A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (rocket ebook reader .txt) 📕

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,