Friday, February 08, 2008

Chair Massage

I’m doing chair massages for employees during hospital week and set my chair up down in the heat and clamor of the boiler room.  A big maintenance guy named Jake is sawing off a hunk of galvanized pipe, his shoulders winched up tight, sign of an injured neck.  “Interested in a chair massage?” I ask.  He makes a face like I brought a dead skunk into the room.  But the plant engineering secretary hops on my chair, and I get down to work.  After a while she asks The Question: “Don’t your hands ever get tired?”

Funny, I never think about that.  Once they come to rest on someone’s shoulders, my hands are too busy listening to the signals they’re receiving, messages coded in muscle and tendon, posture & breathing.  My opening massage move is no move at all: I just wait, like a blind hunting dog.  Waiting for the tension, the flutter, the muffled SOS’s rising up out of the deep field of the body. 

It’s mystical to me.  But for many of my clients, it’s elementary education.  People rattle off a litany of ailments from carpal tunnel to rotator cuff to herniated disks.  But I find they don’t know what these words mean, only wearing them like purple hearts, proof of character in a damned war with their body.  Men who can dissect every angle of a football pass formation can’t tell me what the surgeon did inside their own back a year ago.  Women who can give you a family report on every child in their third grader’s class don’t know that the persistent lump on their shoulder is not a tumor, or a “knot”, but the normal corner of their scapula bone.  Others are so dissociated from their bodies they miss the massage itself.  One client asked me to work on his aching feet during the massage.  So I did my best work: six minutes on each foot.  At the end, the client, who had talked nonstop, frowned.  “Say,” he said, “you still have time for my feet?”

And this is where the physical becomes the political.  Because if you can numb out the sensations in your own body, you can easily numb out the pain in Darfur, or in the living rooms and pediatric burn units of a nation we are at war with.

A real massage is more than a back rub.  It’s a phone call, from the boiler room of your body and soul, up to the bridge, begging to give a status report.  We’ve got a problem here, Captain!  Or, We need to slow down, Captain, the heart’s gonna blow!  Our bodies, that we curse, medicate, flog on treadmills and putty over at cosmetic counters, are trying to talk to us.  Without a glimmer of understanding or curiosity on our part.  Ever wonder how your body can transform a cheeseburger and fries into bone?  Or a baby?

I finish the secretary’s chair massage.  She disappears and returns, towing Jake by his tattooed arm.  “He needs it,” she says.  Jake rolls his eyes, but drops onto the chair like a load of dirt off a truck.  “Keep it short,” he growls.  “I got a lot to do.” He’s silent during the massage.  Afterwards he sits up, and blinks.  He doesn’t move for a while.  But his shoulders have dropped, his face is relaxed, and he is breathing deeper, down in his belly.  He stand up slowly, jams his pliers back in his rear pocket, and lumbers off without a word.

On my way out of the boiler room, I pass Jake’s workbench.  “Hey,” he calls out.  “Don’t your hands ever get tired?”

My hands?

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on February 08, 2008
Customs & Rituals • Health • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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