Massage Parlor
Paul Hostovsky
So my friend Glenn is telling me how
he’s
stumbled onto this place
off Prospect Street on his way home
from
racquetball, and since become
a regular. He says the girls are
all
discreet, and good looking and how.
He says the one the other night
was
quite well-read, kept quoting Rilke
and Ferlinghetti to him. Well
this gets
my attention, so now I’m sitting
in a window seat at
MacDonald’s
on Prospect Street, waiting for Glenn to
show. I’m
fingering a salty
corner of my empty French fries pocket,
licking my
fingers and surreptitiously
scrutinizing each female passerby
for a sign
of her vocation and/or
place of employment, when suddenly
there’s
Glenn smiling down at me
like a big avuncular cat through the
plate
glass window. He orders two Big Macs,
sits down across from me,
and we go over
the procedure with his mouth full of hamburger:
We’ll
ring a bell. They’ll buzz us in.
Two flights down another door will
open
onto a small reception area. Madame,
seated behind a desk, will
give us each
a towel and a key after we give her
the money. In the
changing room we’ll change
out of our clothes, lock them up in our
own
private lockers with the keys, shower, and then—
Wait, I
interrupt him. Where do we keep
our keys? He leans in closer, smiles
bigger
than I’d have thought possible, whispers
that the towels have
a single pocket sewn
into them for the keys, and for the money
in case
you want to order something not
on the menu. So pretty soon I’m
wearing
nothing but a pocket in a towel, sitting
across from a bevy of
certifiably
gorgeous massage therapists wearing
white hospital uniforms
and very
short shorts. Glenn has already chosen
his primary care
provider who leads him
by the hand out of sight. It feels like
a cross
between a harem and a barbershop
and a rehabilitation service where
you
get to choose your own practitioner
and treatment. But I wish I had
another
pocket for my other five fingers
which keep returning to my
face
to huddle there like pigeons as I scan
the brilliant young staff
for a possible
poet. The one in the corner, a kind of
pigeon reticence
about her—or am I
projecting—her eyes seeming to
avoid
everything below the ceiling, is looking
upward as if to ask, Who
among
the angelic orders would hear me? I
hear her. And I choose her. So
then I’m
lying on my stomach on a table
in a small back room, my
jingling towel
like a white mist lifting off the Duino
tower of my
erection as she turns
me over on my back, and while she works
I’m
permitted to kiss the beautiful white
stanzas of her breasts, but not her
mouth—
I am not permitted the intelligence of her
mouth.