You don’t know about me unless you’ve read a book by the name of The Dice Man, but no matter. That book was made by me and I told the truth, mainly. There were things which I stretched, but mainly I told the truth.
In my fashion.
The book was all about how I came to make all my decisions by casting dice, to convert and pervert my psychiatric patients into the dicelife, and to blow my previous life to smithereens.
Now the way that book winds up is in the middle of a sentence, with me dangling on a vine over a cliff. That was in the seventies.
This book you’re browsing through now doesn’t pick up the story then. It skips a bit – about twenty years. It’s mostly about my son Larry and his quest to locate me and give me a piece of his mind. He runs into a lot of my friends and followers and gets a little confused. He tells some of the story himself and I tell some, and to keep the intellectual reader awake, we’ve thrown in some excerpts from my journals. It’s a good read.
Luke Rhinehart
The man is an incorrigible liar. He and his followers are utterly untrustworthy.
Larry Rhinehart
I might never have gone on a quest for my father if it hadn’t been for an unexpectedly light rain in Iowa. I was long three hundred futures contracts of December wheat based on a forecast of torrential rains in the Midwest. I expected the heavy rains to ruin the harvest and raise the price of wheat. Unfortunately, the rains didn’t fall mainly in the plain. They fell primarily on Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit, where very little wheat is grown. The price of wheat plummeted the next day and I lost about two million dollars for my clients. My employer called me in for a chat. My clients phoned me for chats. My employees and colleagues avoided me. The only people who phoned or dropped by were people who wanted to shoot me.
I’d lost big money for my clients a few other times, but somehow having to explain that ‘I thought it was going to rain harder’ was the sort of explanation that incites rather than soothes. And it didn’t help matters that the rains that didn’t fall mainly in the plains hadn’t been my only recent miscalculation. For almost three months I’d been on what is charitably called a losing streak. If my indicators said corn and wheat were going up, corn and wheat immediately changed their minds and took a dive. If I took a long position in the stock market, some unexpected inflation report or mad Iraqi dictator would set stocks spiralling downwards.
For three years I’d been something of a trading hotshot – ever since at the tender age of twenty-five I’d accidentally made a name for myself. I happened to be short several stock market futures on that lovely day in October 1987 when the stock market dropped six hundred points. While all around me friends, colleagues and strangers stood shell-shocked at the monitors watching the value of their stock holdings nosedive, I stood beside them watching myself and my clients grow richer and trying desperately to repress giggles.
In the fickle ways of Wall Street, that day I made my name at Blair, Battle and Pike (BB&P). At dawn I’d been a mere associate trader, given minimum leeway to dabble at my own ideas for trading. At dusk I was a Vice President and Senior Trader.
Mr Battle, the firm’s esteemed leader, knew that he would feel more comfortable being able to tell people that his Senior Trader had been right on that infamous day rather than wrong, so he adroitly changed Senior Traders. In the morning the previous Chief Trader, Vic Lissome, had been king and I merely a peon. In the evening Vic was sitting blank-eyed in a local pub wondering how the market could have clobbered him so badly, and I was humbly thanking Mr Battle for his confidence – and trying desperately to remember why I’d decided to go short those futures.
And from then until the summer of 1990 I’d been a consistent winner, but in the last few months I’d begun to lose money. So when my father began to intrude again into my life after a fifteen-year absence, it came at a time when I was in a vulnerable position – financially, socially and emotionally.
My troubles began when I arrived back at the office after lunch. On a Friday afternoon in September, trading tended to be on the slow side, and this Friday was no exception. Jeff Cannister, a short, dynamic fireplug of a man who always greeted me with shades of nervousness ranging from nail-biting tension to total panic, announced that gold had gone down over a dollar and a half in the ninety minutes I’d been gone. Jeff always managed to report such market movements as if my personal absence had led to the fall in gold – or the fall in the yen, etc. – and that had I stayed in my office staring at my monitor I’d have held up the price and saved the firm money.
With Jeff tailing along behind, I continued to stride through the mass of open cubicles at which brokers and traders sat in various states of controlled frenzy. I was aware of how incongruous the two of us were, my tall and lanky frame towering over the squat Jeff so that backbiters, as I knew, sometimes referred to us as ‘Mutt and Jeff’
So gold had fallen slightly when I thought it was about to rise; at least it hadn’t fallen through the floor, as wheat had done the week before.
‘Any news to cause it?’ I asked Jeff.
‘Nothing I saw,’ said Jeff. Despite his thick