The Dice Man (24 page)

`I guess I'm a little late ... Maybe'

'Were you - were you supposed to meet a girl here who -'

`Yes,' he broke in. `I was supposed to meet a girl here.'

He smiled nervously and adjusted his blond-framed glasses. I noticed two pimples on his forehead.

`What's your name?'

I asked, still holding the door ajar.

'Er - Ray Smith.'

`I see.'

His real name as I remembered it was O'Reilly, and he was, according to his answers on the questionnaire, a smooth, uninhibited young man with women. He was to meet a prostitute, one I had personally hired and instructed to make him feel as inadequate as possible. He'd arrived ahead of schedule. 'Come in, Ray,' I said and swung open the door. 'My is Ned Petersen. I'm here to make sure Terry - that's our girl's' name - gives you her money's worth.'

He looked at me - I was naked - and at the absolutely conventional furniture as if he were the first visitor to a Martian living room.

`Terry's already in bed. I was warming her up. You want to give her a ride now?'

`No. No. You go ahead. I'll read a book,' and he stared toward the bookcase.

`Don't be silly,' I said. `She's here for you. I was just tuning her up, breaking her in.'

`But if you . . .' he looked at me conscientiously. There was egg or something near the shoulder of his sweater. Not too smooth.

`Tell you what,' I said. `Let's both go in to her. It would be lonely for either of us alone out here.'

`No,' no. You go ahead.'

`Won't do it. Absolutely refuse to leave you alone in the living room. Now come. Come on.'

I took him by the elbow and led him into the bedroom. The bed was empty.

'Terry?'

`Yes,' came a highly affected voice from the bathroom.

`A young student of mine is here. Young divinity student. Very lonely young man. Desperately needs companionship. Can he join us?'

What Ray Smith O'Reilly thought of that I didn't know. From the bathroom came silence.

`Who?' she finally asked.

I walked over close to the door.

`A very lonely young anchorite needs your attention. He has a deep need. He's almost crying. Can he join us in bed?'

`Oh yes,' she answered promptly.

Beside the bed where I had left him, Smith stood like an abandoned bulbless lamp. With great gentleness I helped him undress and guided him to the location of the bed. He pulled the covers up to his chin like an eighty-year-old preparing for thirty below. Soon Terry, clutching the same towel at the same place, came modestly out of the bathroom. Smith stared at her as at another piece of Martian furniture.

`Terry Thrush, I'd like you to meet George Lovelace. George, this is Terry.'

`Oh, hi,' said Terry; with a bright smile.

`How do you do?' said George Ray Smith O'Reilly Lovelace, `How would you like to fuck her, George?'

I asked, my own penis lifting its head in more than idle curiosity. `You first,' he blurted.

`Okay, me first, Terry. Give me your ass again.'

Terry looked a little surprised, but quickly hopped into bed beside our young man, and stuck her little behind plumply into the air. Her face on a pillow she turned, smiling brightly at George, whose head lay looking ceiling ward on the other pillow a foot away. George looked sick.

I place my penis; prodded and poked, and, with all deliberate speed, it plunged deep into Terry's warm, wet interior. My God, that was good. Terry had helped aim me with her hands but now as I began easing myself in and out she moved herself on her elbows over to silent George and - undoubtedly smiling brightly to the last - moved her face over his and began giving him her sexy, snakelike kisses.

George lay as rigid as a dried straw, except for his central limb, which was as limp as a wet straw. I pulled Tiny Terry's thighs against me and more or less picked her bodily up and deposited her face on Georgie's belly. Discovering a poor, lonely, unloved cock, she did her duty.

The long and the short of it, Reader - and that is the usual sequence in these affairs - was that I made a splendid splash in Terry's interior and Terry did enough favorable groaning and straining to please everyone, presumably including herself. When she finally let go of old Sir George his limb was just as limp as before. However, as Terry rolled onto her back away from him I saw that the rest of him was at last limp too. Sir George too had seen the Holy Grail.

`Terry has a very nice mouth, don't you think, George?'

'Er, yes, she does,' he said.

`You're exceptionally beautiful in the interior, Terry,' I went on.

'Thank you,' she said. My two young friends were lying on their backs side by side while I had settled back on my knees near the foot of the bed. I was feeling very tired and depressed, and my mood was manifesting itself by my heavy-handed irony.

'Is your ass as warm and juicy as your cunt, Terry?'

`I don't know,' she said and she giggled.

`Live and learn, or in the immortal words of Leonardo da Vinci: "Anus delictoris ante uturusi sec."

Tell me, George do you feel now that someone loves you, that life does have a meaning after all?'

`I - beg pardon?'

`I was telling Miss Truss that you came here tonight very unhappy and lonely and unloved. Has she given you the spiritual nourishment which you needed?'

'A little bit, I guess.'

`Hear that, Terry, only a little bit. George must really be depressed. Don't you realize, George, that Terry kissed you and caressed you without your even asking? She gave herself unrequested and unselfishly for your pleasure and enlightenment. Now what do you say?'

His face contorted nervously; he looked at me. Finally he said: `Thank you, I guess.' `You're welcome,' said Terry. `I like to help people.'

'Terry is unusually helpful, wouldn't you say, Ray?'

`Yes, she is.'

`Let's all have a drink. Scotch for you, Mr. Lovelace?'

`Yes, thank you.'

As I plodded off nude to the liquor cabinet, I found myself for the first time wondering about the reliability of our questionnaires. Little Miss T., the inhibited Catholic virgin, had showed all the juiciness and technique of a fortythree-year old nymphomaniac. And lover-boy O'Reilly ... Well, back to the old data sheets.

After we'd finished our drinks, during which we had several sporadic conversations on (a) the weather (we need snow), (b) Renaissance history (Rabelais was actually a serious thinker), and (c) religion (it's frequently misunderstood), I said firmly to George: `Your turn now, Lovelace.'

`Oh yes, thank you.'

Terry lay on her back to receive him, and after several youthful giggles, he seemed to enter the promised land. The doorbell rang.

For a moment I wondered if there weren't some electronic device deep in Miss Tracy's womb which triggered the apartment bell. It seemed unlikely, but...

I located a bathrobe this time, told the little ones to carry on without me and marched stoically to the door. There, as I leaned my slightly debauched face around the edge of the door, stood Dr. Felloni. We exchanged stares in total disbelief for five full seconds. Then she blushed so fully that I can only describe it by saying that her head, which was of course nodding vigorously, had a climax. She turned and ran down the hall. The next day her secretary phoned to say that she was attending a conference in Zurich and would be away for two weeks.

My experience with Terry Tracy and the results of the Columbia Copulation Caper in general were a revelation to me. After Dr. Felloni had left the apartment door that night and taken a taxi across the Atlantic to Zurich, I had returned to the bedroom to find Tracy and George moiling in the bed and as oblivious of my presence as they had apparently been of my absence. I stood there watching the sheet which covered George's behind rising and falling in regular rhythm and as the sheet shuddered I had something like a Religious Revelation. Other people also were capable of playing artificially imposed roles - and therefore dice-dictated roles. If Terry had in fact been even somewhat virginal, she was this evening demonstrating a remarkable ability to open herself to new experience. If she were in fact a nymphomaniac, she had earlier demonstrated a shyness and inhibition in marvelous contrast to her natural open-door policy. And George Lovelace seemed to be a good learner too; from clod to copulator in thirty minutes.

As I stood there I began to feel that I had only been playing at the dice man. It had been a jeu d'esprit of which I was proud but nothing more: a maladjusted man's way of epater les bourgeois without the bourgeoisie knowing about it. But had I innocently discovered gunpowder and then used it for firecrackers, when a larger man would have used it for explosives? Or a magnifying glass which I was using to create pleasant images but which might be used to see something new? Shouldn't I try to turn other people into dice men? If Arlene enjoyed housewife-with-a-lech for a day and Terry call-girl-for-a-day, might not each enjoy other roles the dice might fling her way, as I had? Shouldn't I be using dice games as dice therapy for my friends and patients? My dice life had become almost a joke; at that instant it seemed a mission - a quest I might pursue to lift my fellow men to new heights. I had cast the dice as a bitter game I'd played against the world; now I would cast them to build New Selves, Random Men. Boredom would be wiped out with the vaccine of the dice, like polio. I would create a New World, a better world, a Place of Joy and Variety and Spontaneity. I would become the Father of a new Race. Dicepeople.

'Could you please get us a towel?' Terry asked, most of her face and body hidden by the sheet and George's ample bulk. Even this rude interruption did not destroy my elevation. During these glorious minutes I was taking myself totally seriously. I went to the bathroom and got them a towel and after a giggle or two they lay together silently, again oblivious of my presence. As the sheet lay limp and still over their silent forms I tiptoed to the spot where my trousers were deposited on the floor and extricated from the pocket my dice.

`Odd,' I would begin dice therapy, with George and Terry tonight; 'even,' I would not. Confidently I flipped a die onto the foot of the bed: a six. Ummmm. Like the good fairy who his left a dime under the pillow, I picked up my clothes and stole away into the night, the immortal words of Christ echoing in my ears 'Physician, help yourself: thus you help your patients too. Let this be his best help that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.'

I was determined to rip from my body the undistinguished clothes of Dr. Lucius Rhinehart and stand forth before my patients naked and revealed: The Dice Man.

The first adult human being to be introduced into the dicelife by Dr. Rhinehart was Arlene Ecstein, inconspicuous wife of Dr. Jacob Ecstein, noted analyst and writer. Mrs. Ecstein had been complaining for several years of various nervous ailments which she attributed to sexual frustration caused by the sporadic nature of her husband's attentions. Dr. Ecstein, who didn't have time, finally decided in mid January that she would enter analysis so that her problem might be treated in depth. With her husband's encouragement (`Give it to her, Luke, baby') she began analysis with Dr. Rhinehart. The first few sessions had been penetrating and Mrs. Ecstein found herself able to open up more frequently than before. Her husband noted that her nervous symptoms declined or disappeared and that her compulsive sexuality seemed relieved.

It was after a little over six weeks of this treatment (three times a week) that Dr. Rhinehart, following his Religious Revelation during the Rhinehart-Felloni Study of Amorality Tolerance, determined to begin dice therapy. He began with the quiet dignity which so marked this whole stage of his life.

`Don't take off your bra, Arlene, I want to talk to you about something important' `Can't it wait?'

`No.'

He took out two new silver dice, fresh from the factories of Taxco, Mexico, and placed them on his desk. He requested Mrs. Ecstein to seat herself in front of the desk.

`What is it, Lukie?'

'Those are dice.'

`I see.'

`We are going to begin dice therapy.'

'Dice therapy?'

Dr. Rhinehart explained with great clarity the practice and theory of casting dice to determine action. Mrs. Ecstein listened with close attention although she squirmed frequently on her chair. When it was clear that he had finished, she remained silent awhile and then heaved a deep sigh.

`But I still don't see why,' she said. `You say I might let the dice decide whether we fuck this morning or not. I think that's silly. I want to fuck. You want to fuck. Why bring the dice into it?'

'Because many small parts of you don't want to fuck. A small part of you wants to hit me, or wants to run back to Jake, or wants to talk to me about psychoanalysis. But these parts of you are never allowed to live. You suppress them because most of you just wants to fuck.'

`If they're small parts of me, let them stay small.' Dr. Rhinehart tipped back in his chair and sighed. He took out a pipe and began filling it. He took one of the silver dice and shook it in one hand and dropped it on his desk. He frowned.

'I'm going to tell you how a God was born: the birth of the Dice Man.'

Dr. Rhinehart then narrated the story, slightly edited, of his discovery of the dice and his initial rape of Mrs. Ecstein. He concluded "had I not given a small part of myself a chance to be chosen by the die we wouldn't be sitting here right now.'

`You only gave it one chance in six?'

'Yes. The point is that I gave a minority self a chance to be heard.'

'Only one chance in six?'

`We can never be full human beings until we develop all important aspects of ourselves.'

`Only one-sixth of you wanted me?'

'Arlene, that was an historical accident. We're talking theory. Don't you see how yielding to the dice opens whole new areas of life?'

`I feel used.'

`If I seduced you out of cold-blooded lust you would feel pleased. Because I let chance intervene you feel used.'