I turned lazily to hand Gina the pipe she was sitting exactly as before, her head back against the couch and eyes ceiling-ward, but nude from the waist up. Her two breasts rose on her chest like two mounds of molded honey, with two neat circular sculpted crowns of brown sugar at the peak of each rounded, honeyed hilt.

Without smoking she passed the pipe on to Osterflood on the other side of her. The pipe went flying off onto the living room floor on top of the buttons, the sweater and the bra. He had bashed at her hand.

`Get up,' Osterflood said.

Slowly, like a sated leopardess, she stood. I could see Osterflood now and he was staring at her bleary-eyed and without expression, neat in his soft, gray suit.

`You bitch,' he said dully. `You cunt-caked bitch.'

'I was smiling to myself without thought, leaning back and examining with aesthetic bliss the curve of Gina's right breast, which stuck out gracefully in front of her right arm like the .prow of a boat nosing out from behind a cliff. An earnest American jawed aggressively with a greasy American just-at the tip of the short bowsprit.

`You slut,' Osterflood said just a bit louder. `You juicy-jointed sewer. Shit-slitted slut. Slime-oozing whore.'

Gina was fumbling with the belt and then one side of her feather skirt and after a moment or two; the skirt dropped like a guillotine to the floor at her feet. She was now totally nude. A long lovely scar ran down the back of one thigh.

`You bitch!' Osterflood screamed, 'and he staggered woozily to his feet and wobbled uncertainly for several seconds. There was a scream from the TV screen and I glanced idly over to see one of the Americans pick up one of the peasants and throw him onto a manure pile where another peasant could be seen struggling ineffectually.

I turned back just in time to see Osterflood grab Gina's curly dark hair and throw her back onto the couch. She bounced once, in segments, and then sat quietly, her large brown eyes looking vacantly at the ceiling.

`Feces!' shouted Osterflood. `Female feces!' I smiled friendlily over at her.

`It's going to be a nice evening,' I said pleasantly.

Chapter Eighty-one

I have been a woman on hundreds of occasions: in my dice life, group dice therapy and in our Dice Centers. I've usually enjoyed myself thoroughly. The only time I haven't enjoyed being a woman is when people have thought I was a man. For example, my experience with the Cleveland Brown defensive tackle (he used to be a truck driver - of Good Humor Ice Cream trucks) was at first unrewarding because he wanted me to be a man and I thought he was a man. Confusion of roles is always difficult.

I found that being a woman physically was more difficult than being one socially and psychologically. Sexually it was a big disappointment. I simply don't have the right equipment to enjoy being laid. It is much more pleasant in bed to play a passive `feminine' role with an aggressive `masculine' woman than with a real man. The pump of a penis in the anus is, to be precise, a pain in the ass. The feel of a nice hot prick moiling in one's mouth is certainly an experience that everyone should try, but is for me one of the minor sexual pleasures. The flood of hot semen into the mouth is pleasing enough if one takes any pride at all in one's work, but it is at best a psychological pleasure rather than a physical one. Choking on over-salted soup is not my idea of sensuous bliss, but I admit my limitations.

The appeal of being a woman - at least for me - lies in the freshness of the experience and in the passivity, the masochistic passivity I might even say. There is something basic in wanting to be dominated by a superior creature #161;whether man or Die. Responding to men respectfully and passively has never been my majority nature, but the times the Die has ordered me to play a woman have uncovered the latent slave in me.

And certainly being a woman is absolutely basic for every man in our society. And vice versa for women. The human is built to imitate, and every male has stored within him a thousand female gestures, phrases, attitudes and acts which long to be expressed, but are buried in the name of masculinity. It is a tragic loss. Perhaps the single greatest contribution of our Dice Centers is that they create an environment which encourages the expression of all roles; it encourages bisexuality. One might even more honestly say full sexuality, were honesty one of our virtues.

I have been a woman on hundreds of occasions and I recommend that every other healthy, red-blooded American man be one too.

Chapter Eighty-two

Dicemasters train young people as well as old. Two Dicemasters each had a child prodigy. One child, going to buy bubble-gum at the store each morning, would often meet the other going to the same place.

`Where are you going?' the first asked one day.

`I'm going wherever my dice fall,' the other responded.

This reply stopped the first child, who immediately went back to his Dicemaster for help. `Tomorrow morning,' Jake Ecstein told him, `when you meet that smart aleck, ask him the same question. He'll give you the same answer, and then you ask him: "Suppose you have no dice, then where are you going?"

That'll fix him.'

The children met again the next morning.

`Where are you going?' asked the first child.

'I'm going wherever the wind blows,' answered the other.

This reply also stopped the youngster, who hurried back to his Dicemaster.

`Ask him tomorrow where he's going if there's no wind. That'll fix him.'

The next day the children met a third time.

`Where are you going?' asked the first child.

`I'm going to the store to buy bubblegum,' the other replied.

from The Book of the Die

Chapter Eighty-three

`Daddy? Why do I have to brush my teeth every day?'

the little girl asked.

`Try this new tube I've got for you, Suzie, and you'll never ask that question again.'

[Close-up of a big long tube of Glare Toothpaste]

But I had to look away because Gina was kneeling on the floor, her hands tied behind her back with her bra, and

Osterflood, with his pants and undershorts bunched at his feet but still dressed in white shirt, tie and suit jacket, was thrusting with his erect, pink weapon at her mouth, cursing her at every poke. I felt I was watching a slow-motion movie showing some huge piston at work, but some flaw in the machinery resulted in the rod's seeming frequently to miss the wide-open mouth which Gina, large-eyed and expressionless, was presenting. Osterflood's sword of vengeance against the female race kept sliding past her cheek or her neck or poking her in the eye. Whenever she would seem to have a good mouthful (she would close her eyes then), Osterflood would withdraw, raging, and thrust away sporadically, redoubling his curses. It wasn't clear whether he hated her more when she sucked him in or when he missed contact and bounced painfully off her forehead. In both cases he seemed like a movie director enraged because she, the actress, didn't mouth her lines correctly.

`Ahhggg! How I hate you,' he yelled and lurched forward and collapsed onto the couch beside me. I smiled over at

him.

He struggled sideways into a sitting position.

`Undress me, you disgusting, filthy hole,' he said loudly.

A cute, frightened peasant girl had joined the number-one earnest American and was pleading with him passionately

about her corn crop. Without any apparent effort, Gina freed her hands and dropped the bra back onto the rug next to

her skirt and sweater and the buttons and the pipe and came to the couch to undress him.

`Get me a drink,' he shouted to no one in particular as Gina tried to slide his pants over his shoes and off. She stood

and said `Sure, honey. You want some acid?'

`I just want your ass, you sink!' he shouted after her.

`It's for the good of your country,' the firm TV voice said.

Osterflood's sword was melting into an arch at the moment but mine wasn't. My body was tingling all over pleasantly and I had to adjust my .38 and my other rod (semi-automatic), to make all continue tingling pleasantly. I wondered how Osterflood could keep his hands off those breasts and buttocks and I deeply resented all his talking and his abominable aim.

He gulped down the drink she brought him while she slowly untied and removed each of his shoes and the CIA man drove a tractor and then on her knees in front of him she removed his necktie, unbuttoned one by one the buttons of his shirt and - all in a slow-motion movie which I watched as if it were a faithful newsreel of the Second Coming #161;she had just managed to slide the second sleeve of his shirt down off his left arm (the peasants I could hear were cheering now and I glanced briefly to catch a glimpse of a forest of white, toothy grins), when Osterflood's huge, muscular arms loomed out, closed around her, his face plowed into her face and his mouth sunk into her mouth.

Gina groaned sharply and the way she twisted indicated he must be hurting her somehow.

`You bastard!' she snapped shrilly when she got her mouth free. She hit him as good a slap as she could from her close-up position, and he grinned and sunk his teeth into her shoulder. As she scratched at his back he toppled her backward onto the rug with a tremendous crash. When he raised himself off her to place his weapon into the disgusting cesspool, she got in a few blows at his face and then he was in and working.

There wasn't much to see: just Osterflood's big buttocks moving a few inches up and down as he plowed away at Gina's rich earth and her fingers splayed out on his back and occasionally changing position, as if she were playing chords. Gina was groaning, when Osterflood abruptly rose to his knees, flipped her over onto her stomach like a farmer working with a sack of wheat and fumbled with his weapon to reengage the enemy in her other cave. When he thrust himself into her and fell forward upon her Gina let loose a terrible scream. It corresponded so perfectly with gun shots from the screen that I looked back quickly to see a beautiful, frightened peasant girl with a ripped blouse clutching the arm of the number one earnest American and the peasant spies blasting away from behind a chicken coop.

Gina was fighting with her right arm to raise herself and twist Osterflood off and out -of her, but he bore down, pulling, her hair with one hand and controlling her right arm with the other. His professional-wrestler role seemed to be paying off.

`Bitchbitchbitch,' he gasped, and the American was dragging the beautiful peasant girl through a cornfield and bullets were shattering the kernels every which way and Osterflood was banging Gina's head against the rug and the American tossed a grenade and whomp! the chink peasants were splattered like fertilizer over the cornfield and 'Diediedie-bitchbitch,' Osterflood hissed and with a supreme thrust deep into her anus they both screamed.

An unearthly silence filled the room. The beautiful peasant girl was looking with most frightened eyes from the pieces of peasant to the earnest American. 'My God,' she said.

`Steady,' the deep voice answered. `We've won this round, but there's always more of them.'

Osterflood rolled off his conquered foe with a grunt, his weapon still cocked, but presumably discharged.

Gina's hilly form lay quietly for a few moments and then she got to her knees and stood up. Although she was still facing away toward the TV set, I could see blood running in a tiny stream down the right corner of her mouth and something was smeared down the inside of one thigh. Slowly she moved off to the left and disappeared into what seemed to be a bathroom.

I was perspiring a good deal and a lady was smiling ecstatically as she held up her laundry and I found myself sailing over to the liquor cabinet and fixing three more drinks, adding mostly melted ice.

Osterflood was lying on his back when I sailed back again, but he sat up to take the drink I offered him. He stared

wild-eyed at me.

'I'm going to be killed,' he said.

I'd forgotten all about that.

He clutched at my pants leg, spilling part of his drink on the rug.

'I'm going to die. I know it. You've got to do something.'

'It's all right,' I said.

'No, no, it's not, it's not. I feel it strongly. I deserve to die.'

`Come into the kitchen,' I said.

He stared wild-eyed at me.

'I want to show you something,' I added.

`Oh,' he said, and with a great effort he turned himself onto his hands and knees and staggered to his -feet.

I flowed off behind his whale-like form toward the kitchen and as he passed through the door in front of me I drew

my gun from my pocket, raised it in a long endless arc up over my head, and then down with all my force onto the top

of Osterflood's huge head.

'Wha'sat?'

Osterflood said, stopping and turning, and slowly raising a hand to his head.

I gazed openmouthed at his erect, swaying, hulking body.

'It's .. . it's my gun,' I said.

He looked down at the black little pistol hanging limply from my fist.

'What'd you hit me for?' he said after a pause.

'Show you my gun,' I said, still gaping at his blank, bleary, bewildered eyes.

'You hit me,' he said again.

We stared at each other, our minds working with the speed and efficiency of lobotomized sloths.

'Just a tap. Show you my gun,' I said.

We stared at each other.

'Some tap,' he said.

We stared at each other.

'Protect you with. Don't tell Gina.'

When he stopped rubbing the back of his head, his hand and arm dropped like an anchor into the sea.

'Thanks,' he said dully, and moved past me back into the living room.

Two snake-eyed peasants were conspiring together on the screen, and I wandered over to the liquor cabinet and stared

at the big photograph of Al Capone. Was it Al Capone? It was Al Capone. Robot-fashion I plucked three more fresh glasses from the neat stack there, poured in the dregs of ice from the bowl, and splashed some Scotch and water into each. I stirred them all idly with my finger, licked my finger and as a kind of dreamy afterthought, drew, from my jacket pocket the envelope of strychnine and poured about half of it (fifty mg) into one of the drinks. I stirred it with my finger again and was about to lick my finger but thought better of it. I poured the other half of the poison into an empty glass, filled it from the pitcher of water and stirred it with my finger again.

'I'm going to die, whip me!' Osterflood was saying on his back from the floor. 'Beat me, kill me.'

Gina had returned from wherever she had been and was standing over Osterflood, sweat glistening lightly on her chest

and forehead. Her child's face peered down at him as at an interesting toad. Osterflood was groaning and writhing

mildly on the rug. Then he stopped and said quietly.

'Whip me.'

Gina leaned down to her left and picked up her leather skirt and stepped into it, buttoning it loosely at her hips. She

drew out the leather belt.

'Would you two like a drink first?' I asked, holding the three Scotch drinks on a tray before me.

Osterflood didn't seem to hear me, intent instead upon some inner light. Gina reached her free hand out and took one

of the two harmless drinks and took a big swig from it.

'Frank, would you like I began.

Whack ! The belt burst across Osterflood's thighs like a cannon shot. He grunted and turned over onto his stomach.

Whack ! it came across his buttocks; whack! across the back of his thighs. His powerful body arched in pain and then

when Gina paused, collapsed trembling.

I noticed now a bloody gash on Gina's shoulder and blood mixed with saliva was still sliding from her lower lip. She

looked down at Osterflood and in a single swift terrifying motion slashed the belt across his back. Three or four

pinkish welt lines were now clearly etched on his body.

'Ahh,' I said. 'Is this part of the regular show?'

She stood without answering, breathing deeply, a single line of sweat now running from the side of her neck down in

between her breasts, which rose and fell moistly.

'I'm dying, I'm dying,' Osterflood moaned. 'Beat me, please beat me.'

'You white pig,' she said in a soft voice. 'Fat, man pig.'

Thock! I absentmindedly took a sip from one of the drinks and spat it out on the rug. Wrong drink.

A burst of applause flooded into the room and I glanced over to see a pompous little dictator parading down the aisle

of an auditorium to the applause of formally dressed spics, or chinks, or gooks or greasies.

'Drink,' I heard a voice say.

Osterflood had gotten now to his knees and was reaching out an arm toward my tray. His eyes were unfocused and glittering. . - .

I raised my free hand and Gina took from the tray a glass and handed it to Osterflood and he downed it at a gulp.

Holding the third drink in my free hand, I sighed. Osterflood had taken the wrong drink.

While Gina reached down to take another swig from hers, I returned to Sugar Ray and Al Capone and poured two more drinks. I marched back again with my tray of three and stood just beside and behind Gina.

'You're trying to kill me,' Osterflood said looking up at us from his knees. 'You shit-filled monster, you're trying to kill me:' He was staring at us glassy-eyed.

Gina looked down at him, her large brown eyes radiant and curious, and for the first time she smiled, slightly.

'Bad trip?' she asked quietly.

'I see it all now,' Osterflood shouted at us. 'You're the killer!' He began shaking his head and trembling. 'Now I see, now I see! It's you!' The 'Thock!' that caught him across the face surprised both him and me, and he fell forward with a crash.

`Yes, yes, whip me, I deserve it,' he groaned. 'Hit me again.'

Gina looked down at him, the soft smile still on her face, and sweat running now from her forehead, chin and both heaving breasts.

She raised the belt slowly till her arm was perpendicular above her head and then dropped it in a lazy arc snapping the belt at only half-force across his back. Osterflood writhed nevertheless, and Gina's soft smile became a sneer.

I put my tray full of drinks on the couch and came over behind Gina, reached my arms around and enclosed at last in my hands those two marvelous mounds. They were hot and sweaty and firm and I grunted with pleasure. As I squeezed and pinched, and sucked at the salty sweat of her neck, I felt Gina lean back again and 'whack' across Osterflood's buttocks, and after a short pause another heaving motion and 'whock!' and Osterflood and I both grunted, although presumably for different reasons. Then Gina turned to me and we were two hot mouths endlessly exploring each other's watery, snake-bulging wombs. Although my hands had removed her leather skirt and were around her bulging buttocks and digging into everything they could, my world was soon composed of mouths, huge caverns of tongue-tangled flow of motion endlessly plunging and being plunged, biting and being bitten, rising and sinking, filling and emptying, and I felt something scratching at my leg.

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

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

I straight-lined and she broke her mouth from mine and arched her head away from mine and said shrilly 'Suck me, suck me,' and cupped her breasts out toward me.

I lowered my open mouth on to one and as I tongued and sucked and nibbled she moaned 'I'm a woman! I'm a woman!'

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

'Hard, harder,' she moaned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I never meant to . .'

he was muttering. `Nice boys nice girls . . . mistake . , . I'm sick, I'm sick . . . dying . . . see that now .. NEVER AGAIN … be a good boy, Mommy, beat me BEAT ME.'

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

'Now, Joanie, there's something I must tell you tonight,' the husband was saying.

'Sure, Dad, but make it quick, Jack's coming with his motorcycle.'

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

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

'Teen-agers today are so violent,' the silly woman said to a silly woman friend as they walked their dogs.

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

Gina, her head bent back now, breasts trembling, had cupped my balls and buttocks with her hands and was forcing my now bulging, slimy, hot-tipped cock deeper into her mouth, pressing with her hands to force me deeper deeper plunging, a lady sword-swallower arching ever back deep to the throat moaning working me deeper, then out, gasping blowing licking open and down down again swallow whole the great worn weapon of the much beloved foe down #161;fascinating, will my whole body be sucked up into her like a cartoon ghost by a vacuum cleaner? down, her finger now in my anus, then she pulling me out of her mouth breathing me, tonguing me, sliding a long hard kiss along the length of me and then in again deep deeper . . . and up for air.

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

Gina was awash with semen and sweat and her own love juices and she used my head like a giant penis and pressed at her openings, squeezing with her thighs, writhing for something to enter her, burying me in the silken slime of her cunt until I felt I was drowning and broke myself free. `We did it, we did it!' some male voice was crying from the television screen until the roar of other motorcycles drowned him out. Lowering my lips only to her clitoris I lengthened my hold on her buttocks to ooze my fingers into her rich openings, her cunt like a deep silken pool of the finest lubricants, her other a smooth, tight-fitting glove. I could feel Gina's hand around the base of my prick and occasionally enclosing my balls, and another hand around my buttocks and in my crack and another hand scratching hard at my back and shoulder until I wondered where she got her third hand and suddenly saw five inches from my eyes the twisted horrible grin of Osterflood, eyes bulging.

`Drink, drink,' he said and clawed at my shoulder.

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

`You want to try a few?' she said.

`No, no, I'm a pacifist,' I said. `Thanks anyway.'

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

'That wasn't very nice,' I said, wondering if Osterflood were immortal.

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

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

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

grin his cock stiff his belly spilling his semen pools onto the rug his eyes open glassy, staring, fixed, unmoving, dead.

The Die giveth and the Die taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Die.

Chapter Eighty-seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely yours, Joseph Fedel, President Fedel's Hats, Columbus, Ohio.

Chapter Eighty-eight

Professor Boggles at a CETRE

Dear Luke, I am a rational, linear, verbal, discursive, literary man and even your previous absurdities prepared me only minimally for the shock of my first week in the Catskill CETRE. I dutifully expressed anger, played Hamlet, pretended to be a fool, acted like an enraged tiger; I even swished my considerable hips effeminately when the Die tried to turn me into a woman. However, I did all this in isolation; I saw to it that none of my role-playing involved active interaction with other people. When other people attempted to impose their `selves' on me I became cynical inside, no matter what I was halfheartedly doing outside.

A middle-aged woman grossly importuned me to seduce her and the Die dictated that I ought to respond favorably. I found myself slobbering on her neck and squeezing her expansive bosom but feeling totally detached. My phallus remained detumescent. After five minutes she huffed off to someone else.

My awakening came on the fifth day, in the creativity room. The Die had chosen for me the assignment to write four pages using a new language - one employing primarily words from known vocabularies but combining them in a new grammar, syntax and diction. I was to try to express real feelings. I sat for an hour and couldn't get past doodles. Then -I finally wrote a sentence `Muckme piddles ping pong poetry.'

I liked the sound of it but the syntax was too regular. I wrote a second `Skinned. Skinniedup, baked. Stick a.'

That I felt was better, but lacking in verbs.

`Farceuncle midwoof floops on the conch Harkening strayners at the dolor.'

I smiled to myself: I felt I was getting closer to truth.

`Missy-led clanker retchatches purr purr floops midwoof flushiting. I wonted crandy. Yo no crandy git, dabby sated. Yo knotted again, he, replyed jobbily. Fluckit shushit. Hotbam mastar.'

But I was supposed to be expressing real feelings. How might I do that without being absurdly clear and trivial? I must proceed further, I thought: 'Mime a riter. A riter is sumun who rights. Words, wurts, worst … what too due? Fusshackle thought, ruddycup the blissbiz pronotions gaym, baby gone. Flat chance I have of whining a prize. Holy Muffer, merry of God . . . Ahhh.'

Remaindered Redeemer, where dost thou go? Kink of the Whirl, you knot me so I ken not. Rash anality has deshitted me Of all my straineth. I beg you show me merdesee. Yoose your head, your my-end, your braying! Your rashan. ality

1. He rashandill l (A reckoning crew will destroy us all.) Member, an hefull man is one who unjoys life, finds many playsures. He is a cheyeheld who nose nothink. Be rashanal and use sickology. But write, rite, right, reyet 1 Got is the kink of the Universe (Ice died for our since I ) Got is the kink of the Whirl (He nailrows what is wide and free) God makes ridid what is fleshible (To him who hass much shall be piled) The seven deadly Since he names, The thinks we've done, we must do penitentiary for (Luff, Hee says, is oil) Got so luffed the whirl that he graved is unly beGotten son that those that bleaf he died for their since may have infernal life.

Ah, Luke, I wrote on and on, for two and a half hours I wrote all glorious nonsense and sense so interfused it will take my graduate students decades to decipher it all. It's beautiful. I felt so good the next fat female that bloated her boobs for Boggles was erected on the spot. Dear Luke, you are utterly amid and I your faithfool decipherpill.

Yours, Gobbles.

Chapter Eighty-nine

[Being a questioning of Dr: Lucius Rhinehart by Inspector Nathaniel Putt of the New York City police regarding the unfortunate rigidification of Mr. Franklin Delano Osterflood.]

'It's good to see you again, Inspector Putt,' Dr. Rhinehart said. 'How have you been?'

'Fine, thank - Sit down, Rhinehart' 'Thank you. You've got a new couch.'

'You know why I've called you in?'

'No, I'm afraid I don't. Lost some more mental patients?'

'Do you know a man named Frank Osterflood?'

'Yes, I do. He was a-'

'When did you last see him?'

Dr. Rhinehart pulled out a die, shook it in his cupped hands and leaned forward to drop it on the inspector's desk. After

examining the results he said 'About a week ago.'

Inspector Putt's eyes glittered minutely.

'You . . . saw . . . him . . . one week ago.'

'Yes, about then. Why? What's Frank up to these days? Nothing serious, I hope.'

`Please describe your meeting with him.'

'Mmmmm. I remember I ran into him purely by chance on the street near his apartment. We decided to go to dinner

together.'

'Go on.'

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

'Go on.'

'I spent a couple of hours with Osterflood with his girlfriend and then I left' 'What took place at this girlfriend's place?'

'We watched some television. And, well, Osterflood engaged the girl in sexual congress and then I engaged her in

sexual congress. It was a joint session you might say.'

'Did Osterflood leave with you?'

'No. I left alone.'

'What was he doing when you left?'

'He was sleeping on the living room rug.'

'What was Osterflood's relation to this girl?'

`I'd say it was basically masochistic. Sadistic elements too.'

`Did the girl seem to like him?'

'She seemed to take pleasure in her interaction with him.'

`You say Osterflood was asleep when you left'

'Yes.'

`Was he drunk?'

`Probably.'

`Was he in good health?'

`Mmmm. No. He was overweight, had eaten too much that night. Had digestive problems. Was exhausting himself in

acts of atonement.'

Inspector Putt stared coldly at Dr. Rhinehart and then asked abruptly 'Who prepared the drinks for everyone that night?'

'Ahh. The drinks.'

'Yes, the drinks.'

Dr. Rhinehart bounced the die on the desk a second time. He smiled.

'Mr. Osterflood prepared the drinks.'

'Osterflood!' `I found several of my Scotches unfriendlily watered-down, but the service was otherwise fine.'

The inspector's face and eyes became exceptionally cold as he stared at Dr. Rhinehart.

'Did the die tell you to murder Osterflood that night?'

'Oh I doubt it. But it's an interesting question. Let's see.'

Dr. Rhinehart dribbled the die a third time, and then looked up brightly at his questioner. 'Nope.'

'I see. I suppose that's the truth,' Inspector Putt sneered.

`It's what the die told me to say.'

The two men looked at each other and then the inspector, tight-lipped, pushed a button on the side of his desk and told

the detective who came to the door to 'bring her in.'

Gina entered, dressed conservatively in a knee-length skirt, a heavy blouse and an ill-fitting jacket.

`That's the man,' she said.

'Sit down,' said the inspector.

`That's him.'

'Hi, Gina,' Dr. Rhinehart said.

`He admits it See, he admits it'

'Sit down, Gina,' the detective said.

`Miss Potrelli to you, fuzz-face.'

'Please briefly repeat your story of how the evening with Osterflood went,' said the inspector.

This guy and Frank came to my apartment and I gave them both a fuck. This guy served the drinks. Osterflood began

to act as if he'd been drugged and was getting woozy and this guy dragged him off.' 'Dr. Rhinehart?'

Inspector Putt said coldly.

'Mr. Osterflood and I paid a social call on Miss Potrelli. Frank made us all several drinks while we watched television

and engaged in sexual congresses. I left with Frank lying on the floor with a blissful smile on his face. Where is old

Frank, by the way?'

'He's dead, damn you,' said Gina.

'Shuttup,' said the inspector and then went on quietly: 'The body of Frank Osterflood was discovered on November 15

in the East River under the Triborough Bridge. An autopsy has revealed that he'd been dead about two days. He was poisoned with strychnine.'

He looked only at Rhinehart. 'You or Gina here - one of you - was the last one to see Osterflood alive.' `Maybe he just took a midnight swim in the East River and accidentally swallowed some water,' suggested Dr. Rhinehart.

`The percentage solution of strychnine in the East River,' said Inspector Putt soberly, 'is still at acceptable levels.'

'But then I wonder what happened to him,' said Dr. Rhinehart.

`Traces of strychnine have been found on the shelf above Gina's liquor cabinet and in the rug in front of the TV set.'

'How interesting.'

'You mixed the drinks!' Gina said shrilly.

'I did? No, my story is that Osterflood mixed them.'

Dr. Rhinehart scowled in concentration. 'Maybe a dice decision made him decide to kill himself in retribution for his

sins. He showed certain masochistic tendencies.'

'You mixed the drinks and you left with him,' Gina said again shrilly.

'Not according to my story, Miss Potrelli. According to my story I left first and he left later.'

'Oh,' she said. 'You're a liar.'

'Let's just say we have different stories. This confuses the inspector and makes him uneasy.'

'There are already four other witnesses who claim that they saw you leave with Osterflood, Rhinehart" said the

detective.

'Ahh, four! That shows initiative, Gina. It would be a shame to waste those witnesses.'

Dr. Rhinehart retrieved his die from the desk and dropped it onto the couch beside his thigh.

'I left with Osterflood, Inspector.'

'Where did you go?'

'Where did we go, Gina?'

`You took a tax-'

`Shuttup! Get her out of here.'

Gina was removed from the room by the detective.

`We got in a taxi, I believe. I got off at the Lexington Avenue subway stop at 125th Street. I needed to relieve myself.

Osterflood went on. He was quite drunk and I felt slightly guilty about leaving him with a suspiciously cheerful cabby,

but I was drunk too. I found a urinal near-'

'Why did you lie to us the first time?'

`Who says I lied to you the first time?'

`You've just changed your story.'

'Details.'

'Gina's witnesses exposed your lie.'

`Come now, Inspector, you know full well that her four witnesses are even less reliable than the dice, and that's going

some.'

`Shuttup!'

'And besides, the Die told me to change the story.'

The inspector was glaring at Dr. Rhinehart.

`You'd better consult your dice again,' he said. 'No cabby in the city remembers picking up two big white men in

Harlem that evening, or for that matter any evening in the last five years. You, as a doctor, would have recognized the symptoms of strychnine poisoning as different from simple drunkenness. We know Gina and her four witnesses are lying. We know you're lying. We know Osterflood was murdered at Gina's and never left there alive.

Inspector Putt and Dr. Rhinehart stared at each other.

`Wow!' Dr. Rhinehart said after awhile. He leaned forward on the couch, wide-eyed, attentive, interested, and asked intently: `Who killed him?'

Chapter Ninety

Dear Doc, The Die told me to write you. Can't think of much to say. Die bless you, Fred Weedmuller, Porksnout, Texas. Chapter Ninety-one A week after my interview with him, Inspector Putt announced to anyone who was interested that new evidence

(undisclosed) indicated conclusively that Osterflood must have committed suicide probably. Privately, he informed friends and informers that it was clear he couldn't possibly get a conviction against either Gina or me. Gina wouldn't have murdered Osterflood so premeditatedly in her own apartment with another white man present, and strychnine, he noted, is not the usual mode of murder of `abused Harlem whores' Moreover, her four witnesses, while obviously they were lying, nevertheless would raise a shadow of doubt in the minds of a few radlib jurors.

Dr. Rhinehart would be impossible to convict because no jury, radlib or one hundred and ten percent American, could be expected to understand Rhinehart's motivation. The inspector admitted he himself wasn't certain he understood it. 'He did it because the dice told him to,' the D.A. would proclaim and the defense attorneys would lead the general laughter which would follow. The world was changing too rapidly for the typical juror, no matter, how American, to keep up. Moreover, even inspector Putt was beginning to doubt that Rhinehart had done it, for, though he was certainly capable of murder, Rhinehart, if the Die had told him to do it, would clearly not have done such a debauched, confused, messy, unaesthetic, incompetent job of it.

Nevertheless, Inspector Putt had called me for one last confrontation and had concluded a long lecture with the ringing words 'Someday Rhinehart, the law is going to catch up with you. Someday the furies are going to come home to roost. Someday the sins you are committing in the name of your dice games are going to be taken out of the bank. Someday, you will learn, crime, even in the United States; does not pay.'

'I'm sure you're right,' I said, shaking his hand as I left. 'But is there any hurry ?'

So my dicelife went on. I gave the Die one chance in six that I do everything in my power to bring Osterflood back to life again, but the option lost out to another one-in-six shot: that I spend three days in mourning for Frank, and that I compose a few prayers and parables for the occasion.

On January 1, 1971, I. had my third annual Fate Day to determined my long-range role for the year. The Die was given the options that (1) sometime that year I marry Linda Reichman, Terry Tracy, Miss Reingold, or a woman chosen at random (I felt that if I couldn't make a go of a dice-marriage with someone, then the nuclear family might be in danger); (2) I give up the dice for the year and begin an entirely new career of some sort (this no longer frightening option was inspired by Fuigi Arishi's article I had read that day on `The Withering Away of the Die'); (3) I begin revolutionary activity against the established clods of the world, my purpose being to expose hypocrisy and injustice, shame the unjust, awaken and arouse the oppressed and, in general, to wage an unending war against crime: namely, to smash society as radically as I am trying to smash society in me' (I'd read a month or two before that Eric Cannon and Arturo Jones had formed an underground revolutionary group and the memory that day made me feel heroic: I wasn't sure what my words meant that I do; but the ring of them made me sit proud on the living room rug where I was preparing to cast the dice); (4) I work during the year on books and articles and novels and stories about whatever the Die dictated, completing at least the equivalent of two books (I resented the bum job of publicity work that was being done for our Dice Centers and the DICELIFE Foundation and vaguely pictured myself coming to the rescue); (5) I continue my multiple activities in promoting diceliving throughout the world, the nature of my contribution to be determined by the Die (it's what I most felt like doing: Linda and Jake and Fred and Lil were all sporadically part of our diceteam, and the dicelife without other dicepeople is often lonely); and (6) I spend the whole year limiting my options to the duration of one day only, so that, indeed (to quote the inspired rhetoric of my '71 Fate Day), 'each day's dawning bring a new birth, while others ignore it and grow old.'

(This last option fascinated me since I always find long-range options something of a drag: they tend to make me too patterned, even if it is the pattern of the Die.) But the Die, testing me, tumbled down a 'four' : that 'I work during the year on various writing projects.'

Two subsequent dice decisions soon determined that I was to complete sometime during the year 'an autobiography of exactly 200,000 words' (so I've had this stupid thing barging in on my days most of the year) and that I worked on other Die-selected work when appropriate (namely when the Die and I felt like it).

Of course writing is hardly a full-time job and I continued randomly seeing my friends, working sporadically with Dice Centers and dicegroups, occasionally lecturing, whimsically playing, occasional new roles, occasionally practicing my dice exercises, and generally leading a very enjoyable, repetitious, consistently inconsistent random sporadic unpredictable dicelife.

Then, naturally, Chance intervened.

Chapter Ninety-two

RELIGION FOR OUR TIME presents [The camera pans from one figure to the next of the five people seated on the slightly raised stage in front of the fifty or so people in the audience.] Father John Wolfe, assistant professor of theology at Fordham University; Rabbi Eli Fishman', chairman of the Ecumenical Center for a More United Society; Dr. Eliot Dart, professor of psychology at Princeton University and noted atheist; and Dr. Lucius M. Rhinehart, psychiatrist and controversial founder of the Religion of the Die.

`Welcome to another live, free, open, spontaneous and completely unrehearsed discussion in our series about Religion for Our Time. Our Subject today IS THE RELIGION OF THE DIE A COP-OUT? [Image of Mrs. Wippleton.] `Our moderator for today's program: Mrs. Sloan Wippleton, former screen and television actress, wife of noted financier and socialite Gregg Wippleton and mother of four lovely children. Mrs. Wippleton is also chairman of the First Presbyterian Church's Committee for Religious Tolerance. Mrs. Wippleton.'

She bursts into a smile and speaks with enthusiasm.

`Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are fortunate today to have a very interesting subject for discussion and one I'm sure you've all wanted to learn more about: the Religion of the Die. We also have a very distinguished panel to discuss it. Dr. Rhinehart [image shifts briefly to Dr. Rhinehart, who, dressed totally in black with a heavy black turtleneck sweater and suit, looks vaguely ministerial. He chews on but does not smoke a large pipe throughout] is one of the most controversial figures of the last year. His papers and books on dice theory and therapy have scandalized the psychiatric world, and his readings from The Book of the Die have scandalized the religious world. He has earned from the American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists a Special Condemnation. Nevertheless, many individuals have rallied round Dr. Rhinehart and his religion, some of them not in mental hospitals. Last year Dr. Rhinehart and his followers began opening Dice Centers called Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments and thousands of people have gone through these centers, some reporting deeply religious experiences, but others suffering severe breakdowns. No matter how opinions differ, all agree that Dr. Rhinehart is a very controversial man.

`Dr. Rhinehart, I'd like to open our discussion by asking you our central question for today, and then asking each of our other guests to comment on the same thing: "Is your religion of the Die a Cop-out?"

`Sure,' says Dr. Rhinehart, chewing contentedly on his pipe, then he remains silent. Mrs. W. looks first expectant and then nervous.

`How is it a cop-out?'

`In three ways.'

Again R. chews wordlessly on his pipe, serene and satisfied.

`In what three ways?'

R. lowers his head and the camera pans down to see him rubbing something between his hands and then drop onto the small table in front of him a die; it is a six. When the camera pans back up to his face the viewer sees R. looking directly out 'from the screen. With a benevolent glow, he holds his pipe steady and smokeless, looking at the viewer. Five seconds, ten seconds pass. Fifteen.

`Dr. Rhinehart?' says a feminine voice off-screen. Image shifts to a serious Mrs. W. Then back to R. Then to Mrs. W., frowning, then to R., exhaling smokeless air from an open mouth. Then, uncertainly, appears the image of Father Wolfe, who looks as if he's concentrating on what he's going to say.

`Rabbi Fishman. Perhaps you'd like to lead off today,' says the off-screen feminine voice.

Rabbi Fishman, short, dark and fortyish, directs his words intently first toward Mrs. W. and then to R.

`Thank you, Mrs. Wippleton. I find everything Dr. Rhinehart has said this afternoon extremely interesting, but he seems to be missing the chief point: the religion of the Die is a resignation from the status of man: it is a worship of chance, and as such, a worship of that which has always been man's adversary. Man is above all else the great organizer, the great integrator, while a dicelife as I understand it, is a destroyer of integration and unity. It is a cop-out from human life, but not into the life of random nature as some of Dr. Rhinehart's critics have maintained. No. Nature, too, is an organizer and an integrator. But the religion of the Die represents in a way the worship of disintegration, dissolution and death. It is anti- I find it another sign of the sickness of our times.'

[Camera pans smoothly back to Mrs. W.] `That's very interesting, Rabbi Fishman. You've certainly given us much food for thought. Dr. Rhinehart, would you like to comment?'

'Sure.'

R. stares again serenely out at the television audience, benignly chewing on his pipe. Five seconds, ten, twelve.

`Father Wolfe.' says Mrs. W. in a high-pitched voice.

`My turn?'

[Image of round, red-faced blond-haired Father Wolfe, looking at first uncertainly off toward Mrs. W., then staring into the camera like a prosecuting attorney.]

`Thank you. The religion of the Die is, no matter how Dr. Rhinehart may try to weasel out of it this afternoon, the worship of the Antichrist. There is a moral law, er, a moral order to the universe which God created, and the surrender of one's freewill to the decisions of dice is the most outrageous and complete crime against ah God that I can imagine. It is to surrender to sin without raising a fist. It is the act of a ah coward.

`Cop-out is too mild a word. The religion of the Die is a crime, against ah God and against the dignity and grandeur of man created in ah God's image. Free will distinguishes man from ur God's other creatures. To surrender that gift may well be that sin against the Holy Spirit which is unforgivable. Dr. Rhinehart may be well educated, he may well be a medical doctor, but his so-called er religion of the Die is the most unh poisonous, unh obnoxious and satanic thing I have ever heard of ah.'

`May I comment on that?' says R.'s voice from off-screen, and his image appears, wordless and relaxed, staring out, obviously not intending to speak a single further word. It is as if the channel had been switched every time his face appears on the screen.

Five, seven, eight, ten seconds pass.

`Dr: Dart,' says a subdued female voice.

Dr. Dart appears, young, dynamic, handsome, cigarette smoking, nervous, intense, brilliant.

'I find Dr. Rhinehart's performance today rather amusing, and perfectly consistent with the clinical picture I have formed of him through a reading of his work and through discussions with people who have known him. We can't understand the religion of the Die and the peculiar way it is a cop-out unless we can understand the pathology of its creator and of its followers. Basically, as Dr. Rhinehart himself has acknowledged, he is a schizoid. [The image on the screen becomes that of Dr. Rhinehart, benignly looking at the viewer, and remains through the next part of Dr. Dart's analysis.]

Dr. Rhinehart's alienation and anomie apparently reached such a degree that he lost a single identity and became a multiple personality. The literature is full of case studies of this schizoid type, and he differs from the typical case only in the large number of personalities he is apparently able to adopt. The compulsive nature of this role playing is masked by the use of the dice and by the mumbo-jumbo religion of the Die created around it. The pathological pattern of alienation and anomie is common in our society, and the significant number of people influenced by the religion of the Die manifests the appeal of a verbal structure to mask and support the psychological disintegration which has taken place. [Image of Dr. Dart reappears.] 'The religion of the Die is not so much a cop-out as it is, like all religions, a comforter, a confirmation and, one might say, an elevation of the psychological debilities of the individual who embraces the religion. Passivity before the rigid God of Catholicism or Judaism is one form of cop-out, passivity before the flexible and unpredictable God of chance is another. Both can be understood only in terms of individual and group pathology.'

Dr. Dart turns back to Mrs. Wippleton. Her image appears, serious and sincere.

'What kind of nonsense is that about the rigid God of Judaism?' says Rabbi Fishman's voice from off-screen. 'I'm just reporting commonly accepted psychological theory,' Dart answers.

'If anything is pathological,' says Rabbi Fishman darkly from the screen again, 'it's the sterile pseudo-objectivity of neurotic psychologists pretending to understand spiritual man.'

'Gentlemen,' interposes Mrs. Wippleton with her best smile.

`Catholicism is not the elevation of man's debilities [comes Father Wolfe's 'voice and then face] but of his spiritual grandeur. It is the insect minds of psychologists.'

'Gentlemen'

'Your defensiveness interests me,' says Dr. Dart.

`Our subject today,' interposes a beaming Mrs. Wippleton, 'is the religion of the Die and I for one am anxious to hear what Dr. Rhinehart has to say about the charge that his religion is schizophrenic and pathological.'

[The image of Dr. Rhinehart appears, glowing, friendly, relaxed: Five seconds. Six.] 'I don't understand your silence, Dr. Rhinehart,' says Mrs. Wippleton from off-screen. Not a flicker of change in R.

`This is a typical symptom, Mrs. Wippleton,' says Dr. Dart's voice, 'of the schizophrenic in the catatonic state. Dr. Rhinehart is apparently capable of going in and out of such states almost at will, a most unusual ability. In a few minutes he may be talking so much you won't be able to shut him up.'

Dr. Rhinehart removes the pipe from his mouth and exhales a lungful of fresh air.

'But if I understand you correctly, Dr. Dart,' says Mrs. W., 'then you are saying that Dr. Rhinehart has a form of mental disease which would normally be institutionalized.'

'No, not quite,' says an intense Dr. Dart. 'You see Dr. Rhinehart is a sort of schizophrenic manque, if I may coin a-phrase. His religion has permitted him to do what most schizophrenics are incapable of doing: it justifies and unifies his splintered personality. Without his religion of the Die he would be a hopelessly babbling maniac. With it he can function - function as an integrated, schizophrenic manque of course, but function nevertheless.'

'I find his silence this afternoon senseless, rude and a copout,' says Rabbi Fishman.

'He is afraid to confront the unh American people with the enormity of his ur sin,' says Father Wolfe. 'He cannot answer Truth.'

'Dr. Rhinehart, would you like to answer these charges?' asks Mrs. Wippleton.

[The image of R. slowly removing his pipe, still looking at the viewer.]

'Yes,' he says.

Silence of five seconds, ten. Fifteen.

'But how?'

Dr. Rhinehart is seen now for the second time leaning forward and rubbing his hands together and dropping a die upon

the table next to the untouched cup of brown liquid. A close-up shot magnifies the result: a two. He reverts without a

flicker of expression to his benevolent serenity flowing out to the viewers of the world.

Rabbi Fishman begins speaking and his face appears on the screen.

`This is the sort of imbecility which attracts thousands? It's beyond me. People starving to death in India, the suffering

in Vietnam, our black brothers still with legitimate grievances, and this man, a doctor mind you, sits puffing on an

unlit pipe and playing with dice. He's a Nero fiddling while Rome burns.'

`He's ah ah worse, Rabbi,' says Father Wolfe. 'Nero rebuilt Rome afterward. This man knows only how to destroy.'

Dr. Dart speaks: 'The alienated schizoid experiences both himself and others as objects and is unable to relate to others

except in terms of his fantasy world.'

`And we're not in his fantasy world?' asks Mrs. W.

`We're there. He thinks he's manipulating us with his silence.'

`How can we stop him?'

`By being silent.'

'Oh.'

Rabbi Fishman speaks `Maybe we should talk about something else, Mrs. Wippleton. I hate to see your lovely program

ruined by a loony.'

[The image of Dr. Rhinehart appears and is left there, eyes and pipe leveled at the viewer through all of the next bit of the program.] `Oh thank you, Rabbi Fishman, that's thoughtful of you. But I do think we should try to analyze Dr. Rhineharts

religion. It's what the sponsor paid for.'

`Notice he has no tics.' Dr. D.

'What's that mean?' Rabbi F.

'He's not nervous.'

`Oh.'

'I'd like to answer your second question now, Mrs. Wippleton' [Father W.] 'Er, what's that?'

'Your second question was going to be "Oh my goodness, perhaps we should discuss why the religion of the Die

attracts some people."

'Oh yes? .

`May I give my answer now?, 'Oh yes do. Go ahead.'

Father Wolfe's prosecuting-attorney voice snaps out from the same screen from which looks Dr. Rhinehart.

`The devil has always attracted men through gaudy disguises ah, through bread and circuses ahh and through promises

he cannot fulfil unh. I believe-'

`Wouldn't it be interesting if he never came out of it?' interrupts Rabbi Fishman's voice.

`I beg your pardon, I was speaking.'[Father Wolfe.]

`Oh he'll come out of it says Dr. Dart. `The permanent catatonic looks more tense but less alert. Rhinehart's obviously

just putting on an act'

`How can people be interested in such a nut?' asked Rabbi Fishman.

`I believe he's not always this way, is he?' asks Mrs. Wippleton.

Father Wolfe says: `He talked to me quite pleasantly before we went on the air, but I wasn't fooled. I knew it was just

ah un trick.'

`Dr. Dart, perhaps you'd like to comment on -why the religion of the Die attracts followers,' says Mrs. W.

`Look, he's exhaling again,' says Rabbi Fishman.

`Ignore him,' says Dr. Dart, `we're playing his game.'

Father Wolfe says: `Mrs. Wippleton, I must point out that you asked me to answer that question first and that I was

rudely interrupted by Dr. Dart before I had finished.'

[Silence. The image changes to Mrs. Wippleton, who is sitting wide-eyed and openmouthed looking to her right.]

`Oh my God,' she says.

`Jesus H. Christ,' comes one of the panelists' voices off screen.

[A loud crash and two or three feminine screams from the audience.] `What the hell-is this?'

`STOP THEM!' [Bang.] Mrs. Wippleton, still openmouthed, is seen standing up and fiddling with the microphone at

her neck She tries a smile: `Will the members of the audience please-'

'Ahhhhgggh a long scream.

`Shut her up!'

[The camera jerks a pan over the audience to locate two armed men, one white and one Negro, standing at the door

behind the audience, one looking out, the other glaring at the audience. Then, for obscure reasons, the image of Dr.