The Search for the Dice Man Read Free Page A

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 theearly 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 Larryusing 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