The Dice Man

‘So I knew I had to find someone who would scream.’

[Pause]

[Long pause]

‘You sought other alternatives to relieve your tensions.’

‘Yeah. Fact is I began raping and killing young girls.’

[Pause]

[Long pause]

[Longer pause]

‘In an effort to relieve these tense feelings you began raping and killing young girls.’

‘Yeah. You’re not allowed to tell, are you? I mean you told me professional ethics forbid your telling anything I say, right?’

‘Yes.’

[Pause]

‘I find the raping and killing of girls helps relieve the tension quite a bit and makes me feel better again.’

‘I see.’

‘My problem is that I’m beginning to get a little nervous about getting caught. I sort of hoped maybe analysis might help me find a little more normal way to reduce my tensions.’

‘You’d like to find a different way to reduce tensions other than raping and killing girls.’

‘Yeah. Either that or help me to stop worrying about getting caught …’

The alert reader may now be feeling that this stuff is slightly too sensational for a typical day at the office, but Mr Osterflood really exists. Or rather existed – more of that later on. The fact is that I was writing a book entitled The Sado-Masochistic Personality in Transition, a work which was to describe cases in which the sadistic personality developed into a masochistic one and vice versa. For this reason my colleagues always sent me patients with a markedly strong sadistic or masochistic bent. Osterflood was admittedly the most professionally active sadist I’d treated, but the wards of mental hospitals have many like him.

What is remarkable, I suppose, is Osterflood’s walking around loose. Although after his confession I urged him to enter an institution, he refused and I couldn’t order his being committed without breaking professional confidence; moreover no one else apparently suspected that he was an ‘enemy of society.’ All I could do was warn my friends to keep their little girls away from Harlem playgrounds (where Osterflood obtained his victims) and try hard for a cure. Since my friends all kept their children out of Harlem playgrounds because of the danger of Negro rapists even my warnings were unnecessary.

After Osterflood left that morning I brooded a little on my helplessness with him, made a few notes, and then decided I ought to work on my book.

I dragged myself to it with the enthusiasm of a man with diarrhea moving toward the toilet: I had a compulsive need to get it out but had some months earlier come to the conclusion that all I was producing was shit.

My book had become a bore: it was a pretentious failure. I had tried a few months before to get Random House to agree to publish it when it was finished, imagining that with extensive advertising the book would achieve national and then international fame, driving Jake Ecstein to fury, women and reckless losses in the stock market. Random House had hedged, hawed, considered and reconsidered … Random House wasn’t interested. This morning, as on most recent mornings, neither was I.

The flaw in the book was small but significant: it had nothing to say. The bulk of it was to be empirical descriptions of patients who had changed from primarily sadistic behavior patterns to masochistic ones. My dream had been to discover a technique to lock the behavior of the patient at that precise point when he had passed away from sadism but had not become masochistic. If there were such a point. I had much dramatic evidence of complete crossovers; none of ‘frozen freedom,’ a phrase describing the ideal mean state that came to me in an explosion of enlightenment one morning while echoing Mr Jenkins.

The problem was that Jake Ecstein, car-salesman front and all, had written two of the most rational and honest books about psychoanalytic therapy that I’d ever read, and their import essentially demonstrated that none of us knew or had any likelihood of knowing what we were doing. Jake cured patients as well as the next fellow and then published clear, brilliant accounts demonstrating that the key to his success was accident, that frequently it was his failure to follow his own theoretical structure which led to a ‘breakthrough’ and the patient’s improvement. When I ended my early-morning dialogue with Miss Reingold joking that Jake’s reading the 1967 budget record sheets might lead to a breakthrough I was partly serious. Jake had shown again and again the significance of chance in therapeutic development, perhaps best dramatized in his famous ‘pencil-sharpening cure.’

A female patient he’d had under treatment for fifteen months with so little success in changing her neurotic aplomb that even Jake was bored, achieved total and complete transformation when Jake, absentmindedly confusing her with his secretary, ordered her to sharpen his pencils. The patient, a wealthy housewife, went into the outer office to obey and suddenly, when about to insert a pencil into the sharpener, began to shriek, tear her hair and defecate. Three weeks later, ‘Mrs P.’ (Jake’s choice of pseudonyms is only one of his unerring talents) was cured.

I, then, was coming to feel that my elaborate writing efforts were only idle, pretentious playing with words for publication.

I thus spent the hour before lunch: (a) reading the financial section of The New York Times; (b) writing a page-and-a-half case report of Mr Osterflood in the form of a financial and budget report (‘bearish outlook for prostitutes’; ‘bull market in Harlem playground girls’), and (c) drawing a picture on my book manuscript of an elaborate Victorian house being bombed by motorcycle planes piloted by Hell’s Angels.

Chapter Four

I lunched that day with my three closest colleagues: Dr Ecstein, whom I mock because he’s so intelligent and successful; Dr Renata Felloni, the only female Italian-born practicing analyst in recent New York history; and Dr Timothy Mann, the short, fat, disheveled father figure who had psychoanalyzed me four years before and been mentoring me ever since.

When Jake and I arrived, Dr Mann was hunched over the table chewing heavily on a roll and blinking benevolently at Dr Felloni seated opposite him. Dr Mann was a big wheel: one of the directors at Queensborough State Hospital, where I worked twice a week; a member of the executive committee of PANY (Psychiatrists Association of New York) and the author of seventeen articles and three books, one of them the most frequently used text on existentialist therapy in existence. It had been considered an extraordinary honor to be psychoanalyzed by Dr Mann and I had appreciated it greatly until my increasing boredom and unhappiness had deluded me into believing that analysis had done me no good. Dr Mann was concentrating on his eating and may or may not have been listening to the dignified discourse of Dr Felloni.

Renata Felloni resembles a spinsterish dean of women at a Presbyterian all-girls college: she has gray hair always neatly coiffured, spectacles and a slow, dignified, Italian-cum-New England twang that makes her discussions of penises, orgasms, sodomy and fellatio seem like a discussion of credit hours and home economics. Moreover, she had, as far as anyone knew, never been married and, with less certainty, had never in the seven years we had known her given any indication of ever having known a man (biblical ‘know’). Her dignity acted to prevent any of us from either direct or indirect investigations into her past. All we felt free to talk with her about were weather, stocks, penises, orgasms, sodomy and fellatio.

The restaurant was noisy and expensive, and, except for Dr Mann, who loved every trough he had ever fed in, we all hated it and went there because every other restaurant we had tried in the convenient area was also crowded, noisy and expensive. I usually spent so much nervous energy trying to hear what my friends were saying over the clattering of voices, dishes and ‘soft’ music and trying to avoid watching Dr Mann eating that I never remembered whether the food was good or not. At any rate I rarely got sick on it.

‘Only ten percent of our subjects believe that masturbation is “punished by God eternally”,’ Dr Felloni was saying as Jake and I sat down opposite each other at the tiny table. She was apparently talking about a research project she and I were jointly directing, and she smiled formally and equally to her left at Jake and to her right at me, and continued: ‘Thirty-three and a third percent believe that masturbation is “punished by God finitely”; forty percent that it is physically unhealthy; two and one-half percent believe that there is danger of pregnancy, seventy-five per –’

‘Danger of pregnancy?’ Jake broke in as he turned from accepting a menu.

‘We use the same multiple choices,’ she explained smiling, ‘for masturbation, kissing, petting, premarital and postmarital heterosexual intercourse, homosexual petting, and homosexual sodomy. So far, subjects have indicated that there is danger of pregnancy only with masturbation, petting to orgasm, and heterosexual intercourse.’

I smiled to Jake, but he was squinting at Dr Felloni.

‘Well,’ Jake asked her, ‘what’s the question you’re reeling off these percentages for?’

‘We ask, “For what reasons, if any, do you believe that sexually exciting yourself through fantasy, reading, looking at pictures or manual excitation is bad?”’

‘Do you give them a choice of reasons for why masturbation is good?’ Dr Mann asked, wiping his lower lip with a piece of roll.

‘Certainly,’ Dr Felloni replied. ‘A subject can answer that he approves of masturbation for any of six options: (1) It is enjoyable; (2) it releases tension; (3) it is a natural way of expressing love; (4) it is something one should experience to be complete; (5) it procreates the race; (6) it is the social thing to do.’

Jake and I now began laughing. When we quieted she assured Jake that only the first two choices had been chosen for masturbation, except for one person who had indicated that masturbation was valuable as a way of expressing love. She had determined in a recent interview, however, that the subject had checked that item in a cynical frame of mind.

‘I don’t know why you ever got involved in this thing,’ Jake said, turning to me suddenly. ‘Social psychologists have been turning out studies like yours for decades. You’re digging in sterile ground.’

Dr Felloni nodded politely at Jake’s words as she did whenever someone was uttering anything which might vaguely be construed as criticism of her or her work. The more vigorous and direct the criticism the more vigorously she nodded her head. It was my hypothesis that were a prosecuting attorney ever to attack her for a full hour there would be no need for a guillotine: her neck would have melted away, and her head, still nodding, would be rolling on the floor at the prosecutor’s feet. She replied to Jake:

‘Our plan to evaluate the validity of the multiple choice answers by in-depth interviews of every subject is, however, a genuine contribution.’

‘You’ll spend – my God – a hundred and twenty hours verifying the obvious: namely, multiple-choice attitude tests are unreliable.’

‘Yes, but remember we got a foundation grant,’ I said.

‘So what? Why didn’t you request it for something original, something worthwhile?’

‘We wanted a foundation grant,’ I answered ironically.

Jake gave me his I-see-into-your-soul squint and then laughed.

‘We couldn’t think of anything original or worthwhile,’ I added, laughing too, ‘so we decided to do this.’

Dr Felloni managed to nod and frown, both vigorously.

‘You’ll discover that sexual intercourse is more frequently approved after marriage than before,’ said Jake, ‘that homosexuals approve of homosexuality, that –’

‘Our results,’ Dr Felloni said quietly, ‘may not fulfill conventional expectation. We may discover from our in-depth interviews that subjects misrepresent their attitudes and experiences in a way that previous experimenters did not guess.’

‘She’s right, Jake, I agree the whole thing seems a mammoth bore and may lead to the verification of the obvious, but it might not.’

‘It will,’ Dr Mann said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘It will verify the obvious and nothing more.’ He looked up at me for the first time. His jowls were a Santa Claus pink, either from alcohol or anger. I couldn’t tell.

‘So?’

‘So why do you waste your time? Renata could do the whole thing herself without your help.’

‘It’s an entertaining time-filler. I often daydream of publishing embellished results to parody such experiments. You know: “Ninety-five percent of American youth believe that masturbation is a better way of expressing friendship and love than intercourse.”’

‘Your experiment is a parody without embellishment,’ Dr Mann said.

There was a silence, if you can exclude the cacophony of voices, dishes and music of the surrounding hubbub.

‘Our experiment,’ Dr Felloni finally said with a gallop of nods, ‘will offer new insight into the relations between sexual behavior, sexual tolerance and personality stability.’

‘I read your letter to the Esso Foundation,’ Dr Mann said.

‘I know a teen-age girl that could run intellectual rings around most of us here,’ Jake said, changing the subject without blinking an eye. ‘She knew everything, brains coming out of her ears. I was within weeks of a major breakthrough. But she died.’

‘She died?’ I asked.

‘Fell from the Williamsburg Bridge into the Eastriver. I must confess I see her as one of my two or three possible failures.’

‘Look, Tim,’ I said, turning back to Dr Mann. ‘I agree our experiment borders on nonsense, but in an absurd world, one can only go with the flow.’

‘I’m not interested in your metaphysical speculations.’

‘Or my scientific ones. Maybe I’d better stick to talking about the stock market.’

‘Oh come off it now, you two,’ Jake said. ‘Ever since Luke wrote his paper on “Taoism, Zen and Analysis”, Tim has been acting as if he’d been converted to astrology.’

‘At least with astrology,’ said Dr Mann, looking coldly at me, ‘one still tries to predict something important. With Zen one drifts into Nirvana without thought or effort.’

‘One doesn’t drift into Nirvana,’ I said helpfully. ‘The drifting is Nirvana.’

‘A convenient theory,’ Dr Mann said.

‘All good theories are.’

‘Gold stocks and General Motors have risen an average of two points a week so far this month,’ Dr Felloni said, nodding.

‘Yeah,’ said Jake, ‘and you’ll notice that Waste Products, Inc., Dolly’s Duds and Nadir Technology are all rising.’

Dr Mann and I continued to look at each other, he with warm red face and chill blue eyes, and I with what I intended to be cheerful detachment.

‘My stock seems rather low these days,’ I said.

‘Perhaps it’s gravitating to its natural level,’ he replied.

‘It may yet rally.’

‘Drifters don’t rally.’

‘Yes, they do,’ I said. ‘You just don’t understand Zen.’

‘I feel blessed,’ Dr Mann said.

‘You’ve got eating, let me have my Zen and sex experiments.’

‘Eating doesn’t interfere with my productivity.’

‘I rather imagine it increases it.’

He flushed even more and pushed back his chair.

‘Oh shit,’ said Jake. ‘Will you two stop it. Tim, you’re sitting there like a fat Buddha attacking Luke’s Buddhism, and Lu –’

‘You’re right,’ Dr Mann said, sitting now as stiffly in his chair as his lumpy clothing and body would permit. ‘I apologize, Luke. The rolls were cold today and I had to attack something.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I apologize too. My martini was diluted and I had to hit back.’

The waitress was at the table again and Jake was getting ready to order dessert, but Dr Felloni spoke loudly to the general table:

‘My own portfolio has risen fourteen percent in the last three months despite a market decline of two percent.’

‘Pretty soon you’ll found your own foundation, Renata,’ Dr Mann said.

‘Prudent investment,’ she replied, ‘is like prudent experimentation: it sticks to the obvious.’

For the rest of the lunch, the conversation was all downhill.

Chapter Five

After lunch I paid my ransom at the local parking lot and drove off through the rain for the hospital. I drove a Rambler American. My colleagues drive Jaguars, Mercedes, Cadillacs, Corvettes, Porsches, Thunderbirds and (occasional slummers) Mustangs: I drove a Rambler. At that time it was my most original contribution to New York City Psychoanalysis.

I went east across Manhattan, up over the Queensborough Bridge and down onto the island in the Eastriver where the State Hospital is located. The ancient buildings appeared bleak and macabre. Some looked abandoned. Three new buildings, built of cheerful yellow brick and pleasant, shiny bars, make the hospital appear, together with the older horror houses, like a Hollywood movie set in which two movies, ‘My Mother Went Insane’ and ‘Prison Riot’, are being filmed simultaneously.

I went directly to the Admissions Building, one of the old, low, blackened buildings which, it was reliably reported, was held together solely by the thirty-seven layers of pale green paint on all the interior walls and ceilings. A small office was made available to me there every Monday and Wednesday afternoon for my therapy sessions with select patients. The patients were select in two senses: one, I selected them, and two, they were actually receiving therapy. I normally handled two patients, meeting each for about an hour twice a week.

A month before this, however, one of my two patients had attacked a hospital attendant with an eight-foot-long bench and, in being subdued, had received three broken ribs, thirty-two stitches and a hernia. Since this was slightly less than he had inflicted upon the five attendants doing the subduing, no charges of hospital brutality seemed justified, and after his wounds healed, he was to be sent to a maximum-security hospital.

To replace him, Dr Mann had recommended to me a seventeen-year-old boy admitted for incipient divinity: he showed a tendency to act as if he were Jesus Christ. Whether Dr Mann assumed all Christs to be masochistic or that the boy would be good for my spiritual health was unclear.

My other QSH patient was Arturo Toscanini Jones, a Negro who lived every moment as if he were a black panther isolated on a half-acre island filled with white hunters armed with Howitzers. My primary difficulty in helping him was that his way of seeing the world seemed to be an eminently realistic evaluation of his life as it had been. Our sessions were usually quiet ones: Arturo Toscanini Jones had very little to say to white hunters. Although I don’t blame him, as a non-directive therapist I was a little handicapped; I needed sounds for my echo.

Jones had been an honors student at City College of New York for three years before disturbing a meeting of the Young Conservatives Club by throwing in two hand grenades. This act would normally have earned long tenure in a penitentiary, but Jones’s previous history of ‘mental disturbance’ (marijuana and LSD user, ‘nervous breakdown’ sophomore year – he interrupted a political science class by shouting obscenities at his professor) and the failure of the two hand grenades to maim anything more valuable than a portrait of Barry Goldwater, earned him instead an indefinite stay at QSH. He had become my patient under the questionable assumption that anyone who throws hand grenades at Young Conservatives must be sadistic. That afternoon I decided to let myself go a bit and see if I couldn’t provoke a dialogue.

‘Mr Jones,’ I began (fifteen minutes had already passed in total silence), ‘what makes you think that I can’t or won’t help you?’

Sitting sideways to me in a straight wooden chair, he turned his eyes at me with serene disdain: ‘Experience,’ he said.

‘That nineteen consecutive white men have kicked you in the balls doesn’t necessarily mean the twentieth will.’

‘True,’ he said, ‘but the brother who came up to that next Charlie with his hands not protecting his crotch would be one big stupid bastard.’

‘True, but he could still talk.’

‘No suh! We Niggahs gotta use our hands when we talk. Yessuh! We’re physical, we are.’

‘You didn’t use your hands then when you spoke.’

‘I’m white, man, didn’t you know that? I’m with the CIA investigating the NAACP to see if there’s any secret black influence on that organization.’ His teeth and eyes glittered at me, in play or hatred I didn’t know.

‘Ah then,’ I said, ‘you can appreciate my disguise: I’m black, man, didn’t you know that? I’m with –’

‘You’re not black, Rhinehart,’ he interrupted sharply. ‘If you were, we’d both know it and only one of us would be here.’

‘Still, black or white, I’d like to help you.’

‘Black they wouldn’t let you help me; white, you can’t.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

When I lapsed into silence, he resumed his. The last fifteen minutes were spent with us both listening to the regular rhythmic shrieks from a man someplace in the Cosmold Building.

After Mr Jones left I stared out the gray window at the rain until a pretty little student nurse brought me the folder on Eric Cannon and said she’d bring the family to my office. After she left, I mused for a few seconds on what is called in the medical profession the ‘p’ phenomenon: the tendency of starched nurses’ uniforms to make it seem as if all nurses were bountifully blessed in the bosom and thus shaped like the letter ‘p’. It meant that doctors surveying the field could never be sure that a nurse they were flirting with was proportioned like two grapefruit on a stick or two peas on an ironing board. Some claimed it was the very essence of the mystery and allure of the medical profession.

Eric Cannon’s folder gave a rather detailed description of a latter-day sheep in wolf’s clothing. Since the age of five the boy had shown himself to be both remarkably precocious and a little simpleminded. Although the son of a Lutheran minister, he argued with his teachers, was truant from school, disobedient to teachers and parents, and a runaway from home on six separate occasions since the age of nine, the last episode occurring only six months before, when he disappeared for eight weeks before turning up in Cuba. At the age of twelve he began a career of priest baiting, which culminated in the boy’s refusal to enter a church again. He also refused to go to school. He was caught possessing marijuana. He was stopped in what appeared to be the act of trying to immolate himself in front of the Central Brooklyn Selective Services Induction Center.

Pastor Cannon, his father, seemed to be a good man – in the traditional sense of the word: a conservative, restrained defender of the way things are. But his son had kept rebelling, had refused to be treated by a private psychiatrist; refused to work, refused to live at home except when it suited him. His father had thus decided to send him to QSH, with the understanding that he would receive therapy with me.

‘Dr Rhinehart,’ the pretty little student nurse was saying suddenly at my elbow. ‘This is Pastor Cannon and Mrs Cannon.’

‘How do you do,’ I said automatically and found myself grasping the chubby hand of a sweet-faced man with thick graying hair. He smiled fully as he shook my hand.

‘Glad to meet you, Doctor. Dr Mann has told me a lot about you.’

‘How do you do, Doctor,’ a woman’s musical voice said, and I turned to Mrs Cannon. Small and trim, she was standing behind the left shoulder of her husband and smiling horribly: her eyes kept flickering off to a line of female hags who were oozing noisily through the hallway outside our door. The patients were dressed with such indescribable ugliness they looked like character actors who had been rejected for Marat-Sade for being overdone.