be played when he felt like it. I emphasized, however, that when he did play he must always follow the dice.
Unfortunately, my efforts during the succeeding two days to turn Larry into Lao-Tzu were confounded by his child's good sense; he gave the dice only extremely pleasant alternatives - ice cream, movies, zoos, horsey, trucks, bikes, money. He began to use the dice as a treasure chest. I finally told him that the dice man game always had to provide risk, that slightly bad choices had to be there too. Surprisingly he agreed. I invented for him that week a dice game which has since become one of our classics: Russian roulette. The initial version of the game for Larry was simple: out of every six alternatives one had to be decidedly unpleasant.
As a result, Larry had some interesting experiences over the next five or six days. (Evie returned to her dolls and to Mrs. Roberts.) He took a long hike in Harlem (I told him to keep an eye open for a big muscular white man with candy named Osterflood) and he was arrested as a runaway. It took me forty minutes to convince the 26th Precinct that I had encouraged my seven-year-old son to take a hike in Harlem.
The dice sent him to sneak into the movie I Am Curious Yellow, a film involving a certain amount of naked sexual interplay, and he returned mildly curious and greatly bored. He crawled on all fours from our apartment down four flights of stairs and along Madison Avenue to Walgreen's and ordered an ice-cream sundae. Another time he had to throw away three of his toys, on the other hand the dice ordered him a new racing-car set. He twice had to let me beat him in chess and three times I had to let him beat me. He had a wonderful hour making ostentatiously stupid moves and thus making it difficult for me to lose.
The dice ordered him to play Daddy and me little Evie for one hour one day and he was soon bored: my little Evie was too weak and too stupid. But he enjoyed greatly playing Daddy to my Lil two days later. I didn't realize at the time that the seeds of group dice therapy and my Centers far Experiments in Totally Random Environments were being planted while Larry and I gambolled about as Daddy and Lil or Superman and a crook or Lassie and a dangerous hippopotamus.
The first and last crisis of this phase of Larry's dicelife occurred four days after Lil had returned from Florida. My contacts with Larry had decreased, and on his own he sometimes created such farfetched alternatives for the dice that when the dice chose them, he wasn't able to carry them out. For example, he told me just before the crisis that once he had given the die the option of his killing Evie (she had broken his racing-car set). When the die chose it, he said, he decided not to. I asked him why.
`She would have tattled on me and you wouldn't have fixed my car.'
`If she were dead how could she tattle on you?' I asked.
`Don't worry, she'd find a way.'
The crisis was simple: Larry's dice told him to steal three dollars from Lil's purse and he spent it on twenty- three comic
books (a whim of the die which he told me he resented deeply, being quite fond of bubble gum, lollipops, dart guns
and chocolate sundaes). Lil wondered where he got the money for all the comic books. He refused to tell her, insisting
that she asked Daddy. She did.
`It's very simple, Lil,' I said and while she was putting on Evie's shoes for the fifth time within the hour I consulted the die: I was ordered (one chance in six) to tell the truth.
`I was playing a dice game with him and he lost and had to steal three dollars from your purse.'
She stared at me, a strand of blonde hair dangling on her forehead and her blue eyes momentarily blank with
bewilderment.
`He had to steal three dollars from my purse?'
I was seated in my easy chair puffing on a pipe and with a copy of the Times spread across my lap.
`It's a stupid little game I invented while you were gone to help Larry learn self-discipline. Certain options are created
by the player, some of them unpleasant, like stealing, and then the dice choose which one you have to do.'
'Who has to do?'
She shooed Evie off to the kitchen and advanced to the edge of the couch, where she lit a cigarette. She'd had a good
time in Daytona and we'd enjoyed a nice reunion, but she was beginning to look less tanned and more flushed.
`The player, or players.'
`I don't know what you're talking about.'
`It's simple,' I said (I love these two words: I always imagine Immanuel Kant pronouncing them before he set down the
first sentence of The Critique of Pure Reason, or an American President before launching into an explanation of
Vietnam War policy).
`To encourage Larry to branch out into new areas of this young-'
'Stealing!'
`-new areas of his young life, I invented a game whereby you make up things to do'
`But stealing, Luke, I mean-'
`Which the dice then choose from among.'
`And stealing was one of the options.'
`It's all in the family,' I said.
She stared at me from near the edge of the couch, her arms folded across her chest, a cigarette between her fingers.
She looked amazingly calm.
`Luke,' she began speaking slowly. `I don't know what you think you're doing lately; I don't know whether you're sane or insane; I don't know if you're trying to destroy me or trying to destroy your children or trying to destroy yourself, but if you if you - once more involve Larry in any of your sick games - I -I'll..'
Her amazingly calm face suddenly split like a broken mirror into dozens of cracks of tension, her eyes filled with tears and she twisted her face to the side and gasped a suppressed scream.
`Don't. Please don't,' she whispered, and she sat abruptly on the arm of the couch, her face still averted. `Go tell him no more games. Never.'
'I stood up, the Times fluttering to the floor.
`I'm sorry, Lil. I didn't realize `Never - Larry - more games.'
`I'll tell him.'
I left the room and went to his bedroom and told him, and his career as dice-boy, after only eight days, ended.
Until the Die resurrected it.
Chapter Nineteen
My childhood! My childhood! My God, I've now written over a hundred and ten pages and you don't even know whether I was bottle fed or breast fed! You don't know when I was first weaned and how; when I first discovered that girls don't have any weeny, how much I brooded because girls don't have any weeny, when I first decided to enjoy the fact that girls don't have any weeny. You don't know who my great-grandparents were, my grandparents; you don't even know about my mother and father? My siblings! My milieu! My socioeconomic background! My early traumas! My early joys!, The signs and portents surrounding my birth! Dear friends, you don't know any of that `David Copperfield kind of crap' (to quote Howard Hughes) which is the very essence of autobiography! Relax, my friends, I don't intend to tell you.
Traditional autobiographers wish to help you understand how the adult was `formed.'
I suppose most human beings, like clay chamber pots, are 'formed'- and are used accordingly. But I? I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. Living flows, and the only possible
