The Dice Man

`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.