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

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 reflex 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