The Best Hour of My Month 💆

It costs more than a dollar per minute but is worth every cent.

When you search for stories about massages on Medium, you come across two things.

If you simply search that one word, “massage,” you mostly come across highly sexualized stories, some of which are in a publication based upon that topic. I’m no prude whatsoever. Quite the opposite. But I find it interesting that massages are so frequently associated with sex.

It’s basically the topic that comes to my own mind when I think of massages, yet the best hours of my typical month do not include it.

The other stories are those that include the word “therapy” after the word “massage,” thus making it a more respectable topic and one that massage therapists make a profession of. A licensed profession, no less.

The venue where I enjoy a sixty-minute rub-down and massage with the lovely Lisa is one that most respectable folks would not want to be photographed or videotaped coming or going from.

It looks more like this:

Than this:

From the outside.

Inside, the place is run by recent Chinese immigrants who speak very little English. It’s very clean and the staff is friendly. Besides the fact that there are multiple massage tables in each room, it is a comfortable place to visit.

Imma be honest with you. I live in the Chicago area and work for a city where these unlicensed massage parlors are frequently busted for you-know-what. I wonder how the women, Lisa included, are treated, if they are there willfully, and how much of the payments that customers make are paid to her and the other employees for their efforts. I assume that she keeps the generous tips that I give but I am not even sure about that.

As you may have surmised from the title, the hour that I treat myself to every two to three Saturdays is the best one of my month. So sometimes they are the best two hours of my month. Many times, the only thing that gets me through a stressful twelve-hour workday (the three times per month when I have night meetings) is counting down the days until my next massage.

I will skip the long story about how it came to be that I frequently go for massages, but it has to do with an injury that causes me chronic pain and made me become a Pusher.

It is often my only waking hour within the two- or three-week span of time when I am not experiencing ankle pain and, more recently, pain in my right shoulder. Basically, my left side is still pretty good but the right side of my body could use some improvement.

Like everything else, there has been inflation in the massage world. It is not atypical to find places that charge $70, $100, or even more for an hour-long massage.

The establishment that I frequent is considerably more affordable than that, and even though it looks a bit sketchy from the outside and does not have a licensed masseuse on staff, it is one of the cleanest-run businesses around. So much so that there is a camera trained on each massage table, which I know would make some people feel uncomfortable, but I have become used to it. I am mostly covered by towels, anyway.

A few years ago, my first regular masseuse at that business was a stocky woman named Mary with the strongest hands ever. She was a “3” to my 5ish rating so I was not self-conscious about my midsection and scrawny legs with her.

Sometime last year, the front desk lady informed me that Mary had “retired” and “moved back to China.” But a woman named Lisa, who had previously served as Mary’s backup when she was not available, suddenly became my go-to masseuse.

Again, not that I was seeking out a new girlfriend being the happily married man that I am for twenty-six years, but Lisa is an easy “7” or “7 1/2” to my “5.”

As opposed to Mary’s massages, where I often worried that she was going to rub my muscles right off of my bones, Lisa’s touch is light and caressing. Most likely too light, but I’m too nice of a guy to mention that to her, and I like the way I feel during and after a massage.

Sometimes it is the only hour or two hours of the month when I feel nice and relaxed. It is my best way to de-stress and award myself for whatever I might have done that was good over the past two to three weeks.

I consider it like my regular tune-up and typically thank Lisa profusely afterward. I tip at least fifty percent, sometimes higher, which is likely the primary reason that she is so nice to me.

I realize that it is her job to be nice to customers, but the way she greets me and massages me makes me think that my frequent visits to her coupled with generous tips puts me just a bit higher on her ranking of customers.

Most likely I will never know. Plus, with everything that I have going on in my life, admitting that my favorite hour or sometimes two hours of my month are those spent being massaged is not something that I would normally share.

You can read stories about the many benefits of massage therapy including lowering stress and tension, increasing immune functions, boosting your mental health, managing pain, and more. You could tick off all four of those boxes for me, and it does not hurt that I kinda sorta have a middle-aged man crush on my masseuse. So there you have it.

Any and all earnings from this story will be added to my “normal” tip for Lovely Lisa around Christmastime 🎄, so I hope that many paying customers read the entire thing.