The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
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on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine – but don’t slug the bastard with a bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.
It is a conservative doctrine, guaranteed to help the patient avoid violent, passionate and unusual acts and to permit him a prolonged, respectable life of moderate misery. In fact, it is a doctrine aimed at making everyone live like a psychotherapist. The thought nauseated me.
These trivial insights actually began to form in the weeks following my first unexplained plunge into depression, a depression ostensibly produced by a long writing block on my ‘book,’ but actually part of a general constipation of the soul that had been a long time building up. I remember sitting at my big oak desk after breakfast each morning before my first appointment reviewing my past accomplishments and future hopes with a feeling of scorn. I would take off my glasses and, reacting to both my thoughts and the surrealistic haze which became my visual world without my glasses, I would intone dramatically, ‘Blind! Blind!’ and bang my boxing-glove-sized fist down on the desk with a dramatic crash.
I had been a brilliant student throughout my educational career, piling up academic honors like my son Larry collects bubblegum baseball cards. While still in medical school I published my first article on therapy, a well-received trifle called ‘The Physiology of Neurotic Tension.’ As I sat at my desk, all articles I had ever published seemed absolutely as good as other men’s articles: blah. My successes with patients seemed identical to those of my colleagues: insignificant. The most I had come to hope for was to free a patient from anxiety and conflict: to alter him from a life of tormented stagnation to one of complacent stagnation. If my patients had untapped creativity or inventiveness or drive, my methods of analysis had failed to dig them out. Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow-working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight. The thought pleased me.
In the midst of my cynicism I would occasionally daydream of the future. My hopes? To excel in all that I had been doing in the past: to write widely acclaimed articles and books; to raise my children so they might avoid the mistakes I had made; to meet some technicolor woman with whom I would become soulmate for life. Unfortunately, the thought that these dreams might all be fulfilled plunged me into despair.
I was caught in a bind. On the one hand I was bored and dissatisfied with my life and myself as they had been for the past decade; on the other, no conceivable change seemed preferable. I was too old to believe that lounging on the shores of Tahiti, becoming a wealthy television personality, being buddy-buddy with Erich Fromm, Teddy Kennedy or Bob Dylan, or entertaining Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch in the same bed for a month or so would change anything. No matter how I twisted or turned there seemed to be an anchor in my chest which held me fast, the long line leaning out against the slant of sea taut and trim, as if it were cleated fast into the rock of the earth’s vast core. It held me locked, and when a storm of boredom and bitterness blew in I would plunge and leap against the line’s rough-clutching knot to be away, to fly before the wind, but the knot grew tight, the anchor only dug the deeper in my chest; I stayed. The burden of my self seemed inevitable and eternal.
My colleagues, and even myself, mumbling coyly by our couches, all asserted that my problem was absolutely normal: I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis. The assumption is that a limited and bored self is the unavoidable, all-embracing norm. And I was beginning to agree until, after a few months of wallowing in depression (I furtively had purchased a .38 revolver and nine cartridges), I came washing up on the shore of Zen.
For fifteen years I had been leading a rather ambitious, driving, driven sort of life; anyone who opts for medical school and psychiatry has to have a pretty healthy neurosis burning inside him to keep the motor going. My own analysis by Dr Timothy Mann had made me understand why my motor was racing away but hadn’t slowed it. I now cruised consistently at sixty miles per hour rather than oscillating erratically between fifteen and ninety-five, but if anything blocked my rapid progress along the speedway I became as irritable as a cabby waiting for a parade to pass. When Karen Horney led me to discover D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts and Zen, the world of the rat race, which I had assumed to be normal and healthy for an ambitious young man, seemed suddenly like the world of a rat race.
I was stunned and converted – as only the utterly bored can be. Seeing drive, greed and intellectual aspiration as meaningless and sick in my colleagues, I was able to make the unusual generalization to myself; I too had the same symptoms of grasping after illusions. The secret, I seemed to learn, was in not caring, in accepting limitations, conflicts and ambiguities of life with joy and satisfaction, in effortless drifting with the flow of impulse. So life was meaningless? Who cares. So my ambitions are trivial? Pursue them anyway. Life seems boring? Yawn.
I followed impulse. I drifted. I didn’t care.
Unfortunately, life seemed to get more boring. Admittedly I was cheerfully, even gaily bored, where before I had been depressedly bored, but life remained essentially uninteresting. My mood of happy boredom was theoretically preferable to my desire to rape and kill, but personally speaking, not much. It was along about this stage of my somewhat sordid road to truth that I discovered the Dice Man.
Chapter Two
My life before D-Day was routine, humdrum, repetitious, trivial, compulsive, disordered, irritable – the life of a typical successful married man. My new life began on a hot day in the middle of August, 1968.
I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four or five minutes we both rolled over and she began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.
‘Nnn morning, sweetheart,’ one of us would eventually say.
‘Nnnn,’ would say the other.
From that point on the day’s dialogue would all be downhill, but with warm, languid hands and lips floating over the body’s most sensitive surfaces, the world was as near perfection as it ever gets. Freud called it a state of ego-less polymorphous perversity and frowned upon it, but I have little doubt that he never had Lil’s hands gliding over him. Or his own wife’s either for that matter. Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone ever effectively stroked his penis.
Lil and I were slowly advancing to the stage where play is replaced by passion when two, three, four thumps resounded from the hall, our bedroom door opened and sixty pounds of boy-energy exploded onto our bed in a graceless flop.
‘Time to wake up!’ he shouted.
Lil had instinctively turned away from me at the sound of the thumps and, although she arched her lovely behind against me and squirmed intelligently, I knew from long experience that the game was over. I had tried to convince her that in an ideal society parents would make love in front of their children as naturally as they would eat or talk, that ideally the children would caress, fondle and make love to the parent, or both parents, but Lillian felt different. She liked to make love under sheets, alone with her partner, uninterrupted. I pointed out that this showed unconscious shame and she agreed and went on hiding our caresses from the kids. Our girl, a forty-five-pound variety, was by this time announcing in slightly louder tones than her older brother:
‘Cock-a-doodle-do! Time to get up.’
Generally, we were up. Occasionally, when I don’t have a nine o’clock patient, we encourage Larry to fix himself and his sister some breakfast. This he is happy to do, but the curiosity aroused by the sound of shattering glassware or the lack of sound of anything from the kitchen makes our extra minutes in bed unrewarding: it is difficult to enjoy sensual bliss while certain that the kitchen is on fire. This particular morning Lil arose right away, modestly keeping her front parts turned away from the children, slipped