Spa

This is one of the last things I wrote before the pandemic. My Uncle Paul died from Covid a few months later. I lost my job the same day. It was also my ninth wedding anniversary. That was a rough time. But I’m here now. And he isn’t. But his sense of humor remains, in me, and his other nieces, nephews, and their children. If you’ve read this before, I rewrote nearly all of it.

In my family, men didn’t go to spas. Not even the uncle who managed gay bars for the mob. His “spa” was falling asleep on the floral print couch at my grandma’s house after Sunday dinner, because he closed the bar at 4AM that morning. My father worked in construction and broke bricks with his hands at parties. He also smoked Capri cigarettes and loved Barbara Streisand—like Odysseus, he was a complicated man—but the closest he ever got to a manicure was when he nearly cut two fingers off with a circular saw, and I had to change his bandages. I’m a third generation immigrant and the first on my mother’s side to go to college, and also the first of the men to go to a spa.

Note: not a massage parlor. A spa. Named after the town of Spa in Belgium, which was supposedly famous since Roman times for its healing waters. Nowadays you don’t need a mineral spring to have a spa, just some some hot rocks, a jug of water with cucumber slices, and a bunch of people with too much money. (Of which I am now one, to my enormous, ex-Catholic, blue collar guilt.)

After following my father’s command to make the hardest thing I do at work be pushing my chair away from my desk, I’ve become a bougie white collar dork. I’m built like a tank because I’ve been a gym rat since high school, after three coked-up Jersey-Shore douchebags from the wrestling team clobbered me. In my family, I’ve been the amateur masseur for decades. I have strong hands and a knack for finding the knotted tendon in the shoulders of my mom, tired from waitressing all day, or my dad, from carrying sacks of concrete. (On separate days, of course. They split up when I was seven.) But no one is strong enough to return the favor. Sarah got tired of doing the cha-cha-cha on my back and told me to go to the spa down the street.

When we lived in Montclair, we were up the street from a spa built in a former 19th century Masonic Temple, which had taken over a Baptist Church. It is said to be haunted, and some think its very existence is blasphemous. Why? The Pope washes people’s feet, so why can’t you go to a former house of God to get yours exfoliated? It’s not like the Limelight in New York, which put S&M acts in cages in a former sixth avenue church (though monks probably invented flagellation….)

I haven’t seen any vengeful spirits. I started going there for haircuts, up on the second floor, looking through stained glass. Where the organist would be. I asked my barber about the ghosts. He said, “I haven’t seen anything, but others have.” Like what? Is a poltergeist throwing loofahs? I started looking in the mirrors for shades of dead Templars performing forbidden rites.

There’s something about strutting into a gutted church, the vaulted ceilings and stained glass intact, to have your body worshiped by a legion of trained, attractive, well-coiffed artisans that inflames the privilege something fierce. The building is a historic landmark, and they had to leave the exterior untouched. It’s easy to imagine the brownstone church was once occupied by Knights Templar, before massage therapists and hair stylists took over in a bloody battle that left freemasons impaled on thinning shears, and colorists disemboweled by halberds and Bohemian Earspoons.

I use a back entrance that takes you right to the spa area, down half a floor in an elevator, which gives it an Eyes Wide Shut meets Get Smart kind of vibe. Don Adams infiltrating the Fidelio sex ring, telling Tom Cruise, “Would you believe, under this cloak, I have a schwantz the size of a kosher salami?”

The view from the upper floor.

The co-owner is a master mason, so I am on the lookout for hidden statues of Baphomet. Once inside, it’s all dark wood and gleaming chrome, with the sound of a waterfall on river stones behind glass. More like a Rainforest Cafe designed by unimaginative, over-moneyed tech bros than a temple. The cheerful receptionist pointed me toward the men’s locker room, because few men come here, all of us dazed, slightly embarrassed, and afraid we’ll break some kind of spa code and be banished for life. I’ve only met another man in the locker room once or twice, and they are either terrified into silence or unnecessarily garrulous:

“They got granola,” they’ll announce, pointing to a pitcher of lemon water and the jar that dispenses oats and raisins like a gumball machine at the petting zoo. I like to make it as uncomfortable as possible, by grunting responses in my brashest of Jersey accents, the one reserved for talking to a longshoreman about a trucker who walked outside the safety lines and got cut in half by a mobile gantry. “What ya gonna do?” with a shrug.

It is a locker room, and there are lockers, but it’s thankfully not like the gym. There are no benches for old men to lounge upon naked with their nutsacks¹ dangling to the slate floor like a fleshy perpetual motion desk toy. There is folding screen for shy customers to change behind. There is granola, as mentioned. And there are grooming products for you to freshen up with. My father used a jar of mint fluorescent gloop called Dippity Doo, which sounds like a cartoon dog sidekick, Scrappy Doo’s dumber brother. I have the locker room to myself today, so I change into the provided rubber slippers and a white terrycloth robe as thick and plush as a litter of sleeping Samoyeds, partake of the lemon water, and wait on the faux cowskin sofa until Liz, my massage therapist, knocks on the door.

I’ve been going to Liz for half a year, usually after a few hours of Krav Maga and boxing, so she can undo the damage. She’s the deep tissue specialist, and has the strength of a Terminator. When I strained my rotator cuff and could barely move my arm, she tortured me for twenty minutes, muttering quiet succor—“poor baby”—while she crushed my tangled tendons beneath the marble rolling pin of her forearm. I wanted to scream, but one glance at her pitiless gaze and I bit my tongue and bored holes through the ceiling with my eyes instead. She fixed me up like a curly-haired myrmidon of Themyscira, whose iron forearms can deflect bullets like Wonder Woman.

Liz leads me past rooms labeled “Serenity” and “Haven,” which she opens and tells me to sit on the table and dunk my feet in a washtub of soapy water in which she has sprinkled blue crystals. She could be a witch making bone broth out of my metatarsals. I do not care by this point. I am under the spa spell.

This is the weirdest part of the whole thing. The foot washing. I have a thirty-year relationship with my podiatrist—I have giant Hulk Hobbit feet—but this never feels not wrong. (I don’t care how many negatives that is.) I get the reason, no dirty feet on the massage table, but it feels well, bougie as fuck. Thankfully it’s over in a minute, and Liz leaves me to shuffle off my robe and struggle under the heavy blanket. Like the foot washing, there’s a ritual to this. I think it’s so you can try to squeeze out any possible farts in solitude. Which get trapped under the blanket until the massage therapist releases them like smoke signals.

Which reminds me, don’t those weighted blankets make you dutch oven yourself? How does that soothe your anxiety? As soon as you lift a corner, you’re going to get a whiff of your last three farts, marinated in your own juices. I tried one once, and it felt like being buried up to your neck in a Care Bear’s ass. Kind like how I feel on the massage table, now. I plant my face in a plush cushion shaped like those ass-donut pillow for hemorrhoid sufferers, and try not to imagine that it’s a padded chin rest for a glory hole. I inhale the intoxicating beach breeze aromatherapy pumped into the room—to waft away your cave-aged blanket farts—and absorb the mellow tones of the Sirius XM Spa channel piped through the speakers. I know the channel’s name because the announcer husks it every few minutes like Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. This is Sirius XM Spaaaaaaa. There’s only one ‘a’ in spa, but as I wait, I find myself extending it, like a koan:

Spaaaaa. Spaaaaaaaaaa.

The music varies from windchime-and-whale-fart earth music to white people appropriating indigenous choruses, and the occasional bored Gregorian monk chanting passages from Revelations with accompaniment on the pan flute. I wish you could bring your own mixtapes. I could dig Isao Tomita’s Snowflakes are Dancing, or the Vangelis soundtrack to Blade Runner. What I listen to relax is drone metal by Sunn O))), three guys in Satanic robes with Marshall stacks that emit the brown note of super subsonic bass that shakes loose the RNA from your chromosomes. To me, it’s like an ASMR channel on YouTube. (I don’t even know what that means or how you pronounce it. I say assmurr.)

If I had my choice at the spa, I’d be assmurred out by thumping drone metal doom songs like “Her Lips Were Wet With Venom” and “Cursed Realms of the Winterdemons” while Liz donned a black cloak and rubbed me down with 15W50 motor oil and hot stones made from basaltic rock stolen from the tombs of evil warlords, whose names were so loathed that the peasantry erased them from the lintels of their crypts. Then Liz wouldn’t hear me whimper when she grinds her elbow into my lats.

The fart-catcher robe in question.

My right lat is abnormally large because I broke my leg by jumping off the ticket booth at the baseball diamond built on top of the landfill behind my grandma’s house when I was six. What can I say? I thought I was The Incredible Hulk. I had the feet, just not Lou Ferrigno’s physique, or Bill Bixby’s for that matter. Or his sparkling blue eyes. My right tibia cracked in half, and grew longer than the other one. I didn’t wear corrective shoe inserts for about ten years when I didn’t have health insurance. Instead, I used to duct tape together Dr. Scholl’s heel cushions until I felt like I was standing straight—which I wasn’t—so I had serious back pain for decades, until I got a job with insurance and could afford orthotic inserts. I still stand on one leg at long concerts and conventions, like some sort of Frankenstein monster/sandhill crane hybrid. Years of my body compensating for the short leg have left my back a scoliotic disaster, and Liz helps me with the pain by breaking up the tense muscle fiber without mercy.

Did I mention the CBD oil? These sessions are best if you take CBD oil, medical or recreational marijuana, Hawaiian kava root, or preferably, all three. I took a massive dose of the first of these. I was so blissed out on the walk here that I skipped along, pumping coins into people’s expired parking meters like an overfed, poodle-haired giggling gnome. After five minutes of Liz working her shiatsu sorcery, I’m drooling through the terrycloth butt donut face hole and murmuring glossolalic imprecations that would surely summon Baphomet if there truly were ghosts of masonic Templars stalking the flower-encrusted halls of this unholy hedonistic sepulchre. And now, I really have to fart.

You knew this would be an extended fart joke, didn’t you? The problem with holding in a fart during a deep tissue massage is that you tense up, and the massage therapist thinks that means you are either in pain, or that they’ve found “the spot,” and start grinding their elbow into your ass cheek like a frantic competitor over-kneading a particularly pasty, over-proofed white dough on the Great British Bake Off.

Except YOU ARE THE LOAF. I struggle not to release gases the yeast has spewn into the glutenous matterhorns of my glutes, while Liz—earnest, professional, unflappable Liz—rocks me back and forth on the table to loosen my tense muscles. And as I’m squeezing my cheeks together for dear life, I remember the first time Sarah bought me a massage at a little Vietnamese-owned place, and the massage therapist—a taut, black-clad strapping young man with elbows like daggers—went to work on me in a room so tiny that he climbed up the walls with his feet while his elbow was in my ass cheek, because that’s how tense I am. I didn’t fart that time. But he wasn’t Liz.

I can hold my ass kegels for a long time. But Liz is stronger. I cringe as I release what would surely be the interminable, sad death song of a beached narwhal. But my fears are unfounded. I squeak out what can only be defined as a dry little popcorn fart. A mere blip on the flatulence radar. Given my past of orchestral tuba Le Petomaine concertos, it was barely a fart at all.

Liz laughs. “Good, you relax.” Then she goes back to attacking my spine like the bear in The Revenant. I breathe in the whispery breeze of sage and butterfly armpits wafting from the aromatherapy machine, knowing that my dwarf star death fart remains safely trapped beneath the terrycloth, waiting to dutch oven me when the massage is over.

1. The things I do for my craft…when writing this, I didn’t know if nutsack was one word or two. So I asked Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief for Random House, and the author of Dreyer’s English. He was kind enough to give this advice free of charge:

Benjamin Dreyer 🇺🇦 @BCDreyer

@thomaspluck I like a nice nutsack. Or even nutsac, though that sounds a bit military.