Crack Is Whack

Or,

PLEASE.  It’s Friday. Like You Have Anything Better To Do.

And finally,

This Story Is Probably Not Worth The Wait.

But when has THAT stopped me in the past?  That’s right smarty bears:  NEVAH!

                                                 ***   ***   ***   ***

To be fair, my Mom talked me into her latest evil plot by saying, "he’s a great body worker and I think he could really help your back pain."

Sounds harmless enough, right?

NOT.

I had called my sister a few days before the appointment, whining, "I don’t wanna…"

"You don’t want to what?" she asked.

"I don’t want to go to another one of Mom’s crazy healer friend types and be told AGAIN to stand on one foot for fourteen hours straight and then drink forty frillion gallons of unpasteurized goat’s milk and then, and only THEN, will I get pregnant!"

"Then DON’T GO," she shouted, as if that was the most obvious answer in the world.

But then what the hell would I have to blog about? "But what if he can help my back?" I asked.

"THEN GO," she said snippily, clearly her patience with me was waning.

"Ok, I’ll go, but I swear if he’s a crackpot I am sending Mom straight to Shady Pines!"   

                                                 ***     ***    ***    ***

A few days later (a couple of Sundays ago), I arrived at my parents’ house and this <bunny ears> body worker is setting up a massage table in my Father’s office.  He looks normal enough, pretty friendly.  Not like a deranged psycho killer with crazy eyes and drool running down his chin, not like he was going to start pulling chicken pieces out of my abdomen, you know, all the things you DON’T want to see in your body worker.

That level of comfort was quickly replaced by abject terror.

I knew immediately things were going terribly wrong when my Mom left the room saying, "there’s no one else home and I’ll shut the door so you can scream as loud as you want when it hurts."

WHA??

My head shot up off the table so fast I thought it would fly right off my neck and hurl itself out the door passed my Mom. And down the hall where the evil cats would start pawing it back and forth.  But luckily this didn’t happen. I just stared at her with that deer-in-the-headlights, what the fuck are you talking about woman and if when this goes terribly awry I swear I will get you for this  kind of look.

But she just laughed, and shut the door behind her, leaving me alone with Willis, the gigantic body worker that I just recently learned caused his clients so much pain they might feel an overwhelming urge to scream.

I was expecting a one hour-long massage sort of thing, which would leave me refreshed and relaxed and thrilled that, for once, my Mom had steered me in the right direction.

Instead?

Instead I was subjected to almost THREE HOURS of horrific pain and a grilling not unlike the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials all jumbled together in one long macabre nightmarish afternoon.

Willis would use his substantial heft to press on certain spots on my back, legs, hips and feet. And HOLY HANNAH THE FEET.  It was like he could zero in on a specific location that, when pressed, was so sore and tender it literally brought tears to my eyes.

And as if this was not already a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, he grilled me about everything. I guess it was an attempt to figure out why all of these pressure points hurt so badly. (Because you’re like over six feet tall and weigh a thousand pounds and you’re pressing on my joints and tendons and muscles with the force of King Kong??  Could THAT be it, jackass?)

No.  It was all emotional, he claimed.  He proceeded to question me about the last few years: why was I so stressed out, why didn’t I release the stress, what was I holding on to for such a long time?  Why couldn’t I get pregnant and on and on…

"Are you a stuffer?" he asked.  My mind shot to the rather large bagel, egg and turkey bacon sandwich I had crammed down my gullet earlier that morning…WAS I stuffer? I asked myself.

"OH!  You mean emotionally….No. I am not a stuffer." I answered.

"Do you take a long time making decisions?" 

"No."  (I said very quickly to help illustrate my point.)

"How are your bowel movements?"

"Errrrrrr…do you want like a description or just a general overview?  If you picture, say, soft-serve frozen yo–"

" –Just the frequency, do you go two or three times a day at least?"

I was dumbfounded by this question.  Do people DO that?!  I mean, I have a full time job!  I wasn’t quite sure how I’d balance that busy schedule of working AND defecating and as I was trying to formulate what I hoped would be an acceptable answer, he continued on and on and on…like a crazed, question-asking, pressure point pushing, pain-inducing MEANY. 

I was very quickly deciding that I hated this man.

In order to distract myself from the searing pain, I would try to answer his questions in between shouts of "OW" and "HOLY GOD" and "GEEZ that hurts."

(And yes, I did resist the almost overwhelming urge to bust out the "Watchu talkin’ about, Willis?")

He persisted with the inquisition:  Why did we cancel our wedding five years ago?  Wasn’t it my choice to do so? Why was I still angry about that?

"I’m not OW still OUCH angry about that…but you asked when I started to feel anxiety and HOLY CRAP that hurts and that was a OW difficult time," I stuttered.

Finally he got to the whole getting pregnant thing and he was definitely in the ‘just relax and it will happen camp.’ And to me there is nothing more irritating than that.  I could put up with the pressing and the screaming and the questions and even the judging, but that was IT.

"Why do you want to have kids?" he asked me, as if attempting to pry deep into my psyche and uncover some deep-seeded reason I was not already pregnant.

"For the tax deduction, obviously…" I responded cooly.

I managed to get a look at the clock and that’s when I realized it had been OVER TWO hours. Holy crap.  Time flies when you’re being assaulted by someone your own Mother hired to torture you.

I was a good sport up until then.  I played along with his theory of how our bodies hold on to stress and I tried to answer his inane questions, and then I just had enough.

I glanced at the clock and said I was done, I had to be somewhere very soon and that was the end of  my massage (HA!  Term used very loosely) and I made a freaking beeline for the door.

My Mom had been leisurely reading a mystery this whole time, I’m sure gloating over the sound of my screams coming from the office. (Even those ass clown cats were outside the door, just waiting for a limb to become detached. Furry little bastards.)

I called her the next day and she asked, "Did you like Willis?  Did he help you?"

"Um, NO." I answered.  "No he did not help me and NO, I did not like him.  In fact, I HATED HIM."

"Oh.  Then I assume you don’t want to come back next weekend?"

"That would be correct," I said bitterly.

Bitter that she claimed he would help my back and bitter that once again I was such a sucker I spent a Sunday afternoon being battered and bruised by a so-called holistic healer type.  Bitter that I didn’t leave sooner…just BIT. TER.

But not so bitter that I wouldn’t treat you to a little photographic evidence of my latest exploits into the world of alternative medicine.

Don’t say I never give you nothin’:

Speaking of asking your husband to take a photo of your (unfortunately-for-everyone-very) lower back and emphasizing that he freakin’ better avoid the CRACK, well, have YOU ever tried this stunt at home?  My back is just an expanse of white flesh, like a large frozen tundra of blinding whiteness punctuated only by a tattoo and, now, a very large black, blue and green bruise courtesy of Willis.

But it’s ALL ABOUT THE  SCALE, people. (She says still regretting the fact that this photo exists and will soon be projected on a blog for ALL to see. There goes her career in politics…)

If, for example, I told you that tattoo was the size of a dinner plate, why then you’d remark on what a lovely and dainty, small-sized lower back region I had.

But if I told you the tattoo was the size of a dime, then you might say MY GAWD, it’s like she’s a gigantic, hairless YETI or some other horrible creature and you might run shrieking from your computer screen clawing your own eyes out with a dull pencil, fearful of ever reading another blog ever again.

So let’s just say it’s somewhere in the middle and leave it at that, ‘kay?

And in the end?  Turns out the standing on one foot and drinking goat’s milk routine would not have been so bad…