Milestoned: 13 Years as a Massage Therapist

“Your hands must be soooo tired at the end of the day,” comments yet another anonymous massage client.

Three minutes later: “But would you mind going deeper?”

It’s been 13 years. The body count must be at 56,000. I’ve been patiently waiting for a gold pen to recognize my years of service, but may have to settle for gold shots instead. Goldschlager shots would be better yet.

Two of my current co-workers keep me semi-buoyed with enthusiasm. Suzanne has been a well-oiled massage machine for 19 years, casting hope and future into what seems like a quagmire of a career that sometimes rubs me the wrong way. Linda (whose name I should probably change, but won’t, just to make her squirm), is entering the massage industry at age 60. Imagine! So, why am I beefing and moaning at age 37?

Mostly I feel slightly doomed to wearing clip-on costume jewellery in my golden years. I’ll be partial to Mr.T –esque necklaces, mostly for their large clasp quality. I will definitely be the blue hair in the third row of the cinema wrestling with a Werther’s wrapper a good hour into the movie. At least I’ll be able to open twist-off beers with my teeth.

It’s been a love-hate relationship of sorts (with my career, not Suzanne and Linda). I’ve had career affairs and nearly committed career hara-kiri (Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment with a sword when disgraced or under sentence of death). I took off to Africa, twice, on sojourns/sabbaticals/aka: exasperated-retreats-from-boredom, that allowed me to pursue a wildly different life that stirred my stagnating creativity and restored my restless self.

Editor’s note: I’d recommend a solid dose of the Congo and time with chimpanzees to anyone feeling like they are playing the role of a sleepy extra in Groundhog Day.

What I’ve known for sure, then and now, is that I never wanted a job that interrupted the larger, balancing part of my life that falls into categories like love, recreational reading, extensive travel, excessive holiday time, general loafing around, writing post-midnight, writing post 3 a.m., heavy socializing, mass movie intake, realistic search time for Toronto’s best Americano (and burger, pork belly banh mi, butter chicken, etc.), supine-on-the-beach time, sleeping 10 hours and the like.

I shudder, a lot, when I digest glimpses of other lives. Lives spent commuting. Three hours in gridlock, bleary-eyed hours zoned out in front of a computer, Blackberry operating in tandem with heart beat and blood pressure. A nose-dive of a sex life due to work fatigue. A steady diet of sterile coffee and garbage snacks to help fuel meeting a deadline. Twelve hour shifts. One week of vacation time. Eight a.m. meetings.

I don’t work a 40 hour work week.  I can’t. I would drop dead of instrumental music overload before anything else.

I remember (not even wistfully) days of scheming, so young and naive in massage college, calculators pulled out, tabulating our awesome future salaries. At $80 an hour, six hours a day, our payload was going to be $480 bucks a day. Five days a week? We’d be raking in $2,400. That math meant that we’d be earning an easy $9,600 a month. I’m choking on my Beck’s beer as I type this now (which I bought in a can that I can still open).

I can’t even do calculations that high, but, if my long hand multiplication is right, we would have estimated a yearly salary of $115,200.

Which is way less than what I’m actually earning.

Cough-cough.

In my 13^th year I am working more and making less than I ever have. Math was never my strength, but this I know to be true.

Body Blitz Spa, Toronto

Life as a massage therapist is not exactly lucrative. I suppose if you expanded into other hand-friendly modalities like acupuncture, or subjected yourself to

Practicing what I preach and subjecting my body to a Thai treatment at The Owl & Pussycat in Victoria, BC.

additional schooling in an osteopath program (the very words “Five year curriculum” make me want to collapse and/or barf), there might be more dollars. But, when you are physically unable to cushion an income with overtime, you hit a glass ceiling early on. The ladder of success in the massage industry is more like a treadmill. Get on, pretty much at warp speed, and operate at a speed that will reasonably carry you the number of years you plan to work. But do so with caution and for every 25 bodies you massage, make sure you get one in return.

I have repeated myself at least 6,000 times in assuring clients that every job has its sacrifice. Though we appear to have a romantic career (the smoke and mirrors of dim lights, lavender and *&$^% Solitudes soundtracks), we have our limits. Massage therapy sacrifices: standing all day long, above-mentioned instrumental music, fear of sharp knives, inability to pursue activities that promise broken wrists like snowboarding and, poor performance post-work in crokinole tournaments or arm-wrestling matches.

Even worse? The party situation and admitting that you are a massage therapist. This tidbit suddenly becomes an invite for story time: motor vehicle accidents, broken leg stories, brushes with carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis here and there, bursitis here and there and, “feel this. No, really. What do you think it is? Can you fix that?”

My girlfriend gets off lucky in party conversations. She’s a steel quality specialist. Most people don’t have steel stories. My brother is even luckier. As a genome sequencer who looks for genetic disease markers, most people come to a dead halt in conversing. What the hell is a genome sequencer? “How about another beer?”

Truth be told? Most true friends know that my days of giving out free massages dwindled about a year after I finished school. Oh, those were the keen, shiny days of wearing a magic cape, so eager to save the world, one rub at a time.

Not that I’m disenchanted or jaded now. I still find elements of the career remarkably rewarding.

1. Everyone looks forward to seeing you

2. Workplace stress level is at a sub-zero level

3. At the risk of sounding schmaltzy, we provide a sanctuary for weary bodies and minds. Perfect strangers place their trust in our hands and are reliably relieved, rejuvenated and lightened of a life load in 60 minutes. No pressure!

My twin & I in front of a mural I painted in my biz, “The Upper Hand” in Dunnville, Ontario. I’m about 12 in this pic. Brand new massage therapist.

I’ve been spoiled with working in ambience-laden atmospheres. I’ve worked poolside at the Sheraton (that was a great tanning summer) and schmoozed at the Fairmont Royal York and King Edward hotel. I’ve worked with Olympians, cancer survivors and horses. (Yes, real live horses). I’ve had my own biz and was content to hand over the sheet-folding and hectic mess of scheduling for a percentage to work in some posh spas like the Wild Orange in BC and currently, Body Blitz in downtown Toronto.

What’s best? It’s always changing. Can I honestly answer and say my time in the Congo? Or four months in Uganda NOT massaging? That was the best. Drawing monkeys for a colouring book and feeding rescued chimps overshadows a lot.

But. Being a massage therapist has allowed me to do everything I’ve wanted. And, as you know, that means Egypt, Belize, Honduras,  Amsterdam, Venezuela, the Ice Hotel, the Galapagos, nights at the Gladstone and Queen’s Landing, Puma sneakers, fancy cheeses and fancier beers and a whole lot of life in between.

When my high school counsellor said I needed to research a vocation, I thought she said vacation. Largely and luckily, it’s been a lot of that, which is exactly the kind of symbiotic career I need.

Beer Baths, Barbie Spa and Biblical Snakes

I’ve always had a near-fatal attraction towards weird things: Venus flytraps, naked mole rats, the steamy sex lives of chimps, Salvador Dali, Grapples (apples infused with a grape scent to make them more appealing to kids), Bjork, Inuit throat singers, Anthony Bourdain’s lunch box of bovine penis and wildebeest entrails—these things tickle my fancy.

Alternative to the Czech beer bath

Imagine my thrill when I came across the adverts for bird dropping facials and cat crap coffee.  My thrill meter reached roller coaster ride-levels when I read this “Beer: It’s not just for drinking.” I was skimming Healing Lifestyles and Spas magazine, when I felt my testosterone spike. A beer spa? The Chodovar Brewery in Czechoslovakia has become every man’s wet dream. In the vaulted cellars of Chodovar, you can indulge in a beer bath of live yeast and steep in the molasses-coloured depths. The one-two punch of Vitamin B and crushed hops helps nourish neglected skin, hair, nails and even aids in battling anxiety. Iron and carbon dioxide bubbles increase the skin’s circulation as the beer brew boils your joints at an intense 34 degrees. Fan club members boast that the beer bubble bath soothes psoriasis, acne and joint pain.

Rules are that while soaking you must sip a pint of beer to aid digestion. When you and your liver reach a prune-like state, the spa attendants wrap you in sheepskin and let you snooze on a bed of barley hay. When you regain consciousness you can stumble to the onsite Ve Skale restaurant for a smoked beef tongue with horseradish and mustard. I’ve already decided on the fried carp and knuckle of pork. However, I’d be willing to share a bowl of the tripe soup and another pint of non-bath water with my fellow spa-goers to discuss whether the “overall modulation of dermatic problems and mental disharmonies” (as advertised on the Chodovar website) were resolved.

If the beer bath proved to be all talk no action and I still suffered from dermatic problems and mental disharmony, I’d have to check out the Channings Day Spa in Chicago. My friend Jules lives there—and I’m certain she’d be game for a caviar facial after a catch-up over a Chicago-style deep dish pizza. The freeze-dried caviar is imported from Switzerland, and for $185 US, the 90-minute treatment promises to combat wrinkles. Because caviar has the same composition as human skin (70% amino acids and trace minerals), this somehow works. While $185 might seem outrageous, a top of the foot wax at Channings is only $3.

While visiting Channings, it would only make sense that Jules and I opt for one of the special spa services catering to “the young woman just starting out with make-up.” Here we could “learn the fundamentals of proper skin care and how to coordinate wardrobe selection with make-up colour for a stunning effect!” Sixty dollars is a small price to pay to learn which eye shadow to pair with camo cargos and Haviana flip flops.

After fishing for compliments on my caviar complexion, the Euphoria Spa in Detroit would be my next pit stop to buff my bum for the leather chaps-wearing season. Booking the “Sweet Cheeks Derriere Facial” would probably make me the butt of every joke, but  this cheeky facial is seriously technical. After a cleanse and exfoliation, a masque is applied and the grand finale comes in the form of a butt wax with warm paraffin. Like a nice bum candle.

Maybe I’d skip the hot cross buns for a soak in green tea or sake at the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun Spa in Japan, which is oddly a spa and amusement park. After a day at the Rodeo Mountain heated waterslides, guests can choose from a variety of soaks.  The coffee spa is intended to revive fatigued muscles (real coffee made with hot spring water). Word has it that the Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, preferred a red wine bath. Obviously she never looked in the mirror after a night of drinking merlot. If a nice bottle of red can turn your teeth clay grey and your tongue as black as a Chow dog’s after a single glass—what would a half-hour soak result in? The green tea spa treatment sounds safest with the promise of powerful anti-oxidant and tumor-fighting catechin, which is also good for one’s complexion.

Anti-bowling shoe but pro-Barbie pedi feet

At Yunnesun, the Mori No Yu zone is a tranquil bathing space where you can experience onsen Japanese-style. The website advises “you can enjoy the bathing experience without a bathing suit. Remember, the bathing experience in Japan means enjoying in Japanese-style for relaxation and pleasure and is not a place to wash your body with soap.” Swimsuits are available for rent at 1,000 yen. I wonder what I’d rather subject myself to—bowling alley bowling shoes or a rental swimsuit that’s probably seen more pee than green tea.

For those wanting to channel Cleopatra beyond the wine bath, rumour has it that the vain dame also liked to sleep with a gold mask on every night. At Yunnesun you can have 24 karat gold sheets applied to your face which will undoubtedly leave your skin feeling like a piñata.

Bently, wishing he was having a ramen noodle bath instead

A seasonal treat, much like pumpkin pie, Christmas cake and a June strawberry social is Yunnesun’s Ramen Soup bath. Bathers can share “a steaming broth of pepper, garlic extract and collagen to help boost metabolism and nourish the skin.”  Men sweating in a bowl of soup makes me lean towards prettier and pinker options like the Barbie Spa in Shanghai where it’s sugar and spice and everything nice. Barbie must have sold her mobile home and snazzy pink Corvette to afford this splashy Shanghai spa.  There’s a posh hair salon where you can no doubt get Barbie bangs, estheticians offer Barbie manis & pedis (did she even have fingernails and toenails on that smooth, supple body?) and you can also take in an afternoon tea if you aren’t worried about keeping Barbie doll dimensions.

Even sweeter is the list of treatments available at the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The spa packages read like the very best food porn: exfoliations of cocoa bean husks and walnut shells, foaming chocolate milk baths, chocolate sugar scrubs and a chocolate fondue wrap of warmed Moor mud and essence of cocoa.

When Willy Wonka’s arch enemy, Milton Hershey, travelled to Cuba in 1916, he was so smitten that he bought several sugar plantations and mills there so he could refine sugar for his chocolate factory in the states. The Hershey spa pays tribute to Milton’s Cuban love affair by offering equally sumptuous indulgences like the Mojito Sugar Scrub and a Coffee Body Polish with Dead Sea Salts and Arabic coffee.

If, like me, you find yourself torn between the ramen noodle hot tub and the Cleopatra lifestyle, there’s one more option that will split your decision. Ada Barak, who owns the Carnivorous Plant Farm and Barak Snake Spa in Northern Israel, has become a media darling. The introduction of snakes as a therapeutic treatment was only natural to her, even “biblical” as Barak explained to Reuters. Women and snakes came together in the Garden of Eden, ‘nuff said. When an elderly woman told her that the snake coiled around her felt like a cold compress, the idea for opening a snake spa instantly slithered into Barak’s mind.

So, tell me. Will it be an hour with the biblical snakes, caviar in your crack or a beer bath followed by a beef tongue with horseradish?

Chodovar Beer Spa: http://www.chodovar.cz/id216en-beer-wellness-land.htm

Caviar at Channings: http://channings.com/

Wine soaks at Yunessun: http://www.yunessun.com/english/yunessun.html

Barbie Bangs and Barbie-tinis: http://www.barbieshanghai.com/en/SPA.html

The Hotel Hershey: http://www.chocolatespa.com/index.php

Ada Barak talkin’ about her biblical snakes: http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=11749

Cat Crap Coffee, Bird Dung Facials and Nibbling Fish Therapy

Tess, dreaming of cat shit coffee

If you missed the cat shit coffee craze of five years ago, it’s back, and better than before. Even Dr. Jane Goodall is backing the Vancouver-based Doi Chaang Coffee Co.’s newest product because it’s organic and sustainably collected from the wild. At $500 a pound though, it may be cheaper to fly to the Doi Chaang village in Northern Thailand to scavenge for your own.

The cat crap brew that is the cat’s meow again is a product of the civet cat. When someone put two and two together, meaning civets & coffee and barf & poop, a beautiful thing was discovered. Civets eat the beans and pass them, creating lucrative stooping and scooping for the entrepreneurial Akha Hill tribe of Doi Chaang. Even regurgitated beans (cat barf) are collected and marketed as “spat” coffee as opposed to “passed” coffee.

 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Civet_cat_(PSF).jpg

Unfortunately, the Western popularity of civet crap coffee resulted in many of the wild civets being captured and caged to maximize profits. Apparently the civet-passed coffee has been around for decades, but only appreciated in Asian markets.  As reported in “Brother, can you spare $500 for coffee?” (The Vancouver Sun, May 23, 2009) hunky Toronto chef Jamie Kennedy detected “honey notes and a deeply mellow chocolately earthiness.”  Online food sites suggest bright and fruity flavour profiles for the litter box coffee. Deeply mellow chocolately earthiness? Really?

The civet coffee buzz can only lead to one thing: a really expensive crappacinno.

It seems like everyone is cashing in on shit lately. The swanky Shikuza Spa in New York is promoting a Geisha Facial which uses traditional and natural Japanese ingredients, like dried bird droppings, or uguisu no fun (and I didn’t even make that up). This spa treatment gives a new meaning to “getting shit-faced.” Somehow, some Geisha with waterproof mascara discovered that nightingale droppings could be used to remove make-up (I would love to know how exactly this discovery came about. Hmm, this soap and water just isn’t working. I know, that big pile of bird droppings on my window sill, I bet that’ll do the trick!). The Shizuka Spa website even suggests that this same Geisha noticed that the droppings helped “to brighten, heal and retexturize the skin due to natural enzymes and guanine, which imparts a pearly luster to the skin.” After all those years of dedicated Clearasil and Oxy Medicated Cleansing Pads use.

Pearly luster? I say save your $180 for the 60 minute facial, side-step the $500 pound of coffee and buy a flight to Mexico. Blast that potentially pearly porcelain luster with UV rays and H1N1. More than 20 coastal Mexican hotels have launched a “flu-free guarantee” this month in response to the Swine Flu that has drastically reduced the number of tourists tanked on tequila. With this guarantee, if you catch the H1N1 virus while vacationing (and obtain a blood test to prove it), you can get your next three vacations for free. As of May 17^th, the virus had infected nearly 6,500 people worldwide, so odds are good. Besides, Mexico is generally associated with diarrhea anyway, what ‘s a little touch of the Swine Flu?

Real Resorts, AMResorts and Karisma’s El Dorado and Azul hotels (Cancun and Mayan Riviera) are participating in this promo for travel until December 20, 2009. If you are a winner and test positive for H1N1 within five days of departure you will be magically granted three return stays (valid for one traveler and one companion), one per  year.  This is an exceptional deal, provided you don’t die.

A Tang in my brother Dax's aquarium, not involved in any spa treatments

A safer bet that doesn’t involve cat or bird droppings would be a visit to Malaysia’s Sampuoton Spa. Flipping through a copy of Elle at lunch last week, I was sucked into the “ELLE HOT 100 List” that suggested an alternative beauty fix for dry, winter skin. Branding itself as the first “fish-therapy designer concept spa,” Garra Rufa fish from Turkey will nibble at your dead skin cells. The fish are intelligent too—they will only eat the dead and infected skin cells. Kindly, while snacking, the fish emit an enzyme that “prevents the fast development of cells on the skin.” The hour long treatment is inviting. Who wouldn’t want to slip into a thermal pool filled with Garra Rufa fish? I’m thinking NIGHTMARE, but the Sampuoton suggests that the treatment is relaxing, and you will only feel a mild tickling sensation.

When I visited the site to read more about this seemingly horrifying treatment I clicked on “The Fish” page. Here I learned that the Turkish Garra Rufa fish is actually from the carp family, is known as the “Doctor Fish” by working professors (not sure who they are referring to in that statement), and outside medical circles, the fish is better known as the Reddish Log Sucker. I can see why they decided to incorporate the more exotic Latin fish reference. Who would want a Reddish Log Sucker to eat their dead skin cells? The Garra Rufa Doctor fish, well, that fish has credentials and sounds smart.

The site wisely appeals to those searching for Zen and balance. “Recreation and Nature return. People may realize harmony between human and nature while playing with the fish in the pool while reaching the goal of promoting health recreation.” Who plays with fish? I had Sea Monkeys as a kid, and they were a scam. The comic book adverts said you could teach the smiling Sea Monkeys to play baseball. Yeah, right. This alone discourages me from playing with Reddish Log Suckers who have been eating  the garbage off people I haven’t even met. And, if these Doctor fish are so awesome, shouldn’t they be in every public pool and hot tub? Imagine the dead skin available to those hungry nibblers. What a fantastic surprise for unsuspecting YMCA swimmers too as they feel the odd tickle while doing laps and later learn that the Suckers are providing a beauty treatment while they exercise.  Sampuoton Spa goes even further—“after an hour of the fish nibbling session the skin becomes elastic, smooth and gives a healthy shine and a feeling of freshness.”

Civet crappacinno?

For feelings of freshness I use Dove green tea and cucumber deodorant and give my skin a healthy shine with eight glasses of water and a daily bowl of oatmeal. But, maybe I’ve fooled myself all these years by not trying to achieve the pearly luster of a Geisha by smearing bird shit on my cheeks. I willingly drank and ate fecal matter when I was in Africa which was just foolish. Now I know that a refined palate only chooses spat and shat civet coffee beans.

I guess the spa I work at has a long way to go. We thought clients enjoyed aromatic blends of citrus, lavender and eucalyptus. Tomorrow I’m going to submit a proposal to my boss about creating a Canada Goose Dung Facial and a Coast Mountain Crow Crap body wrap. If that goes successfully, I’m going to gather wild scat in the ravine behind my house and see what shit works best for removing tomato sauce and red wine stains. If the nightingale droppings helped the Geisha with her make-up removal, I bet bear poop studded with blueberries is good for something.

Tall, skim spat coffee

http://www.shizukany.com/geisha-facial.htm

http://www.sampuotonspa.com/fish.php

http://www.thewildorangespa.com/

Driving Miss Daisy

The rain was falling so hard from the miserable sky that it jumped an inch backwards off every surface. I had just dropped the dogs off at their daycare and turned on to Marshall to head to the spa where I work. The rain pelted the soft top of my Sidekick at such a volume that I could no longer hear James Blunt. And then I saw her.

I drove 50 feet further, wipers sliding frantically back and forth across my windshield, and turned into a circular drive. She walked with her head down, her hand shielding her glasses. Her knitted tam sagged to one side, saturated. She clutched a white plastic bag to her chest and carefully stepped along the sidewalk, negotiating the dips of the uneven pavement. I rolled down my window and asked, “do you want a ride?”

“But, you don’t know where I’m going.”
“I’ll go wherever you need to go.”

She opened the passenger door and climbed in, her tiny body shivering. The heat I had blasting from the vents on the front dash made her glasses fog instantly. They were the kind of glasses that make your eyes look three times bigger than they really are. Her curls hung limply under her tam. She spoke to me through her fogged glasses, telling me she lived up past the college, was I really going that way?

I looked at her white shoes, the kind that are marketed to seniors for walking. She smoothed out her black slacks and apologized for getting my car wet. Instead of putting on her seatbelt she turned in her seat so that she was directly facing me, like we were at a table.

“I’m all alone now. My husband passed on, I like to walk, you know. It keeps me busy, gives me something to do.” She took off her glasses and folded them in her hands. “I walked down to the MCC, you know that little thrift shop downtown?” I did. “The girl there called me to say that she had a big box of glass bottles, someone dropped them off overnight. I collect them, and she knew I’d be interested, so I thought I’d walk down there today. Never expected this rain!”

She asked where I lived, where I worked. When I said the Wild Orange Spa, her eyebrows arched. “Oh, that’s that fancy place. Well, maybe with the rain you won’t be too busy today—people won’t want to go out in the rain to get fancy things done.” My passenger had to be in her late 70s, early 80s maybe. I wanted to take her to the spa and book her for a full day of fancy things.

“Do you have children?” I asked with hesitation. She had four, two girls up north, a son in Surrey and one son, “I have no idea where he is. No idea.”

“Did you see any of them for Mother’s Day?”

“Nope. They’re all quite busy with their lives. That’s why I walk, I have to take care of myself, and just worry about what I can do to make myself happy.”

At the stoplight I turned to look at her and saw all of my grandmothers in her wrinkled face. The skin on the back of her hands was as thin as tissue paper. Water dripped from her hair and slid down her cheeks like tears. Why didn’t she have one of those plastic rain bonnets that every old lady has? Those kind that fold up into a square smaller than a deck of cards?

“So, no, I didn’t see any of them for Mother’s Day.” My heart ached in my chest for her.

“Buggers,” I said.

“That’s right. Buggers,” she laughed.

She pointed out the church on the corner and told me to turn left. My god, she had already walked at least five kilometers to get downtown to the thrift shop. I was amazed, she seemed so frail.

“You think living beside a church all these years would have made me a better person,” she said, “but I’m only human.” And this is when she imparted a few philosophies on me, as though she could read all the questioning cartoon bubbles above my head.

“You gotta laugh. All the time. If you don’t have humour about things, you’ll never get through the down days.”

I asked for her name.

“Eileen Kelly. I know, it’s a lot of e’s and l’s, isn’t it?” She asked mine, and when I said Jules she repeated ‘Joyce’ which was fine. I get that all the time

“Joyce, if you want to come over for tea or lunch one day, I’d like that. I’m usually here. I have a big property (and she did, at least half an acre), and my cat, well, she doesn’t help much with the housework. She just creates it!”

I asked to see the treasures she had bought at the thrift store and told her of my mother and grandmother, how they spend every Saturday morning creeping around garage sales. And the few times that they have held garage sales of their own, how they end up buying each other’s knick knacks.

Eileen unwrapped her purchases like they were baby birds. “I don’t know why I collect anything, seems silly, doesn’t it? Like, what’s an old lady like me bothering with a collection for.” She told me it gives her purpose though, and besides glass bottles, she collects ceramic things with little roses on them. “See.” She held up a porcelain swan with a tiny pink rose on its back. “I bought this one too, it’s a little different. This one has gold on the beak. And they were only 50 cents, which is a great deal.”

I found myself making a mental note to remember the tiny pink rose, in case I found another piece that she could add to her collection. The glass bottles that she originally went to look at “were junk” so she was thrilled to find the swans with those roses.

Eileen opened the car door and said, “thank you for making sure I got home safely.” She apologized again for getting my seat wet, and waved. I watched her climb the steps to the front door of her two-storey house. She waved again, her full arm sweeping the air as I pulled out of the driveway. Resisting the urge to not go to work and run up Eileen’s stairs to tell her I would stay for tea was difficult.

As I turned on to McCallum I passed another old lady waiting at the bus stop, shifting her weight back and forth to keep warm. I wanted to give her a ride too but I had to be at work in less than five minutes. She had a rain bonnet on, at least.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of good deeds or upping my karma or Pay it Forward. Picking up Eileen was a reflex. I was only thinking of my mother and my grandmother, caught in a downpour far from home, hoping that someone would have the same reaction I did.

Lady of the Daytime: Life as a Massage Therapist

Behind closed doors, the life of a massage therapist is not all sunshine and lollipops. Yes, we are bathed in candlelight, our hands are supple from silky, aromatic oils and the atmosphere is designed to be like a warm hug. Clients are genuinely thrilled to see us, dream of us most hours of the day and praise our work on an hourly basis. What’s not to like?
The dark side of massage comes in many forms, the most dominant being the instrumental music that makes me want to put Enya in a chokehold (and if I could get my hands on that Pachebel guy…).
The antibacterial soap that is efficient in removing above-mentioned silky, aromatic oils makes my skin itch like I have rolled around in poison ivy. My dog looks at me questionably. “You? You have fleas? I thought I was the only one.”
Like any profession, there are horror stories that are exchanged between wide-eyed colleagues over shaken-not-stirred martinis in dim-lighting. Client confidentiality is utmost, but, we have to unload on someone about the warts, farts, black sock lint and moles that make up a large part of our career. We have job hazards too.
The warts, they are always a surprise. In that buttery light, the naked eye doesn’t notice the familiar cauliflower-form on the sole of the foot. No, it is the unsuspecting hand that glides over it first. The sensation is one that will never be confused with anything else. A wart is a wart, and I have touched far too many.
Some days I think that I may never eat finger food again. I see the estheticians licking their fingers at lunch, enjoying bags of salty chips or hand-held ham sandwiches. I need to eat everything with a spoon or fork after what I have seen and touched.Wanda worries about the moles in our backyard. I worry about the moles under my fingertips. If one every rolled off a body, I’d be done.
And the farters. In ten years, there have been a select few. One woman was consistent, and she consistently scared me as well. Just as I would lean in to do a stroke up her hamstrings she would let out a cracker of a fart. I always jumped, my hands flying off her body in fear. There was no recovery, and in those awful, dreaded minutes that followed, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I should have reassured her—hell, she should have reassured me! Then, it was too late for either of us to say anything at all. I remember being generally relieved that I didn’t fall to the ground thinking I had been shot (and this is why I’m not a cop, because loud farts make me shake).

  In a decade I have seen more bodies than McDonald’s has served greasy Big Mac’s. From antsy six-year-old’s toting stuffed animals to war vets with concentration camp tattoos on their forearms. My lucky hands have marvelled over Olympian gastrocs and size 19 feet belonging to leggy basketball stars. Feet as long as my arm, swear to god. And a beefy NHL player with quads so big that he had to have his pants custom made.
Of course, in working with people so intimately, I hear hushed secrets and see tattoos that only their lovers and proctologists have seen. I am whispered confessions about affairs by the wife, and then by the husband in a later session (and sometimes by the mistress herself). This is what happens when you run a clinic in a town of 5,000. (i.e.: George, a pony-tailed guy who had been shot by his ex-wife in the leg when caught in bed with the Other Woman. “Hell, she almost took my nuts off with the second shot!”).
The cosmopolitan city of Toronto and the splashy hotel environment introduced me to a clientele unafraid of asking for what they wanted. Like the Spanish model who insisted that I massage his anus “because it makes me feel gooooooood.” If I didn’t want to do his anus during the treatment time he invited me up to his hotel room where I could finish the “job” properly and he’d slip me another fifty. “Oh, gee, could I?” He was a model asshole to me.
There was only one other occasion where I was asked if I was a “Lady of the Evening,” in broad daylight in Dunnville, Ontario. It was 11 a.m., and I couldn’t wrap my head around somebody actively searching for Lady of the Evening services that far from Amsterdam. Dunnville, Red Light District? And, at this hour?
Then there was Bob who asked politely if I would tickle him for the last ten minutes of every treatment. He had curly Chia Pet hair on his back, and only wanted the hair touched“gingerly,” and not the skin. If I wanted to, I could tickle his feet too. I should have hooked him up with the Spanish model.
The moment that made me want to spit daggers was when a beligerent Turkish client insisted on disrobing infront of me (and there is nothing worse than something mauve and floppy in your face, and then watching that mauve and floppy-something wobble and flop as a client ungracefully mounts himself on the massage table). He insisted he was too hot for a sheet and kept throwing it on to the floor. When I finished, an unbearable hour later, he told me I wasn’t done. “You are finished when I tell you you are finished.” I surprised myself by telling him that “no, I am telling you that you are finished.” Then I ran like hell out of the room. He was not a Turkish delight.
I massaged a man at that same hotel who openly told me he had so much money that he would never be able to spend it all in his lifetime. He would book weekly for two hours at a time and begged to extend it to three. Another client at that hotel had two life coaches that he had to communicate with every night for 45 minutes to remain stable. His body was covered in weeping hives, but he was one of the richest in Canada. Rich in what? I often wondered…
Many clients have left a deep impression on me. I think Don could feel my tears dropping on his back when he told me that he had end stage lung cancer. He said the doctor gave him a month, and he died a few days short of it. I reminded myself that I was able to offer him a temporary sanctuary when the rest of his life slid sideways. Don’s brother had dropped dead of a heart attack when he was running just before his 50th birthday. Don didn’t think it was fair that he was allowed to live so much longer (20 years longer) than his fit brother by smoking two packs a day, but he did.
For the woman who wept openly on my massage table for her father, I will always remember her story. She had been a regular client for over a year, and then she disappeared. Months later she phoned to book with me again. Immediately, she felt the need to explain her absence. Her father had died during the last massage she had with me, and she couldn’t forgive herself, knowing that he had died alone. One bright winter morning, she sat at her kitchen island as she always did, and a bright yellow bird came to the feeder. It came closer, and hopped along the window sill, looking inside at her in the kitchen. She knew it was her father. “He always wore these god-awful yellow pants when he went golfing. My mother couldn’t stand the sight of them!” The bird had a big beak, and her dad had a big nose—it was him. She said the bird came to the window every morning while she drank coffee for a month, and then simply went away. It was time. She was ready. She couldn’t help but cry telling me the story, and she had me sniffing and bleary-eyed too.
In a day of treating five or six clients, the emotions, stories and scars change rapidly. I will never forget the client who told me about making bread in his underwear. He was the sort of guy who liked to use my name three times in the same sentence, and he had a bit of a Tweedle Dum (or Dee) look to him. It went something like this:

“Jules, I gotta tell ya, as a health professional and all. No, Jules, lemme ask you this first. Now, Jules, have you ever had a hemmorhoid? Actually, Jules, don’t answer that one(as if I was about to! But just to clarify, I haven’t). So, Jules, I read or heard something about putting cornstarch on the ‘roids. I don’t know where I read it, but Jules, I was desperate. So, the wife was out shoppin’ or something, and Jules, I can’t find the cornstarch! What I did find, Jules, was flour. And, I said to myself, hey, can’t be too far off the mark you know. Cornstarch-flour, what’s the big difference? Well, Jules, I put some flour in my underwear to take the edge of this hemmorhoid, and I gotta tell ya, it’s a hot day. I’m sitting there with my underwear full of flour and I start feeling somethin’. I goes to the bathroom Jules, and I feel things rolling in my underwear—hell, Jules! I was making bread in my underwear! The flour and my sweat I guess, it was making bread. Can ya believe it?”

An unfortunately true story.
An elderly woman gave me an equally big laugh recently. When I asked her to turn over so I could massage her neck, she said, “I know, dear. God put me in the wrong line up. I should write ‘front’ and ‘back’ on me so you would know which is which.”
What I have come to realize is that the farts and warts get balanced out by clients who bring such light into a room. There are clients desperate for mere escapist zen, those battling cancer and bigger battlegrounds, and sad souls craving the basic connection of human touch.
My hands have seen a lot, and I am grateful to be able to offer such an oasis of calm and relief. But, just so you know, most spas offer waxing services and wearing navy or black socks will always leave sweaty lint between your toes.
And making bread in your underwear is a story for a Lady of the Evening, not a Lady of the Daytime like myself.

by the artist formerly known as Jules Torti