Touched By An Angel
Memories of Massages
It has occurred to me that I have an unusually strong desire, and in fact - a need, for being massaged, that could perhaps be loosely described as an addiction. Being of the age where you start to question the deeper meaning behind everything said, done and felt, I’m making some inquiries about my relationship to massage through memory -publicly- because this is what I do now. Feel free to psychoanalyse and judge me from your armchair.
My family is “touchy-feely” as they say. When my father or stepmother would embrace me in long loving meandering hugs (as hippies are wont to do) they would rub into the tight muscle of my shoulder with their chin and dig their fingers under my shoulder bones to rub out the nuggets there. I gave my stepmother foot rubs on the couch while we watched tv or read scripts at night and would walk on my mother’s back to crack it when she came home from long days lugging plants into truck-beds or standing at the CD Warehouse. This is my origin story.
When I was 8 years old, I lived in Malaysia for a little while (where my father was working as a construction manager on a film called Anna and The King). We stayed in a resort on a beautiful island called Langkawi one weekend, and my parents booked me a Reflexology massage as a novelty and a treat. I was nervous and anxious about it, but also excited -butterflies-in-the-tummy -because I knew it was a luxury. I was also curious about these “pressure points” and thought some magic might happen to me. I’m laying on a hotel bed, with my head propped up by a pillow, and I’m holding my legs out straight in front of me like a pin with what I remembered to be a tense look on my face (but is clearly not! *see below*) while a man is kneeled at the end of the bed hitting all the pressure points in my feet. This photo my stepmother took of the moment made her laugh out loud every time she saw it. She texted it to me yesterday with the caption: You asked “how long was our flight to Langkawai?” “20 mins” “this massage feels longer than the flight!”. There is something innately ridiculous and cringe-worthy about this image to me. I’ve come to conclude that the discomfort extends from the obvious (white and socio-economic) privilege and servitude that set up begets, coupled with the foreign, vulnerable and beautiful intimacy of being touched in a caring way by a stranger, as a child, knowing that money has been exchanged for this act of kindness, and that it is a somewhat low-paying, yet labor intensive job. This is something I will dive into a little more, later. The look of bliss on my face is undeniable though, like an alcoholic after their first sip of booze.
When I was 14 in Bali at the height of puberty, raging mood swings - a man called Wayan (a name all first born children receive) came to our villa to give me a private massage (another gift from my parents). I remember feeling slightly shocked (but equally thrilled) at being left alone with a grown man who was touching me, while I was basically nude, in this somewhat intimate way. I remember the nervousness and pleasure when his thumb moved up and around my ass cheek (which is totally normal and effective in a Thai/Balinese style massage- that area holds a lot of tension) and wondering if he was being inappropriate or not. He was just doing his job but I fell totally in love with him.
A year later, in a slow motion rollerskating accident at the Moonlight Rollerway, set to the tune of Anita Bell’s Ring My Bell, I compressed two vertebrae in my thoracic spine. I couldn’t feel my legs and saw my life flash before my eyes (an image of myself under a stage spotlight in a wheelchair- the way I had seen Karen O do at a festival that year). The floor cleared, the music stopped and and the staff came running toward me screaming “YOU CAN”T SUE US! YOU SIGNED A WAIVER!”. I didn’t have travel insurance, couldn’t walk for a couple days, and jumped straight on a plane back to Australia out of sheer fear of exorbitant hospital fees. After X-rays and so on, it was recommended that I see an Osteopath to help with the pain and healing. I couldn’t walk very far without getting back pain. Every week we could afford to, I strolled my-teenage-self into this man -Anthony’s 3 story terrace listening to Wilco in my tiny school skirt, face down, while he softly massaged me and talked about country music, Rickenbacker guitars and Vox amplifiers. He was just doing his job but I fell totally in love with him.
It’s 2012 and the handsome personal trainer getting me ready for a music video shoot in London reveals to me that he is also a sports massage therapist while rubbing deep into my shoulders after a session. Lo and behold, he was just doing his job but I immediately fell totally in love with him, staying with him romantically for most of my early 20s, reaping the incredible rewards of massages every night and every morning. I’m thinking of that Seinfeld episode -”The Masseuse” suddenly. These deep tissue massages really did something to me. I started having extreme dreams and confronting memories and realisations. It felt like a dam had broken, the flood gates to my tears and emotions flung wide open and I became a hot inconsolable mess.
“I got massaged into madness... I was having about 30 massages a day… I couldn’t stop crying for three weeks!” Hugh Grant
I saw Hugh Grant tell this story on a late night show, about having a complete life-crisis, a 6 month depressive meltdown, triggered by a holiday in the Maldives where he was massaged excessively. There’s something so outrageous about the contrast of luxury, privilege, relaxation and neurosis there, but I obviously related to the part about being “massaged into madness”. I believe massage is so powerful it can both cause and relieve madness.
Backstage in a safari park somewhere in Holland, I’m suffering one of the more devastating break ups of my life. The artists are offered complimentary massages and you know I walked my broken shell straight to the empty shipping container where this woman had set up shop. We didn’t speak, but after two minutes of placing her hands on my back, she says “you poor thing, what did he do to you?”. I suppose she she knew what my muscles had to say; she spoke their language. I burst into tears and told her everything. She fixed me. The daze you enter after a massage, is like a calm after the storm. Disorienting, yet still. You feel light and soft but with an impenetrable forcefield around you. The hard shell around your soft crab-like insides.
Cut to turning up to my husband’s house after a long haul flight and him asking how much money I had left - “Um, $15”. How? “Well, I got a massage during the layover in Abu Dhabi”. “The layover was only 1.5 hours!” he said incredulously “Are you really one of those people?”. The people who get massages during layovers is a thing apparently, something worthy of judgement and in fact, I am one of those people. I get anticipatory stress of how I will turn up on the other side of a long haul flight -how the time zone, lack of sleep and so on will make me turn bat-shit crazy and that is so terrifying that I do everything in my power to even the playing field. I hydrate like the deserts miss the rain, I dutifully sleep when they suggestively turn the lights down in the cabin and wake when they turn them back up. I get a massage in the layover, even if it’s the last money I have, even if it’s only a ten minute scalp rub. It’s as compulsion. I convince myself that I deserve it. Especially in the middle of a long tour, especially when I have no money left and it’s especially absurd to do so.
One of these lay-over massages was in a dodgy room in Singapore airport in the early hours of the morning when most of the shops were eerily shut. The male masseuse’s thumb slipped up, my, um, you know. I say “slipped”, because I do believe it was a mistake -there was oil and momentum involved. I kind of just shrugged it off, but my male friends laughed so hard when I told them, saying there was no way that was even possible, let alone a mistake. I disagree, but maybe I’m naive. He was just doing his job, I think, and saved us both the embarrassment of addressing the slip-up, so to speak.
My breasts are huge. They were double D in high school, and a G in late 2019 -sizing is alphabetical, so you do the math. They are heavy too (full of fatty deposits as opposed to breast tissue according to the doctor who was scanning for tumors and just found gravity clumping fat). It’s impossible to find bras for them because the circumference of my back is tiny. I wish I could cut off a pair of men’s hands as cups and just wear those all day -“here, carry my weight, for a change”. So anyway, I get bad back and shoulder pain. I dreamed about getting a reduction in high school, mostly because I didn’t enjoy the attention they afforded me and the personality type I was slapped with as a result of my body instantly becoming sexualised by their size. Look at me, trying to find legitimate excuses for these excess of massages, like a true addict.
I really love the idea of a couples massage; holding hands across the aisle of beds -a frangipani or rose petal placed on a pink towel, the sound of a waterfall. I’m a romantic, in an obvious, stock photo hotel leaflet, cliché way. I love clichés. I love living them. So my Bollywood baby and I went for weekends in Italy sometimes. We worked really hard and saved up. The first time, we’re staying at a Wes-Anderson-worthy - Grand Hotel Savoia in Genova. It’s pink, big and old -belle epoch. We turn up to the designated massage room on the 3rd floor for a couples massage. A handsome Italian man goes to massage my beau and a portly woman (who I anticipate has strong hands) comes to massage me. My beau is horrified, I think mostly because he has some suppressed homosexuality that presents itself this way, but maybe because he had been excited by the idea of a woman massaging him. I don’t know, but he’s not happy about it and apparently the masseuse made him feel uncomfortable -spending a very long time on his ass (which to be fair, was very tight). He looks truly defeated afterwards and the masseuse is seemingly laughing at him. It was kind of an odd vibe in there. I doubt the veracity of his suspicions, but nevertheless the massage was pretty bad, not least because of Enya’s Sail Away and Ride of The Valkyries playing in the background. Kind of anxiety inducing.
The second time we try (after my pleading and prodding) is only a few hours before our flight home from Palermo, Sicily. The only place that will accept a booking so last minute is very expensive, displaying silver silhouetted naked ladies (like you’d see on a truck’s mudflap) decal stickered above the door. The steep price does not match the shabby interior and I immediately feel uneasy. It takes 20 minutes for two giggling blonde twins (who look underage) with matching floral leggings to meet us and lead us to a room with futons on the floor covered in semi-damp, discoloured towels. Being a seasoned massage client, something feels very wrong to me here. They ask us to strip naked. My beau obliges happily and I ask to keep my thong on. The girls keep giggling and start to kind of caress my back with a light flimsy touch that suggests to me they are not masseuses and starts to make me feel eerie and like I’m being assaulted. They quickly realise we are not there for Happy Endings and try to pretend that they can massage. It’s awkward. One girl tries to pull and crack my neck at which point I flew into a panic, thinking they were trying to murder us. The language barrier made it impossible to communicate. As we leave, having paid all my savings on the massage, I start to sob and feel extremely vulnerable and weird all the way to the airport and the whole flight home.
The mafia is still a big deal in Palermo. A man was shot in the head in the market we walked through the day before in a feud between the Cosa Nostra and the new African migrant gangs. Helicopters and sirens rang through the air in irony as we visit Teatro Massimo from The Godfather. A police helicopter with a search light came down upon the crystalline Mondello beach as we were sun baking for a good 30 minutes. These headlines - “Behind Illicit Massage Parlors Lie a Vast Crime Network and Modern Indentured Servitude” (NY Times) and “Inside The $4.5 Billion Erotic Massage Parlor Economy” (Forbes) paint a clear picture. Recently in Thailand I wandered into a parlour to find two painted women sleeping, drool pooling from their beautiful crimson mouths, beads of sweat on their peony pink cheeks. Startled at my appearance, the younger woman gets up, discombobulated, palms facing up and says “no, no -not normal massage”, starts shaking her head and laughing at me, smiles and shoos me out the door, directing me elsewhere. Perhaps the discomfort around massage for some is around the hairline difference between a “normal massage” and prostitution. Perhaps it is to do with the racial and socio economic elements undoubtedly tied to the profession, so brutally on display in the Atlanta spa shootings this year.
I often pause to consider why I want and need massages so much, aside from the obvious physical benefits. Just 20 seconds of being touched increases Oxytocin (the love/bonding hormone) and decreases Cortisol (the stress hormone). Touch is essential for healthy brain development. You can go down a wormhole on CT fibres, Microneurography and epigenetics that will illuminate the absolute seriousness of touch; the difference between fast touch and slower tactile touch. Humans are designed to touch and be touched. It is imperative to our survival and community. Touch is communication more vastly intricate, universal and intuitive than language. Maybe we are in a society so disconnected from one another that touch had to become commodified and systematic. I dream of a world where we reassure and connect in safe, requited, mutual, caring touch. That’s how it was meant to be.
Many of my friends will attest that I have taken them to get a massage together in the same spirit as a casual dinner date. Like a true addict, I so want them to experience the same elation and relief I do. I was almost offended when my friend Jeremy hated the massages I insisted we get at my favourite parlour. How is that even possible? I think of sitting in a taxi having just left my cousin with a dodgy drug dealer from Chicago at the Sunset Marquis with the fatefully whispered “do you have mace? Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”, sitting next to my girlfriend Fabi, who starts massaging my hand with her royal-like elegant fingers of perfection and I somehow forget how worried I am for my cousin’s safety, and I barely even catch the ride-share passenger in the front seat touching the Uber driver’s dick. Just another night in LA.
I think back to that first reflexology massage, and skip fast forward to being pregnant on tour in Philadelphia when the pedicurist says she can’t massage my feet because the pressure points in my foot might cause me to miscarry (which I do). A Thai woman in Los Feliz smiles at me after my 5th deep tissue (trying to cure the debilitatingly stiff hip I have from 13 hour van rides) and says “I love your generation! Young people these days understand that massage is as powerful as therapy but so much cheaper!” And cackles like a witch that knows the depth of universal secrets none of us will ever touch the surface of. All I know is that there are angels out there, and many of them are massage therapists. Tip generously.