The Dice Man (44 page)

`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.

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.

Three feet from me rocked two young men engaged in a passionate, deep-throated kiss. I felt as if I had been halfslammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet cunts.

I moved past them into a melee of dancing boys and men and made my way to a vacant table. It was about two inches by three and held the remains of three beer bottles, eleven cigarettes and a lipstick. After staring noncommittally and unseeingly into the chaos of noise, smoke and males for a minute or two, a young man asked me if I wanted a drink and I ordered a beer. Glancing around, I saw that at the two dozen tables only a few people were now sitting, all men except for one middle-aged couple immediately to my right. The man had a sickly smile on his face and the woman looked cool, and amused. When I looked over, she stared at me as she might at an inmate in a mental hospital, her husband simply appeared nervous; I winked at him.

My eyes couldn't seem to focus on any single person or couple but only on the torsos of males dancing. Finally, I raised my eyes and looked at the two men dancing nearest to me. The man, or rather the tallest of the two men, was in his late twenties, rather ruggedly homely, with a crooked nose and bushy eyebrows. The other person was shorter, younger and very good-looking in a young Peter Fonda sort of way. They were dancing rather disinterestedly and looking past each other at other couples. As I was watching, the younger man suddenly turned his eyes on me, lowered his lashes and raised one shoulder and gave me a sensual feminine sexual parting of moist lips. It was a sexual shock. It was one of the most lecherous and exciting looks I had ever received.

Ping! Did this mean that all my life I had secretly been a latent homosexual? Did my sexual response to a female come on in a male body imply healthy heterosexuality, debased perversion or healthy bisexuality? It was time to take stock. Was it the intention of the Die that I be active or passive: Zeus to Ganymede or Hart Crane to a sailor? Was I to be Socrates entering into the old dialogue with one of his boys, or Genet supine and spread before the onslaught of some six-foot walking erection? The Die had been ambiguous, but it seemed more appropriate and habit breaking to be passive arid feminine than aggressive and masculine. But where would I find a Zeus to my six-foot-four Ganymede? Where was the Great Cock that could split me in two? It would be much easier to find someone who saw in me the Awful Erection of his dreams. But ease was irrelevant. I needed to be a woman, to play the role of a woman. Even if I loomed over my husband like Mount Everest over a stunted shrub I must learn to spread myself supine before him. My femininity must be given freedom. The dice man could never be complete until he was a woman.

`Can I buy you a drink?' the man asked, standing above me like Everest above a stunted shrub. It was the exCleveland Brown defensive tackle, and he looked down at me with world weary knowingness. And a smile.

You must never question the wisdom of the Die. His ways are inscrutable. He leads you by the hand into an abyss and, lo, it is a fertile plain. You stagger beneath the burden he places upon you and, behold, you soar. The Die never deviates from the Tao, nor do you.

The desire to manipulate your surrender to the Die so that you may gain from it is futile. Such surrender never frees you from the pains of the ego. You must give up all your struggling, all your purposes, values and goals, and then, only then, when you have given up the belief that you can use the Die to gain some ego end, will you discover liberation from your burdens and your life flow free.

There is no compromise: you must surrender everything.

from The Book of the Die

`I'm a virgin,' I said in a thin, delicate voice. `Please be gentle.'

There are two paths: you use the Die, or you let the Die use you.

from The Book of the Die

`Christ,' I said heavily, `am I going to be sore.'

Dear Dr. Rhinehart,

I admire your work so much. My husband and I do our dice exercises every morning after breakfast and again before bedtime and we feel years younger. When are you going to have your own TV show? Before we began playing with emotional roulette and Exercise K we almost never spoke to each other, but now we're always shouting or laughing even when we're not playing dice games. Could you please give us some advice as to how we might better bring up our daughter Ginny to serve the Die? She's a willful girl and doesn't say her prayers to It regular and is almost always the same sweet shy girl and frankly we're worried. We've tried to get her to do the dice exercises with us in the morning or by herself, but nothing seems to work. My husband beats her every now and then when the Die says to but it doesn't help much either. The only dicedoctor in these parts left for Antarctica three months ago so we have no one to turn to but you.

Yours by Chance, Mrs. A. J. Kempton, (Missouri)

Dear Dr. Rhinehart,

I discovered my sixteen-year-old daughter on our living room couch with the postman this afternoon, and she referred me to you. What the hell is this all about? 

Sincerely Yours, John Rush

The birth of the first dicebaby in the world was I suppose, an event of some historical importance. It was just after Christmas in 1969 that I got a phone call from Arlene announcing that she and Jake were rushing off to the hospital to have our dicebaby. They knew where I could be reached, since I'd stopped off two days before to give them each a Christmas present: Arlene a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and Jake a rakish bathing suit (Not my will, O Die, but Thy will be done).

When I arrived, Arlene was still in labor, and her private room was something of a messy jumble from two huge opened suitcases, filled, as far as I could see, entirely with baby clothes. I noticed at least thirty diapers with two green dice branded on each, and many of the pajamas, shirts, pants and tiny baby socks seemed to be similarly monogrammed. I found this to be in bad taste and told Arlene so while she was in the middle of a labor pain, but when she stopped groaning (she claimed it was mostly pleasurable), she assured me the Die had picked a one-in-three shot and ordered the monograms.

The three of us chatted about our hopes for the baby, with Arlene doing most of the talking. She told us that she had given 215 chances in 216 that she practice natural childbirth and breast-feed the child and that much to her delight the Die had chosen that she should do both. But most of her talk was about when the child should be potty trained and when it should be dicetrained.

`We've got to start early,' Arlene kept saying. `I don't want our baby corrupted by society the way I was for thirty-five years.'

'Still, Arlene,' I said, `for the first two or three years I think the child can develop randomly without using the dice.'

`No, Luke, it wouldn't be fair to him,' she replied: `It would be like keeping candy away from him.'

`But a child tends to express all his minority impulses - at least until he gets to school. They may batten down the hatches there.'

`Perhaps, Lukie,' she said, `but he'll see me casting dice to see which breast he gets or whether we go for a walk or whether he naps, and he'll feel left out. What I'd like to do .is ...'

But she went into such a long labor pain and it came so soon after the previous one that Jake buzzed for the nurse and they wheeled her off to the delivery room. Jake and I trailed after her down the hall.

`I don't know, Luke,' Jake said after a while, squinting up at hopefully. `I think this dice business may be getting out of hand.'

`I think so too,' I said.

`The dice may be good for us uptight adults, but I'm not sure about two-year-olds.'

`I agree.'