Body of Work

I am on a quest for the perfect massage.

This Holy Grail of bodywork takes place in a simple, un-fussy, clean space that is light and airy, yet cool and muted. There is no discernable odor, such as patchouli, nag champa incense, tea tree oil, Lysol, B.O., or any variety of Glade plug-ins. The masseuse dresses unobtrusively and professionally, perhaps in black yoga pants and a white t-shirt, and she is not chatty. She uses a firm, not quite too-painful pressure. For this, I pay approximately $50 for one hour.

I have sought my unicorn, this Holy Grail, for years. My quest has taken me from Burke Williams to Tassajara, from Ten Thousand Waves to Bliss, from one end of the main drag in Calistoga back across the street to the other side again. I have fully disrobed, partially disrobed, disrobed “to my comfort level,” and remained completely clothed (for a pay-by-the-minute neck & shoulder job that was surprisingly competent at a West LA nail salon.) I’ve had massages from a blind-deaf-mute teenage girl (West LA; her parents are a wealthy Pacific Palisades couple who arranged to have her train and got her a job at the Massage Therapy Center on Sawtelle) to a gay man (Burke Williams) to a straight man (Riverside; he had a sweating condition which caused beads of sweat to drip onto me as he massaged me, which was the end of that masseur/client relationship) to James Garner’s son (Palm Desert), and I’ve settled on my favorite type: the disarmingly small grandma.

“Esther” (names have been changed to protect the innocent) was one of these. A pleasant, smiling Mexican grandma who worked at my chiropractor’s office, Esther chatted about the best tamale fillings and other innocuous grandmotherly topics. Dr P raved about her, but I was skeptical. “You love massages! You should try her,” Dr P’s trusty receptionist kept telling me. Finally, around Mother’s Day, Esther set out promotional flyers offering a one hour massage for $25, and her regular price for an hour was only $39, at least $20 cheaper than the regular going rate in Riverside. I’d been having a lot of problems with alignment and my yoga teacher predicted I’d soon be “a crooked old woman” (her exact words), so I figured a good massage or two couldn’t hurt.

It felt weird getting completely undressed in a side room at the chiropractor’s office. One of the best things about chiropractic as a treatment is that you can do almost everything while keeping your clothes on: none of this sitting in the first anteroom, then the second treatment room, shivering in a backless paper gown. Esther came in the room once I was safely hidden under the warmed blankets she’d set out. She switched on a whale sounds CD and got to work.

“What type of pressure do you like?” she asked. I tried to describe what I wanted without hurting her feelings, since she looked at least sixty, and probably a bit more, and I figured her possibly-arthritic hands couldn’t do too much. “I specialize in deep tissue,” she offered. Reasoning that her “deep tissue” was probably the equivalent of “medium” with anyone else, I agreed, and five minutes later, I was trembling, with tears springing from my eyes. She chuckled and changed her pressure to light/medium, and advised me to drink a lot of water for the next 48 hours. (In fact, I could hardly stand up the next morning.)

Esther’s massages featured liberal quantities of olive oil purchased in giant jugs from Smart + Final. I always left feeling good, smelling like a garden salad, and with hands so slippery I could hardly drive the car home.

My hands-down favorite type of massage, though, is of the “under five feet tall with hands registered as deadly weapons” variety: the Korean grandma.

Beverly Hot Springs sits, undeterred by the ups and downs of the neighborhood, at the same location on Western on the edge of Koreatown as it did at the turn of the Twentieth Century, when it supplied drinking water to discerning city residents. The inside has grotto-like pools of naturally warm water burbling up from underground springs, and it is wonderfully peaceful to soak away the hustle and bustle of the city, but the real attraction are the massages.

There are no “pressure levels” at Beverly Hot Springs. Ten or twelve customers are massaged at once, in one big room with shoji screen dividers between the tables. Every masseuse I’ve ever seen there has been Korean, at least fifty, and under five feet tall. They wear nondescript white pants and scrubs tops like dental hygenists, though no root canal was ever as painful as a Beverly Hot Springs massage. There is no introduction to the pain, either. One moment you’re settling your face into a terrycloth-cushioned face-hole, the next you are being pummeled, grandma-style. Their specialty is an “active” style of massage, meaning they twist and contort you into a variety of pretzel poses. But the real highlight happens about midway through the procedure, when at one moment you are looking through the face-hole at a pair of white Keds on the floor in front of you, and the next, the feet disappear. The 4’10″ grandma has leapt onto the table and is standing on your back.

When Eva was about eight months old, my mom, sister and I went to Beverly Hot Springs for massages. Eva and I rode Metrolink from Riverside to Union Station, where we all met, and Dad took Eva to West Hollywood Park, where they explored the baby swings and sandbox. We girls headed over to the spa for our pummeling. Over lunch, we all agreed it was wonderful, but pricy (though a bargain at twice the price for the skill and labor that goes into the massage, I still believe.) “Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a cheaper place?” we all agreed.

A couple months later, LA Weekly released their annual “Best of LA” issue, and my sister and her best friend decided it would be fun to work their way through every restaurant, attraction, and service featured. “Best Thai Massage In Town” immediately caught their eye, and they booked appointments right away.

“Oh. My. God,” my sister called me later that day. “You have GOT to go to this place. It is amazing! And it’s so cheap. It’s seriously like $25 for an hour. But you have to get 90 minutes. We’ll go! I want to go back. I want to go every week.” She raved and raved about the place so much that my mom and I demanded to join her at once, so we made our appointments and again arranged for Dad to take Eva to the park while we luxuriated. Beverly Hot Springs had been around my birthday, which is in November, and this was about a month later, so right before Christmas, on a drizzly, cold December morning. In fact, we had plans to have our annual girls’ tea later that day, so our bags had a change of clothes, makeup, hair styling stuff, and everything we’d need to look beautiful and festive later that day.

I rode in the front seat of my sister’s car while Mom followed behind us as we drove back and forth along a sketchy looking stretch of Pico, looking for the place, which my sister remembered only as a nondescript storefront with small sign. There seemed to be some problem with the number sequencing on the street, which unpredictably went from three-digit addresses to four-digit, then back to three. “I think that passport photo place looks familiar,” she said, but then she’d wrinkle her face. “No, I think it’s a few blocks past that pupuseria” (there’s a real ethnic mix on that stretch of Pico near Beverly.)

Finally she dug out the clipping from LA Weekly and we matched a somewhat similar street address, which was an empty looking storefront on a corner. A thin Thai man with narrow mustache dressed in a U.S. Postal Service uniform pushed a broom in the doorway and eyed us suspiciously. Mom, always bright and cheery, approached: “Is this the Thai massage place?” He eyed us and pointed to a hand-lettered sign: “Thai Massage Close Sorry Customer.”

“Shut down. No permit.” But he remained in the doorway, eyeing us as though sizing up our Snitch Factor. “I’ll bet I know who turned you in!” Mom said. “One of your competitors who read about you in ‘Best of LA.’ They were jealous.” That was the perfect combination of compliment and complaint about “the Man,” and we must have passed some type of test, because the man gestured toward the door, where we now saw a wary looking Thai woman seated at a desk. “I’m calling. Cancel appointments!” she quickly said, in case we were wired. Seamlessly, she stood and whispered, “You come back here now!” as she led us through a back door into a narrow alley lined with razor wire-topped chain link fence. We followed through a maze, in one gift shop and out a side door, through an unoccupied office, out the back door, and into a freezing cold room with mattresses on the floor, where we were directed to undress and wait for our masseuses. KLOV, a Spanish-language rock station, blared from next door. “What should we do? Should we stay?” I asked. “They could kill us and nobody would even know where to look for our bodies,” Mom said. “What if there’s an earthquake? I’ll bet this place isn’t up to code.”

Before we could discuss it further, three young Thai women came in and gestured for us to take our places on our respective mattresses. Figuring a good massage is a good massage, we complied, though it was freezing, and the girls chatted loudly and passed around a box of See’s candy as they massaged us. I don’t like whale sounds or crashing surf, but even Celtic music is better massage accompaniment than the crazed Mexican DJs on KLOV announcing contests and reading traffic reports in frenetic Spanish in between love songs and upbeat pop hits.

When it was over, we were once again led through the maze, where we paid, noting a few die-hards chatting on the sidewalk with the Thai mailman.

Over cups of Beverly Hills Hotel Blend tea later that day, we agreed that the only real downsides were the fact that it had been freezing, and that we had to freshen up for tea in the back seat of the car. But you can’t beat $25 for an hour, $35 for 90 minutes.