Dice Man Read online

  Luke Rhinehart

  THE

  DICE

  MAN

  THE OVERLOOK PRESS

  New York

  This edition first published in the United States in 1998 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 1971 by George Cockcroft

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now

  known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher,

  except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a

  review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rhinehart, Luke.

  The dice man / Luke Rhinehart.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR3568.H5D54 1998 98-10741

  818’.54—dc21 CIP

  ISBN: 9781590207048

  9 11 13 15 17 18 16 14 12 10

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PREFACE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  EPILOGUE

  To A.

  J.

  M.

  and a “four”

  without any of whom,

  no book.

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

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

  —from The Book of the Die

  PREFACE

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

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

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

  I tell my life’s story for that humble reason which has inspired every user of the form: to prove to the world I am a great man. I shall fail, of course, like the others. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” Elvis Presley once said, and no one can refute him. I tell of a man’s instinctive attempt to fulfill himself in a new way and I will be judged insane. So be it. Were it otherwise, I would fear I had failed.

  We are not ourselves; actually there is nothing we can call a “self” anymore; we are manyfold, we have as many selves as there are groups to which we belong… . The neurotic has overtly a disease from which everybody is suffering …

  —J. H. van den Berg

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

  —Carl Jung

  The torch of chaos and doubt—this is what the sage steers by.

  —Chuang-Tzu

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

  —Nietzsche

  Anybody can be anybody.

  —The Dice Man

  1

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

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

  I realize that it’s your job as a reader to try to create a credible consistent pattern out of all this, but I’m afraid I must add that I am normally atheistic, have given away at random thousands of dollars, have been a sporadic revolutionary against the governments of the United States, New York City, the Bronx and Scarsdale, and am still a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. I am the creator, as most of you know, of those nefarious Dice Centers for experiments in human behavior which have been described by the Journal of Abnormal Psychology as “outrageous,” “unethical,” and “informative”; by The New York Times as “incredibly misguided and corrupt”; by Time magazine as “sewers”; and by the Evergreen Review as “brilliant and fun.” I have been a devoted husband, multiple adulterer and experimental homosexual; an able, highly praised analyst, and the only one ever dismissed from both the Psychiatrists Association of New York (PANY) and from the American Medical Association (for “ill-considered activities” and “probable incompetence”). I am admired and praised by thousands of dicepeople throughout the nation but have twice been a patient in a mental institution, once been in jail, and am currently a fugitive, which I hope to remain, Die willing, at least until I have completed this 305-page autobiography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I had been a brilliant student throughout my educational career, piling up academic honors like my son Larry collects bubblegum baseball cards. While still in medical school I published my first article on therapy, a well-received trifle called “The Physiology of Neurotic Tension.” As I sat at my desk, all articles I had ever published seemed absolutely as good as other men’s articles: blah. My successes with patients seemed identical to those of my colleagues: insignificant. The most I had come to hope for was to free a patient from anxiety and conflict: to alter him from a life of tormented stagnation to one of complacent stagnation. If my patients had untapped creativity or inventiveness or drive, my methods of analysis had failed to dig them out. Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow-working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of jobs overnight. The thought pleased me.

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

  I was caught in a bind. No matter how I twisted or turned there seemed to be an anchor in my chest which held me fast, the long line leaning out against the slant of sea taut and trim, as if it were cleated fast into the rock of the earth’s vast core. It held me locked, and when a storm of boredom and bitterness blew in I would plunge and leap against the line’s rough-clutching knot to be away, to fly before the wind, but the knot grew tight, the anchor only dug the deeper in my chest; I stayed. The burden of my self seemed inevitable and eternal.

  However, after a few months of wallowing in depression (I furtively had purchased a .38 revolver and nine cartridges), Karen Horney led me to discover D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts and Zen, and the world of the rat race, which I had assumed to be normal and healthy for an ambitious young man, seemed suddenly like the world of a rat race.

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

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


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

  2

  My life before D-Day was routine, humdrum, repetitious, trivial, compulsive, disordered, irritable—the life of a typical successful married man. My new life began on a hot day in early July, 1968.

  I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four or five minutes we both rolled over and she began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.