After what I would personally consider a strange and tumultuous holiday season, I thought I would treat myself to a relaxing massage. Having grown up with a no-frills, decidedly brainy mother who spent most of her weekends trudging around in the dirt of her gardens, I never had a good example of what pampering oneself actually looked like. Up until a few years ago, pedicures were most certainly unnecessary, haircuts could easily be done at the local Super Cuts, and massages were seen as recreational habits of the bored. But no more. In 2010, I will treat myself.
This is the stance I took before entering the Thai massage spa on Beverly last night. This was before I lost all movability in my upper back. Before my range of motion became limited to the most rudimentary of movements. That is to say, this was before this morning. Two days into the new decade and I already plan on negating on these pampering promises to myself.
My frequent partner in crime and agony, Veronica, accompanies me late last night into the depths of what appeared to be quite a lovely little massage parlor. Exposed wood ceilings, dimly lit chandeliers, a soft-spoken male receptionist who struck me as two parts Kenny G, one part Dog The Bounty Hunter. I am immediately thankful that I didn’t take Veronica to the hole-in-the-wall Thai town spot located in a strip mall. This is a girl whose version of “I look like shit today” involves still curled hair and YSL boots, drowning in a cashmere sweater.
Fake Kenny G leads us into a small changing area where I am instructed to put on some beyond giant pants with ties at the waist and a black shirt. I put on the woven slippers despite my aversion to other people’s feet and the spreading of various fungi and walk over to the brown curtained massage deck.
I call it a deck because that’s what it seems to me to be. Thin mattresses covered in blue cotton sit atop a soft brown wood floor. The curtain that would ordinarily separate me from the next client has been left open because, after all, that client is my friend. Couples massage! I look to Veronica as to what I should be doing, similar to like what the most uncoordinated person in aerobics class does: find the most talented and experienced person in the room, stalk them with your eyes, repeat all movements, play it off like you know what the hell you’re doing. Oh, yeah? Me? I come here all the time.
I never know what to do in situations that involve someone else serving me. I don’t want to seem too comfortable. I never know if I’m supposed to take all of my clothes off and seem whorish. I don’t know if I’m supposed to keep all of my clothes on and look like that kid in second grade who wore tee shirts in the pool. I am overcome with a similar terrified bashfulness when at the doctor’s office and I am instructed by a nurse to wrap 8 yards of a dinner napkin around my waist and put a boxy paper jacket on. Do you unfold the entire king sized sheet of paper? Do you wear the jacket open in the front or in the back? Do I keep on any clothes underneath? With frequency comes familiarity, but like I said, this whole “treat yourself” gig is new territory for me.
Our two lovely Thai masseuses open the brown curtains with smiles and Veronica instructs me to lie down on my stomach. Here we go. From this point on, all semblance of calm and tranquility vanish and I am left only with the screams in my head obliterating the gentle music peppering the atmosphere above me and the babbling of a plug-in miniature water fountain.
She asks me if I have any areas that hurt and I tell her, much to my later regret, that I have a terrible knot near my left shoulder blade. She begins to rub. She begins to rub hard and I know that I am in for an hour of hell because I know myself and I know that I am not going to say anything about the pressure being too great. I think that asking for less pressure is criticizing the style and skill of a masseuse and God forbid I make her feel bad.
She begins to use body parts that, judging from their ability to apply two-ton pressure to my poor body, are not hands. When the pain becomes too great I try to play a distracting game I would like to call “Foot, Elbow, Knee.” She moves around my body: sometimes standing, sometimes squatting, sometimes sitting on the back of my thighs. She begins to rub at my self-appointed tough spot, which turns out to be something that feels an awful lot like a pile of nautical ropes left on a pier somewhere. Currently, the feel is something like that same pile of ropes, only now like ropes trampled on by a classroom of young children.
I am contorted into positions I am familiar with because of a brief dalliance with yoga (pre-recession budget). The difference here is that my masseuse does not have the loving, gentle hands of my yogi who understood the importance of lining everything up correctly before getting deep into a painful bend. Instead, I am literally pushed into positions I have never been flexible enough for. At a certain point she tells me that I have to place my legs all the way down on the ground when she sits on my back and I tell her this is not possible, as I am about as flexible as a 7 foot, 500 pound linebacker who has never attempted to stretch before or after workouts. That’s just how it is.
When she places me on my back and begins to massage my neck and temples I come as close as I have ever been to sense what it must feel like to be torn apart limb from limb by a gorilla. My poor epidermis holds on for dear life, praying not to split violently during what I had only hoped would be a therapeutic experience. Next on her list is a knot in my head, which hurts so badly I see white under my eyelids and I am terrified what she is aggressively trying to work out is actually a vein or some vital part of my body unrelated to a muscle and I am going to be sent to the emergency room.
In attempt to seem amiable, I keep my eyes closed and hope that I am not wincing or contorting my face the way it wants to. She asks me if I am okay and I squeak out an “Uh huh.” It is as though she thinks that any pain I might be experience is due to the sorry state of my stressed upper back, and not of her warm bony hands and feet and elbows tearing at every piece of surface area I have available.
When my silent pleas to just fall unconscious until the hour is through go unanswered, I resort to thinking about painful memories of my past to dull the painful present. My brother and I used to run around the house beating the living shit out of each other. Scratching, spitting, slamming toes in doors. All in the name of picking out what to watch on TV, of course. He wanted sports; I wanted Forrest Gump. One would run around with the clunky remote, until safely barricaded in our parent’s bedroom, which was the only door in the house that locked. The other would find a bobby pin and try to poke the door open to unleash further fury. But there was always the option of white-flagging it when you just couldn’t breath any longer, couldn’t blood let in good conscious. And when that moment inevitably came, tired and spent from angst, one could scream, “WHEN! Good God. WHEN!” Then my brother and I would sit side by side on the blue sectional sofa, too exhausted to care about what was on the glass screened projection television.
What I wouldn’t do for that ability last night.
Tweet
So you didn’t get a happy ending then? Nevermind.
The part of this I find the most engaging is the concept of guilt. When did we middle class Americans become so prone to shame at enjoying ourselves, even if only for an hour?
What I really felt guilty about was when my pants kept falling down and she would tug them back up aggressively. I got the distinct sense of shame that would have accompanied the act of pulling them down myself and raising my bare ass in the air…which, I assure you, was not the case.