I had been feeling worn out and stiff. When I complained to my wife about it, she suggested I let her make an appointment with her massage therapist. I had never had a professional massage. My feeling was that a good backrub or a massage wasn't something a person needed to be trained to do. Or even could be trained to do. I had been told that I gave a dynamite massage by all the women who had shared my bed over the years. To me, you either had the gift of applying just enough pressure or you didn't. To me, it was very similar to making love as regards sensitivity of touch.
But Candy insisted, so I finally gave in. That was why I found myself that afternoon sitting on the futon in Jennifer's waiting area while she finished up with her earlier customer. I had seen Jennifer a couple of times when I'd gone to pick my wife up from her appointments. She was a short, almost petite, black woman with mocha colored skin. Her black hair was bobbed short and she liked to wear shorts and tank tops when she worked. Her breasts were small and almost pubescent under her loose top. On one occasion when she'd worked up quite a sweat during Candy's massage, her nipples made their presence known by reacting to the somewhat cooler air of the outer room. They appeared to be outsized for the size of the mounds they adorned, standing almost a half inch and about the same in diameter.
The studio was in the center of a strip mall just off the east-west highway. There was another reason I had shied away from "massage therapy". It was that these days there was too much of the New Age b.s. that surrounded so much of it. I accept the therapeutic value of massage. But the crystals, the aromatherapy, the temple bells, and all the other happy horseshit so many of them tossed in made me want to puke. Jennifer might be one of those, I wasn't sure. What I did know was that she kept an assortment of magazines that were all over the map. From far out there to Smithsonian and Time.
Jennifer ushered a rather large woman out of the back room and shepherded her out the front door. Then she turned to me. Crossing from the door, she held out her hand and smiled. "Bill, I'm so glad Candy convinced you to come. I'm sure I will be able to help you." I wondered what my wife had said to her, exactly.
"I'm sure you give a great rubdown," I replied, not knowing what else to say. Jennifer chuckled and told me that the term 'rubdown' was for locker rooms and boxers. But, she added, she wasn't so P.C. that she disagreed that a rose by any other name... etc., etc. I began to like this woman more.
In the room with the table, she told me to strip down as much as I was comfortable and she would return. She ducked out under a curtain across a door in the back. I was pretty comfortable naked, so I stripped everything off and lay on the table. I wasn't sure of the protocol, so I pulled the sheet over my lower half and relaxed on my back. After a few minutes, Jennifer called from behind the curtain asking if I was ready. I told her I was.
She came back into the room. She had some fresh towels in her arms, which she deposited on a table at the side of the room. "Any musical preferences?" she asked. I told her anything but 'that New Age crap'. She laughed and put on some soft instrumental I didn't recognize. But it didn't have any instruments in it that I couldn't name, so I was content with it. She asked me to turn over on my belly and she adjusted the doughnut-shaped face rest to my size. Starting at my neck, she worked her way down my back, then repositioned the sheet to do the backs of my legs. During all this, she asked questions. "Do you have any specific sore spots, or stiffness in a particular location?"
"Well, I've been having some sharp pains down the backs of my legs from time to time," I told her.
"Maybe we should do some serious work on your glutes," she answered. Taking the term to mean my ass, I just said she was in charge.
"I'm in your hands -- literally. Whatever you think will do the most good is okay with me." She hesitated before saying anything else. When she went back to working my lower back, she spent some time putting some pressure around my kidney area. When I tensed at one point, she asked about it. "It's just that you hit a spot there that seems sensitive." She slowed down and worked it inch by inch until she hit it again. I jerked again, but she had been more gentle that time.
"This may seem like a personal question, Bill," she began. She seemed reluctant to ask me something. "but how is your digestion?" Thinking she meant to ask if I had heartburn or stomach aches, I said it was fine. "I mean, what about your bowels? Are you pretty regular?"
