Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

`And boys … little boys are easier to get at. They're more trusting, less suspicious.'

`But really hurting someone frightens me. I suppose - No! It is a limitation. A limitation I must overcome. To be free

from habitual inhibitions I will have to rape and kill: His chair squeaked, and I heard one of his feet hit the ground.

`No,' he said firmly. `No, Dr. Rhinehart. I'm trying to tell you, raping and killing aren't necessary anymore. Even

hitting may be out.'

`Raping, or at least killing, is absolutely necessary to the Random Man. To shirk that would be to shirk a clear duty.'

`Boys, little boys, even teen-age boys, will do just as good, I'm sure. It's dangerous with little girls, Doc, I warn you.'

`Danger is necessary. The whole concept of the Random Man is the most dangerous and revolutionary ever conceived

by man. If total victory demands blood then blood it must be.'

`No, Dr. Rhinehart, no. You must find another way to work it out. A less dangerous way. These are human beings

you're talking about.'

`Only according to our habitual perceptive patterns. It may well be that little girls are actually fiends from another

world sent to destroy us.

He didn't reply but I heard the chair give one small squeak.

`It's quite clear,' I went on, `that without little girls we wouldn't have women, and women - snorfu buck clisting rinnschauer.'

`No, no, Doc, you're tempting me. I know it, I see it now. Woman are human beings, they must be.'

`Call them what you will, they differ from us, Osterflood, and you can't deny it' `I know, I know, and boys don't. Boys are us. Boys are good.

I think I could learn to love boys and not to have to worry so much about the police anymore.'

`Candy and kindness to girls, O., and a stiff prick to boys you may be right. It would, for you, definitely be a habit breaker.'

`Yes, yes.'

Someone knocked on the door. The hour was, up. As I dazedly rolled my feet onto the floor I felt Mr. Osterflood pumping my hand vigorously: his eyes were blazing with joy.

"This has been the greatest therapeutic hour of my life. You're . . . you're … you're a boy, Dr. Rhinehart, a genuine boy.'

`Thank you, O. I hope you're right.'

Chapter Twenty-four

Slowly and steadily, my friends, I was beginning to go insane. I found that my residual self was changing. When I chose to let the sleeping dice lie and be my `natural self I discovered that I liked absurd comments, anecdotes, actions. I climbed trees in Central Park, assumed the yoga position of meditation during a cocktail party and oozed esoteric, oracular remarks every two minutes which confused and bored even me. I shouted, `I'm Batman,' at the top of my lungs at the end of a telephone conversation with Dr. Mann - all not because the dice said so, but because I felt like it.

I would break into laughter for no reason at all, I would overreact to situations, becoming angry, fearful or compassionate far in excess of that normally demanded. I wasn't consistent. Sometimes I'd be gay, at others sad; sometimes I'd be articulate, serious, brilliant; at others, absurd, abstracted, dumb. Only my being in the process of analysis with Jake kept me free to walk the streets. As long as I did nothing violent, people could still feel relatively at ease: `Poor Dr. Rhinehart, but Dr. Ecstein is helping him: Lil was becoming increasingly worried about me, but since the die always rejected the option that I tell her the truth, I kept making semi-rational excuses for my absurdities. She talked with Jake and Arlene and Dr. Mann, and they all had perfectly rational and usually brilliant explanations of what was happening, but unfortunately no suggestions as to how to end it.

`In a year or two…' said Dr. Mann benevolently to Lil, who told me she almost started screaming.

I assured her that I'd try harder to control my whims.

National Habit-Breaking Month certainly didn't help matters. How upset people become when confronting the breakdown of patterns, how upset or how joy-filled. My jogging into the office, my absurd speeches, my blasphemous efforts to seduce the sexless and incorruptible Miss Reingold, my drunkenness, my nonsensical behavior with my patients - all brought to those who witnessed them shock and dismay, but also, I began to notice, pleasure.

How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd: Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning, if only patterns would break down.

By the end of that month I was thinking if only Nixon would get drunk and say to someone, `Fuck you, buddy: If only William Buckley or Billy Graham would say, `Some of my best friends are Communists'; if only a sportscaster would just once say `Sure is a boring game, folks.'

But they don't. So each of us travels, to Fort Lauderdale, to Vietnam, to Morocco, or gets divorced, or has an affair, or tries a new job, a new neighborhood, a new drug, in a desperate effort to find something new. Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experience.

But in most ways National Habit-Breaking Month turned out to be impractical; I ended up at one point letting the die decide when I would go to bed and for haw, long I would sleep. My sleeping a random number of hours at randomly selected times quickly made me irritable, washed out and occasionally high, specially when kicked by drugs or alcohol. When and whether I ate, washed, shaved, brushed my teeth were also dice determined for a three-day period. As a result, I once or twice found myself using my portable electric razor in the middle of a midtown crunch of people (passers-by looking around for the camera crew), brushing my teeth in a night-club lavatory, taking baths and getting a rubdown at Vic Tanny's and eating my main meal at 4 A.M. at Nedick's.

Another time the Die ordered me to sensitize myself to every moment, to live each moment fully awake. It seemed a marvelously aesthetic thing to do. I pictured myself as Walter Pater John Ruskin Oscar Wilde all rolled into one. What I first became aware of during Aesthetic Sensitivity Day was that I had the sniffles. I may have had them for months, years even, and never noticed it. In January, thanks to this random command of the Die, I became conscious of a periodic intake of air through my nostrils running through some accumulated mucus which produced a sound normally denoted as a `sniff.'

Were it not for the dice I would have remained an insensitive clod.

I became aware of other previously unrealized sense experiences during that Sensitivity Week. Lying in bed with Lil is the early morning hours I would listen fascinated to the symphony of street noises from below, noises which previously I had named silence - meaning that Larry and Evie were not awake. Admittedly after about two days they became a quite monotonous and second-rate symphony, but for two mornings they - and I - lived again. Another day I went to the Museum of Modern Art and tried desperately to experience aesthetic bliss, decided after half an hour to shoot for simple pleasure and settled at the end of a footsore hour and a half for being content with a low level of pain. My visual sense must have atrophied at some point and even the mighty dice couldn't resurrect it. The next day I was happy the dice killed off Walter Pater.

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.