Froggy's World - Alms for Oblivion (Weblog)

Relaxing massage hits the spot
29th March, 2007

Vainly I searched for the disposable pair of knickers that I knew from experience should have been somewhere in the changing room. I remembered attending a men's spa health last year and being handed what I thought was a surgical face mask and shown the changing rooms. "Has there been an outbreak of bird flu?" I had wondered as I adjusted the mask. At that point I had noticed the instructions for use and quickly whipped the disposable underwear off my face. That could have been awkward if someone had walked in, I'd thought to myself.
Thus abandoning my search for disposable underwear and thankful I had taken the precaution of wearing a pair that did not look as if they had been attacked by fabric-eating locusts, I ventured forth into the massage room. "Hello," said Lee. "You lie down there." Obviously, there had been a mistake. Lee was a bloke. A wide-shouldered, muscle-rippling Asian bloke.
I had only ever been massaged by women and had presumed that this was the way it was. Men got massaged by women. There was a certain natural order to the arrangement. Hairy sportsmen got pounded and pummelled by masseurs. Ordinary, non-sporting males like me were pampered by masseuses.
   "You take off robe, lie down and get under towel," said Lee as I continued to stand and stare at the massage table.
   "Right," I said, trying to think of an honourable escape, one that did not involve me feigning the sudden onset of insanity and running shrieking through the day spa.
So I slid out of the robe, sidled over to the table, climbed beneath the towel and immediately sensed that something was amiss. Feeling my toes dangling in space, I realised that in my confusion I had put my head where my feet should have been. My face was buried in the folded towel meant as a footrest while my feet dangled through the hole meant for my face.
   "You back to front," said Lee, frowning.
   "Quite right," I said, a totally inadequate response in the absence of anything else to say.
There is an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza is massaged by a male and becomes convinced that, mid-massage, "it" had moved. Confronted by doubts as to his sexuality, George's paranoia all but devours him and as I wriggled and squirmed in my attempts to get my head in the hole, the episode kept playing and replaying in my mind.
   "You very tense," said Lee as his hand descended on my neck.
   "Really," I said, trying to sound surprised.
Could this, I wondered, have anything to do with the fact that Lee was standing at the head of the massage table and that I knew without looking that if I raised my head, my eyes would be five centimetres from his belt buckle? It was a position with which I was neither familiar nor comfortable.
   "Aaarrrggghhh!" I shrieked as Lee's fingers hit a spot somewhere in my neck. "It", per se, had not moved but my entire body had levitated several centimetres off the table.
   "That hurt?" he asked.
   "A bit," I squeaked, eyes watering with the pain.
   "I treat a lot of footballers," said Lee.
A doctor once tried to put me at ease by asking me where I preferred to go for my holidays. He was examining my prostate at the time and I found it difficult to frame a coherent response. Lee followed a similar philosophy, attempting to engage me in conversation and failing to appreciate that it's difficult to speak when your teeth are gritted against pain.
I needn't have worried about "it" moving. I sensed that "it" had retreated in fright and had all but disappeared. "Finish now," said Lee after what seemed like a very long time, leaving me alone in the room. I got dressed and wobbled outside.
"It was a bloke," I said to my waiting wife. "No, it didn't," I said as she began to smirk. That's the trouble with the world - too many Seinfeld fans.

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