A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

There’s a gate by the side of the office and a little outside waiting area with a bench. I flipped the switch on the wall that lets her know you’re out there, and George and I sat on the bench to wait.

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