A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  But I didn’t know then I wouldn’t be back in the Dresden for a long time. I didn’t know any of the bad things that were going to happen to me, and, worst of all, to Monica.

  3.

  I kept my car in the lot behind the bar, and during the time it had taken me to drink my small dose of tequila, it had stopped raining and the sun, just before setting, had come out, and the light was magnificent. The world had turned purple.

  I opened the windows as I drove and the air was fresh and sharp, and for a moment Los Angeles really was what the Spanish first called it: the Town of the Queen of Angels.

  I headed north on Vermont and up ahead, on the mountain, the Griffith Observatory kept watch over the city, its wet dome like the head of an eagle.

  I made a left onto Franklin, endured the traffic for a few lights, then made a right onto Canyon Drive in the direction of Bronson Canyon and the caves. I cut through the hills the back way and descended down to Beachwood Canyon and home. I live off of Beachwood Drive on a little dead-end street called Glen Alder. It’s at the base of the hill with the big wooden sign, the one that says HOLLYWOOD.

  I parked in my detached garage, a white stucco box with terra-cotta shingles, opened the gate to the fence, and started my way up the forty-five stairs to my house, a white Spanish two-story bungalow built in 1923.

  It has just four small rooms and a bathroom, but it was part of the original Hollywoodland development, and it rests high above the street, lodged into the side of a small hill. My front yard, feral and overgrown, is like a bit of sloping forest.

  “Hello, everyone,” I said as I climbed, and I was speaking to all the trees and plants, and then in the dying light, I bent over some salvia and addressed them directly. “You’re so beautiful,” I said, and the thin purple tentacles swayed like underwater lilies.

  I climbed some more stairs and touched one of my avocado trees—its trunk was strong and proud. Then, as I approached my house, which is shrouded by another avocado tree and a big elm, I said, “Hello, Frimma, darling,” which is what I call her. My house, like a ship, is female, and then I was through the door, and my dog, George, went nuts, jumping on me.

  “Hello, George,” I said in English, and he said, “Hello, my great love,” in dog, which is spoken with the eyes. Then I plugged in my phone in the kitchen so I could call Lou after it charged.

  In the meantime, George needed a walk and I grabbed his leash, and he started jumping even higher than he had in greeting. He’s half Chihuahua, half terrier of some kind, and quite springy. I’ve had him two years—he’s a rescue; someone left him chained to a fence—and he’s three or four years old, according to the vet. Unfortunately, I know nothing of his life before me, which I have to accept.

  “George, sit!” I said. “Sit. Come on, sit!”

  Finally, he calmed down enough for me to loop the leash around his neck and we went out the door. He was pulling hard down the stairs, but I didn’t care. He’d been cooped up all day and I wanted him to feel free.

  Then we hit the street and I admired, as I often do, his small, muscular torso and how sleek and handsome he is. His legs are thin and elegant, as are his long-fingered paws, and his coloring—a tan head and body and a white neck—makes him look like he’s wearing a khaki suit and a white shirt, which is a good look for a gentleman like George in the semiarid clime of Los Angeles.

  Trim and fit, he weighs about 22 pounds and has large mascara-rimmed eyes that break your heart and make you fall in love simultaneously.

  Unlike most dog owners, I don’t project onto him that he’s my child, my son. Rather, it’s a more disturbed relationship than that. I think of him as my dear friend whom I happen to live with. In that way, we’re like two old-fashioned closeted bachelors who cohabitate and don’t think the rest of the world knows we’re lovers.

  He does have his own bed, which I banish him to every now and then, but that’s very rare, and so we sleep together most every night of the year.

  He starts off with his head resting on the pillow next to me, giving me moony eyes as I read—I always read before going to bed—and then when I’m tired, I put my book down and bury my face in his neck and inhale his earthy dog smell, which I love, and then I kiss his neck like he’s my wife before I turn off the light, and then he tries to put his tongue in my mouth, which I don’t allow, but I let him lick the corner of my eye to get some salty crust or something else tasty—it’s a whole ritual we have—and then when the lights go out, he burrows under the sheets and puts his warm body next to mine, and I’m ready to sing like Fred Astaire: “Heaven. I’m in heaven…”

  So we walked down to Beachwood and then over to Glen Holly and back; he had one nicely formed bowel movement and at least two dozen marking urinations. Back inside, I filled his bowl with his food and made a quick plate for myself—a pickle, some crackers, some sauerkraut, and a can of mackerel whipped up with some Vegenaise.

  Some intrepid ants were crawling around on the counter as I prepared this feast, but I didn’t have the heart to kill them. They were going about their business with such great purpose and industriousness that it seemed unfair to just come along and crush them. They had things to do! And I hate to kill anything.

  So I took my plate into the small living room, where I have an old wooden table, and ate quickly. The pickle and the sauerkraut I thought of as my vegetables and my fiber, and the mackerel was my protein.

  My eating habits are odd but healthy.

  I was out of the house and headed down the stairs by 6:10, and George went out to his little wire enclosure, off the kitchen, to say goodbye. There’s a doggie door in the kitchen door, and the eight-foot enclosure beyond it—like a chicken coop—lets George get some fresh air when he wants to while keeping him protected from coyotes. He can also use it as a pissoir when necessary.

  “Goodbye, George,” I said, and his eyes were sad, but I steeled myself and didn’t look back.

  As I drove to work, I left Lou a message. Being even more old school than I am, he didn’t have a cell phone but a landline with an answering machine; he lived in a small unit of the Mirage, which came with a kitchenette and its own phone. He’d been living there for about ten years and the room was a perk of his job as the night man at the motel.

  The answering machine made a beep—there was no outgoing message—and I said: “Lou, it’s Hank. Thought about what we talked about. I’d like to do it. Let’s go to the VA and find out if we match.”

  Then I paused. I almost said “I love you,” but I didn’t. I just said, “So call me,” and hung up. I have no problem telling George or the plants or the trees in my yard or my house that I love them, but with people it doesn’t come so easy.

  4.

  My night job was at the Thai Miracle Spa, on the second floor of a two-story strip mall at the corner of Argyle and Franklin, not far from my house.

  I got there at 6:20, and Mrs. Pak, the owner, was working the desk. She lowered her reading glasses to give me a look but didn’t say anything. She was in her midsixties, but her hair was still lustrous and black, like oil. She was always very serious, but when she smiled, which was rare, she was radiant. That night, she was wearing a man’s white shirt, blue work pants, and simple black shoes. Her usual costume.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “It’s okay. It’s quiet,” she said, then she pushed her reading glasses back up her nose and went back to her Korean-language newspaper.

  I took my usual seat on the other side of the waiting room, across from the desk, and fished out the novel I was reading, which was in the front left pocket of my jacket. The book was The Great Santini, by Pat Conroy, and it was my second time reading it—I’m a sucker sometimes for sadistic-daddy books with a military angle—and I settled in and began the long wait for trouble, which might not come.

  Mrs. Pak also owned the Laundromat and the nail salon on the ground floor, and I had been doing my laundry at her place for a long time, and about a year before, when I
was waiting for my clothes to dry, she asked me if I could provide security at the spa in the evenings. She knew I was an ex-cop and ran my own business, and she thought it might be a good fit. I was broke and said yes, without really thinking it through, and so I became the muscle at a jerk-off farm, which wasn’t something to be proud of.

  I did seven years in the Navy, ten years in the LAPD, and since 2004 I’d been on my own. Working the Thai Miracle Spa was not where I thought I’d be at fifty, but it’s where I ended up, working Monday through Saturday, six to midnight.

  During the day at the spa, it was a mix of female and male clients, but the night trade was different: there were almost no women customers and a lot of the men had their drink on, which was why Mrs. Pak had wanted security. The strip mall is right near the entrance to the 101 and a lot of these drunks stopped off at the spa on their way home to the Valley.

  Of course the girls weren’t supposed to have sex with the customers, but Mrs. Pak looked the other way at what she called “prostate release.” What she didn’t look the other way at was the extra cash it brought in, which she split 60/40 with the girls—60 for her, 40 for the girls. Which was much better terms than most.

  It was supposed to be a Thai spa, but all the girls were from China, and it was a crew of about twenty. They worked at all three locations—the Laundromat, the nail salon, and the Miracle—and it was like a big family. Mrs. Pak’s eightysomething mother cooked for everyone. In the back room of the salon, lunch was served at one, dinner at nine.

  Mrs. Pak had one son—an ER doctor at Cedars-Sinai, whom she put through medical school at UCLA—but he never came around. Her ex-husband, a gambling addict and an old-fashioned morphine addict, lived in Reno, and so I was the only man on the premises, other than customers.

  That night things were slow at first and I was tearing through the Conroy novel. In the Navy, they called me the Dictionary because I always had a book and liked to do crossword puzzles.

  Then around eight things began to get busy, and whenever a man came in, I stood up and gave him a look while he conducted his business with Mrs. Pak.

  Once the man paid, she’d lead him through the beaded curtain on the other side of the room and then down the hallway, which had eight little massage rooms, four on each side.

  The look I gave the men wasn’t meant to frighten them off but to let them know that someone was there and that there were rules to follow. Loose rules. No intercourse, no oral sex, but hand jobs and a little fondling were okay. Also nursing.

  Mrs. Pak had told me that a lot of the men just liked to suckle on the girls and would pay dearly for it, and I couldn’t say I didn’t understand. My mother died in childbirth and I was never breast-fed. Not even by a wet nurse. My analyst has implied—she doesn’t say things directly—that this is a big part of my problem in life and I don’t disagree.

  It’s also something of an issue for me that my first breath was my mother’s last. It’s hard to forgive yourself for something like that, and it doesn’t make it easy for your father to forgive you, either, or even to love you. All of which has led to a strange life with George and four days a week on the couch. I think I’m the only ex-cop I know in Freudian analysis, but I could be wrong.

  So I didn’t like the rules at the spa, didn’t like being complicit with what was going on, but being low on cash had made me stupid, and then I got caught up in thinking—more stupidity, vain stupidity—that the girls needed me.

  At least three times a week, one of the drunken idiots who came for the prostate release—but then wanted something more—would get violent and rough, and I’d have to step in and do some arm-twisting, which does come natural to me. I’m six two, 190, all lean muscle from eating canned fish the way I do, and in the Navy I was a cop and in the cops I was a cop, so I know how to subdue people. There are two basic rules: bark loudly and act first.

  It also helps to have a weapon, and at the spa, I carried a sixteen-inch steel telescopic baton, the kind that starts out eight inches but expands when you flick it, and it fit nicely in the large front right pocket of my blazer, which is my jacket of choice.

  Every day of my life, I wear the same basic outfit: tropical-weight blue blazer, blue or tan khaki pants, and a blue or white button-down shirt. I also wear, every day, black ankle boots. They’re good for kicking people, if it comes to that, and I also like the click-clack the wooden heels make as I walk—it’s like out of a movie, the sound effect of a man in a city late at night, alone and in danger. It’s a romantic sound.

  At the spa, I also carried in the front pocket of my blazer a small belly gun, which I had never fired and never wanted to fire. It was there as a deterrent and as a last resort.

  So I was well set up to take care of the drunks, and upon my recommendation, Mrs. Pak had splurged on a neat little system to help me know if the girls were in trouble. There was a switch on their massage tables they could hit if things were getting out of control, and on the coffee table next to me was a little electronic board, like the kind they used to use at restaurants for seating, and if a girl in, let’s say, room 6 was having trouble, a little red light—the sixth one on the panel—would start flashing.

  It wasn’t a foolproof system, but it was better than relying on one of the girls screaming for help—she might not get the chance, but she might get to the switch.

  That night a girl screamed.

  5.

  Mrs. Pak had stayed at the desk until nine o’clock, when a girl named June replaced her. At 9:10 another girl brought us our dinner—a bowl of bibimbap: vegetables and rice with monkfish.

  At 9:45, I tried the Mirage, but Lou wasn’t at the front desk. The owner, Aram, a friend of mine, answered the phone and said Lou hadn’t shown up for work.

  “Is he in his room?”

  “No, he’s not in there,” Aram said. “I don’t know where he is. So I’m stuck working the desk and I haven’t had dinner.” Aram’s an Armenian man in his midsixties, and we’ve gotten friendly over the years playing backgammon, a passion for both of us, and sometimes he’s hired me to chase away drug dealers.

  “When Lou turns up, tell him to call me,” I said.

  “Right,” he said, and we hung up.

  At around 10:20, a big guy came in. Real big. I stood up and felt small, which doesn’t happen to me too often. This piece of meat was about six six, 340, most of it in his belly. He was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt and had a shaved white head the size of a watermelon made of fat. A dirty backpack was slung over his shoulder.

  He had a blondish-red goatee, cauliflower ears, and small, pink-rimmed eyes, like a rat. All his features were tiny and strange, like they’d been glued onto the wrong head. Even his nose was small, just a button, and he must have gotten his deformed ears from wrestling or being in too many fights, and he looked at me with his brown rat eyes and I looked at him with my blue eyes, and he gave me the creeps. I fingered the steel baton in my pocket.

  But he was polite to June, soft-spoken the way a lot of big men are, and he asked for the body wash and the salt scrub.

  In room 8, there was a special shower with a long rubber hose and a waterproof massage bed. The girls would put on rain boots and a bathing suit, and it was a high-priced item. Rat Eyes gave June his credit card—all went smoothly—and then she led him through the curtain and down the hallway. A sweet girl named Mei was working room 8, and I didn’t envy her the task of sluicing that big boy’s nasty body.

  I sat back down, picked up my book, but got distracted and thought about Monica. Why did she, out of the blue, tell me she loved me? I knew it probably just meant that she loved me as a friend and nothing more, but maybe she was also open to giving me a second chance. It had been four years since our one night, and I hadn’t been with anyone since.

  At 10:43, I heard the scream.

  June stood up and I stood up. I ran through the beaded curtain and a couple of the girls popped out of their rooms. Where did the scream come from? The doors to rooms
3, 5, and 8 were still closed, and then there was another scream. Seemed to be coming from room 8. Which made sense.

  Rat Eyes.

  I took the baton out of my pocket and flicked it to its full length. I yanked the door open and Rat Eyes was on the far side of the room and had the rubber shower hose around Mei’s neck. She was in her bathing suit, her eyes were bulging out of her head, and his immense body was naked and wet. He saw me and dropped Mei and dashed for his backpack, which was on a chair with his clothes. Out came a big hunting knife.

  Water was all over the floor and there was a chemical smell in the air—I saw a glass pipe on the counter by the towels. He had smoked some meth and was out of his mind.

  He charged me like a wet bull and I flashed to his orange pubes. Same color as my father’s, and the purple head of his penis was poking out of the pubes like some kind of hideous growth, and all of it was tucked under the slick monstrous slab of his stomach.

  The whole thing threw me—my father’s Irish pubes, Mei lying dead or unconscious on the floor, water everywhere, Rat Eyes’s cock—and I was slow to react. I didn’t bark and I didn’t go first, and he was on me and slicing down at me with the knife and I got my left forearm up just in time and took the blow there, the knife cutting through my jacket and deep into my skin.

  As I was blocking him, I took a swing at his rib cage with the baton, but I was all off balance and it was a weak blow and he hardly felt it, there was too much beef on him, and then he was slicing down at me again and this time his blow was stronger and it knocked my arm out of the way and the blade caught my face and sliced my cheek open and I could feel it peel off like a sticker.

  Then suddenly we were on the floor—he had slipped and brought me with him—and the back of my head bounced off the hard tile and I lost the baton, and he climbed on top of me, naked and slippery, and the knife was in the air and then coming down at me, to stab me, and my eyes were filled with blood from my cheek, but I was able to grab his wrist with my left hand and I made my right hand like a knife, my fingers all together, like they teach you in self-defense, and you either go for the eyes or the throat, and I jabbed him hard in the left eye, and that got through the meth and he screamed and rolled off of me, and I rolled away, and then we were both trying to stand on the slippery floor, and he was squinting, and I got to my feet first and kicked him in the shoulder, which didn’t do much, and on his knees he swiped at me with his knife and nearly got me, and so then I took out my belly gun and meant to shoot him in the leg to slow him down, but my hand was unsteady, and I shot him through the neck and blood geysered out in a spray.