`I can't think of anymore.'
`How about you, Evie?'
`Eat ice cream.'
'Yeah,' said Lawrence.
`That's number five. Just one more.'
`Go for a long hike in Harlem,' shouted Lawrence, and he ran back to the couch and got the dice. `Can I throw?'
`You can throw. Just one, remember.'
He cast across the floor of his fate a single die: a four horsey. Ah gods, in what nag's clothing comes the wolf.
They played, raucously, for twenty minutes and then Lawrence, already, Reader, I lament to say, hooked, asked to
play dice man again. His father, smiling and gasping for breath, wobbled to the desk to write another page of the book
of ruin. Lawrence added some new alternatives and left some old ones and the dice chose: `Go beat up Jerry Brass.'
Lawrence stared at his father.
`What do we do now?' he asked.
`You go downstairs and ring the Brass's doorbell and ask to see Jerry and then you try to beat him up.'
Lawrence looked down at the floor, the enormity of his folly beginning to sink into his little heart.
`What if he's not home?'
`Then you try again later.'
`What'll I say when I beat him up?'
`Why don't you ask the dice?'
He looked up quickly at his father.'
'What do you mean?'
`You've got to beat up Jerry, why not give the dice six voices of what you'll say?'
'That's great. What'll they be?'
`You're God,' his father said with that same horrible smile. `You name them.'
`I'll tell him my father told me to.'
Dr. Rhinehart coughed, hesitated. `That's .., um … number one.'
`I'll tell him my mother told me to.'
`Right'
'That I'm drunk.'
`Number three.'
'That . .. that I can't stand him'
He was deep in excited concentration.
`That I'm practicing my boxing…' He laughed and hopped up and down.
`And that the dice told me to.'
That's six and very good, Larry.'
`I throw, I throw.'
'That I'm practicing my boxing…'
He laughed and the living room rung and yelled its command back to his father: 'Three!'
`Okay, Larry, you're drunk. Go get him.'
Reader, Lawrence went. Lawrence struck Jerry Brass. Struck him several times, announced he was drunk and escaped
unpunished by the absent Brass parents or present Brass maid, but pursued already by the furies which will not leave
un-avenged such senseless evil. When he returned to his own apartment, Lawrence's first words were - I record them with shame:
`Where 'are the dice, Dad?'
Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never bad. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often weal cough before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety filled and diffused?
It was the goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? Or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self- destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? Indeed men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.
I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: `Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another'
- why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be.
The sense of a permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy.
`Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bowel movement every morning after breakfast'
`Billy just loves to read all the time…'
`Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.'
'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.'
It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but . . . Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but … And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn't have to worry but how she looked …
Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery.
What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free even of `good' habits.
`What, my boy, haven't told a lie yet today? Well, go to your room and stay there until you can think one up and learn to do better.'
`Oh, my Johnny, he's so wonderful. Last year he got all 'A's an his report card and this year he's getting mostly 'D's and 'F's. We're so proud: `Our little Eileen still pees in her panties every now and then and she's almost twelve.'
'Oh, that's marvelous! Your daughter must be so alive.'
`Good boy, Roger, that was beautiful the way you walked off the field and went home to play Ping-Pong with the
score tied and two out in the last of the eighth. Every dad in the stands wished his kid had thought of that.'
`Donnie! Don't you dare brush your teeth again tonight! It's getting to be a regular habit.'
