Then she closed the door and stood facing me with her arms folded. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t some lesbian trying to get some action, I simply wanted a massage… Although, to be perfectly honest, there has been an occasion or two where I’ve received massages that were so enjoyable and relaxing that had the masseuse buried her head in my hot pocket, I probably wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.
I didn’t know what my next move should be, so I opted for some light stretching.
“Cwothes off! Underwear stay on!” she said after I had stepped into a deep lunge.
“Okay, okay. Can we at least turn the lights off?” I asked her, not feeling entirely comfortable getting naked in front of someone who I could carry in a Baby Bjorn.
After I received no response from the masseuse I had nicknamed Memoirs of a Geisha, I started to unzip my jeans while hopping on one foot to take off one of my boots. I didn’t understand why she had to watch me undress. I wanted to remind her that I wasn’t the prostitute in this situation; I was just a nice girl from New Jersey trying to get a back rub.
A normal person would have realized at this point that things were not on the up and up, but I have always been willing to forgo standard operating procedure for an activity that requires you to do nothing in return. “Do you think you’d be more comfortable without those shoes on?” I asked. “They must be killing your feet.” I wanted to make this a pleasant experience for us both.
Once I was down to my bra and underwear, I turned my back in modesty to take off my bra, then jumped onto the bed, which had as much bounce as a dining room table.
I put my face directly down on the towel, with no pillow, and put my arms to my sides. “On your mark, get set, go!” I yelled.
“Put this over your tushy,” she said, handing me a washcloth large enough to cover one half of an ass cheek. Being on my stomach, and not being able to perfectly place the towel, I spastically put it over the center of the back of my thong in order to cover a little of each cheek.
The first thing I felt was a towel on the back of my shoulder. I wasn’t familiar with this kind of technique but felt it was best I kept my mouth shut. For the next ten minutes she continued rubbing my back through the towel, so the primary sensation I was feeling was the towel, which wasn’t much different than getting a massage after rolling around in a pile of sand. If anything, this was more of an exfoliation.
I found it ironic, considering my surroundings, that I was the one being cleaned off with a towel, but obviously Memoirs of a Geisha danced to the beat of her own drummer. Or hummer. Whichever. The point is, I was expecting her to make some hand-to-skin contact once she had disinfected me. This never happened. The next twenty minutes were spent in the same manner, with her using a towel to rub me. It became apparent that she hadn’t been cleaning me at all. That this was, in fact, the massage.
I wanted to inform her that if this was the way she gave happy endings, it was no wonder they were empty on a Saturday. If there was any service being offered here it was blue balls… Unlike some women, I can sympathize with what blue balls can do to a man because of some early childhood experiences.
I thought back to when I was thirteen and on my very first date with Justin Ledwith. We were in a movie theater in Martha’s Vineyard and he had put his arm around me, but even with all my advances, he refused to lean in for some tongue. I put my hand on his knee repeatedly, slowly moving toward his upper thigh, repeatedly brushing by his ball sack, over and over, to no avail. By the end of
I craned my neck to look back over my shoulder at Memoirs of a Geisha questioningly, to somehow convey to her that this wasn’t something I was enjoying. “You likey?” she asked me.
“No. No likey.” I took the towel out of her hand and threw it on the floor. “No towel,” I said, and grabbed her hand to redirect it to my back. “Rub my skin.”
It was clear she didn’t understand what I was saying because she walked out of the room and shut the door. A minute later Dim Sum walked in without Memoirs, but with another heavier Asian who weighed close to three hundred pounds and may have very well been a Sumo wrestler. My instincts told me that it was a woman, but I couldn’t be sure.
“You no want massage!” Dim Sum yelled.
“Yes, yes, I do want massage,” I told her. “Just not with that softscrub towel.”
“You want sucky sucky! No sucky sucky here!”
“Huh?” I asked.
“This not sucky sucky place, we don’t do that, wesbian!”
“No,” I argued. “I don’t want sucky sucky, I just want a massage. It’s okay if she doesn’t know how to give a massage, but could she at least tickle my back?”
“No happy ending!” she yelled, getting louder.
“I don’t want a happy ending, you hot mess, I just want a little back rub. She can even just write letters on my back, if that’s easier, and I’ll guess what they are. I’m really not trying to be difficult.” It was mildly humiliating to be arguing with Dim Sum while I was lying naked on a table and being called a wesbian.
“Listen, I’m not the police, I’m not going to tell anyone about this place. I don’t care if there are girls giving handjobs in the next room, right this very minute. I just want a goddamn massage.”
“You are bad girl, we have no bad girls here,” she said, shaking her head.
That was it. “Listen, Dim Sum, you little fuck fuck, I didn’t pay a hundred dollars for a fucking towel rub. It hurts!”
“You bad bad girl, you go home, no sucky sucky here!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, whatever,” I said as I got up to get dressed. Before I could grab any clothing, the Sumo grabbed my shoulders, and forced me back down, this time with my back on the table, and then laid on top of me face-to-face. She was heavy, and reeked of beef with broccoli.
My boobs were being flattened and hadn’t been in this much pain since I had hooked up with a thirty-year-old who wore braces. They were the clear kind and I didn’t realize he even had them until he undid my bra and headed toward my areola.
My breathing was becoming strained and my eyes were starting to roll back in my head. “No!” I yelled. Mustering up my last ounce of strength, I put my forehead to hers, grabbed her cheeks, and screamed, “My body, my choice!”
Finally, Tons of Fun rolled off me and they both stood there while I got dressed.
“I’d like my hundred dollars back,” I told Dim Sum.
“I don’t think so, buddy,” Dim Sum replied in perfect English.
“Well, I want my license,” I told her. She reached in her pocket and held it above her head as she walked out of the room and headed toward the front door. Once she reached the door, she leaned outside and threw my license onto the sidewalk. I looked at both of them, horrified. “This is no way to run a business,” I told Dim Sum, and then looked at Tons of Fun. “And you might want to lay off the carbs, you fucking wildebeest.”
I walked outside and called Sarah’s cell phone. She picked up on the first ring. “Are you still in there?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “are you kidding? I hightailed it. I’m at Whole Foods down the street. I was not about to get a massage there.”
“Oh, that’s nice, thanks for leaving me.”
“I’m right down the street,” she said. “Just walk down here. I thought you’d be an hour.”
“I got kicked out.”
“What?”
“Yeah. They kicked me out and told me never to come back, and called me a wesbian.”
“What?”
“Yeah, and that’s not the worst of it,” I told her. “I think I just got dry humped. By a woman. And paid for it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I spent the better part of my early twenties being too much of a weakling to tell my friends that I had absolutely no interest in picking them up from airports, seeing them perform in their improvisation troupes, or, the worst of all three, dog-sitting. I don’t have a problem with animals in general, but I’m just not one of those people who’s looking to pack my schedule with some extra one-on-one time with a friend’s dog.
I also don’t appreciate people who celebrate their dog’s birthday with “dog parties,” and then invite their friends who don’t even have dogs. I understand why people like dogs, and I think they definitely bring more to the table than cats or those godforsaken ferrets, but I don’t think it’s healthy for people to treat their dogs like they are real people. Another thing I take issue with are people who take their dogs on “play dates,” or even worse, people who choose to dress their dogs up in outfits better suited for homosexuals participating in a gay pride parade. Dog costumes are right up there with something else I find particularly offensive: sweater vests.
A friend of mine, Lesley, whom I had dog-sat for in the past, called me to tell me she and her sixty-year-old boyfriend were going away for a long weekend to celebrate the holiday. Why they assumed I had no plans of my own for Flag Day was not only insulting on a personal level, but on a national level as well.
“We wanted to know if you wanted to dog-sit for Pepper and Daisy,” she said to me over the phone while I was trying to figure out the best way to disguise a huge bruise I had on my upper arm from a Yahtzee tournament I had participated in the night before. I wanted to tell her that I’d rather be forced to watch a Lord of the Rings marathon and then be raped by a hobbit than dog-sit for anyone. But I hadn’t had enough therapy at that point to know about creating boundaries, so instead I said, “Definitely!”
Lesley and her father/boyfriend live in a big house in Brentwood and are under the impression that anyone who lives in an apartment would jump at the chance to sleep in a real live house. This is not the case, unless of course you were raised in a shelter. Or if the house you’re pet-sitting in has a pool, butler, steam room, and a closet filled with cocaine. I take absolutely no pleasure in staying at other people’s homes. Even when I go to visit a friend in another city, I rarely stay at their place. I prefer hotels and not having to worry about walking around naked or farting, which happens almost every time I get into a cross-legged position. The biggest discomfort of all is sleeping in someone else’s bed, which is not appealing on any level-unless, of course, penetration is involved.
I went by later that day to pick up the keys from Lesley, giving myself the middle finger the whole way there. Not only was it imperative that I sleep at their house because if Pepper, their newest dog, wasn’t put in a crate at night she’d shit all over the floor, but they also made it a regular habit to cook fresh ground hamburger meat twice a week for Daisy, their golden retriever. One of my responsibilities would include taking a big log of hamburger meat out of the freezer, defrosting it, and then cooking it in a frying pan. Each batch was meant to last for three days, but with me also snacking on it regularly, I ended up having to make three to four batches.
I had met Lesley a couple of years earlier when I had worked at a restaurant called Chaya Venice. I wasn’t even really good friends with her, but I made the mistake of dog-sitting for another girl at work, and word spread like an AMBER Alert. The most ridiculous thing about it was I had never led anyone to believe I even liked dogs that much. The only animals I had ever been publicly effusive about were apes. Aside from their bright pink assholes that stick out like toilet plungers, I think that as far as personalities go, they really have the most to offer.
The minute I arrived at Lesley’s house, insanity ensued. Anytime the front door was opened, Lesley had a full-on wrestling match with Daisy, the big dog, while simultaneously shooing away Pepper, the Peekapoo, so that neither would escape. My feeling is, if a dog is that hard up to break free, let it go. It’s like a boyfriend who wants to break up. We all know the old adage, “If you set someone free, and he never comes back, then he was never yours.” I understand the main fear with setting dogs loose is that they could get hit by a car, but so could an ex-boyfriend. That’s just a chance you have to take.
In between her screaming “Daisy, down!” and “Pepper, no!,” we chitchatted and she reminded me how to use all the TVs and DVD players and told me where the dog park was. I wanted to tell
