Hyper-chondriac (20 page)

“I'm supposed to drink a half gallon of water with grated ginger in it every day and eat barley with cinnamon for breakfast.”

“I'm supposed to not do that.”

“And he told me to make a paste out of turmeric and honey for my mucous problem and lick it off a spoon before I go to bed.”

I was jealous because that sounded good and ghee sucked.

“I'm also supposed to buy special supplements online.”

“Did he give you a list of things you could and couldn't eat?”

“Yes. Let's make a copy before I lose it.”

“Can you have sushi?”

“No,” she answered glumly. “But I'm allowed to eat spicy foods!”

“I can't eat anything spicy,” I said sadly. “But you can still have avocado, right?” Nancy makes killer guacamole.

She scanned her dietary sheet for the answer.

“No. Not on here. Can you have brown rice? I'm supposed to eat a lot of brown rice.”

“Two asterisks, so very little. Mangos?”

“No sweet fruits.”

“Almond oil on scalp?”

“Sesame oil on shoulders.”

“Will we ever share a meal again?”

“Probably not.”

Although, through the grace of God, we both had asparagus on our sheets.

After thirty days I felt better than I ever had in my life and went back for my scheduled Pitta-Vata reanalysis.

Todd greeted me right in front of the bamboo—which miraculously no longer stirred up hostile memories.

“All right.” He had on a green Izod shirt and had trimmed his beard. “How'd it go?”

“I feel amazing. I'm calm, relaxed, my colon doesn't palpitate like a second heartbeat. Even my joints don't crack as loudly as they used to.”

“You take the ghee?”

“Yeah. I got used to it.”

“Did you heat it up?”

“Nah. Just ate it right off the spoon.”

“It tastes better if you heat it up.”

“It's easier to just eat out of the jar. I wanted to spend as little time with it as possible. Can we please stop talking about ghee?”

“All right! I forgot. C'mon, let's check out your Pitta-Vata again.”

We went back to the couch area and he proceeded to take lengthy readings on both wrists. My Pitta had dropped from a high three to a high two, and my Vata had gone down to one. And my surface Vata wasn't even noticeable anymore. Don't worry if you're confused; I still am. But I felt fantastic.

“All right! These results are great!” It was the most excited I had ever seen Todd.

“I still don't really get this whole Pitta-Vata thing.”

“All right, the Pitta is more reactiveness and aggression. The Vata is more about sensitivity and anxiety.”

“So the road rage is Pitta and the panic attacks—like the one I had here last month—is Vata?”

“Sure.”

“So what's in the herb jar that I make the tea with?”

“You've probably never heard of any of it.”

“I probably have,” I said, all braggy and balanced.

He proceeded to jot down what he had included in my custom-made brew.

He was right. I had never heard of any of these things. But frankly, I didn't care if there was rabbit shit in my tea as long as I felt this good.

Since my Ayurvedic experience had been far better than expected, I signed up for the deluxe package for another $400. I didn't know the specifics of what it entailed. I was about to find out.

Todd told me to take off my clothes so I could get a special massage to open my pores and have the exact same nutrients that I had in my tea thrust into every crevice of my body. Now, unless I'm home alone, I'm not wild about being naked. (Yes, in my twenties I had no problem standing in front of strangers while wearing a Speedo and flexing, but the Speedo makes a big difference.) Actually, I wasn't completely naked. I was given a small white hand towel and told to place it vertically between my legs, which made me feel like a miniature sumo wrestler.

I wasn't used to a masseur. In fact, I'd rather have a really lame massage by a female than an awesome one by a male. I don't like the rough hands. Frankly, I could do without having a man touch me for the rest of my life. I think my dad and I have hugged once and I hated all six seconds of it. I'm not even comfortable shaking hands. So right off the bat, there was this odd dichotomy of having things done to my body designed to help me relax that just made me more tense.

After twenty non-blissful minutes of Todd rubbing the mudlike paste onto my back and legs, he told me to flip over and I did, clutching the mini-towel in hopes that it would cling to my groin. I was uptight enough while I was facedown staring at the ground, but now I'd be making occasional eye contact with the guy I'd just paid to put his hands all over me. I vowed to pretend I was asleep and keep my eyes shut until this madness was over. The good news was, at least he wasn't chatty. Todd put some dark paste on my face and moved down to my pectorals, where it seemed he was spending just a
little
too long rubbing my nipple area.

I opened my eyes about a millimeter and peeked over at Todd and then I noticed it. Todd had a hard-on. The only other possible explanation was that it was flaccid but gigantic. Either way, it was creepy. I had gone from uncomfortable to terrified. My body was tensing up so much that I wouldn't have been surprised if he thought rigor mortis was setting in.

I had to get the hell out of here! I wished there was some kind of nurse's button they have in hospitals that I could push that said “Okay, put your dick back between your legs, I've had enough male nipple rubbing!” But there wasn't. Had I not been naked and covered in mud, I might have just sprinted off. Instead, I cleared my throat to not so subtly notify Todd that he was going over the line, but he either didn't hear me or thought I was clearing my throat for medicinal purposes. The only saving grace at the moment was that I didn't remember seeing “cock” on my list of foods I could eat.

Maybe I'm a homophobe. My introduction to the gay community was rather jarring. I'd never even met a gay person until my first night of freshman year in college. My roommate, Ross, was overtly out of the closet and I was oblivious. I just thought people from western Massachusetts acted a little differently from Long Islanders. Ross was funny, polite and as good a roommate as I've ever had in or out of college; nonetheless, I was still nervous that he would spoon me in the middle of the night. I assumed this because all of his friends used to blatantly hit on me, but, in hindsight, only because they delighted in how uncomfortable it made me.

Then the unthinkable happened. Todd leaned over to massage the far side of my body and his—well, I'd like to think it was a pen in his pocket, but it wasn't—poked me in the cheek. It was like when a busty hairstylist leans over and her breasts rub against you. But that's fun. This wasn't.

“What the fuck!” I finally said. This was now officially the antithesis of relaxing.

“Oh, sorry.”

Then he backed up a quarter of an inch. Now it was like that game you played with your siblings where they said “Stop touching me!” and you'd wave your hands millimeters away from their faces while announcing “I'm not touching you!” because
technically
you weren't. But it's actually even more annoying than being touched.

I was going to shoot him an Orange Juice Carton Face but feared that under my mud mask it would be unrecognizable or look like I was happy. So I merely changed the subject, hoping that the sound of my voice and a barrage of questions would turn him off.

“So…what's next…after this?”

“The hot box.”

At least it wasn't called the rape box. I wished I'd just come back for a simple pulse reevaluation. Why did I have to take it this far? I wasn't even a spa fan when they were reasonably priced and I didn't have a strange man's dick trying to puncture my cheek.

I gingerly stepped off the massage table and followed Todd down a hallway to another small room that housed the hot box. I was uncomfortable and tense horizontally, but far worse when vertical and 97 percent naked following somebody down a hallway. Why couldn't he have just told me where to go and I'd meet him there? The place wasn't all that big and I'm really good at following directions. Give me a little space, ghee pusher!

Meanwhile, Todd acted as if the “trying to play groin-pool with my skull” was a normal part of his day. I was still mortified. Although my body was completely coated with the mudlike substance, I pushed the towel into my groin area with maximum force to retain a smattering of dignity. I would not let another man see my penis. For crying out loud,
I
didn't even want to see my penis. I've even considered keeping a piece of electrician's tape over it like when they blacked out the guys' privates in old porn magazines.

I followed Todd inside another room, where he propped open the lid of a small wooden crate and told me to sit inside it. Todd politely looked away, but that did nothing to quell my discomfort. Since my rear was completely bare, I backed into it as if I were a woman with a large sweater tied around her waist who didn't want anyone noticing her enormous ass.

I sat down, still naked and covered in mud, still clutching my small white towel to my groin, on a slab of wood covered with a beach towel. It was instantly sweltering. Then Todd closed the lid as I maneuvered my head through the hole in the top. For the next hour, I had no access to my face. I didn't like that. That's just one of many reasons I was never able to play guitar live. Too many twitches and itches. I'd have to stop and scratch my chin or nose every three chords. I can't even have a five o'clock shadow, let alone a beard. If I'm not clean-shaven, I touch my face incessantly. If I were an actor and really needed facial hair for a role, I'd have to wear a giant cone around my neck like a dog to prevent me from stroking my stubble. Maybe having my face estranged from the rest of my body would be a good thing. Maybe this would teach them both a lesson. It made me think of
Boxing Helena
starring Lara Flynn Boyle or that other girl from
Twin Peaks.
Whoever it was, I felt like her.

Every ten minutes or so, Todd would stop by and hold a small cup of water with a straw near my mouth. I was half-expecting him to tease me with the straw and make me bob and work for it, as if I were giving a blow job. I'm glad he didn't. While sweating, I made an agreement with myself to only look at him from the chest up. As far as I was concerned, he no longer had a lower body and was just the top part of a genie, floating in space.

After an hour of sweating toxins out of my system, I was instructed to get up and commute yet again—with my tiny towel, which had apparently gotten tinier from shrinking inside the hot box. Part of me was thinking of lying and telling him I was a doctor and that one of my patients had just paged me and there was a medical emergency and I had to go and thank you very much for everything. But (a) I wasn't a doctor and (b) naked people don't carry pagers.

I went into another room and was told to lie on another table, this one much lower to the ground. And the tenser I got, the more relaxed Todd became, probably because he enjoyed seeing me squirm.

“Okay,” said Todd matter-of-factly. “Now I'm going to drip some hot oil on your forehead.”

I thought this was to punish me, but apparently it was just another relaxation technique. So for the next thirty minutes hot oil dripped onto my forehead from a brass urn. Oil hot enough to cook an otter with. At first it felt like being tortured but I soon fell into a deep sleep, and I was later told that my legs and arms were twitching violently.