The Diceman

As a wealthy southern aristocrat I had seduced a young, reasonably presentable typist and kept her two nights (`Y'all shore do have a nice boahdy') before the dice reincarnated me as a Bowery bum. I stored all my cash and some new clothes I had bought in a locker, stopped shaving and for two days and nights panhandled and got drunk on the lower East Side. I didn't get much sleep and felt lonelier than ever, my only friends being an occasional stray derelict who would hang around until he was sure I was really broke. I got so hungry that I finally straightened up my clothes as best I could and stole a box of crackers and two cans of tuna fish from a small supermarket. A young `clerk looked very suspicious but after I'd finished my `browsing' I asked him if they sold amoratycemate and that shut him up while I left.

As a life-insurance salesman looking for a fresh lay, I failed to get anywhere and spent another lonely night.

The dice permitted me to phone the police three times: once to say in a thick Negro accent that the Black Panthers had sprung Arturo Jones from the hospital; once as Dr. Rhinehart to inform that I had left my wife but if they wanted to question me about anything I'd make myself available; and once as an anonymous hippie informer, telling them that Eric Ca

I spent two days playing with a thousand dollars in a Wall Street brokerage house, letting the Die buy and sell or hold at its discretion and I only lost two hundred dollars but I was still bored.

About nine o'clock one hot August evening, sitting crowded and lonely at one end of a packed Village bar and having crumpled up in the course of the previous two days at least four separate lists of options, I had to face the fact that now that I was free to be absolutely anything, I was rapidly becoming interested in absolutely nothing: a somewhat distressing development. It was such an original experience, however, that I began to laugh happily to myself, my big belly shaking like an old engine warming up. I would obviously have to give the dice a brief vacation and see what happened. I would grow for a few weeks organically instead of randomly.

Having thus decisively decided not to decide, I felt vaguely better, even with a tart, rather evil-tasting beer awash in

my tummy and unfinished in my glass. I wanted rest. I'd left Lil: a great triumph (I felt tired). Let me drift in peace. Trying to feel serenity I left the noisy bar and, after a half hour's organic wandering, entered another just like it. The beer tasted the same too. I thought of telephoning Jake and pretending to be Erich Fromm calling from Mexico City. I dismissed it as a symptom of loneliness. I thought of yelling, `Drinks on me!' but my organic frugality vetoed the impulse. I daydreamed about buying a yacht and circling the globe.

`Well, if it isn't old coitus-interruptus himself.'

The voice, sharp and feminine, was followed by the fact, soft and feminine, and the recognition, hard and masculine, of the half-smiling face of Linda Reichman. 'Er, hello, Linda,' I said, not to suavely. I found myself instinctively trying to remember what role I was supposed to be

playing.

`What brings you here?' she asked.

`Oh. I .. don't know. I sort of drifted here.'

She edged between my neighbor and me and placed her drink on the bar. Her eyes were heavily made up, her hair a

more deeply bleached blonde than I remembered it, her body no need to speculate about her measurements; her breasts swayed bralessly against a tight-fitting multicolored T-shirt. She looked very sexy in a debauched sort of way and she eyed me with curiosity.

`Drifted? The Great Psychiatrist drifted? I had the impression that you never even picked your nose without writing a

treatise proving its value.'

'That was the old days. I've changed, Linda.'

`Ever managed an orgasm?' I laughed and she smiled.

`How about yourself?'

I asked. 'What've you been doing?'

`Disintegrating,' she said and gracefully swallowed the last of her drink. `You ought to try it, it's fun.'

`I think I'd like to.'

A man appeared next to her, a small frail man with glasses who looked like a graduate student in organic chemistry,

and after glancing once at me, he said to Linda: `Come on, let's go.'

Linda slowly turned her eyes to the man and, with a look that made all previous looks I'd seen on her face seem like

idolatrous administration, a

Organic chemistry blinked at her, looked at my impressive bulk nervously and took her by the elbow.

`Come on,' he said.

She lifted the dregs of her drink carefully off the bar past my face and poured it slowly down organic chemistry's back

inside his shirt, ice cubes and all.

`Go change your shirt first,' she said.

He never batted an eye. With a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders he merged back into the surrounding mob.

`You think you'd like to disintegrate, huh?' she said to me and then signaled to a bartender for another drink.

`Yes, but it seems an awfully hard thing to do. I've been trying it for over a year now and it takes tremendous effort.'

`A year! You don't look it. You look like a middle-class insurance salesman who comes once every four months to the

Village for a fresh lay.'

`You're wrong. I've been trying to disintegrate myself. But tell me, how do you go about it?'

'Me? Same as always. I haven't changed since you last saw me. Get my kicks the same ways. I spent three months in

Venezuela even lived with a man for almost a month, twenty four days to be precise - but nothing's new.'

`Then you're failing,' I said.

`What d'you mean?'

'I mean if you're really trying to disintegrate you're not succeeding. You're not changing. You're staying the same.'

She wrinkled her clear, still youthful brow and took a big gulp from her fresh drink.

`It was just a word. Disintegration doesn't mean anything. I'm just living my life.'

`Would you like a new kick, one you've never had before and really disintegrate the old self?'

She laughed abruptly. `I've had enough of your brand of kicks.'

`I've developed new brands.'

`Sex bores me. I've made love with every possible number and configuration of men, women and children, had penises

and other appropriately shaped objects up every orifice in every possible combination and sex is a bore.'

`I'm not necessarily talking about sex.'

`Then maybe I'm interested.'

`It will mean a partnership with me for a while.'

`What kind of partnership?'

`It will mean giving up your freedom entirely into my hands for - well - a month, let's say.'

She looked at me intently, thinking.

`I become your slave for one month?' she asked.

`Yes.'

A middle-aged woman with dyed black hair, sharp dark eyes and no makeup knifed out of the moiling sea behind us,

glided up beside Linda and whispered in her ear. Linda, watching me, listened.

`No, Tony,' she said. `No. I've changed my plans. I may not be able to make it.'

Another whisper.

`No. Definitely no. Goodbye.'

The raven-haired shark fell back into the sea.

`I do whatever you want for one month?'

`Yes and no. You follow a special way of life which I've developed. It gives you a new kind of freedom, but if you're

going to get the kicks, you must follow the system unconditionally.'

She smiled a little bitterly: `I'm not sure I really need any more kicks.'

`You'll learn more about yourself and life in one month than you have in all your previous twenty-five years.'

`Twenty-eight,' she said indifferently. She placed her half-empty drink on the bar and started to move away restlessly

but returned. She stared at the ring of sweat her glass had made on the counter and .then looked up at me coldly.