Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

warm, soft thigh.

`So what are your natural desires? What do you really want?'

Silence.

`I want being with you. I want sunshine. Love, caresses, kisses. [Pause] Water. Good books. Opportunities to practice

the dicelife with people.'

`But whose kisses, whose caresses?'

`Yours,' I answered, blinking into the sun. `Terry's, Arlene's, Lil's, Gregg's. A few others. Women I meet in the street.'

She didn't respond.

`Good music, a chance to write,' I went on. `Good film occasionally, the sea.'

`I feel . . . Huh! You're not even as romantic as I used not to be, are you?'

`Not this particular me.'

`You love me deeply though,' she said, and I looked up to catch her smiling down at me.

`I love you,' I said holding her eyes with mine. We looked deeply and warmly at each other for more than a minute.

Then she said softly: 'Up yours.'

We watched a gull circling and swooping, and she started to ask something but stopped. I turned my head to press my

mouth against the inside of one thigh. It was hot and salty.

She sighed and pushed my head away.

`Then don't spread your legs,' I said.

`I want to spread my legs.'

`Well,' I said, and buried my head between them and sucked in a firm hot fold of the other thigh. She pushed medium

hard at my head, but I had one arm around her now and held fast.

Letting her fingers relax in my hair, she said `Some things are naturally good and others aren't'

`Mmmmmm,' I said.

'The dicelife sometimes takes us away from what's naturally good.'

`Mmmmmm' `I think that's too bad.'

I broke my mouth hold and hauled myself up on an elbow alongside her.

`Was that crazy slavery deal I created with you a natural and good thing?' I asked.

She smiled at me.

`It must have been,' she said.

`Everybody is always doing what seems to them to be naturally good. Why is everybody miserable?'

I unhooked her bikini top and slid it off her onto the blanket. A ridge of sand lay across the upper half of each breast. I

brushed it off.

`Everybody's not miserable,' she said. `I'm not miserable.'

`You were before you discovered the dicelife.'

`But that's because before I had a sex hang-up. Now I don't'

`Mmmmmm,' I said, my mouth filled with her left breast and my right hand holding the warmth of the other.

`The Die is good for getting you over certain hang-ups,' she said, `but then I think maybe it isn't so necessary any

more.'

I un-swallowed her breast, licked the taut nipple a few seconds and said `Personally, I think you may be right'

`You do?'

`Certainly.'

I untied the near side of her bikini bottom. `I don't consult it about a lot of things,' I said. `But when I'm in doubt, I

find it nice to consult the Die.'

I untied the far side of the bikini.

`Bur why bother?' Linda said. She had a hand now under my trunks and was pushing them down with the other.

`In consult the Die at dawn every day about whether I should consult it about everything during the day, about only

the big things or not consult it at all under any circumstances. Today, for example, it told me not to consult it about

anything.'

'so even your dicelessness is filled with the Die?'

`Mmmmmmnnnrui.'

`So you're acting naturally today, huh?'

`MmmmmmMmmmmm., 'I hope you're enjoying eating the sand down there.'

'Mmmmmm.'

'That's nice,' she said. `I like that I'm glad you told me. I like 'to know that what you're doing is natural.'

I came up for air and said: `Most things people do aren't natural the first time they do them. That's what learning is all

about. That's what the dicelife is all about.'

'Mmmmmm,' she said.

`If we always limited ourselves to what was natural to us, we would be midget dwarfs compared to our potential. We

must always be incorporating new areas of human action which we can make natural.'

'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.'

Chapter Seventy-three

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.'