So, sad story: my back is a pile of useless spine bones and nerves and puny muscles at the moment. It hurts to sit, it hurts to stand, it hurrrrrts. I complain a lot to people, so I'll spare the blogosphere the boring details. The point is, I decided to give myself a treat and go get a massage after work and before sitting through a 4 hour long opera.
Along 5th Avenue there are signs written half in Chinese and half in English advertising their 35 minute for $30 massages. I've gone one other time to this kind of venue for a massage and it was easy breezy. No ceremony or chit-chat of any kind occurs, you just strip off your clothes and plop on their table. The women who aren't working at the moment watch TV and gab right outside of the massage table curtain. I like the casualness of it, though I am terrified of the possibility that I might hear a happy ending in the curtained "room" next to me.
It had been over 6 months since I had gotten a massage along 5th avenue, so I forgot where I had gone the last time. I ended up just walking up the stairs of the first place I saw and rang the doorbell to get in. The door was half frosted and half transparent. I woman's face appears and she says nothing and walks away shouting: "He's very young!"
Suddenly, another woman's face emerges above the frosting and she immediately waves her hand at me and screams: "NO! You must go! You are too young! Too young boy!"
I'm scream back: "WHAT?? I'm nearly 30 years old!"
As she walks away from the window she screams again: "No, you are too young boy! You must go! You come here every Friday! Not this time! Go!"
I scramble in my bag for my driver's license to show her my age and gender and clear my name (well, really my face). "I'm a girl! And 30!"
She's gone from view and I'm so embarrassed and angry. I fume up and down the street, not sure what to do. I want to go buy a frilly shirt and put a barrette in my hair and then go back and show them what's what. I want to write a hundred bad reviews on yelp. I want to sit outside of their massage parlour every Friday and wait for the boy who looks like me and then bring him in there by his ear and show them how different we are.
Instead, I continue down 5th avenue and find another massage place that hasn't heard about my bad reputation and they laugh when I take off my clothes and surprise them with my girl parts. But I still get a massage.
