It started with a nice cup of tea with a friend.
We had talked about work and the kids’ school and the housing market and now, being women of a certain age, we began to talk about our physical ailments. I was up first.
“Some days I can’t even turn my head, other times the pain runs over the top of my shoulder all along the outside of my arm and makes my fingers tingle. When I stay on top of going to the chiropractor I can keep it at bay but if I miss two weeks it comes back.” She is nodding in sympathy. “Right now the muscles in my shoulder feel like they are strangling themselves. No oxygen. I just want someone to take my arm off and plug it back in. I want someone to beat the shit out of me.”
Here I have to smile reassuringly at the neighboring table of women. “Not really.” I tell them.
“Well…” My friend has her finger in one of her loose curls twirling it.
“What? I’ll try anything.” Extreme but at the time true.
“So I went to this guy who does bodywork that is pretty intense.” (No mom, this is not something sexual.)
“He used a baseball bat to get into some really tight muscles.” This immediately sounds good to me. Like a pestle or a mortar whichever one does the grinding (still not sexual).
“I’m here for it.” I told her pulling up the website. Every single slot was available but my chiropractor couldn’t see me for two weeks so I booked an appointment for the next day.
The next morning I am standing three levels above Broadway on the balcony outside of his office. It was cold. I was early. No one was there.
Steve had driven me to the appointment and was working at the coffee shop on the first floor. We did this a lot. Picked an area of town, walked around, worked (or not) in a coffee shop in whichever district we had chosen. This coffee shop had willingly been taken over by whatever that super common plant was where a single pot could lead to legs of waxy leaves climbing up pillars and along shelves. This spot was known for paying its baristas $25 and hour and eschewing tips. A better system for sure, but as a former restaurant owner who had to close in part for offering employees health insurance I wasn’t too confident in their success.
I am standing on the frigid balcony peering in through the bent slats of metal blinds and can see a massage table, a much sadder specimen of the same species of plant, and a desk. Well I couldn’t see the desk because it was covered in piles of papers and tools. Leaning next to the desk was a baseball bat. And several shovels. Full sized home depot metal scoop shovels.
Ten minutes later Damian arrived.
“Hi” he said pushing past me and unlocking the door. “I’m Damian, and you are?”
“Oh, hi, I’m Anna I have a 10:00?”
“Right, sure, my booking system got hacked so I don’t know people’s names.” I am thinking about the credit card number I entered yesterday feeling not that amazing about his hacked system.
He is tall, wears sneakers that I’m pretty sure are worth a lot of money and makes me feel a little on edge. I am hoping this isn’t racism, I’m pretty sure this isn’t racism, but it is my first thought so perhaps it is racism? I slow my thoughts down before I have spiraled to far and take stock. He looks at me but then cuts his eyes away, we are in a tight space and he is a little too close, I can see the sheets, presumably from the last client, piled in the corner. He gathers them and stands, looking over my head at the glass door.
He gestures towards a narrow hollow core door with his elbow. “Do you need to use the bathroom?” I don’t really but I need to take a step away. So I nod and enter the little room. It has the same kind of anti bacterial handsoap that my Vermont therapist had and lift my sudsy hands to my face before I lower them into the water aerated water which is splashing back on me. As described on his website I am wearing loose clothes and am going to remain dressed during this treatment. My sopping sleeve is going to bother me. I am rolling it up, trying to have enough folds so that only dry cotton touches the tender inside of my forearm when I walk into the main area with the table. He is seated at the desk and leaning over to clear off what he has revealed as a side chair. He is putting things on the floor in the corner, a mini souvenior style baseball bat, two note pads yellow front pages covered in slashed blue writing. A chisel. An ice pick. The coffee shop where Steve sits two floors below me seems far away. I am telling myself that my friend made it out and I just need to calm the fuck down. It is working about as well as being in a room with a man and an ice pick might.
Despite having cleaned off the chair he is motioning for me to stand. In previous iterations of treatment for a variety of pain caused by accidents and aging I have done rolfing. Received rolfing? His assessment is like that. “Stand facing the window” Stand facing me.” “Walk that way” “Walk back.” “Sit on this still and look at the blinds.” Here he produces a stool that is hidden by an easel and pulls it forward. “I am going to show you how well this works.” What, I am wondering is THIS exactly? But I am in it now. He has a clothespin and is moving it up and down the blind. I have no idea what I am supposed to do. “Tell me when to stop.” He says. Is this some sort of psychic something? What test am I failing? “What should I be looking for?” I ask. He peers directly into my eyes for the first time. “When your sight line is level.” He seems to be reassessing my intelligence. So am I.
“May I take some pictures?”
“Uh. Sure?”
“OK now measurements.” I know what you are thinking. Skin suits. But it wasn’t that sort of measurement. There are huge panels along the wall and he is fumbling with them and he slides out a door. I don’t mean slides open a door I mean slides one out. It is attached to nothing, seems solid maple and is marked with ticks and initials like many families have in their homes. “Stand with your back to it” He tells me. He is somehow holding the door up straight and marking my height. “Wait until you see the difference after your treatments have finished.”
“How will we know which is mine?” I ask. Not joking. He laughs as though I am.
I am back in the chair and he is telling me what is wrong with me. Diaphragm, hip rotations, something about my fifth rib. I am trying to remember anatomy and Adam and Eve, two subjects that are not my forte. He must see my confusion. “I have a model.” He tells me. This. A model. I have seen these at orthopedists, orthodontists, even the chripractor. They are made of something between plaster and plastic and they feel so science-y and official. But he is reaching into his desk. Well into the piles on his desk, and he pulls out a crumpled coke can bent to one side. He is running his finger along ridges that look like the inner curve of a bendy straw. “These are your ribs.” “Mm hm” I am saying. I’m realizing that this can is the model he wants to show me. Looking at it though I feel some truth. I do feel crunched like pre-recycling. He pulls out a second can with a flourish. It stands straight. “When you leave you will feel like this.” We both pause, contemplating that. “Can I take a picture?” I ask him. “Of COURSE.” He says.
So I am on the table and he has the metal point of the full sized spade in my abdomen. He is backed all the way up to the panels so he can use the length of the handle as a lever. All he is doing, he tells me, is moving aside my organs to make more space for my diaphragm. He has me hold my breath, which, obviously, I was already doing. “Now take in little sips of air until you can’t inhale anymore” No problem. I am already not really breathing. So he is digging around in there and I definitely feel something. “People are surprised that sometimes the best way to the spine is through the stomach.” I am wondering if they are still surprised by the time someone has accessed their spine through their stomach. And by someone I mean Damian who I now and forever call “Shovel guy.”
He is telling me about his tools, how energetically they need to be wood, metal or bone. And that bone hurts most. I’m wondering if he means the source of the bone hurt most but I don’t ask. Because I can’t breath. And without oxygen I can’t talk. But he can. And he does.
I learn about how he can cure endometriosis and cancer. With tools from Home Depot. Now I am on my stomach and he has a washcloth-wrapped chisel to my ribs. I’m glad for the washcloth but am pretty sure in a game of water, washcloth, chisel chisel still wins. “It’s going to look bad. Like when you get home tonight and get changed its going to look really bad. But it won’t hurt.” I am so pleased that I will be getting home tonight that I don’t think much about that. He is telling me about his ten session program which includes a shovel facelift and a cure for snoring. I tell him he should brand his tools and re-sell them at a higher price. “Like body WORKs" He likes this. “Maybe I could paint it pink and call it ‘massage shovel’?”
“Does anyone ever find you listed under massage in google and show up and get…I don’t know…weirded out?” “Oh yeah. At least twice a year I get some lady in here looking around for a robe and I know there is going to be trouble.” He is laughing. A little troublingly.
“We are all set here.” He says. I sit up. “I think I could probably have you all fixed up in about 20 more hours.” My eyes are squinched closed in what he must assume is skepticism. “Well it took you forty plus years to get like this. It takes a little while to re-set you.”
He is still talking but I am not listening. Instead I am taking my first full breath in a decade. I hadn’t even realized that I had a hitch in my inhale but now that it is gone I breathing feels completely different. I am turning my head side to side with an owl-like range of motion. I am lifting my arm, hinging it back and poking into the newly pliant muscles of my scapula.
I am handing over my credit card hackers be damned. “Why aren’t you booked ALL THE TIME?” I ask him.
He laughs in a way that might possibly be considered creepy if I didn’t now know that he was magic. “I dunno, maybe not everyone likes a massage shovel.” “Or ice pick.” I say.”Yeah, people don’t like the snoring treatment at all, chisels way up your nose do hurt.” “I bet” I say and as I straighten up on the stool after putting on my boots I look at the clothes pin. My gaze is way above it. “Did you move that down?” I ask. He laughs again. “Amazing isn’t it?”
That night I am holding up my PJ top twisted around to see the back of my ribs in the mirror. I have purple gash after purple gash running down my side. “You are never going back there.” Steve tells me. It does look frightening. But it doesn’t hurt at all. I take a nice full breath and tell him. “Oh yes I am.”
“I will also consult with an oncologist if I get a cancer diagnosis, but shovel guy will be my second stop.” Steve doesn’t know if I am kidding. Neither do I.
A sad but not unexpected post script: the coffee shop had closed the next time I went to shovel guy.
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What is the strangest thing you have paid for? Or the weirdest treatment you have ever received?
Great post. I loved this: '“People are surprised that sometimes the best way to the spine is through the stomach.” I am wondering if they are still surprised by the time someone has accessed their spine through their stomach.'
Once upon a time, in a city that shall remain nameless, I would pay people to look after my car in the street. What I was actually doing, as it was later explained to me, was paying them not to damage it. But it amounted to the same thing, I guess.
I love this, Anna. I am committed to getting a regular massage (which, so far has been one every 4 months, but, considering I hadn't had a massage since 2019 before I went in April, this is a good start). Depending on what my year-end bonus bestows, I might find a good Rolfer. Your story won me over (and if I see a pink shovel, I'll be in touch). The weirdest/best thing I ever paid for was my OMD (doctor of Oriental medicine). I found out after I went that he was kind of famous (Cher went to him; we both have EBV). Everyone told me how good he was, but no one mentioned the "process". He would touch me (usually my knee, nothing improper), then do a little finger dance before touching a vile of herbs, finger dance, me, finger dance another herb until one was selected and verified, then on to the next until the full formula was created...and I did everything in my power NOT to full-on fold over and cackle-laugh. But this man was magic. He was no BS (believed you should go to your MD not just rely on herbs), and changed my life. Weird sh!t works! You just need to be sure you don't end up with a weird-o doing it. xo