You kneaded me

Thanks to what fellow badminton nuts call their "baddiction," I’ve acquired yet another compulsive habit: I’ve become a creature of the spa. Hardly a week goes by these days – at least before I left recently for a semester in the US – without me submitting myself to the ministrations of some robust individual who can toss and slap me around like a sack of rice.

Like many Pinoy males, I’d had my share of being massaged (and never mind our egos, which can always use the service). But also like many Pinoy males, I used to think of a massage as something that went with a "wink-wink," a foray of fingers into the netherworld. I wonder if I – a reasonably respectable 52-year-old professor of English and purveyor of lofty thoughts about the dignity of man and such faithful bromides – should be admitting this, but I had a wild and woolly youth. Sort of.

At 18, out of college by choice and then also out of a job as a newspaper reporter because of martial law, I found temporary employment as a minimum-wage, casual employee of the Makati mayor’s office. My mission – and that of the dozen or so ex-journalists I covered Makati with – was to do a headcount of the Metro Aides (street sweepers to the later-born) in my assigned barangays early in the morning; and then we were off to play Scrabble and basketball in the municipio, topped off by a free visit to any of Makati’s newly opened massage parlors. It was, of course, a sinecure, an accommodation provided by the late Mayor Mesio Yabut for all the press people who used to cover his office.

As despicably corrupt as it sounds, I should hasten to add that we did perform our attendance checks with exemplary zeal, and that we used the massage-parlor coupons that augmented our meager income with judiciousness and decorum. That means we kept our shorts on and behaved like First Communicants; in 1972, despite and perhaps because of martial law, you tried not to do anything too outrageous (that would come later). Heck, I didn’t even drink beer then, and remained a virgin that year and the next one (spent mostly in martial-law prison, but that’s another story), even in the veritable Gomorrahs that massage parlors would come to be known as. Maybe I was just too young, too stupid, and too broke to do anything truly dissolute, but at that point, if I’d been run over by a truck while crossing the street to buy chocolate cupcakes at Jo-Ni’s, I would’ve qualified for heaven after a few weeks in purgatory for minor malfeasances like, well, jaywalking.

It was this lost age of innocence that swarmed back to my senses when I first entered a "spa" on Katipunan Avenue a few months ago at the suggestion of a friend, to banish the aches of badminton.

The first thing I noticed was how clean and correct the place felt, what with the wind-chime arpeggios of New Age music and the sprinkling of green tea in the air. I’d signed up for the one-hour "massage therapy" service, and the word "therapy" flicked a hard switch in my brain: I wasn’t here for sensual pleasure, but for medical and spiritual relief. I could feel my, uhm, extremities shrinking prudently. If I was going to get naked, it wasn’t going to be à la Burt Reynolds, but Mahatma Gandhi.

And then my attendant emerged to greet me and lead me to our cubicle; she had the sweetest face and smile, and also the build of a UFC (that’s Ultimate Fighting Championship to non-guys) contender. Clad in ninja (or was it clinical) pajamas, she was evidently going to brook no nonsense, and I knew I was in for 60 minutes of unmitigated manhandling. To underscore the place’s seriousness of purpose, I was offered, and accepted, a pair of XXL shorts to wear over my XL shorts – and a thick towel to drape over the whole production.

But what a manhandling the service turned out to be. Given a choice of massages between Swedish (you get kneaded all over with aromatic oil) and shiatsu (you get pulled, bent, and folded like an origami chicken), I wisely chose the former. My attendant, whom we’ll call Alyssa, seemed to sprout extra fingers and knuckles that bore down on muscles and tendons I didn’t even know I had. There’s this spot on my left shoulder that’s just never felt quite right, and she found the knot like there’d been a big red X over it. She didn’t need to be prescient to know that I had a swollen right elbow from playing too much badminton too badly, but she felt that sucker right away and treated it like a newborn puppy. I got my toes and fingers pulled strongly enough to make me yelp, and yet without my knowing whether I was yelping out of pain or pleasure. I don’t have too much hair left, but I was glad to lose a fistful of strands to her vigorous ministrations. And so on – the hour passed all too quickly, and Alyssa got me out of there with a hearty "Reach for your toes!" – a final though futile exercise routine.

I often think of heaven as a place where you can get free foot, back and scalp massages for eternity; I had to settle for 60 minutes and was P550 poorer at the end of it, but I came out smiling and shiny with oil, like a well-bred porker, happy to have made the very proper acquaintance of Alyssa and her terrier fingers.

If there’s such a thing as massaging the pounds away, I should be as light as a foil packet of peanuts by now. I know that even if I come down to 150 pounds I still won’t be mistaken for Keanu Reeves or Piolo Pascual – but hey, I can feel like them.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at <http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html>.