Lovable Weirdos: What It's Like Being a Massage Therapist in San Francisco - thebolditalic

[massage]

The good, the bad and the weird


Wallowing in a sordid stew of cubicle life and gin-drenched aimlessness, I decided to leave it all and go to massage school. What would my parents think? Could I make a living? Clients covered in oceans of body hair—could I deal with stuff like that? I went for it and never looked back.

I’ve been a certified massage therapist for 10 years now, and I have—literally and figuratively—held the pulse of a steaming cross section of San Franciscans. It feels amazing.

My style isn’t clinical or posh à la Massage Envy or the spa at the Four Seasons; nor is it the kind of thing you’d find behind a green door in some alleyway near Stockton and Clay. But let me assure you—a lot has happened in the gray area between those two extremes.

Of course, there’s the client who left his spouse and started dating me. I didn’t cause the divorce so much as happen to be at the right truck stop on his road to long-overdue marital freedom. Then there was the client who would cry uncontrollably on the table. Lawyers, dancers, yogis. Pressure junkies, conversation junkies, touch junkies (naturally) and junkies of full-strength peppermint oil applied to weird parts of the body.

Why do massage in San Francisco? Like me, this city doesn’t give much of a fuck about the rules. I can’t imagine doing massage in some all-American town obsessed with Walmart and golf, unless my existence there was only to serve as a sizzling counterpoint. (Also, San Franciscans have money.)

The closest I came to that buttoned-up reality was during my stint working at a “progressive” spa in the Mission. The average client was a savvy, discerning businesswoman. According to the spa’s policy, every session was to include some work with hot stones. They always burned my hands.

Every client was tightly wrapped in sheets and blankets like a newborn baby — standard for spa culture, because if you get too close to a client’s butt, they might like it so much they’ll sue someone. So you really need to be safe.

Despite all this, I’d really try to impress — kneading, swooshing, dazzling. I’d flaunt my wingspan by squeezing a shoulder with one hand while stretching an Achilles’ heel with the other. I’d tantalize the scalenes with staccato finger strokes akin to the fluttering wings of a molten butterfly. I’d nestle my palm between the scapula and the lamina groove with such assured, graceful force that the client couldn’t help but be thinking — in my imagination — Who IS this therapist? He is out of this world!

Me checking in with a client: “How are you so far?”

Client: “I’m fine.”

I quit after six months.

I needed to be self-employed, and I needed work on people who get it. So I got myself a space, got myself some business cards, bought a fuck-ton of coconut oil and charged on.

The first time Patrick came into my studio, I immediately thought “Bauhaus.” Was it his slick style or because he looked like Daniel Ash, or both? At any rate, this mysteriously wealthy man with impeccable manners and a perfect physique came in for a 120-minute massage so regularly that he was single-handedly paying my San Francisco rent. The major bonus of his increasingly unabashed infatuation with me were the gifts he brought: bags full of kumquats the size of key limes, egg cartons filled with fresh figs and, finally, homemade raw chocolate bars with quaint labels he’d designed at home — fit for an upper-crust farmers’ market and laced with things like fresh lavender he’d grown at his second property up north.

The chocolate was excellent, and so were the fresh-baked bread and homemade jam that Perry brought me every time he came in. Perry was bright and beautiful, an Olympic freestyle diver who rode a motorcycle and brought in his own playlist. When I saw “Clean” by Depeche Mode on the roster, I assumed he was a former speed addict who was replacing that vice with outlandishly frequent bodywork sessions from me. He once came in for a two-hour massage, then booked another one for the very next day. The bread, like Patrick’s chocolate, was farmers’-market gold.

I had no idea where Patrick or Perry got their money from. But in a city like this, you might be right to assume that most of my clients were professional benefactors of the tech boom. Except you’d be wrong.

In the pantheon of characters dropping over $100 for a single hour with me, virtually none actually worked in tech. Odd, right? Tech people are everywhere now—necks locked into position, lower backs curling into hump-like mounds, shoulders like stone. If anyone should be booking frequent sessions to keep their poor bodies functional, they are those people. Plus, of course, they have money falling out of their pockets and only so many places to spend $11 on apple juice or $12 on something like a taco-cum-croissant.

I wonder why exactly the tech folks don’t come to me. For one, I don’t have an “app” presence. More likely, it’s that I’m a sensual alien, and my signal never reaches their prepubescent antennae. That may sound harsh, but it’s borne from a personal story.

A while back I got hired by a very large tech firm to give massages — free for their employees. I sat there every day reading a music book by David Byrne that I’d found, waiting as the sign-up sheet sat perennially empty.

I checked in with the wellness manager. “Go walk around, meet some people and try to get people to sign up,” he said with a billion-dollar smile.

“OK, sounds great!” I said, twirling around with a spin in my step.

I approached. It was about as comfortable as the first day of school in seventh grade. The work energy was thick, the social order fraternal, everything buzzing electrically yet stone-cold, like a sea of neon “Do Not Enter” signs offering little to no welcome for my little pleas to nudge anyone into a few minutes of body restoration at no monetary cost whatsoever. Multiple people even expressed to me, with arms crossed, “Thanks, but I do not get massages. I will never get a massage.”

Feeling dejected — and aimless for the first time since before going to massage school — I rode out the days getting high by guzzling copious amounts of free coconut water and organic mango slices until this wellness program was discontinued and I was laid off.

Back in my studio, I worked on a man named Kent, 80 years old and very out. Some old San Francisco soul, at last! I heard tale after tale of nights he spent with cute boys in his apartment in North Beach back when Allen Ginsberg must have been doing the same exact thing just a couple of blocks away.

Similar was Terry, an exuberant man who oozed charm and power.

“You’ve heard of Frank Lloyd Wright? Here’s my house, designed by his student.” He hands me his phone to reveal photos of what could easily be on the cover of Architectural Digest magazine.

“And there’s my yacht.” I see a photo of something that looks like two zeppelins plated in polished titanium.

“Look at the next photo.” I scroll to find snapshots of outlandishly attractive people looking ecstatic. “That’s one of my parties. You should join us at the next one.”

As Terry undressed from his power outfit and lay on my massage table, I approached and noticed he was wearing a diaper. I thought little of it, other than, Jesus is this going to be a long 90 minutes.

Within moments, Terry opened up. He grew up gay in Nebraska in the 1930s, and it wasn’t easy. Yet he made things happen—like, at age 13, he found the toughest-looking cowboy on the street, mustered up the courage to approach him and coaxed him into a nearby bathroom and sucked him dry. My eyes popped out of my head. He then spent the next hour vividly accounting the days of his 20s in San Francisco, when he’d moved into a warehouse on the Embarcadero that put him in an optimal position to get explicit with the most attractive heterosexual sailors in the world visiting during Fleet Week every year.

Not all my clients were swimming in money. Theo was rich with ink. If you saw him walking down the street — probably to a comic book store, as he had the twitchy exuberance of an 11-year-old boy — you wouldn’t notice anything on his visible skin. In fact, his own friends and family had not a clue of what lay underneath his shirt sleeves and pant legs. But as I did my work, I saw it all: one continuous tattoo covering every millimeter of his body that could be concealed by clothing. It was beautiful: a swirling, heaving, undulating cauldron of monstrous characters, bulging waves, crackling flames, gooey rivers, mechanical legs and mighty tentacles. No longer having any virgin skin to adorn, he spent his weekend money coming to see me, with the added bonus of experiencing scheduled blasts of literal and metaphorical nakedness when the rest of his life was spent harboring such a profound secret.

Genevieve came in regularly too, always stoned and thrilled. These sessions were clearly a respite from her cutthroat day job that was predictably devoid of massage or marijuana, and the connection between us was unspoken yet palatable. Every few months, she’d send me a long text message gushing about how much the sessions meant to her. I’d read these and realize that the stretches of my life spent giving massages were unabashed highlights. I think back 10 years to when I signed up for massage school—the greatest decision of my life.

It’s always bothered me that freewheeling San Francisco is part of California, which is one of the United States of America, which was founded by the Puritans and, as such, still possesses a culture belied by a very cold acceptance of human touch. Sure, maybe this comes from the shitty weather in England coupled with its advent of the concept of private property, but it means that everyone is walking around with a very isolating requirement for “personal space.” Couple this with our increasing reliance on digital reality, and we are becoming a sea of people whose need for human touch is woefully out of balance. Meanwhile, people are frantically scrolling through dating apps that yield nothing but horror stories, if not dead air.

The good news is that I’m here for all the Theos, Genevieves, Terrys and tech heads who need a soulful hand to soothe the back of the neck (or and an elbow to breathe life into the lower back).

The bad news is that giving massages to this ocean of lovable weirdos for 10 years has been tiring. So instead I figure I can write about it for The Bold Italic.


Let's block ads! (Why?)