Massage Gone Wrong: Why Is She Measuring My Dick?

by Paul, 41 

 

I'm forty-one. I've got a back that goes out roughly twice a year, a wife who has stopped reminding me to stretch, and a body that was briefly quite good in my twenties and has since made other arrangements.

So when my back went on a Sunday — lifting a garden gate, of all the heroic ways to do it — she booked me a massage without asking me first. That's the correct way to book a man a massage. Ask him and he'll say no.

Thursday, six o'clock. A narrow staircase above a pharmacy. The room was small and warm and smelled of eucalyptus, and there was a trolley beside the table with an oil bottle on it and a folded stack of towels.

And a tape measure.

Sitting on the trolley. Next to the oil. As though it were standard. As though every massage room in the country had one and I'd simply never noticed.

I clocked it on the way in. Then I forgot about it entirely, which turns out to be the theme of the evening.

Rosa was in her forties and had the specific calm of a woman who has seen every body a body can have and stopped being surprised sometime around 2011. She left me to get undressed, told me to get under the towel, and came back and started on my shoulders.

And for twenty minutes it was a massage. An ordinary massage. A good one. I lay there and remembered that I like massages, and that I should have more of them, and thought about nothing whatsoever.

Then she said, "Turn over."

I turned over. She tucked the towel, moved my arm, found something in my hip flexor with two fingers and went to work on it, and I lay there looking at the ceiling with my mouth slightly open.

And then I felt something.

A cool line, laid lightly along the crease of my hip. I assumed it was her knuckle. Then it moved, and stopped, and there was a small click, and a hiss, and a snap — the unmistakable sound of a tape measure going back into its case — and I opened my eyes and looked down my own body.

Rosa was holding a tape measure.

She'd got the short blade out. She was measuring me. And here's the part that did my head in: she did not stop. She didn't stop, she didn't explain, she didn't ask. She just moved the tape half an inch, checked the number, let it snap back, and went back to my hip as if nothing had happened.

I lay there and said nothing for a full minute, on the reasonable assumption that I'd imagined it.

Then she did it again.

"You're measuring me," I said.

"Mm." She adjusted my leg. "Turn your knee out."

I turned my knee out. She carried on with the hip. She was very good at the hip. Suspiciously good at the hip.

"So what's that about," I said.

"Deep tissue. You've got a knot in here the size of a walnut."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant."

She finished the leg. She did the other one. She did my arms. And then, at the end, when any normal masseuse would be patting you on the shoulder and telling you to drink water, Rosa picked the tape measure back up, folded the towel down a hand's width, and did it properly.

Balls first. Lifted, taped, a number said out loud, written down. Then the length — hook at the base, blade out along the top, and this time she said that number out loud too, because there was no longer any reason not to. Then the girth. Then the tape went back in the case, and she wrote one more thing down, and I lay there under a towel that had stopped being a towel about four minutes earlier and had become the only thing standing between me and a professional assessment.

"Right," she said. "Up you get. Slowly."

I sat up. I held the towel. I was, I noticed, slightly hard, which was now a third separate thing to be embarrassed about.

"Do you do that to everyone?"

"Everyone."

"Every man?"

"Everyone with a cock," said Rosa — which is the line I've thought about most since, and I think about it roughly daily.

She had a wooden box on the shelf. She opened it while I was getting dressed, and I went over to look, because I couldn't not. Index cards. Hundreds of them, standing up in rows, each with a first name and a date and a short column of figures in neat blue biro.

There were a lot of cards. I'd been in that room ninety minutes and had somehow assumed I was the only person who'd ever been in it.

"Where am I?" I said.

"In the box."

"In the box. Where in the box."

She looked at me for a second, decided I could take it, and took my card out and held it up against a few at random. Then she put it back and tapped the card directly in front of mine.

"That's the middle," she said. "You're that."

"So I'm average."

"You're the median. There's a difference." She shut the box. "There are three hundred and eleven cards in there, Paul. You're the one in the middle. Everything I know about men is you and a bit either side."

I stood there in my socks in a treatment room above a pharmacy and felt something go off in my chest that I still can't name. Not pride. Adjacent to pride.

"Is that good?" I said.

"It's not good or bad. It's standard." She gave me a look. "You know what nearly every man in that box does when I tell them? He argues. Tells me I measured wrong, or it was cold, or he'd have been bigger in the morning. Three hundred men, and the only ones who don't argue are the ones with something to argue about." She put the oil away. "You didn't argue."

"There's not much to argue with."

"No," she agreed. "There isn't."

She wrote my name on the card and filed it. I watched her do it. Between a Daniel and a Frank, in alphabetical order, exactly where it belonged, in the middle of a box of three hundred and eleven.

"Same time in three weeks?" she said.

I said yes before I'd finished deciding.

I drove home with the radio off. My back was already better. My wife asked how it went and I said it was fine, because it was, and because there's no way to explain the rest of it without starting at the beginning, and the beginning is a garden gate.

I've been back twice since. The second time she measured me again, same number, wrote it on the card, filed me back between Daniel and Frank. The third time she didn't, and that was somehow worse.

I don't fully know why any of it works on me. But there's something restful about being the middle of three hundred and eleven. Somewhere in a wooden box above a pharmacy there's a small card with my name on it, doing absolutely nothing, and I've decided that's mine.