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

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