Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 14*
Waiting for this appointment proved to be just as interesting as my last, even without my help. Mr. Willoughby’s office occupied a room in one of the ubiquitous, cheerless concrete edifices that comprised a lot of downtown San José, and his receptionist sat at a desk in a central waiting room off of which several practitioners’ offices opened. A handsome, hefty, middle-aged woman with black hair and flaming red lips, the receptionist told me to have a seat after I gave her my name, then went back to leafing through her magazine with a bored air. This was one of the things that I was coming to love about Costa Rica. If there really wasn’t anything to do, no one had to pretend that there was. You didn’t have to type up your Roladex cards or make new labels for your file folders or even look alert. You could sit around and shoot the shit with your co-workers or read a magazine if you wanted to. Costa Rica was not efficient, but boy, was it relaxed.
I had started taking a novel with me everywhere I went, so I settled down with it and commenced to reading, too. Five minutes later, a blood-curdling scream erupted from Mr. Willoughby’s office behind the closed door. Alarmed, I jumped to my feet, but then I glanced at the receptionist and saw that she hadn’t budged, except to flip the next page of her magazine with a languid, laconic air. A second scream rang out and she stifled a yawn, leaned back a little farther in her chair. Then I heard moaning and groaning and terrible whimpering sounds, even a few sobs. Things quieted down then, but I was starting to think that perhaps I should tell the receptionist I had to leave when the door opened and out walked a well-dressed woman wearing a stylish black hat and pulling on a pair of black leather gloves, bidding The Beast a fond farewell.
Then Mr. Willoughby appeared, looking all the world like some sort of Nazi dentist who might be carrying out medical experiments, like transplanting molars into people’s hippocampuses or something. He was bald, either because he had no hair or shaved it all off; I couldn’t tell which. He wore those creepy, mass-murderer-type rimless eyeglasses. He was trim and clean-shaven and wore a white dentist’s smock, which struck me as a little peculiar. I mean, what was with the smock? As he gazed at me with an almost predatory curiosity, I shrank away from him, trying to blend in with the Naugahyde on the sofa and look as much like a throw pillow as I could.
“Ms. White?” he said, in a crisp British accent.
Against my will, I found myself nodding.
“Come this way, won’t you?” He stepped back, opening the door wide and gesturing for me to enter.
I walked hesitantly into the office where, much to my relief, all I saw was a massage table. I’m not sure what I’d expected. After listening to those screams, I don’t think I would have been surprised to find drills and cattle prods. He drew a little curtain behind which I could undress and then I climbed onto the massage table where I slipped under a sheet. He told me to lie face down and when I let him know I was ready, he snapped the curtain back and strode up to the table. His fingers dove onto my back with a bizarre sensation of individual sentience. It didn’t take them long to spot a problem.
“Aha!” he declared, as he encountered a particularly nasty little knot masquerading as a muscle, then proceeded to apply so much pressure that my soul practically left my body from the shock and intensity. I know it wanted to. Unlike the client who preceded me, however, I can’t seem to make a sound when I’ve been physically hurt. My vocal chords seize up. I think it might be related to my freezing strategy whenever I’m presented with a dangerous situation. Now that I think about it, it could be that I’m working on becoming invisible when necessary.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, his fingers feeling like steel rods; “you’ve got harp strings for muscles! Piano wires!”
I made some strangled little squishy sound in reply.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed again.
I suppose I could have asked him to stop and beaten a hasty retreat, but the bizarre thing was, once I got over the preliminary jolt, what he was doing actually felt good in a strange sort of a way. I don’t know how many people make this distinction, but I’ve always recognized two different kinds of pain: healing pain and destructive pain. When you sprain your wrist or fracture your kneecap, that’s destructive pain. You’ve hurt yourself and the pain is letting you know you fucked up. But then there’s healing pain, like the sting from pouring hydrogen peroxide over a bad scrape. What The Beast was doing felt like healing pain. I noticed that when he worked on muscles that weren’t in spasm, they didn’t hurt at all. I didn’t have enough experience with body work at the time to know that he was practicing a form of deep tissue work. His particular technique had come about, however, not from any formal school, but from his experience with clients.
“I used to do a different kind of massage,” he told me, finding a spot deep inside my hip that recoiled hastily yet futilely at his touch. “But one time I was working on a man who was making me very angry. Every single thing that he said irritated me. And the madder I got, the harder I pressed. I kept expecting him to protest, but he never did, even though by the end of the massage, I was absolutely crushing him.” He moved down to my outer thigh and found a particularly tender location that he went for without mercy. “The next time he came back, he was in extremely high spirits and told me that was the very best massage anyone had ever given him.”
“Grrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkkkk,” I said.
“You know,” he observed, “it’s all right to cry out if you’re in pain. It’s good, in fact. It’s healthy.”
Well, that would have been nice if my vocal chords hadn’t been paralyzed and if I weren’t working on my invisibility thing. And vocality isn’t really my forte, anyway. I hate sing-alongs, I don’t yell, “Cook it, Freddy baby!” at blues concerts, and I didn’t even scream when I was thirteen watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. However, I tried emitting a small moan, for Mr. Willoughby’s sake. I don’t think it quite satisfied him because when he asked me to turn over onto my back and I glanced up at him once I got settled, his lips seemed pursed in annoyance.
“People want to know why I don’t work in the United States,” he continued with a sigh, apparently overlooking my lack of cooperation, “where I could make a lot more money. But why on earth would I ever want to go there? If someone falls off my table here, I just ask them what the hell they’re doing and tell them to get back on. In the United States, everybody would be suing me.”
Well, quite.
I don’t know whether he gave me a particularly hard workout or not, given his disappointment over my lack of expressiveness—okay, so I’m uptight! so what?—but when I went home after that appointment, I did sort of feel like I’d been roughed up. I took a couple of aspirin, pretty big medical guns for me, and spent the evening lying on a sofa watching videos with Richard and Horace. I was starting to think I needed to reassess my definition of healing pain and destructive pain, but when I awoke the next morning, a very, very wonderful thing had happened. The chronic pain in my back was gone! The aggravating, constant, niggling, subliminally wearing pain that had plagued me for months now had vanished completely.
I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to undergo deep tissue work (a friend of mine once complained about such a massage therapist, “If you don’t have a BM or nervous breakdown on the table, then he’s not satisfied!”), but myself, I’m willing to undergo short term discomfort if it means I don’t have to be in constant pain. Now I knew why he was called The Beast from Britain, of course. And in the same way that I came to enjoy the earthquakes, I actually started looking forward to my visits with The Beast.
Above: Downtown San José, taken by Luis Tamayo of Arlington, TX, and posted on Wikimedia (Creative Commons) for upload.
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is chapter 14 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Thursday, June 4, 2009