Thy Neighbor's Wife (31 page)

The examiners also made certain that the student was aware of the proprieties of the profession, which included the practice of always covering the genitals of the person on the massage table with a towel or sheet, and also avoiding direct physical contact with the female breast. Such admonitions, to be sure, were not overemphasized by the examiners since the reported instances of personal misconduct by a masseur or masseuse had been exceedingly rare during the many postwar years in which opposite-sex massaging had been considered acceptable in the United States.

This is not to say, however, that improprieties on the massage table had not at times transpired; in fact it had long been privately known within the profession that certain licensed practitioners, including some matronly masseuses whose hefty figures might not be expected to inspire romantic illusions, had regularly favored requests for sexual intimacy with male clients and patients who were considered trustworthy and prudent. Since the extent of this was primarily masturbation, which some veteran masseuses of Scandinavian origin in particular regarded as a healthy culmination to a relaxing massage, and since it was always privately performed at the client’s solicitation—and added both to his satisfaction and proffered gratuity—the massage associations, while never officially condoning genital gratification, were nevertheless no more eager to publicly expose their colleagues’ misdeeds than were the associations of doctors and nurses when hearing of occasional transgressions within
their
circles. It had certainly been no secret to the medical associations that for decades certain distinguished physicians had arranged illegal abortions for privileged patients, or that psychiatrists sometimes indulged in tepid trysts on the couch with lady patients, or that night nurses and female therapists often brought manual re
lief to the genital frustrations of hospitalized male patients who were long restricted to restless confinement.

Such merciful acts of masturbation, in fact, were often remembered by grateful men as high points in their recuperation, and it was perhaps not surprising that a few of these Florence Nightingales of massage were among the pioneering women in the first “parlors” that began to inconspicuously flourish in smaller West Coast cities and towns in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These parlors were actually massage offices and they were usually located in commercial buildings that specialized in renting space to physicians, dentists, podiatrists, dermatologists, and others in the healing profession. In appearance, the massage office closely resembled a medical office—it had a white door with the upper half inset with frostlike glass, across which was printed in small black lettering the words “Physical Therapy” or “Massage” and the name of the practitioner. The interior of the office was hygienic if not antiseptic, and tidily furnished; and hung on the walls were framed parchment massage licenses and physical therapy diplomas, of sometimes dubious authenticity, that were bordered with tiny ink-drawn curlicues and seraphs. In the rear rooms, in addition to the massage table and showers, the stacks of white towels and bottled emollients of the trade, there was often a whirlpool bath, a sauna, and weight-reducing equipment.

Visitors were admitted by appointment only, and the masseuses, invariably refined-looking women, often wore starched nurses’ uniforms that they covered with a white smock while administering a massage to a naked man on the table. To be fully massaged and finally masturbated by one of these white-gowned professionals was, to many men, a highly erotic experience, placing as it did a traditionally guilt-ridden act in unsullied surroundings while also catering to certain adolescent male fantasies of once-imagined intimacy with childhood nannies, or school nurses, or Dominican nuns, or other women that one would not expect to see working in a massage office with oily fingers adroitly stroking an erect penis until it ejaculated into a small towel or Kleenex kept readily within reach.

Dozens of men became once-a-week customers of these massaging amorettas, and for years the practices prospered without legal difficulty partly because politicians and law-enforcement officials were among the satisfied regulars, and also because the masseuses conducted their businesses fairly and discreetly. For a complete massage they rarely charged more than fifteen dollars per half hour, and often refused gratuities. They restricted their advertising in the local press to a few agate lines under “Massage” in the classified columns, listing only office hours and telephone numbers. Their customers, too, were protective of their practices; indeed, many men believed that they alone were the recipients of a masseuse’s
spécialité
, and even those customers who were less naive would not loudly boast or gossip around town about their massage visits. While men might jubilate after a wild evening in a brassy bordello, or discuss with their male friends their extramarital activities, a midday appointment with a nurse-manqué for the primary purpose of being masturbated was quite a different matter. Such an admission might be interpreted as pathetically desperate or kinky; and there certainly was nothing adventurous about it. It might even be considered foolish to pay money to a woman for a service that a man could as easily perform on himself, although the habitué of the massage office would not agree with this reasoning. Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in
Playboy
and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.

The massage man was typical of many secret survivors in the enduring world of marital monotony: He was competent at his job, reasonably contented with his wife and family, and, as he approached middle age, he sought the spice of sexual variety without wishing to become entangled in romantic involvements or complications, which he could support neither financially nor emotionally. Too old for the singles scene, too slow for the fast amateur action often available at neighborhood bars patronized
by other men’s discontented wives, he also eschewed the scabrous and possibly disease-infected flophouses of street hustlers and even the more elevated boudoirs of call girls and other women who capitalized each night on what Balzac called the fortune between their legs.

For such a man, distracted almost daily by the conflicting forces of lust and guilt, restlessness and caution, a soothing sexual massage represented an almost perfect panacea; and by the 1960s there was hardly a major city in America that did not have at least one of these masquerading medical offices in which could be found a white-gowned manual therapist who would satisfy a man’s desire to be touched in ways that he could not get, or did not want, from his wife at home.

By 1970, however, things began to change in the massage world as this private service went public: Young entrepreneurs from the counterculture moved in to build—along with head shops that sold pot pipes and yoga books and other marketable nirvanas—funky massage parlors and nude photography studios that they operated conspicuously along city streets. Above the front doors of these massage parlors, or in the windows, they blatantly displayed such signs as “Girls of Your Choice—Live Nude Models,” and additional offerings were often hinted at by the long-haired men who stood along the sidewalk handing out leaflets to male pedestrians.

While these leaflets did not promise orgasmic satisfaction, they did guarantee a “sensuous massage” by a “topless masseuse”; and such offers initially prompted no adverse response from law-enforcement authorities because sensuous massaging and the display of nude bodies had gained conditional acceptance and legality in much of America by 1970. Total nudity had been permitted on the Broadway stage in
Hair
and
Oh! Calcutta!;
and topless and bottomless bars were allowed to exist in several cities, at least for the present. The famous Esalen massage, administered in the nude by attractive suntanned masseuses and masseurs to oil-slick patrons of the California spa, was described and extolled in illustrated books and manuals sold around the nation; and on
television talk shows, Reich-influenced therapists and authors recommended the erotic massage as a means to a smoother relationship between couples. In sex clinics, female surrogates massaged and aroused to orgasm “dysfunctional” men; while sexually dissatisfied female patients were trained to stimulate their lovers with artful genital stroking and acts of mutual masturbation, as well as to masturbate themselves often when alone, sometimes with the aid of vibrators or dildoes. In sexual education classes in most American schools, perhaps for the first time in history, autoeroticism was not presented as a sad or shameful act.

Although the licensed massage associations were quietly displeased by the neon lights and psychedelic signs that identified the new parlors, they were slow to condemn them because they knew what had long been the private practice of certain nurse-
manqués
. The police, too, had reason to ignore the parlors; after years of club-swinging confrontations with young people, followed by charges of police brutality in court and notorious publicity in the press, the police had become wary of impulsive behavior and were not eager to raid the parlors while the massage laws remained as vague as they appeared to be in 1970.

Thus the time was propitious for the young entrepreneurs; for in addition to the legal confusion and the expanding market for pleasure, there was an abundance of sexually liberated women, unemployed free spirits from the sixties revolution, who had no compunction about earning money through the masturbation of men; and for the young owner, his initial financial investment was small—merely the monthly cost of renting a second- or third-story floor above a store in a business district, and the hiring of amateur carpenters to erect beaverboard walls that would subdivide the floor space into a reception room and several smaller private rooms for massaging and, occasionally, nude photography. The entire place could be inexpensively furnished with junk shop sofas, chairs, and an old reception desk; secondhand massage tables and army cots covered with Indian print bedspreads; and the walls could be adorned with psychedelic posters or verdant oil paintings done perhaps by a hippie masseuse who had re
cently returned to urban living after a prolonged stretch of salubrious stagnation in a rural commune. While some of the young men who opened the first studios in 1970 had themselves lived briefly in communes and identified with the peace movement, their mellow manner and embroidered blue denim shirts belied their mercenary zeal: They were Easy Riders who during their campus days had frequently dealt in minor drugs as casually as they would now deal in minor sex.

One of the first parlors to openly flourish in New York was called the Pink Orchid, located at 200 East Fourteenth Street off Third Avenue, and founded by two former City College students, Alex Schub and Dan Russell. Schub, an aspiring rock musician who was pensive and shy, was also a fine carpenter, and he employed this skill in building the studio, while the more extroverted Russell, the son of an attorney and nephew of a rare-book reprint publisher, was the studio’s main manager and promoter.

With the immediate success of the Pink Orchid, which averaged forty customers a day during the summer of 1970, the two men hired extra people and expanded their business with other studios—the Perfumed Garden on West Twenty-third Street, and the Lexington Avenue Models studio near Fifty-seventh Street; and Alex Schub also hired himself out to other young men to help build their studios.

For one of his friends, a former student of literature at Fairleigh Dickinson College, Schub designed the four dimly lit mauve rooms of the Secret Life Studio, on Twenty-sixth and Lexington; and for another acquaintance, a onetime Columbia student who owned a pair of uptown studios called Casbah East and Casbah West, Schub enclosed the massage rooms with white rounded plastic walls with jagged edges, evoking the atmosphere of an ultramodern cave, or suggesting the splintered parts of a demolished space capsule. On Third Avenue near Fifty-first Street, Schub built the Middle Earth Studio, owned by a student dropout who was an aficionado of Tolkien’s fiction, and it conveyed
the feeling of a hippie commune, having beaded curtains, madras pillows, and incense burning in the rooms.

Competing with these parlors for business were such places as the Stage Studio, at 12 East Eighteenth Street, which advertised private sessions with “young actress models”; and Studio 34, at 440 West Thirty-fourth Street, which promised: “Five Beautiful College Girls—the kind you would like.”

For a salary, the masseuses in all the studios received about one third of the cost of each session, plus their tips, and they could average between $300 and $500 a week, depending on how many days and hours they chose to work. Each parlor had an afternoon shift and night shift, and the women’s schedules were flexible. Aspiring actresses and dancers frequently switched their hours with other masseuses, or called in sick, on days when they wished to attend auditions. They also maintained regular contact with their agents through a coin-box telephone installed in the rear of the studio, near the masseuses’ private dressing room.

The masseuses who were still attending college—at such schools as NYU, CCNY, and Hunter—often read their textbooks in the reception room when not busy with a customer; while the other masseuses—the adventurous young divorcees, the drifting dropouts, the
grisettes
with an aversion for “straight” office work, the Belle du Jour wives, the girl friends of the owners, the pretty lesbians and bisexuals for whom the parlor provided introductions to certain sister masseuses—idled away the waiting hours in the reception room by conversing among themselves, or reading magazines, or practicing their yoga on the floor, or meditating in a corner despite the constant sound of music coming from the radio and the ringing telephones on the manager’s desk.

If the manager was temporarily out of the reception room, and a masseuse picked up the phone, she would sometimes be greeted by the sound of heavy breathing or a man’s voice sputtering obscenities—which was why in most parlors only the male manager was supposed to answer the business phones. In addition to collecting money from the customers, and assigning each customer to a private room, and buzzing those rooms twenty-five minutes
later to alert the masseuse that the half-hour session was nearly over, the manager could also serve as an occasional bouncer; but there was not much need for this, for it was a rare customer who was obstreperous. Nearly all the men who patronized massage parlors were well mannered and diffident, and a large percentage of them arrived wearing suits and ties. As they walked in, sometimes carrying the leaflets that they had been handed on the sidewalk, they were welcomed by the manager seated behind the desk and received smiles from the assembled gathering of masseuses. After the customer had paid the fee to the manager, and selected the masseuse of his choice, she escorted him through a hall into one of the private rooms, carrying over her arm a starched sheet she had gotten from the linen closet.