Bouganvillea
My mother had gotten in touch with a long lost brother who just happened to be living across town. My uncle and his son, neither of whom I had ever met, contacted me and arranged to pick me up. I was terribly excited to learn that I had relatives I didn’t even know existed. The son, my cousin, was four years older and that meeting was to start a relationship that would last until his death recently. Pete was the big brother that I had always wanted. So when I left my houseboy job, my uncle, a widower, told me to stay with them.
Again I found myself looking at the want-ads for a job and one that advertised “Learn massage. Room, board and salary” caught my eye. I applied at a big brown house on north Vermont Avenue–a house that only the wealthy could have afforded in its early day. I was hired by the general manager, a tall bushy-haired man with a likable smile. He would prove to be my mentor there, often teasing about adopting me as soon as I agreed to being circumcised. The deal was they would train me for six weeks and I would work for a year. The salary was four dollars a week while in training.
I met other members of the staff and I was shown the male dormitory down stairs. I noticed it had a separate outside entrance. We all ate in a common dining room. After dinner I suddenly began to notice the lighting was being turned on very low and very pink. There was occasional door bell ringing and a masseuse would leave the group and be gone for a half hour period. I became convinced I had landed at a house of prostitution and I wanted no part of it. I sneaked off downstairs to make my getaway. While I was getting my little black suitcase repacked one of the male students came down and interrupted my plans. He introduced himself and was very friendly. He told me what to expect and what was going on. I was relieved to hear it was not a bawdy house. In answering the telephone, though, I noticed the girls talked in a provocative sort of come-on voice. In time I would learn that the shady aspect of the business was in locating the salons (of which the owner had a chain) in buildings that had been a house of ill-repute or, failing that, in a house close by.
The Vermont house was the headquarters and to give greater legitimacy to the operation, Mrs. James, the owner, created a health institute which would offer, sweat baths, reducing massages, exercise,and other health amenities. The big rage though was reducing massage. You read about it in the papers and magazines. The theory was you pounded the bejasus out of the fat areas and the fat cells would float away in the blood stream and be eliminated. It didn’t work but I didn’t know that at the time. However it was here I found my niche. The masseuses didn’t like to do reducing massages because they were very strenuous. Whenever the female patient would accept a masseur I got the call. Since we were close to the motion picture studios quite a few young starlets wanting to achieve that perfect hip came our way–more often my way and I enjoyed it. They were beautiful, they were full of life and sparkle. We would have some interesting conversations.
Let me set the stage for one encounter. Here I am an eighteen-year old farm boy from Wyoming. I enter the massage both. She is lying on the massage table with nary a stitch of clothing on save for a couple of small towels in appropriate places and a very light sheet covering her. I greet her cheerily.
“We’ve got to get this little pouches on my hips off,” she says. I nod. The masseuse is standing at the head of the table I reach to the far side of the table and fold back the sheet, gingerly exposing the offending area of fat.
I begin work in earnest. I’m eighteen and I’m going to get that lump off! I twist and pull my best to get those fat cells to run for it. The masseuse is at the head of the table working under the sheet giving her bosom a soothing cocoa butter rub. The patient is gritting her teeth–she wants that fat bump off–she groans,
“Good lord, Bob, where did you get such strong hands.”
I’m only eighteen and think all questions must be answered. I reply, ” Uh, I guess I got them from milking cows.”
She squealed and grabbed the hem of the sheet pulling it up to her chin. “My god, nurse, don’t let him up at this end!”
We had a good laugh at my expense and I loved it. Not all incidents were so amusing. I had been transferred to our Hollywo0d salon at Sunset and Alexandria to be nearer our clients, the movie starlets. Three masseuses and myself made up the staff. Daytime patronage was mostly reducing massages done by me or the on duty masseuse. Night-time patronage was mostly for “relaxation” massages. At any hour of the night, lonely men would come for a welcome feminine voice and the touch of hands on their back. If they fell asleep we let them be. I slept in my whites to be ready instantly if the masseuse had more patients than she could handle. About 2 a. m. one night, the masseuse woke me, looking frightened. I heard a man yelling. I went out to confront a wild-eyed, straggly-haired man cursing and yelling.
“Give him his money back,” I said. She handed me the money. He grabbed it from my hand and turned to go, cursing all the while. That should have ended it but Greg, one of our regulars, yelled for him to shut up and came out from his booth. He was not going have anyone cursing a lady. The man turned his curses on Greg, who went after him chasing him to the sidewalk and around the corner of the building next door. Greg came back holding his stomach with one hand and his chin with the other, blood dripping from both. We laid him on the kitchen floor and tried to staunch the flow of blood as best we could. Emergency arrived quickly and the police asked me to ride with them cruising the streets but to no avail. Greg survived and returned again as one of our night time regulars but not for long. The City of Los Angeles passed a law forbidding the giving of massage to a member of the opposite sex. Mrs. James shut down her business and as for me–it was back to the the classified ads.
Politics
From one recession (1934)to another (2008) there have been many recessions in between though not as severe as those two. One thing they all teach you is that they do end and better times come again. Judging from history this will always be so. Joseph the adviser to the Egyptian pharaoh, Seostris II, warned the ruler that tough times were ahead and the pharaoh should prepare for it, which he did to the benefit of his country. With all our science and knowledge why could we not do the same?
As a nation we are preparing to spend billions upon billions adding to our debt. Would it be possible that that in spending these vast sums in rebuilding our infrastructure, we could encourage people to save through something like the Liberty Bond program used during the two World Wars? Instead of paying the interest to China, wouldn’t it be better to pay ourselves and at the same time encourage more savings by the people. I’m sure many wish they had saved more and spent less. I rest my case.
Haiku
I wrote a haiku for this space but somehow don’t think it qualifies for the honor. It’s 7/7/3 syllable structure is not forbidden these days–the rigid structure 5/7/5 is ignored as often as not–but the haiku doesn’t seem to work here. I personally like the restraint imposed by the 5/7/5 and believe it stimulates better ideas. I don’t see it as aping the Japanese 5/7/5 sound structure–I see it as a bona fide fixed form in English just as the sonnet or other fixed forms. I hope to return to it. Abigail Friedman in her book, “The Haiku Apprentice,” which I have mentioned here before, goes into these differences in detail’
Poem
The Sharper Image
Here in long rows, shelf on shelf
Are glasses for the nearsighted,
The farsighted, the weak sighted,
And the ego-sighted. Every lens
Is a promise of a sharper world,
A world of truer colors, a world
Where intimacy abounds,
Promised all at two hundred dollars a pair
With the hands of the optometrist
Thrown in, fitting and twisting the frame
To enhance satisfaction and feelings
Of self-esteem.
(From Blue Flame~Selected Poems Copyright 2003 R. Dean Tribble)
May the coming year be more beautiful than all the years we have known.