It may be a loaded question, but it’s one I have to ask: “So, what kind of work do you do?” Most clients hesitate to answer. They look back at me through suspiciously cocked eyes and choose their words carefully, as if the information I’m looking for is going to be used against them. Maybe they think I’ll charge them more, or suggest they come in more often, if they have a higher paying job. But to tell you the truth, I’m not interested in income. I don’t care if they own their own jet or manage a residential hotel for drug addicts. How they use their body on a daily basis, what stresses they subject it to, where they carry their tension: These are the things I want to know, and it’s why I ask the question.

It’s why I asked him the question.

I suspected that he worked closely with people. Probably with children. He had that soft, gentle manner of a social worker or kindergarten teacher. His smile was genuine and put me right at ease. His voice was submissively charming. Perhaps he’s a therapist, I thought. Or used to be a therapist but now works with computers. For some reason the baseball cap collecting his salt and pepper locks really made me believe he worked with computers, computers and kids. Maybe he trained as a child psychologist but switched to computers during the dot-com craze and, after being laid off and learning that his stock options are worth their weight in Rice-a-Roni, has now switched back to working with people. I was wrong.

“I’m a pornographer,” he answered. “I make videos of gay men having sex.” It was the smoothest response anyone had ever given me. The words rolled easily off his tongue. For a moment, uncharacteristically, I did not know what to say.

He could just as easily have said, “I’m a film maker” or “I’m in media.” Or even “I do marketing,” “I’m into sales,” or “I work with computers,” all of which would have been true. A pornographer wears many hats. Don’t let the White Sox logo fool you.

“Bareback sex,” he added. “I know it’s controversial.”

After the interview and assessment I stepped out of the room to allow him to get undressed and onto the table. When I returned he was lying face-down, naked, on top of the sheet.

The pornographer had a wide butt and narrow shoulders. His skin, sallow and loose, was interrupted by two rows of evenly-spaced diagonal pink scars, two-inches wide and completely healed, running down both sides of his back like the hash marks on a soldier’s rifle. His skinny legs were stiff and offered resistance when I put the supportive pillow under his ankles. Then I noticed his down-turned erection: red-swollen and throbbing between his legs, calling for attention like a man stranded on a desert island flagging down a rescue plane, anticipating what I thought he couldn’t seriously believe was going to happen.

Wrong again.

An intense silence seemed to smolder in the room. I was not certain whether the knot in my stomach was from the slightly charred odor of his skin or my own tangle of nerves confronting a growing sense of tension, expectations and inevitable conflict. I began to think about getting some kind of protective talisman in the near future.

Standing at his side, I paused to ground myself as I do at the beginning of all my sessions. I placed one hand on my belly just below the navel, the other on my sternum. In Chinese medicine these points are known as the Sea of Qi and the Sea of Tranquility. In the yogic tradition they are the second and fourth chakras, energetic centers in the body representing the creation of beauty within us and our realization of true love for ourselves and others. Then I felt my feet below me and imagined Earth energy drawing up through them to fill these vortices. Secure in my own body, I was ready to touch him. Moving in with a clear, confident touch, my hands made contact with his back.

Softly, at first inaudibly, the pornographer began to cry.

I hadn’t done anything yet, nothing more than remind him through my touch of his existence in this time and place. His body trembled. Soon he was sobbing, tears and saliva and snot dripped through the face cradle to land on the bamboo mat on the floor. He began to wail.

“It’s ok,” I said. “Let it all out.”

The wailing rose to a crescendo, then subsided. His breathing slowed and deepened. I could tell from the sounds he was making that his sinuses were congested and offered him a tissue. He took the tissue from me, rose up onto his forearms and blew his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know where that came from.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “it happens all the time.”

The pornographer put his head back down. As I moved about his body, rocking him back and forth, shaking out and loosening limbs, I noticed that he had finally begun to relax. He stopped fighting me. Between his legs, his penis had softened and retreated into its protective sheath. I warmed a small pool of oil between my hands and began spreading it lightly across his pale, scarred back.

“You know,” he said, his sniffling voice muffled by the foam pad of the face cradle, “this goddamn stock market, it’ll be the death of me.”

—————————————————–

She was the best kind of client: Pleasant, always on time, never left without booking her next appointment.  She’d been coming to me for over a year.  I thought we had a good rapport.  Who would have thought she’d make such a big deal out of an erection?

Never before had I had such an enthusiastic advocate. She referred all of her friends to me.  Like her, they were in their mid-to-late twenties, no kids, married to men with high-paying jobs. They raved about my hands and traded my number within their circle like it was some kind of secret society admission code, 1-800-B-L-I-S-S. Soon they dominated my practice, drifting across the inarticulate border from Union Square with their Cole Haan and Nieman Marcus shopping bags to my office on the edge of the Tenderloin. I had to turn other clients away. My old clientele drifted on. I raised my rates.

She said her husband had never had a massage before, that he was “really stressed out” and had knots the size of golf balls on his shoulders and back. She booked the session for him on a Saturday, back to back with her own appointment, pre-paid including the tip. He was appreciative. Nervous at first, he soon relaxed enough to sleep through most of the session. Didn’t make a sound other than the soft breaths of a light slumber until I straddled his ears with my fingers, rubbing firmly above and below them, at which point he let out a low moan, once, twice, then nothing more. That was when I noticed that the flannel sheet covering his body was stretched into a sideways arc at the waistline. So he got an erection? Big deal. As a friend of mine always says, why throw it a party?  The session was over, and I left the room to give him privacy as he dressed.

At her appointment the following week she was unusually tense and seemed apprehensive of me. She kept looking at me askance as I hung her jacket and brought her a bottle of water. She didn’t say much, refused to exchange small talk as was her custom for the first few minutes of each session. I felt unnecessarily guilty and couldn’t figure out what I had done. When I neared the end of the session and touched her ears she exploded.

“How could you?” she raged, wrapping the sheet around herself tightly as she jumped up off the table. “How could you do this to me?”

I was stunned. I took a step back, the blood draining from my face. “What,” I stammered, “What?”

“You, you gays,” she shouted, “you’re all alike!”

I composed myself. “Get dressed,” I said, “We’ll talk when I come back.”

But when I returned she was just as enraged. “He told me about his massage,” she shouted. “Do you do that to all your male clients? Do you get off on turning them on? You make me sick!” She threw a wad of bills on the table and stormed out.

Over the following week her friends called, almost all of them, one by one. They had to cancel their next appointments, they said. They all had valid reasons. They said they were busy at the moment, vacation, you know, that sort of thing, but would be in touch to reschedule.  Sometime soon.  They promised.

I experienced a steep decline in my income.

One of her friends stayed on with me. She told me what had happened, that the husband had boasted of the erection he’d had on my table as they were making love, and that the wife now questioned his heterosexuality. She didn’t think she could trust him and was blaming me. According to this friend, the woman had told everyone I was a seductive vampire on a mission to suck the moral life out of respectable society.

A month later she filed for divorce. Her friends thought this was a gross overreaction, extreme paranoia and proof that something was psychologically wrong with her. One by one, just as they’d left, they all came back to me.

The ex-husband came back to me, too.

After all, it was just an erection.

—————————————————–

There was once a man who came to see me on Thursday evenings. He insisted that the reason for his weekly visits was to deal with his stress, but instead of drifting off into a state of blissful relaxation as I worked on his knotted shoulders and back, he talked untiringly, often excitedly, throughout the session. Much of the time he talked about himself.

He was a short man, very obese, with thick pink skin that turned blotchy red at my touch. He was, he liked to say, a self-made man, which I took to mean he had money. The technical term for his line of work, he said, was “Commercial Real Estate Developer.” However, this man had a way of talking grandly about himself, and such a generic title, he assured me, hardly reflected the breadth of his labor. Instead, he referred to himself as “an architect of skylines.” “I won’t stop,” he once said to me only half jokingly, “until I’ve blocked out the sun!”

From the very beginning of our working relationship this man spoke about the women he dated. There were about five women he told me about, all with names like Vera and Ida and Ethel, names from another era that sounded assumed on a modern woman. To hear him speak of them, you’d believe he was married to them or, at the very least, seriously committed. There was something almost possessive in the way he spoke of them.

“My Irma,” he’d say, “has legs like a keg o’dynamite!”

Although he was extremely self-confident, I found the fact that he was involved with any woman difficult to believe, as he was a very unattractive man. Not only was he obese, but his skin and rapidly thinning hair had that clamminess of someone who constantly sweats. He was barely into his forties, and yet he was jowly and had difficulty breathing normally, sounding like he had just run up a very steep hill when he had only climbed the seven steps to my landing. “Obviously,” he confessed one day when my blank stare back betrayed my disbelief, “they don’t love me. Not for who I am, anyway.” Obviously, I told myself, if they really existed, they tolerated him for what he had.

Although he avoided any talk of sexual contact, he painted vivid, infectiously riveting tales of dates he had been on in the week since his last session. With photorealistic detail, he would recount a typical evening’s meal so perfectly, so meticulously, that I swear I could feel the steam rising off the plate. Continuing on to the opera, he would summon the spirit of Rossini in describing Il Barbiere until I could see the design of the stage, hear Rosina’s aria of remorse when she believes Count Almaviva to be lost to another woman, and feel the spittle and sweat of the performers flying off the stage. Of shopping trips he would list every item purchased for the women as well as those items rejected and the reason for choosing one evening gown, say, over another.

All of which, once I began to believe him, fascinated me.

Other than sex, the one thing this man steered clear of discussing was money. He seemed to find it distasteful. When he paid me it was always with a stack of twenty dollar bills neatly fanned and placed face down in plain sight on the massage table. He never pointed to it or indicated with a nod or any other gesture that he had left me my payment. Only once, at the end of his first session, had I spoken of my rates, but he cut me off by raising the palm of his hand and shaking his head. “I know your rates,” he’d said. “It’s all there.”

Indeed it was, plus a hefty gratuity that surpassed any standard calculable percentage. The way he left it on the table always made me feel like I was biting down on tin foil, a spark of excitement over the extra income followed by an uncomfortable distaste.

But he seemed to genuinely like me, and our discussions, which were often about him but just as often about movies – we both particularly enjoyed tearing apart the bad ones – were always spirited. He surprised me one day by confessing his preference for my company over those of the women he dated. (If this man had other friends, he never mentioned them). And then one day he invited me out to dinner and a movie. “As friends,” he’d added before leaving my office. “I don’t know what’s playing at the moment,” he said, “but there’s sure to be some dreadfully awful adaptation or remake out there just waiting for our venom.”

I know better than to mix work with pleasure. In some industries it’s commonplace, but in mine it always seems to spell trouble. Part of me was jumping at the chance to learn more about this man, to see him outside the confines of my little studio, to watch how someone as wealthy and confident, if not altogether appealing to most eyes, weaves his way through life. The other part of me knew better than to accept. In the massage world, you never befriend a client unless you want to lose both a client and a friend. There are very few exceptions. The wise part of me withdrew in horror as the other part, formulating some sort of compromise, accepted the invitation.

“How about a movie and coffee afterwards? I’m not much for big dinners.”

“It’s a deal,” he answered, and it wasn’t until that last word was completely past his lips that I felt relieved he hadn’t said “date” instead.

Two nights later we met in front of the large movie complex on Van Ness Avenue. I arrived early and secured our tickets. When the man arrived he was taken aback that I had paid for them.  Inside the theater he insisted on buying my popcorn and soda, plus an overpriced box of Junior Mints. As trailers for upcoming films rolled by we whispered our disparagement towards them to one another. As promised, the feature itself proved to be terrible, and we reassured each other we were the only ones in the theater who were not disappointed. Then his cell phone rang, loudly, and right there in the theater he answered it. There were several moments of silence from him as a tinny voice screamed over the airwaves, punctuated by his occasional “uh huh, ok, ok,” and then, finally, and to my great, embarrassed relief, he said, “I’ll be right there.”

He closed his little phone and turned to me apologetically in his seat. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, leaning his bulk over the wooden arm rest. He was fishing in his pocket for something. “There’s a crisis and I really have to go. Here,” and he handed me a stack of neatly folded bills. “For your time,” he said, and in what I still believe to have been a slip of the tongue, understandable given the darkness of the theater and the immediacy of his crisis, he finished his sentence with the same endearing term he used when talking about his women.

He called me “honey.”

A northern California native, Richard Seeber’s first visit to San Francisco was to see Star Wars at the Coronet in 1977. In 1997 he fulfilled his life-long dream of moving here. A writer of short fiction, he ritually bows to the city before going to bed in gratitude to the muse in its air. Then he prays to God this real estate bubble bursts.