Massage Memoir

By Michael Winecoff

A Licensed Massage Therapist reveals the joys, amusements and disappointments of the profession through thirty one humorous and human anecdotes of transformation through touch. Massage Memoir reads like a novel blended with truth, wit and personal admissions about how working in the helping professions is often as healing for the practitioner as it is for the person who pays for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Winecoff
• Release date: Oct 18, 2013

Book preview

1

Mansion House

The MG sounded like an amplified bumblebee as we left Swiss Cottage going through the gears on the way out of London. I was catching a ride to the Isle of Wight with a friend who invited me to stay with her at her parent’s place for the weekend. There was a rock and roll solstice celebration on the island. It was warm, the top was down and I was suffering the shooting pains of a pinched nerve.

England was home to me after four years living there and I was taken with my driver, but later I did find it odd she never once warned me about the mansion we would find at the end of the drive.

As we neared our destination, Reggie pointed down a country driveway where she said Elton John had a home. Since she had once been a roadie for Pink Floyd, I thought it likely she had driven into that driveway a time or two herself.

After leaving the Ryde Road my mind wandered away from me and when I came back to myself, we were turning again and going slower down a private drive through a tree lined lane that looked like an English postcard.

The road wound down like a lazy snake into a circular driveway in front of an ancestral home with multiple chimneys all seeming too tall for the edifice. I uncurled myself from the MG, and stood in the courtyard stretching.

A middle aged man with a red mustache appeared at the front door, calling his daughter by her formal name Regina which on his tongue rhymed with vagina. Reggie’s father hugged his daughter and shook my hand and we were lead into the house. It was an ancient home with an old fashioned entry hall full of oil paintings of long gone relatives staring out across the ascending great stairwell leading to the upper rooms.

The portraits were suitably severe to their august family legends but to me, even as impressed as I was by the house, the past looked like a somber old haunt, and no place anyone now living would want to hang out, not if they could avoid it.

Reggie had informed me that her father was a John people called Jack, a colonel formerly stationed in Africa, now retired from the British Army. The Colonel walked with us through the house to the kitchen where Reggie’s mother was organizing for the arrival of foreign friends and family guests, who were coming for the weekend. Jack offered to show me through the house and we left the women in the kitchen.

In the Banquet Room, two English Greyhounds raised their heads and yawned like synchronous swimmers as we walked into the room. One of the dogs rose in anticipation to a sphinx position. The family name was a world famous one. The dogs didn’t know they were anything special but they were certainly a regal fit for the house.

A dark, almost black dining table, the largest and longest table I had ever seen, absolutely owned the room. I was surprised by how casual this home seemed to be and pleased with the fact that there were traces of wet glass rings and blackened burn marks on the table, remnants of ancient days and evenings, all well displayed by the afternoon light streaming in through the open windows.

The whole house was a picture of elegance and casual neglect. It seemed to be a painting of privilege that had been comfortable with itself for hundreds of years. This was a wealth that had long ago shed any effort to impress. It was also a portrait of England in another time. I could barely believe I had suddenly been set down in a time capsule as I admired the handwoven Indian rugs which were worn thin but still adorning the burnished floor. Three Cathedral style bay windows overlooked the inside passage of the English Channel.

It was late afternoon and light was fading. The Colonel took me upstairs to show me my room, before calling the dogs and leading me out of the house to walk around the garden and lawn. Two tennis courts sans nets were surrounded by shivering birch trees. The wind-rippled lawn dropped away like a smooth sail, before plunging into rugged cliffs, to the ocean.

While we were walking along overlooking the view from the bluff, the Colonel noticed I was limping.

‘A pinched nerve,’ I said.

‘Oh, that’s the rats,’ said Jack. ‘When I was in Africa I saw a number of native healers for various troubles of my own. Got me interested in the shamanic arts. Now that I’ve retired I dabble in various techniques of healing. I did learn a few valuable tricks in Africa. I do know one or two techniques that might help you. If you’re game, that is?’

‘Anything that could help; I would be most grateful.’

Before Reggie had mentioned her father’s interests in the healing arts, I had lived in London almost four years. But in all that time I had scant contact with the privileged classes. High class or low class, England often seemed to me to be a country of eccentrics.

‘Here we are,’ said Jack as he slid open one of two large doors to the stables. The door groaned as the wheels tracked along a rusty metal rail rolling above our heads. They dogs were ordered to stay outside and they complied. A horse snickered a hissing train sound.

‘The treatment I’m thinking of is something I learned in Cape Town. Very pragmatic. Simple matter of gravity and a beanbag.’

‘How does gravity come into it?’

‘The beanbag is dropped from a height. Gravity and the sudden displacement of the beans in the bag, causes a blood rush. The Chinese say circulation heals. A beautiful idea, don’t you think?’

I wasn’t thinking because I was too busy pushing away pain. Jack opened a cabinet and extracted a faded maroon bean bag. It was soiled deerskin, quite an ugly bag. We were standing in the stable house and there were bales of hay stacked against one wall.

Light streamed down though a window onto the wall behind us. We shifted a couple of bales of hay together to approximate a working surface, and the Colonel began to conduct a verbal ‘intake’ as I lay down on my stomach as instructed.

‘Was there an accident? Or did the pain just appear?

‘Which side bothers you?

‘Is the pain intermittent or constant?

‘Hot or cold?

‘Have you had this trouble before?

‘Are you ready?

‘Take a few deep breaths …’

A smacking loud impact of noise and a sudden sensation of a heavy weight came into my hips and moved down my legs. It was a pleasant and surprising sensation. I could feel the rush of beans spreading across my buttocks, causing a blood-rush of warmth.

‘Feels good,’ I mumbled.

The musty odor of hay in my nose made me sneeze.

The Colonel lifted the bag and dropped it again. As the gravity drops continued, I slipped into another mind state and mentally closed for business.

Jack had me turn over after a while and lie on my back. He lifted my right leg, bent it at the knee, and took it through slow range-of-motion movements, cautioning me not to tense up. He encouraged me by saying ‘let me have your leg’. Then when I was relaxed with my leg nearly outstretched, he tugged on it, pulling it into extension. He did this again and again. Each time my leg was rotated and extended, Jack tugged on it a little more.

‘Your job is to remain as relaxed as possible, even if this hurts,’ he said.

It did hurt a little but I was able to let go. Then the Colonel added intentional breathing to the routine. When I was suitably relaxed and breathing co-operatively, Jack brought the leg again into the almost extended position, and as I breathed out, he tugged at my leg as before. He was holding my leg both above and below the knee. Each time my leg went into extension he tugged a little harder. At one point there was a sharp, shooting nerve pain and then, immediate relief.

This was not a treatment ever approved by a British Board of Medical Examiners. Jack didn’t have an x-ray machine, he wasn’t a chiropractor and his methods weren’t approved. He was however practicing manual therapy in a careful and cautious way. Subsequently I learned that this technique for treating a pinched nerve is a common all over China.

The experience was effective and it provided me immediate relief. I was impressed and began to wonder how I might find a way to do something like that myself one day.

2

Oriental, Occidental

Master Suzuki liked watching Maggie work while he sat at the end of the bar in the Crepe du Paris restaurant, eating a tomato basil bruschetta.

As a bartender Maggie had an economy of movement and a supply of grace which she delivered with an enigmatic smile.

We were living together and she had lately mentioned to me that Koji Suzuki often took his lunch at her bar. Maybe he liked to eat there in order to enjoy the elevated ambiance and observe the spectacle of wealthy diners, and he also must have liked seeing Maggie and her mystery smile.

Maggie had a gift for flirtatious contact that seldom dipped below what appeared to be an untroubled surface. She didn’t give anything away, and knew how to wait patiently, and was gracious in mind and movement.

She looked so placid mostly because, as a girl she had spent too many traumatic days at the window of her childhood home, waiting for her mother to come home. This waiting at the window for her working mother had, curiously enough, given her a keen tolerance for putting off pleasure.

She spent time in a mental institution before moving west and that was really why she moved away from New Jersey. She didn’t want to go back to that place in her mind which had frightened her so much in lockdown.

When her younger sister became an attorney Maggie, seven years older, felt a strong familial pressure to improve herself. She wanted to know what she should be doing with her life, other than standing behind a bar serving drinks.

That childhood waiting and wanting had been intense. It left a deep memory wound. Maggie waited to eat when she got hungry and then didn’t eat much when she was eating, because she waited too long between bites. She put away any eager acceptance of pleasure, as if pleasure was a hoard of goodness she could break out later when she needed it. Someday maybe, it might be time to make a withdrawal, but not now. Maggie had acquired, or more likely unconsciously cultivated, a ‘maybe not now’ attitude.

Doesn’t everybody try to work magic as a child? Wondering how hard do I have to want this wanting to make this wanting happen? A solid day of internal wanting with burning bright desire should do it. Give it another week then since nothing happened last week. It’s true it has been a month now and no magic yet, so what do I have to do?

As a girl, Maggie waited patiently. As a woman Maggie still waited, still hoping the force of her childhood need would one day make such a difference back in New Jersey, that her mother finally, wouldn’t leave the house in the morning, in the first place.

Beneath Maggie’s lovely smile, sandpaper belts and enormous heavy worry wheels, were grinding glass. The wheels and glass-grinding consumed all incoming calories.

Maggie held her breath for twenty nine years. She was pretty sure maybe her Mom would appear if only she could hold it long enough.

Yet to others she seemed to be sailing through life on a warm silky breeze. Everyone, including me, admired her slender, well-defined figure. Her muscle definition was something wonderful. She had nearly zero body fat thanks to serious and solid fretting, coupled with her stone tight habit of not allowing herself too much pleasure. This seemed to make each muscle a stand-out individual who knew exactly where it had originated and right where it was going, and how it would insert into the bone when it got there.

‘Where do you work out?’ people would ask.

‘I don’t do anything,’ she had to say.

Maggie didn’t need a gym. And she looked so good not saying anything, that she didn’t need to say much. She was shy. Still waiting for Mom, after all. Maggie made a habit of not saying anything about herself, not if she could avoid it.

She was Asian in this avoidance of emotional display. She had told me about her mother when we first met, and about being institutionalized. But she didn’t know how to tell me–or didn’t want to tell me–what was worrying her now. Even begging her to talk about it was fruitless.

If you don’t say much and you look good not saying something, other people are usually happy to do the talking. We would have long, drawn out talks in bed where I would tell her everything I was feeling about the space between us. These were long talks and good talks, but I was the only one talking.

Lots of intelligent people seem to make this choice and some people simply don’t know what’s wrong or how to talk about it.

I heard the following conversation word-for-word when Maggie got home.

‘One of my massage therapists quit without notice today,’ Koji said.

‘Really,’ said Maggie. My boyfriend is a massage therapist.’

Maggie then told Koji Suzuki about me and about how I was once again home again from England.

‘Send him in,’ said Koji.

Maggie called me on the bar phone to explain what was happening with koji listening to the conversation, before handing the telephone to him. So Maggie, thinking quickly on her feet, probably got me the job. It was Maggi too who encouraged me to go through massage school. We had lived together by that time, for six years.

Before the bar call, it had been eighteen months since graduation. I had not been able to find a job of any kind in my new profession. I had even gone back to England for the summer to learn copywriting from a friend, a creative director at an ad agency in Manchester.

Back in Seattle, Koji and I were hitting it off so well I was hired as the new masseur at the Richard John Salon, on the spot.

Koji had five women working for him on his massage staff. As a grand entrance, the Salon had half inch, seven foot glass doors. There were nine stylist’s chairs and as many stylists. It was possible to get a manicure, a facial or a pedicure in a private room. There was even a staff kitchen where we could fritter away