The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

  [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 a
ll 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.'