The Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart
about to mash her potatoes …? When?’
‘But I want to help people. I feel no aggression. Ever.’
‘Look, Jenkins, I’m sated with your passivity, your daydreaming. Haven’t you ever done anything?’
‘No opportunity has ever –’
‘Have you ever hurt another human?’
‘I can’t. I don’t want to. I want to save –’
‘First you’ve got to save yourself and that you can only do by breaking your inertia. I’m giving you an assignment for our Friday session. Will you do it for me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt people. My whole soul is based on that principle.’
‘I know it is. I know it is, and your soul’s sick, remember? That’s why you’re here.’
‘Please, I don’t want to rape any –’
‘You’ve noticed I have a new receptionist. I mean a second one?’ [She was a middle-aged call girl I had hired expressly to date Mr Jenkins.]
‘Er, yes, I have.’
‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she is.’
‘And she’s a nice person, too.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I want you to rape her.’
‘Oh no, no, I, no, it would not be a good idea.’
‘All right then, would you like to date her?’
‘But … is it ethical?’
‘What are you planning to do to her?’
‘I mean … she’s your receptionist … I thought –’
‘Not at all. Her private life is her own business. [It certainly was.] I want you to date her. Tonight. Take her to dinner and invite her back to your apartment and see what happens. If you get the urge to rape her, go ahead. Tell her it’s part of your therapy.’
‘Oh, no, no, I’d never want to do anything to hurt her. She seems such a lovely person.’
‘She is, which makes her all the more rapable. But have it your own way. Just do your best to feel aggression.’
‘Do you really think it might help if I got a little aggressive?’
‘Absolutely. Change your whole life. With hard work you might even make it to murder. But don’t brood if at first all you can do is swear under your breath at pedestrians.’ I stood up. ‘Now go. You’ll need a couple of minutes to wheedle Rita into accepting a date.’
It took him twenty, despite Rita’s trying to say ‘yes’ from the moment he told her his name. After three and a half weeks of Jenkins-style courting he finally managed to seduce her in the front seat of his Volkswagen, much to the relief of all concerned. To the further relief of the principals, they shifted to Jenkins’s apartment for further indoor work. The only evidence I was able to garner that Jenkins was trying to express aggression was that once he accidentally bumped her nose with his elbow and didn’t say he was sorry. Rita tried the old game of ‘Oh, you’re so masterful, hit me,’ but Jenkins responded by assuring her that no matter how masterful he was he would never hit anyone. She urged him to bite her breasts, but he said something about having weak gums. She tried to irritate him into anger by using her body to arouse him and then deny the desires she had aroused, but Jenkins sulked until she gave in.
Meanwhile he was trying every trick in the masochist’s trade to try to make Rita break off with him. He stood her up on two occasions (Rita sent a bill for her time), accidentally broke her wristwatch (I got the bill) and as a lover usually had his orgasm when she was least expecting it and in the middle of a yawn. Nevertheless, Rita clung lovingly – three hundred dollars a week – on.
At the end of a month of solid success with her, Jenkins was definitely more comfortable with women; he even flirted for five minutes with Miss Reingold. But he was also perilously close to a total nervous breakdown. Being unable to contract a venereal disease, make Rita pregnant, infuriate her, cause her to leave him or fail in any other obvious way, he was desperate. Of course, he’d compensated by accelerating the rate of failure in all other areas of his life. Twice he lost his wallet. He left the water in the bathtub running while he was out and flooded his apartment. Finally, one day he told me he’d lost so much money on the stock market since taking over his own investing, that he’d have to drop therapy.
I urged him to continue, but that afternoon he managed to get hit by a bulldozer while watching some construction and was hospitalized for six weeks. A few months later the dice told me to send him a bill for Rita’s services and, I regret to report, he promptly paid it. I’ve tentatively listed his case as a failure.
Other cases didn’t work out too well either. With a woman plagued by compulsive promiscuity I tried the William James method number three for breaking habits: oversatiation. I convinced her to work at a busy Brooklyn brothel for a week, figuring that would be enough to drive anyone to chastity, but she stayed a month. With the money she earned she hired one of her male customers to accompany her on a vacation to Puerto Vallarta. I haven’t seen her since, but have tentatively listed her case as a failure also.
My analytic sessions became role-playing sessions without the dice. But instead of restricting such role playing to drama and play as in Moreno-like drama therapy, I restricted it to real life. Everything had to be done with real people in real life.
In most cases over the next five months I assigned my patients to quit their jobs, leave their spouses, give up their hobbies, habits and homes, alter their religions, upset their sleeping, eating, copulation, thinking habits: in brief, to rediscover their unexpressed desires; to achieve their unfulfilled potential. But all this without telling them about the dice.
Without introducing the patients to the use of the dice as in my later dice therapy, the results, as you have begun to see, were generally disastrous. In addition to two lawsuits, one patient committed suicide (thirty-five dollars an hour out of the window), one was arrested for leading to the delinquency of a minor, and a last disappeared at sea in a sailing canoe on his way to Tahiti. On the other hand, I had a few distinct successes.
One man, a highly paid advertising executive, gave up his job and family and joined the Peace Corps, spent two years in Peru, wrote a book on faking land reform in underdeveloped countries, a book highly praised by everyone except the governments of Peru and the United States, and is now living in a cabin in Tennessee writing a book on the effects of advertising on underdeveloped minds. Whenever he’s in New York he drops in to suggest I write a book about the underdeveloped psyches of psychiatrists.
My other successes were less obvious and immediate.
There was Linda Reichman, for example. She was a slender, young rich girl who had spent her last four years living in Greenwich Village doing all the things rich, emancipated girls think they’re expected to do in Greenwich Village. In four weeks of treatment prior to my own emancipation, I had learned that this was her third analysis, that she loved to talk about herself, particularly her promiscuity, with indifference to and cruelty toward men, and their stupid ineffectual efforts to hurt her. Her monologues were occasionally flooded by literary, philosophical and Freudian allusions and as abruptly empty of them. Each session she usually managed to say something intended to shock my bourgeois respectability.
It was only three weeks after letting the dice dictate anarchy that I had a rather remarkable session with her. She’d come in even more keyed up than usual, swivel-hipped her rather swivelable hips across the room and flopped aggressively onto the couch. Much to my surprise she didn’t say a thing for three minutes; for her, an all-time record. Finally, with an edge to her voice, she said: ‘I get so sick and tired of this … shit. [Pause] I don’t know why I come here. [Pause] You’re about as much help as a chiropractor. Christ, what I’d give to meet a MAN someday. I meet nothing but … ball-less masturbators.