A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  He got in my lap, and we were a little early, and I was glad he was with me. Dr. Lavich had heard a lot about George, but, unfortunately, on the day she would finally meet him, I’d also have to say goodbye to her and end my treatment. There was no way my analysis could continue. Not with what I had done in the past twenty-four hours, none of which I could tell her. If I told her, she’d call the police. Immediately.

  9.

  Which is how my therapy had begun four years earlier. I had told her how suicidal I was and some of the plans I had and some of the things I had tried, and she said: “If you keep talking like this, I’m going to call the police right now. It’s my obligation. Legally.”

  “Please, don’t do that,” I said, suddenly scared, and thought of bolting out of there.

  “Then you have to promise me you’re not going to kill yourself when you leave here, and you’re going to stop talking this way.”

  That first visit I was sitting across from Dr. Lavich. Later, I’d go to the couch. And you wouldn’t have thought it looking at her that day, but she was a tough little lady. She had gold hair and big glasses, and a dog named Janet, a rescue spaniel, was in her lap.

  “I promise I won’t kill myself,” I said. “Please don’t call the police. I…I think it was all a cry for help. To myself. I was just going through the motions, without intending to really do it. I was like a child playacting or something. Wanting attention.”

  What I had done a few days before that had alarmed Dr. Lavich was close my garage door and attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of my car and run it up to the passenger window just to see…what? That it was feasible? Then I had turned on the engine, a sort of test run, and sat in the car for a minute, but scared by what I was doing, I quickly turned the car off.

  Then I went inside, put a belt around my neck, and attached it to the pole in my closet and just stood there. Then I undid the belt.

  Not liking how either thing had felt—the business in the garage and the business in the closet—I lay on my bed and fantasized about getting my hands on some sedatives and driving out to Malibu, taking the pills, and then swimming out as far as I could, with no hope of making it back, and with the pills making the drowning come easy, like going to sleep. Forever.

  All this I had told Dr. Lavich within the first few minutes of meeting her, which had elicited the threat, the very real threat, that she would call the cops, and I was there, ironically, because she was part of an analytic institute that offered free therapy to ex-cops and ex-military.

  A social worker at the LAFPP, the pension union for retired cops and firemen, had referred me to Dr. Lavich when I called and said I needed counseling of some sort, and if it hadn’t been free, I probably wouldn’t have tried analysis and definitely couldn’t have afforded it.

  But I did give it a try, and the one rule in analysis, Dr. Lavich said early on, was to be totally candid and to hide nothing, which was part of the reason you lie on a couch and don’t have to face the analyst. You can just talk and not worry about reading their expression, the look in their eye. The goal is to free-associate and bring up anything that comes to mind—your daily struggles, neuroses, past events, current events, the smell in the room. Anything.

  Freud liked to call it the talking cure, a line he appropriated from one of his early patients, and the idea is that just by talking every day to the analyst, who listens—it’s also a listening cure, in my opinion—you come to know yourself in a way that has eluded you all your life.

  And you get truly honest for maybe the first time ever, and through all this talking, you bring the unconscious—all the old injuries and traumas and strange early life misperceptions—to the surface, and you look at everything, the sources of your suffering, like laying out pieces of bone from an archaeological dig.

  And by doing this, you slowly lessen the hold the past has on you.

  It no longer makes you behave like a puppet, in ways you don’t fully understand, and you begin to master compulsions you thought you could never shed.

  But what took years—a whole life—to tangle does take a few years to untangle. There’s no quick fix, which is why analysis takes time, but you can—if you just talk, hold back nothing, and face what most scares you—shift the course of your life, until you finally untangle, grow up, and wake up.

  That’s the carrot, at least.

  So. The talking cure.

  Some of what I had been working on—talking about—for four years was this:

  My mother’s death at my birth.

  And how my father hated me—whether he was aware of it or not—for killing her.

  They had decided or maybe just joked, while she was pregnant, that they would name the child Happy if it was a boy and Merry if it was a girl. Happy Doll. Merry Doll. Why not Baby Doll? The whole thing was ludicrous, but to honor my mother, my father, Christopher Doll, saddled me with the name Happy but never called me by it. I was either Hapless or Ugly or Merry.

  It was always, “Come here, Ugly,” and when he especially wanted to humiliate me, he’d say, “Come here, Merry, my sweet girl.” So, like something out of Snow White, those were my three names: Hapless, Merry, and Ugly. Though in public he did call me Hank or son.

  Both his parents were dead, as were my mother’s, so he raised me on his own and often threatened to put me up for adoption, and I wanted him to, but he had some image of himself that wouldn’t let him do that. He was a good Catholic and he was a Navy man.

  Unfortunately, though, for the bulk of his career, because of me, he was stuck behind a desk in San Diego. As a single father, he couldn’t ship out anymore, and he never dated or met anyone else. His wife was his Jim Beam, which he came home to every night at 5:30. When I was old enough, starting around age nine, I’d make us dinner at seven sharp and he’d eat a little, drink more, and then pass out on the couch. That was our life together.

  Of course, we had some good moments, but when they put my mother in the ground, he went with her. Which was probably the best and noblest thing about him, his love for her, and what was left behind, after my mother died, was more ghost than man.

  And so I had begun, in analysis, to forgive him and even to love him.

  What else had I worked on with Dr. Lavich?

  When I was eleven, a camp counselor orally sodomized me for a month at a Catholic summer camp, which my father had sent me to so as to get me out of his hair.

  The next summer, I refused to go to the camp and heard that the counselor—Vince Angelotti was his name—had been arrested, caught with a boy in the shower room. I tried not to think about this for the next few decades, but then a few years ago, when that football coach was arrested in Pennsylvania, I began to feel very anxious and panicky and knew what it was.

  So I googled Vince Angelotti, and he came up right away: he was living in Arizona—he was in his late fifties now—and he’d been recently arrested for possession of child pornography and his mug shot was devastating. At camp, he’d been the best athlete and the handsomest of all the counselors, which was great cover for his sickness: all the girls loved him and all the boys worshipped him. He was muscular and olive-skinned, with curly dark hair and pristine features, and then there he was again, on my computer, thirty-odd years later.

  But he was barely recognizable. Time had just about destroyed him. Yet he was in there. In that mask. Behind that mask. I could see him. I hadn’t forgotten.

  His age was listed as fifty-seven, but he looked much older, and he had grown more feminine over time, witchlike. His dark hair was cut short and his skin was yellow-gray and his cheeks were sunken, eaten away from the inside, and his nose was misshapen, most likely from snorting drugs, and his eyes, the way they peered into the camera, were defiant: he couldn’t yet relinquish what he craved, and it looked as if his eyebrows and eyelashes had been boiled off. One could imagine that he had been soaked in formaldehyde while still alive.

  Oddly, there was a slight trace of a smile for the mug-shot camera, some old refle
x for when your picture is taken and you try to look nice, and I could see in that pitiful smile some lingering wish to be loved and to have never been cursed this way.

  But I might have been projecting.

  What else?

  When I was fourteen, our church assigned me a Big Brother, Kyle Corcoran, who was eighteen. No one had ever been kinder to me. We played catch together and rode bikes, went surfing and skateboarding.

  Then after three months of this, of what felt like heaven to me, he hanged himself in his parents’ basement, and no one knew why he had done it. Kyle seemed perfect: he was an Eagle Scout and straight-A student and a Big Brother. But then someone started the rumor that he had killed himself because he was gay and didn’t want to tell his parents, who were very religious.

  After he died, I intermittently thought about suicide—hanging, specifically, just like Kyle—for the next thirty-two years, but talking to Dr. Lavich had finally brought the decades of suicidal ideation to an end.

  Then when I was eighteen, to get away from my father, I joined the Navy, only to find myself, three months later, stuck on a ship of men just like him.

  A month after that, my father died, unexpectedly. We were docked in Seoul when they informed me, and he and I hadn’t exchanged a single letter while I had been away, and I had never called home. I never got to say goodbye, and I hadn’t said “I love you” in years. When I got the news, I wished I could have told him that one more time.

  So I did seven years in the Navy, which were fairly hellish: I was a loner and all screwed up. Because I wasn’t popular with my fellow sailors (I was too bookish, too self-absorbed), the master-at-arms on my ship—the naval equivalent of a military policeman—saw me as a natural fit and recruited me.

  I was big and strong, which was mostly what they looked for in a cop on a boat, and they wanted someone who wouldn’t play favorites and be close to the men, which was another box I had already checked. They sent me to masters-at-arms school in San Antonio at the end of my first year, and the next six years I spent as a policeman on different ships, mostly serving in the Pacific.

  When I got out, I followed a girl from San Diego to Los Angeles, didn’t know what to do with myself, and joined the LAPD for the next ten years. The bulk of my career was spent trying to find missing children—maybe because of the whole Vince Angelotti thing—and it got to me. Seemed like I was working in a slaughterhouse every day. My job was to stop the butchers, but it was like a bad dream: get one kid off the meat hook and here come ninety-nine more.

  So the suicidal ideation was around-the-clock back then, and I drank heavily and became a pothead, and all I wanted, I thought, was a girlfriend. That would make everything okay, but I could never make a relationship last. It’s really not possible when you hate yourself.

  At thirty-five, I quit the cops and life got a little better. I liked working for myself, and Dr. Schine sent a lot of business my way. I was a functional alcoholic and pothead, and my love life was busy, though really it was a version of that children’s book where that little bird—not knowing what he is—goes around saying to all the other animals something like: “Are you my mommy?”

  Then, when I was forty-six, it all came crashing down bad. It was like a story out of myth. I had met the girl of my dreams but didn’t know it. I had waited all my life to meet her—maybe ever since my mother’s death—and then when she was right in front of me I couldn’t see it.

  Her name was Joyce and she taught high school English and, like me, she loved books. It was a shared hobby and we would read in bed together, and she was smart and sweet and pretty, and I loved talking to her, and I would bound to the door when she came to my house, excited to see her, and yet for some self-destructive reason, I also kept her at a distance: wouldn’t answer all her calls; would only see her once or twice a week. And yet she was still crazy about me. She would tell me she loved me, and I wouldn’t or couldn’t say it back.

  I even had the audacity after we had been together awhile—I was insane—to suggest we have an open relationship. I had never tried it before and was going through some moronic phase, thinking that maybe the cause of all my years of failed romances was monogamy, which was, of course, totally wrong. The problem was me. Always had been.

  So with all my pushing her away, Joyce, finally, in part because of my stupid suggestion about being open, took up with another guy, fell for him, and ended our relationship.

  And then it hit me: I’m in love with her. I never was so sure of anything in my whole life. Of course, I was half-deluded—what did I know of love?—but the pain was real, and I sent her letters and diaries and asked her to come back to me. But it was too late. She was in love with someone else, and, anyway, why should she give me another chance? I hadn’t valued her the first time.

  And this broke me.

  I couldn’t forgive myself for losing her, and the pain of my whole strange, desperate life came flying out of me.

  Which is when I put the hose in the car exhaust.

  Which is when I went into the closet and played at hanging myself, like my old hero, Kyle Corcoran.

  And which is when I ended up in Dr. Lavich’s office and slowly began a four-year process of rebuilding myself—a reconstruction project that I had just torn down in a single night.

  A little after nine, she opened the door to her office and said, brightly, “Hello, Hank,” as she always did. Analysts like being alive. At least, Dr. Lavich does. Then she took in the big bandage on my face and the dog in my arms, and she said, with concern, “What’s going on?” It was clear that she hadn’t seen yesterday’s LA Times.

  “I have some things to tell you,” I said, and stood up. She nodded and stepped to the side, and I went into her office.

  10.

  I lay on the couch, and George said hello to Janet by sniffing her anus. In return, she licked his penis, and then he jumped on top of me and lay on my belly like a sphinx, a favorite position of his.

  Janet went off to squeeze in next to Dr. Lavich, who sat behind me in her chair, silently, and we made a nice little picture, I imagined, with our dogs, which was fitting because Freud famously loved dogs, always had one in his office and thought they were calming for his patients and a good judge of character. Freud is Dr. Lavich’s hero, and there are a few pictures of him—though none with dogs—on the walls of her office, which is quite large and filled with books and odd paintings and sculptures. It’s a bright room, because of a skylight in the ceiling, and in the corner are old stuffed animals from when she used to work with children.

  The couch I lay on was simply a soft blue leather couch, cracked with age, and across from the head of the couch was a poster, under glass, of a Chagall painting, which I had stared at for four years—it was directly in my line of vision. At the center of the painting, at the center of a somewhat surreal landscape, a man and woman sit on a bench in front of a house. The man has his arm around the woman and she leans into him, with love and trust and perhaps some sadness and fear.

  And that day I stared at the painting as I always did. At the man and the woman. And I thought of Monica. And I could hear Dr. Lavich breathing. Sometimes she had the sniffles, which bothered me, neurotically.

  I wasn’t sure where to begin or what to say.

  I’ve killed two men since I’ve seen you last. Also, my friend died, more or less in my arms, and he had come to me a few days before and asked me for a kidney and if I had said yes right away, if my first instinct had been generosity, he probably wouldn’t have gotten killed, and one of the men I killed was strangling a girl at work and then he nearly killed me, he cut me with a very large knife, and I shot him, though I didn’t mean to kill him, I just wanted to slow him down, and then his father beat me, and I have a prescription for Dilaudid, and I know you think I still drink too much and smoke too much, but I really like this Dilaudid, it puts two inches of gauzy curtain between me and the world, and, oh, one good thing is Monica, you know my friend from the bar, the last woman I
slept with, four years ago, well, maybe she loves me or maybe, which is more likely, she pities me…but I think I love her, which I didn’t think I could feel again…I put my face in her neck, and it felt so good…but I have to get to these men, the ones who killed my friend, before they get to me, but maybe what I’m trying to do is kill myself and I’m utterly deluded…deluded on Dilaudid…maybe that’s why they call it Dilaudid, because it makes you deluded…though it hasn’t occurred to me, until just now, that I could take these pills to Malibu and swallow all of them, like my old plan, and swim out into the ocean and…but I don’t want to do that; I want to hunt these men down, and I didn’t tell you but the second man I killed I threw off a balcony and his neck broke at the most hideous angle, and there was another man in the house, with a bullet in his head, fired by the gun in my pocket…I’m sorry I brought a gun into your office…

  But I didn’t say any of that to her, though that’s what was unspooling in my crazy mind.

  Finally, she spoke: “Hank, tell me what’s going on. Why did you bring your dog, and what happened to your face?”

  I touched the bandage. Could feel the raised, long pucker of the stitches beneath the cotton. I said: “I can’t tell you anything. You’ll have to trust me on this. So I’m going to sit up in a second and leave. My analysis, unfortunately, has to stop.”

  She waited a moment. Then she said: “You can tell me what’s going on.”

  “I can’t. I have to stop seeing you.”

  “I’m very concerned for you right now, Hank. Please tell me—”

  I stood up abruptly with George and walked to the door without looking at her.

  “Hank!” she said with urgency, standing.

  I couldn’t look her in the eye and said, without turning, keeping my back to her: “Please; you have to trust me. Thank you for all you’ve done for me. I have to go now,” and then I said, in a whisper she couldn’t hear, “I love you,” and then I quickly opened the door and walked rapidly to my car, George trailing after me. What a fool I must have looked like. A scared little man—at six two, 190—running away from a tiny analyst. A Freudian with gold-colored hair.