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.