The Dice Man (21 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

`But do you think nymphomaniacs enjoy their lives?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Oh no;' she said. `Who could ever seduce a psychiatrist?' For a moment we blinked incredulously at each other, and then she went through a kaleidoscope of colors, ending with typing-paper white.

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

I trailed off, losing the thread of my argument.

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

'But?' I echoed.

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

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

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

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

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

She stared back at me.

`Are you certain?' she asked.

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

`Oh no, Dr. Rhinehart.'

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

Miss Reingold's face went through its psychedelic color show and again ended in typing-paper white. Then she said in the smallest audible voice I've ever heard `But I am.'

`You . . . you . . .'

`I am sexually attracted to you.'

`Oh.'

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

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

I sat erect and leaned toward her.

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

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

At first, for the only time in my life not dictated by the die, I was impotent. I had to sit on the bed beside her, nude, in a modified lotus position, not touching, and for seven or eight minutes meditate with all the powers of a yogi on Arlene's breasts, Linda Reichman's behind and Lil's innards, until, at last, with the powers properly concentrated, I assumed the cat's cradle position over Miss Reingold's assumed corpse position and lowered myself into samadhi (emptiness).

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

But not that close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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