The Diceman

In the world of sports, girls are absent, but by the age of sixteen or seventeen the stroke of a baseball has been replaced by other strokes, and the only ones intercepting passes are female. The boy has become a man, and the man is commander-in-chief of a harem. Here things go on beyond the wildest imagination of anyone - except that of the boy doing the dreaming. A woman, panting helplessly, flings her nude body onto the hero, who, puffing nonchalantly on a Corsican cigarette and tastefully sipping a glass of rare New York State wine, and steering his Aston-Martin at 165 miles-per hour down a rarely used road in the Alps, manages to give the girl the most exciting love experience of her life. If a male at the age of seventeen is sometimes once again Attila the Hun it is in order to round up the conquered Roman women and, twirling his sword and his mustache, choose fifteen or sixteen to spend the night with him. If he once again scores the wi

But by the age of twenty-one our male is either engaged, married or sated; the world he wants to rule is a new world he has become Horatio Alger. With grim determination and unca

Except our hero, whose income continues to be modest. At the age of twenty-five he has reached the first apex of the Rhinehart Power Pattern for Men: the dream of reforming the world. By the age of twenty-eight or nine regression has begun. His wife is reminding him that the world is still unreformed and that other men are earning … et cetera. He returns to his dreams of success. Only now they are more modest, more limited. Now he rules only Pierce, Perkins and Poof and not General Motors. Now his coup on the stock market is only a thousand dollars, not four million. Middle age, like rigor mortis, has set in.

The regression continues: in three or four years he reassumes his position as managing director of a harem, but it isn't what it used to be. It is populated with secretaries, receptionists and, on particularly good days, a famous movie star. Jane Fonda, while protest picketing at Pierce, Perkins and Poof, takes one glance at him and drags him off to a commune where - but it doesn't seem quite real, so he returns to the conquering of the little telephone operator Maggie Blemish.

At the age of thirty-seven he suddenly resigns from Pierce, Perkins and Poof to join the New York Football Giants. The prospect of ru

At the age of forty-one it is complete; the male, resigning his six head-coach-ships, once again dreams of conquering the world. The accumulated bitterness of the years asserts itself, he becomes as fast as a speeding bullet, as powerful as a locomotive and can leap buildings with three powerful strides. He becomes a General Curtis LeMay and bombs China back into the Stone Age. He becomes a Spiro Agnew and puts the blacks and hippies and liberals firmly in then places. His wife and children are being tortured to death in some horribly creative way: over a fire at the end of sharpened sticks they are being roasted as marshmallows. Sometimes he arrives in time to save his children, sometimes even his wife. But most times he arrives just too late. The giant state funeral procession in which, in tears, he is marching is attacked by the enemy, and leaping back into action with his tactical nuclear weapons . . .

The Rhinehart Power Pattern for Men should now be clear. In Dice Therapy we can predict with great precision the roles which a male student will most want to play by examining his age and relating it to our pattern. There exist variations, of course, some men mature late, and others, a few, are precocious. Eric Ca

Chapter Thirty-four

I had only one session with Eric Ca

`How do you stay loose, Doc?' he asked. `How do you keep yourself on that side of the desk?'

`What do you mean?'

`How come they don't lock you up?'

I smiled.

`I am a professional man,' I answered.

`A professional loony. Giving psychotherapy.'

He shook his head again. `Poor Dad. He thought I was being cured.'

`The concept of the dicelife doesn't fascinate you?'

`Of course it does. You've turned yourself into a sort of computer like our air force use in Vietnam. Only instead of

trying to kill the maximum number of the enemy, you program yourself to drop your bombs at random.'

`You miss the point. Since there is no real enemy, all of life's wars are games, and the dicelife permits a variety of war games instead of the continual sluggish trench warfare of the typical life.' "`There is no enemy,"' he quoted quietly, looking at the floor in front of him. ` "There is no enemy." If there's one

thing that makes me want to puke more than anything else it's people who think there is no enemy. Your dicelife is a hundred times as sick as my father even. He's blind, so he's got an excuse, but you! "No enemy! "' And Eric writhed in his chair, his face distorted with tension. He twisted his muscular body upward until he was standing, his neck still rolling tensely, his eyes on the ceiling. Clenching his fists he finally held himself reasonably quiet.