Bath House Blues

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, but if this is the only job available, maybe it’s time to give up the car and plasma TV.
By Sean M. Miller • Illustrations by Jon Proctor

Naked and sprawled face down on a bench of faded and cracked white tile was the embodiment of George “the Animal” Steele. A shag carpet of body hair covered the 400-pound behemoth, who was so overweight that half his body spilled over the edge of where he lay and hung suspended in the air like an enormous, sagging, silicone dewdrop. Propping himself up by an elbow like a hideously distorted 1940s pinup girl, he looked up at me with a come-hither gaze and asked with a sly smirk, “Are you ready for me?”

The answer, of course, was: Not in a million fucking years.

But like any responsible, buy-now-and-pay-later at-21.9-percent-interest American who’s up to his eyeballs in debt and who had just days before lost his nearly six-figure salary when he was displaced, or, more accurately, fired from his job as a public relations consultant, I was so desperate to hold on to my house and car and plasma-screen television, and so stunned that I was now working as a scrub boy at a predominantly gay bathhouse, that all I could do was stare blankly at the guy until he broke down and asked if I was okay.

“Yeah, I’m perfect,” I belted out, realizing that my poor first customer must have thought that he was going to be serviced by a mentally challenged man.

“You just lie back, relax, and let the stress melt away.”

After the perplexed expression left his face, he eased his head to the tile, and I began replicating the five-minute tutorial I’d received moments ago from the guy who worked the early shift. “The guys in here love a show, and they’ll sense if you’re afraid,” my mentor had noted, waving and smiling at the dozen nude men lounging in the whirlpool, showering, or leaning against tiled pillars in the middle of the room. “Start off with hot water. Then soap ’em down with the loofah sponge. Run it slowly over their ass crack—a couple of times if you don’t mind. That really gets ’em off. Rinse ’em down—slow. Soapy massage. Lean into ’em, touch ’em, get your body into it and onto ’em. Rinse ’em again. Fifteen minutes top left. Fifteen minutes top right. Fifteen minutes, you get the picture. I gotta get going. Oh, yeah, make sure to bend with your knees, it’s murder on your back. Oh, you’re gay, right?”

“No, I’m straight and married,” I said in as blasé a way as I could.

He burst into laughter, and when I didn’t join in, we shared an uncomfortable silence.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” he asked with a deep tone of concern, placing his hand on my shoulder. Although I confidently nodded, I wanted to violently shake my head.

After “George” had excitedly volunteered to be my first guinea pig, I began my illustrious new career by slowly pouring a pitcher of piping-hot water over every fibrously smothered crack and crevice of his body, all the while trying to convince myself that my new career wasn’t born out of a love of money. It was a joke between my wife and me that we’d be able to deliriously laugh about for years to come, or so I told myself as I lathered my nervously shaking hands with soap.

Or perhaps it was penance for a lifetime of random misdeeds and impure thoughts, I mused as I firmly pressed the heels of my palms into his shoulders and began to massage the nape of his neck with my thumbs, working my way south along his spine toward a field of rust-colored and black broken blood vessels etched into the subcutaneous layer of his buttocks. As my hands slipped into a roll of fat on his lower back and uncovered a cluster of bumpy, fiery-red heat-rash blisters ready to burst from the combination of the sweltering temperature and the massage, I tried to stop myself from vomiting while persuading myself that this was an opportunity to overcome that deep seated trace of homophobia that lingers in modern progressive men such as myself.

Then a strange thing happened. As I dug into a stress knot in his lower back, he moaned loudly and melted into a sweaty, hairy pile of primordial ooze—and I began to believe all the bullshit I was telling myself. I would meet the indelible needs that these guys, that all people, have for human touch.

THREE WEEKS LATER
With at least four dozen customers under my belt, my butterflies had settled and any phobia I had of touching other men had completely diminished. Traipsing into the bathhouse at the beginning of my shift, I already had a few customers lined up and had grown accustomed to the men’s leering eyes, so I didn’t pay close attention to who was milling around. Mondo, who blessed me with Buddhist chants whenever he saw me, was in the corner practicing kung fu, his penis swinging wildly as he kicked and stabbed at the steam-filled air. Bill the Undertaker and Billy the Chocolatier were gabbing in the corner like a couple of elderly church ladies. And Grabby McGrabass, who was supposedly straight and happily married with daughters, was leaning out of the hot tub, flagging me down for a rubdown. Just another day in paradise.

Thirty minutes later, as I worked on Grabby, who was sporting a raging erection muffled by the wet towel that I had placed over his groin, a familiar voice from behind my back startled me .

“Got time a little later for an old man?”

“Sure thing,” I said while uncomfortably twisting and contorting my body to avoid having Grabby grope my nether regions while I worked on him.

“I’ve got an opening in … John?!”

“Sean!” my wife’s uncle, a man who resembles an overgrown leprechaun, exclaimed with a snorting laugh. “What are you doing here?”

Stammering for words, I managed to respond,

“Corporate downsizing. Man’s gotta make a living.”

“Sure, sure,” he replied with a smile.

After a prolonged awkward pause, I asked him how long he’d been coming to the bathhouse, curious about what had brought him there. If I had to guess, I would’ve said that 60 to 70 percent of my customers were openly gay or bisexual. Another 10 percent, including Grabby, were obviously gay but hadn’t admitted it to anyone, least of all themselves. Then there was a contingent of older gents following in the footsteps of their forebears, men who had sought out heat and conversation in hammams or banyas or whatever their ancestors called a bathhouse. The remainder, like me before I took the job as a scrub boy, were there for the $35-an-hour massages—basically, because we were cheap.

“I’ve been coming here since I was a teenager, whenever the aches and pains get to me,” he replied.

Pain was surely a great unifier. Whether it stemmed from sitting at a desk all day, backbreaking manual labor, nagging sports injuries, arthritis, or ongoing medical treatments, we were all there, regard less of our sexual preferences, at least in part, for the healing properties of the bathhouse.

“Well, tell that beautiful wife of yours that Aunt Kathy and Uncle John said hello.”

With my face burning red, I turned back to Grabby and joked that Christmas, which annually brought together my wife’s entire extended family, should be far more interesting this year.

“Ahhh, this feels so good,” he said with a deep sigh, his arms stretching toward me, hands coming to life in a pinching motion, as though a primal tic in him had been roused. “Sean, let me ask you something. One straight guy to another. How does it feel to have all these naked, dirty, homosexual men looking at your beautiful body?”

DAY 21—WEEK 7
Armando the Giant, an impressively well-built Latino with a tool that, even limp, dangled at least nine inches, had been pestering me to give him a complimentary scrubdown since I’d started.

“How can I know if you’re good, if you’re worth it?” he asked me with more than a hint of feminine guile.

“I’ll tell you the same thing that I’ve said since day one,” I said with a hearty laugh. “Giving free scrubdowns is a hobby, not a job. But you ought to know that today’s your last chance. I’m retiring my loofah sponge. I got a marketing job with the phone company.”

“Nooo!” he hissed, his face curling into a pout.

“You’re gonna miss us!”

The truth was, he was right. Thanks to the physically laborious nature of being a scrub boy, I’d lost 15 pounds. I’d also regained much of the confidence I’d once had before I’d been fired— raging hard-ons and deep sighs of relief were far more sincere than any of the half-hearted pats on the back or “meeting-expectation” check marks on performance evaluations I’d received from my exboss. Besides, even if the new job meant that I didn’t have to be salaciously leered at and hit on, I couldn’t muster any authentic enthusiasm at the prospect of spending 40 hours a week in a cubicle without even so much as a window to let in natural light, or pretending I cared about why one piece of direct mail failed miserably with a 0.4 percent response rate while another kept the company’s return-to expense projections on track by encouraging 0.7 percent of customers to call in.

But, the fact of the matter was, if I could whore myself as a scrub boy, I could surely take it in the ass from Corporate America—especially when they would kiss me sweetly afterward with medical, dental, and a 401(k).