The Search for the Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
‘Good,’ said Hayes. He stood. ‘But when you do, we want you to get in touch with us. Immediately.’ He reached across the desk and handed me a card.
‘May I ask why my father, after all these years, might now want to get in touch with me?’
Macavoy too now rose.
‘He’s your dice daddy,’ Hayes said. ‘Maybe the dice will tell him to.’
His father – his father was still alive somewhere.
After everyone had left the office, Larry sat frozen in his chair, trying to control the trembling in his hands, his lips, even his gut. The man whose betrayal had poisoned his life was now injecting some new infection into its present flow.
A successful psychiatrist, in the late sixties Luke had thought he’d discovered the cure for human misery: injecting chance systematically into one’s life. He thought he could break down the normal stuck-in-the-mud personality and thus expand human experience, role-playing, and creativity. He embarked on the mad enterprise of trying to explore the malleability and multiplicity of the human soul. He introduced himself and his patients to diceliving – the making of life decisions by casting dice. His theory was that humans tended to get stuck in trying to live with one set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviour – one self – when the healthy human would be better off feeling free to be many selves, with many inconsistent attitudes and behaviours.
In dice therapy he encouraged his patients to create a variety of optional actions or roles, and let the dice choose their behaviour for a given hour, day or week. The goal was to break down the usual single stuck self and discover new habits, loves and lives.
Of course in successfully attacking his own personality, Luke broke up his family, ruined his professional standing, alienated friends, and broke enough laws to attract numerous law-enforcement agencies.
He also became somewhat famous – or notorious, dice therapy and diceliving becoming something of a fad in the early seventies. Luke became a minor cult figure like Timothy Leary or Ram Dass, seeming to symbolize the rejection of society’s traditional values in favour of individual creativity and multiplicity. By jumping bail after his trial and disappearing from sight, he gave his life a certain romantic aura lacking in other counterculture figures who were raking in dollars on the lecture circuit, but the aura faded as his disappearance seemed increasingly final. Total absence is a difficult state to keep exciting.
As he sat in the office that day trying to steady his hand on the flat desktop, Larry remembered bitterly that as an eight-year-old child he had liked his father’s dice games, both for their own sake and for Luke’s playing them with him. He’d once cast a fat red die and seen it choose the option that he go fight a bully who’d been hassling him for months. He remembered knocking the snotnose down, and never having any trouble with him again. For a week, anyway, the event had made him a believer in the dice.
Another afternoon he’d let the dice continually choose in which direction he walk and, giggling, he kept ending up with his nose against some building’s walls.
But his father had become increasingly erratic. He remembered one morning Luke’s eating his eggs with his fingers and grunting like some animal, the eggs mostly not making it into his mouth, he and his sister giggling, Larry’s mother in the background silently glaring. And he remembered his father, who never bought a Christmas present for anyone, unexpectedly bringing home half a dozen presents to both him and his sister, including a gigantic five-foot-high bear that he’d loved for years. And of Luke’s striding around their apartment all one weekend, declaring in stentorian tones, like some Shakespearean actor, lines which were probably muddled quotations from plays somehow appropriate to what was happening.
But most of his memories of that time were less pleasant – of the tense parental silences, of his mother always shouting at his father and her fury when she caught Larry using the dice, shouting that if she ever caught him doing that again she’d send him to a foster home.
And when Luke finally disappeared without a word, Larry came to feel it was the dice themselves that had made him leave and ruined Larry’s life – hence his bitterness against not only his father but against everything his father had stood for.
Nevertheless, there were times when he wished he’d accepted Luke’s offer to take him in after his mother’s death, since from that moment on he’d been on his own and broke. He’d had to work full-time every summer and part-time during all his college years, while most of his classmates were apparently free to loaf. In reaction against his father he’d come to believe passionately in the value of control, order and reason. His psychiatrists pointed out that making a religion of order was a dramatic rejection of his father’s interest in irrationality and chance, and that he’d even chosen his profession in reaction against his father. One of the more notorious features of Luke’s diceliving had been his followers’ remarkable success at picking profitable stocks and bonds using the dice. At Wharton Business School Larry had determined to prove the value of reason and research over his father’s bastard deity, Chance.
But in the last five years of conquering chance with his trend lines, resistance areas, momentum figures, stochastics, point and figure charts and Eliot Waves, how often some chance event would send a market reeling in a direction contrary to that predicted by all his indicators! And how annoying that, even without any measurable chance event, markets somehow refused to perform as all his technical indicators forecast they would.
Despite Larry trying to picture his father before he’d taken up his quixotic quest for the cure to human misery, he had absolutely no memories of him before the age of eight. That was a sure sign of repression, Dr Bickers had assured him. He groaned at the thought of having to talk to Dr Bickers about this FBI visit: how the man would smirk at this archetypal return of the father. And he grimaced too at realizing that despite his dislike of Dr Bickers he seemed to be consulting psychotherapists almost as often as his father used to consult the dice. He ought to bill his father.
Over the years he’d think he was making progress, announce to friends that he’d finally made a key breakthrough, and then a few weeks later tell these same friends that his therapist was a charlatan – and possibly a secret diceperson.
His reveries were abruptly interrupted by an official buzz from Miss Claybell: Mr Battle wanted to see him in his office immediately.
Ah, yes. Nothing like a visit from the FBI to make a trader’s boss want to have a chat.
Mr Battle’s being both the head of the firm as well as Honoria’s father meant that his every word, sigh and stare had significance for me far beyond its merit. Every time I had a losing trade it not only meant a few fewer digits in the asset column, but also that my son-in-law rating went down several points. Rains failing to fall mainly in the plains constituted not merely a small financial disaster, but also a threat to my marriage, a marriage I devoutly and greedily desired. And there’d been far too many rains not in the plains recently.
When I neared the old man’s cavernous office I veered off into the executives’ men’s room to do a bit of grooming. Mr Battle was a stickler for appearances. A trader with shirt unbuttoned, tie and hair askew was a man communicating not concentration and busy-ness, but rather a state of being overwhelmed. Since most traders were overwhelmed, such normal grooming was elsewhere the norm, but not at BB&P. Mr Battle wanted his traders all to look as if they’d just emerged from a men’s fashion ad in the Sunday New York Times magazine section – cool, elegant and unflustered – million-dollar profits something they pulled off between aperitifs.
‘A tie is a symbol,’ he’d explained to me once when he’d caught me alone in my office with my tie off. ‘A symbol of caring about power. If it doesn’t always represent actual membership in the successful levels