The Dice Man (46 page)

'Mmmmmm,' she said.

`Say that again,' I said.

'Mmmmmm,' she said. The vibrations were delicious.

`I hope the dice keep me with you a long time, Linda.'

`Mmmmmmetoommmm.'

'Ahhhhh,' I said, and burying my head, `mmmmmm.'

`Mmmmmm,' she said.

`MmmmMmmmmNnnnn.'

`Uhnn.'

Our Dice Centers. Ah, the memories, the memories. Those, those were the days: the gods played with each other on earth once more. Such freedom! Such creativity! Such triviality l Such utter chaos! All unguided by the hand of man, but guided by the great blind Die who loves us all. Once, just once in my life have I known what it means to live in a community, to feel part of a larger purpose shared by my friends and my enemies about me. Only in my CETREs have I experienced total liberation - complete, shattering, unforgettable, total enlightenment. In the last year I have never failed to recognize instantly those who have spent a month in one of the centers, whether I'd seen them before or not. We but glance at each other, our faces explode with light, our laughter flows and we embrace. The world will go steadily downhill again if they close all our CETREs.

I suppose you've all read in one place or another all the typical mass-media hysteria about them: the love room, the orgies, the violence, the drugs, the breakdowns into psychosis, the crime, the madness. Time magazine did a fine article about us entitled objectively: `The CETRE Sewers.'

It went as follows:

The dregs of mankind have found a new gimmick: motel madhouses where anything goes. Founded in 1969 by naive philanthropist Horace L. Wipple under the guise of therapy centers, the Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments (CETREs) have been from the first unabashed invitations to orgy, rapine and insanity. Based on the premises of dice theory first expounded by quack psychiatrist Lucius M. Rhinehart (Time, October 26, 1970), the Center's purpose is to liberate their clients from the burdens of individual identity. Those arriving for a 30-day stay in a Center are asked to abandon consistent names, clothing, mannerisms, personality traits, sexual proclivities, religious feelings - in brief, to abandon themselves.

The inmates - called `students' - wear masks much of the time and follow the `Commands' of dice to determine how they spend their time or who they pretend they are. Ostensible therapists often turn out to be students experimenting with a new role. Policemen ostensibly keeping order are almost always students playing the game of policemen. Pot, hash and acid are rampant. Orgies go on every hour on the hour in rooms fancifully called `The Love Room' and `The Pit' - the latter being a totally blackened room with mattressed floor- into which students crawl nude at the whim of the dice and where anything goes.

The results of this are predictable: a few sick people feel they're having a marvelous time; a few healthy people go insane; and the rest somehow survive, often trying to convince themselves they've had a `significant experience.'

In Los Altos Hills, California, last week `significant experience' meant arrest for Evelyn Richards and Mike O'Reilly. The two were having a dice-demanded love feast on the lawn of Stanford University's Whitmore Chapel, and townsmen and police were not amused.

Stanford students, frequent visitors to the Hills' CETRE, are bitterly divided on the Dice Center. Students Richards and O'Reilly claim their hang-ups have disappeared since their three-week trip in the local Center. But Student Association President Bob Orly probably spoke for most of the students when he said: 'The desire to rid yourself of your personal identity is a symptom of weakness. Mankind has always disintegrated when he has followed the call of those who urge him to give up self, ego and identity. The people lured into the Centers are the same ones who get lured deeper and deeper into the drug scene. The dicelife business is just another way of slow suicide for those too weak to try a real way.'

At week's end, Palo Alto Police staged their second raid of the year on the Los Altos Hills Center, but netted nothing but a box of pornographic films, possibly filmed at the Centers. Manager Lawrence Taylor maintains that the only reason he regrets the raids is the favorable publicity it gives the Center among the young. 'We're having to turn away a hundred applicants a week. We don't want to seem exclusive, but we just don't have the facilities.'

A team of Time reporters discovered that friends and relatives of CETRE survivors are uniformly upset with the changes which have occurred in their loved ones. `Irresponsible, erratic, destructive' was the way nineteen-year old Jacob Bleiss of New Haven described his father after Mr. Bleiss returned from the Catskill (ICY.) CETRE.

`He can't hold a job, he's not home a lot of the time, he hits my mother and he seems stoned half the time only on nothing. He's always laughing like an idiot.'

Irrational laughter, a classic symptom of hysteria, is one of the most dramatic manifestations of what psychiatrists are beginning to label the 'CETRE sickness.'

Dr. Jerome Rochman of Chicago University's Hope Medical Center stated in Peoria last week: `If I had been asked by someone to create an institution which would totally destroy the human personality with all its integrated grandeur the striving, the moral questioning, the compassion for others and the sense of specific individual identity - I might have created CETREs. The results are predictable: apathy, unreliability, indecisiveness, manic depressions, inability to relate, social destructiveness, hysteria.'

Dr Paul Bulber of Oxford, Mississippi, goes even further: 'The theory and practice of dice therapy both in and out of CETREs is a greater threat to our civilization than Communism. They subvert everything which American society, indeed, any society, stands for. They should be wiped from the face of the earth: Santa Clara District Court Judge Hobart Button perhaps summed up best the feelings of many people when he said to students Richards and O'Reilly: `The illusions that lead people to throw away their lives are appalling. The rush to drugs and to CETREs is like the rush of lemmings to the sea.'

Or the rush of rats into sewers. Time was, within the necessary limits set by fiction, totally accurate. Over the course of two years five of their reporters went through a month-long stay at a CETRE. The bitterness of the article may partly reflect that three of their hirelings did not report back to Time.

Ever since money contributed by Wipple, myself and others to the DICELIFE Foundation permitted us to build our first Dice Center, our CETREs have changed people. They destroy people for normal functioning within this insane society. It all started when I realized that dice therapy worked slowly with most students because they always knew that other people expected them to be consistent and `normal'; a lifetime of conditioning to respond to such expectation wasn't being broken by the partial and temporary free environments of dicegroups. Only in a total environment in which nothing is expected does a student feel the freedom necessary to express his host of minority selves clawing for life. And then, only by making the gradual change from the totally random environment of a-CETRE through our `Halfway Houses' to the patterned society outside can we make it possible for the student to carry over his dicelife of freedom into the patterned world.

The story of the development of the various centers and of our theory behind them will be told in detail in Joseph Fineman's forthcoming book The History and Theory of Dice Centers (Random Press, 1972). The best single rendering of how the centers work to change a man determined not to change can be found in `The Case of the Square Cubed,' an autobiographical account by Dr. Jacob Ecstein. Jake's personal story was first printed in The See of Whim (April, 1971, vol. II, no. 4, pp. 17-33) but it is to be reprinted in his forthcoming book Blow the Man Down (Random Press, 1972). But for a general background, the Die has suggested I quote from Fineman's forthcoming book.

A student can enter only for a minimum of thirty days and must first pass an oral examination showing he understands the basic rules of the dicelife and the structures and procedures of the CETRE. He is told to come to the Center with absolutely no identifying personal possessions; he may use any names he wishes while at the Center but all names will be considered false ....

CETREs vary in their details. In the Creativity Rooms, the Die often commands a student to invent new and better features for our Random Environments and many procedures and facilities have been modified in this way, some changes remaining peculiar to a single Center and others being adopted by all. All CETREs are similar, however, to the original Corpus Die complex inn Southern California.

Although each of the individual rooms in a Center has a student-invented name (e.g. the Pit, the God room, the Party room, the Room room, etc.) the names vary from Center to Center. There are workrooms (laundries, offices, espy rooms, clinics, a jail, kitchens), playrooms (emotion rooms, marriage rooms, love rooms, God rooms, creativity rooms), and life rooms (restaurants, bars, living rooms, bedrooms, movie house, etc) He must spend from two to five hours a day working at various dice-dictated jobs: he waits on table, sweeps out rooms, makes beds, serves cocktails, acts as a policeman, therapist, clothing clerk, mask maker, prostitute, admissions officer, jailer, etc. In all of these the student is diceliving and playing roles.

At first we kept most of the key positions filled with permanent, trained staff members: at least half the `therapists' were real therapists; half the policemen were real staff members; our `admissions officers' were real and so on.

However, over our brief three-year history, there has been a gradual withering away of the staff. With carefully prepared structures and instructions we find that the third and fourth week students can handle most of the key roles as well as the permanent staff used to. The staff members vary their roles from week to week like the temporary students, who thus can't be certain at any time who is a staff member and who isn't. The staff members know, but they can't prove it, since anyone can claim to be a staff member. Whatever usefulness there is in having permanent, trained personnel in a CETRE rests in their having ability, not in their having `authority.'

[In our Vermont Center we experimented by withdrawing our permanent. dicepeople one by one until the center was functioning without a single trained staff member - only transient students. After two months we infiltrate permanent staff members back in, and they reported that everything was proceeding as chaotically as ever; only a small amount of rigidity and structure had crept in during the two months in which the `state' had totally withered away.] In our structured anarchy [writes Fineman] the authority rests with the therapists (called Referees in most Centers), and with the policemen, whoever they may be. There are rules (no weapons, no violence, no roles or actions inappropriate to the particular game room in which you are acting, etc.) and if the rules are broken, a `policeman' will hake you to a `referee' to determine whether you must be sent to `jail.'

About half our `criminals' are individuals who keep insisting that they are only one real person and want to go home. Since such role playing is inappropriate in many of the workrooms and playrooms, they must be sentenced to jail and to the hard labor of dice therapy - until they are better able to function in multiplicity. The other half of our criminals are students who must play out their roles of lawbreakers even if the laws they break are the strange ones of our Dice Centers.

[After entering structured anarchy, the student, armed with his personal pair of distinctive dice, proceeds from room to room, from role to role, from job to job: from cocktail party to a creativity room, from an orgy in the - Pit to the God room, from the madhouse to the love room to the little French restaurant to working in the laundry to acting as jailer to male prostitute to President of the United States and so on at the whim of his imagination and of the Die.]

The Pit, although justly notorious, is mostly used by students in their first ten days at a Center. It is useful for persons with deep-seated inhibitions regarding sexual desires and activities; the total darkness and anonymity permit the inhibited student to follow dice decisions he could never follow otherwise. One woman, fat and ugly, spent three straight days in the Pit, coming out only to eat, wash and use the bathroom. Was she different at the end of her three days? She was unrecognizable. Instead of a slump-shouldered, eye-avoiding lump, she carried herself proudly, looked at everyone electrically and oozed sexuality.

The Pit is also helpful in breaking down the normal inhibitions about sexual contact with members of the same sex. In a totally dark room, who is doing what to whom is often ambiguous, and one may be reveling in caresses which turn out to be by someone of the same sex. Since (`anything goes') in the Pit one may be the unwilling participant in a sexual act which at first horrifies and disgusts but which, one often discovers, neither horrifies nor disgusts when one realizes no one will ever know.

[in the Pit our students often learn that, in the immortal words of Milton in his great sonnet to his blind wife, `They also serve who only lie and wait']

At first there was no money in any of our CETREs, but we soon relearned that money is more basic perhaps than seat as a source of unfulfilled selves in our society. We now arrange that upon entering, each student receives a certain amount of real money to play with, the amount chosen by the Die from among six options listed by the student He begins with from zero to three thousand dollars, the median amount being about five hundred dollars. When he leaves he has to cast again from among the same six options he listed when entering to determine how much his bill for his month-long stay will be. When he leaves he can take out any money he has saved, earned or stolen, less, of course, our randomly determined bill ....

Students receive wages for the work they do while in the Center and these wages are continually fluctuating so as to encourage students to work at certain jobs that need to be done.