The Dice Man (17 page)

The, second meaning of failure is also simple: failure is failure to please an adult; success is pleasing an adult. Money, fame, winning a baseball game, looking pretty, having good clothes, car, house are' all types of success which primarily revolve around pleasing the adult world. There is nothing intrinsic to the human soul in any of these fears of failure.

Becoming the dice man was difficult because it involved a continual risking of failure in the eyes of the adult world. As dice man I `failed' (in the second sense) again and again. I was rejected by Lil, by the children, by my esteemed colleagues, by my patients, by strangers, by the image of society's values branded into me by thirty years of living. In the second sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in the first sense I never failed. Every time I followed the dictates of the die I was successfully building a house or purposely knocking one down. My mazes were always being solved. I was continually opening myself to new problems and, enjoying solving them.

From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

Fail! Lose! Be bad! Play, risk, dare. Thus, I exulted that evening of Larry's first diceday. I became determined to make Larry and Evie fearless, frameless, egoless humans. Larry would be the first egoless man since Lao-Tzu. I would let him play the role of father of the household and Evie the mother. I'd let them reverse roles. Sometimes they would play parents as they perceive us to be and at other times as they think parents should be. We could all play television heroes and comic-strip characters. And Lil and I every conscientious parent - would change his personality every other day or week.

`I am he who can play many games.'

That is the essence of the happy child of foul, and he never feels he loses. `I am he who is x, y and z, and x, y and z only': that is the essence of the unhappy adult. I would try to extend in my children their childishness. In the immortal words of J. Edgar Hoover: `Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not see God.'

Larry's first day as dice-boy had been cut short by boredom with too much of the same thing. He liked the game; he was able to follow the commands of the dice even when they conflicted with his normal patterns, but after about three hours he simply wanted to play with his trucks and didn't want to risk this pleasure to the dice. Since I have often felt the same way (although not about trucks), I explained that the dice man game should only be played when he felt like it. I emphasized, however, that when he did play he must always follow the dice.

Unfortunately, my efforts during the succeeding two days to turn Larry into Lao-Tzu were confounded by his child's good sense; he gave the dice only extremely pleasant alternatives - ice cream, movies, zoos, horsey, trucks, bikes, money. He began to use the dice as a treasure chest. I finally told him that the dice man game always had to provide risk, that slightly bad choices had to be there too. Surprisingly he agreed. I invented for him that week a dice game which has since become one of our classics: Russian roulette. The initial version of the game for Larry was simple: out of every six alternatives one had to be decidedly unpleasant.

As a result, Larry had some interesting experiences over the next five or six days. (Evie returned to her dolls and to Mrs. Roberts.) He took a long hike in Harlem (I told him to keep an eye open for a big muscular white man with candy named Osterflood) and he was arrested as a runaway. It took me forty minutes to convince the 26th Precinct that I had encouraged my seven-year-old son to take a hike in Harlem.

The dice sent him to sneak into the movie I Am Curious Yellow, a film involving a certain amount of naked sexual interplay, and he returned mildly curious and greatly bored. He crawled on all fours from our apartment down four flights of stairs and along Madison Avenue to Walgreen's and ordered an ice-cream sundae. Another time he had to throw away three of his toys, on the other hand the dice ordered him a new racing-car set. He twice had to let me beat him in chess and three times I had to let him beat me. He had a wonderful hour making ostentatiously stupid moves and thus making it difficult for me to lose.

The dice ordered him to play Daddy and me little Evie for one hour one day and he was soon bored: my little Evie was too weak and too stupid. But he enjoyed greatly playing Daddy to my Lil two days later. I didn't realize at the time that the seeds of group dice therapy and my Centers far Experiments in Totally Random Environments were being planted while Larry and I gambolled about as Daddy and Lil or Superman and a crook or Lassie and a dangerous hippopotamus.

The first and last crisis of this phase of Larry's dicelife occurred four days after Lil had returned from Florida. My contacts with Larry had decreased, and on his own he sometimes created such farfetched alternatives for the dice that when the dice chose them, he wasn't able to carry them out. For example, he told me just before the crisis that once he had given the die the option of his killing Evie (she had broken his racing-car set). When the die chose it, he said, he decided not to. I asked him why.

`She would have tattled on me and you wouldn't have fixed my car.' `If she were dead how could she tattle on you?' I asked.

`Don't worry, she'd find a way.'

The crisis was simple: Larry's dice told him to steal three dollars from Lil's purse and he spent it on twenty-three comic books (a whim of the die which he told me he resented deeply, being quite fond of bubble gum, lollipops, dart guns and chocolate sundaes). Lil wondered where he got the money for all the comic books. He refused to tell her, insisting that she asked Daddy. She did.

`It's very simple, Lil,' I said and while she was putting on Evie's shoes for the fifth time within the hour I consulted the die: I was ordered (one chance in six) to tell the truth.

`I was playing a dice game with him and he lost and had to steal three dollars from your purse.'

She stared at me, a strand of blonde hair dangling on her forehead and her blue eyes momentarily blank with bewilderment.

`He had to steal three dollars from my purse?'

I was seated in my easy chair puffing on a pipe and with a copy of the Times spread across my lap.

`It's a stupid little game I invented while you were gone to help Larry learn self-discipline. Certain options are created by the player, some of them unpleasant, like stealing, and then the dice choose which one you have to do.'

'Who has to do?'

She shooed Evie off to the kitchen and advanced to the edge of the couch, where she lit a cigarette. She'd had a good time in Daytona and we'd enjoyed a nice reunion, but she was beginning to look less tanned and more flushed.

`The player, or players.'

`I don't know what you're talking about.'

`It's simple,' I said (I love these two words: I always imagine Immanuel Kant pronouncing them before he set down the first sentence of The Critique of Pure Reason, or an American President before launching into an explanation of Vietnam War policy).

`To encourage Larry to branch out into new areas of this young-'

'Stealing!'

`-new areas of his young life, I invented a game whereby you make up things to do'

`But stealing, Luke, I mean-'

`Which the dice then choose from among.'

`And stealing was one of the options.'

`It's all in the family,' I said.

She stared at me from near the edge of the couch, her arms folded across her chest, a cigarette between her fingers. She looked amazingly calm.
`Luke,' she began speaking slowly. `I don't know what you think you're doing lately; I don't know whether you're sane or insane; I don't know if you're trying to destroy me or trying to destroy your children or trying to destroy yourself, but if you if you - once more involve Larry in any of your sick games - I -I'll..'

Her amazingly calm face suddenly split like a broken mirror into dozens of cracks of tension, her eyes filled with tears and she twisted her face to the side and gasped a suppressed scream.

`Don't. Please don't,' she whispered, and she sat abruptly on the arm of the couch, her face still averted. `Go tell him no more games. Never.'

'I stood up, the Times fluttering to the floor.

`I'm sorry, Lil. I didn't realize `Never - Larry - more games.'

`I'll tell him.'

I left the room and went to his bedroom and told him, and his career as dice-boy, after only eight days, ended.

Until the Die resurrected it.

My childhood! My childhood! My God, I've now written over a hundred and ten pages and you don't even know whether I was bottle fed or breast fed! You don't know when I was first weaned and how; when I first discovered that girls don't have any weeny, how much I brooded because girls don't have any weeny, when I first decided to enjoy the fact that girls don't have any weeny. You don't know who my great-grandparents were, my grandparents; you don't even know about my mother and father? My siblings! My milieu! My socioeconomic background! My early traumas! My early joys!, The signs and portents surrounding my birth! Dear friends, you don't know any of that `David Copperfield kind of crap' (to quote Howard Hughes) which is the very essence of autobiography! Relax, my friends, I don't intend to tell you.

Traditional autobiographers wish to help you understand how the adult was `formed.'

I suppose most human beings, like clay chamber pots, are 'formed'- and are used accordingly. But I? I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. Living flows, and the only possible justification of an autobiography is that it happened by chance to be written - like this one. Someday a higher creature will write the almost perfect and totally honest autobiography 'I live.'

I will acknowledge, however, that I did, in fact, have a human mother. This much I admit.

In November I received a telephone call from Dr. Mann informing me that Eric Cannon had been acting up while I'd been away a week at a convention in Houston, that it had bees necessary to increased his medication (tranquilizers) and would I please make a special trip over as soon as possible and see him. Eric might have to be transferred to another institution. In my temporary office on the Island I read through Head Nurse Herbie Flamm's report on Eric Cannon.

It had a kind of novelistic power that Henry James sought for fifty years without finding:

It is necessary to report that Patient Eric Cannon is a troublemaker. There haven't been many patients in my lifetime that I would have to label that, but this is one. Cannon is a consciously evil troublemaker. He is disturbing the other patients. Although I have always kept this one of the quietest [sic] wards on the island, since he has been here it is noisy and a mess. Patients who haven't said a word in years now can't shut up. Patients that have stood always in the same corner now play pitch and catch with chairs. Many of the patients are now singing and laughing. This disturbs the patients who want peace and quiet to get better. Someone keeps destroying the television set. I think Mr. Cannon is schizophrenic. Sometimes he wanders around the ward nice and quiet like he was in a dreamworld and other times he sneaks around like a snake, hissing at me and the patients like he was the boss of the ward and not me.

Unfortunately he has followers. Many patients are now refusing sedation. Some do not go to the machine shop for factory therapy. Two patients confined to wheelchairs have pretended to walk. Patients are showing disrespect for the hospital food. When one man was ill to his stomach, another patient began eating the vomit, claiming it tasted much better that way. We do not have enough maximum security rooms on the ward. Also patients who are refusing or not swallowing their sedation will not stop singing and laughing when we politely ask. Disrespect is everywhere. I have sometimes had the feeling on the ward that I do not exist. I mean to say no one pays attention any more. My attendants are often tempted to treat the patients with physical force but I remind them of the Hypocratic Oath. Patients will not stay in their beds at night. Talking with each other is going on. Meetings I think. They whisper. I do not know if there is a rule against this, but I recommend that a rule is made. Whispering is worse than singing.

We have sent several of his followers to ward W [the violent ward] but patient Cannon is tricky. He never does anything himself. I think he is spreading illegal drugs on the ward but none have been found. He never does anything and everything is happening.

I have this to report. It is serious. On September 10, at 2.30 P.M. in the Main Room right in front of the destroyed and lifeless television set, a large group of patients began hugging each other. They had a circle with their arms around each other and they were humming or moaning and kept getting closer and humming and swaying or pulsating like a giant jellyfish or human heart and they were all men. They did this and attendant R. Smith attempted to break them up but their circle was very strong. I attempted to break their circle also as gently as I could but as I was so endeavoring the circle suddenly opened and two men physically clamped me with their arms and hands and I was drawn against my total will into the horrible circle. It was disgusting beyond my ability to say.

The patients showed no respect but continued their illegal hugging until four attendants from ward T plus R. Smith rescued me by breaking up the circle as gently as they could, unfortunately accidentally breaking my arm (the lower tibia minor, I believe).

This event is typical of the poor conditions which have developed on our ward since patient Cannon came. He was in the circle but since there were eight, Dr. Vener said we couldn't send them all to ward W. Hugging is also not technically against the rules which again shows the need for more thinking.