*Photos Taken, Secretly, After She Promised She Wouldn’t Take Any, By Jennifer Martinez
How many women go from the spa, to the sangria, to The Goodbye Blue Monday, To Pearls Social Billy Club, to arm wrestling matches at Gotham City Longue? At Pearl’s I felt compelled to kiss the manager of another bar where I am working on pressuring them to give me a job, since she made the move and the place is awesome and has live music or comedy every night (yes, it’s the GBM) and working there would be something I would pay to do, so getting paid to be there would be like getting paid to go to the spa. But I did not pay to go to the spa, that was purchased for me, which at least made it better than if I had paid to go to the spa. That would have been worse.
The point is, I lost my masculinity, but only for a moment. I regained somewhere between the second and third arm wrestling match. I beat Cincanatta and I think the other said he was from Pennsylvania. He bought me a whiskey and rolled me a smoke.
This all might have been an overcompensation for how girly it began. But I hope it all would have happened anyways. By day it was like I played in the princess patch getting my manly hands all girled up by Norma, who was doing my pedicure and by night my newly pedicured hands were winning back to back arm wrestling contents which netted me free whiskey.
3PM.
I arrive at the spa with Jen and Sabrina. Jen put me up to this by inviting me, encouraging me, and ultimately buying me a ticket to pamper myself like a woman.
I felt the inevitable nervousness that ones feels when they are picking up their date to the prom and that date is a feral wolf mother with a history murder. Up until this part of my life massages were only ever done as part of the dating dance. Remember, I reminded myself, this is not a precursor to anything, this is an end itself.
How shall I begin to describe the experience of my first professional massage after years being woman handled by inexperienced hands whose skills at delivering a massage ranked up there with a toad’s ability to do calculus? This woman knew what she was doing. She was a wizard of a woman and her hands were magic. This woman used her fingers to make me new. From there stuff got gayer. The manicure. The pedicure. One man in a room of women.
Let’s get to the politically incorrect bottom of the question of men going to spas and, and I wish there were a better word to use, pampering themselves.
Remember, just because the future is moving towards equality, does not mean men should go to the spa.
What we need, is a spa for men. One the wall, will be manly posters. The women, will be dressed as geishas. Bob Dylan, will play on the juke box instead of the Thai Pan flutes they had at the place I went. Scotch, will be imbibed every step of the way at the man spa. Afterwards, after a man has had a massage, facial, and manly manicure, he will retire into the cigar lunch where belly dancers carrying bloody Marys who will thank the men for their patronage.
Yeah, Man Spas. That’s a talk that needs to be had.
