We never know to what, where, or whom an event will lead us.
When you receive bodywork what most people won’t tell you and what you may not tell yourself is that the experience is personal. How could it be otherwise? Fears and issues are often bound in injuries, and some injuries are more personal than others. There you are, depending on the particular practice, lying naked under a sheet, or exposed in your underwear, or in sweatpants and a t-shirt, relinquishing your body to someone who begins as a stranger. We all have our polarities—male, female, gay, straight, bisexual and all the blends and permutations between, and one may be more comfortable working with some types over others. A straight male may avoid an attractive female practitioner because, worried over controlling his responses, he can’t relax with her. A woman may find she more easily trusts another woman. There’s nothing wrong with this. You’re the one lying there vulnerable. Still, in my experience the individual practitioner supercedes the type. Some are just better than others, or match up better with you, regardless of everything else including how you view yourself. With some it is an art form, and you are their material. As in dance, you can come to know your partner quite well. As with a very good dance partner, you can travel to a place neither of you would arrive at alone. And you will think of them years later, wonder at what transpired between you.
Injuries break boundaries. They reshape us, emotionally and physically. Sometimes they create doorways and humble us to the point where we can step through.
This is a love story.
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One morning in Austin about fifteen years ago, I woke to find my right testicle had suffered a trauma overnight and was fixed rigidly to the base of my member. When I prodded it the pain was so severe it brought sweat to my eyelids. After I recovered I stood and examined myself in the mirror. There it hung, or more accurately, didn’t, torqued an inch above my left as if it had tried to retract itself into my body for safety, and in failing clung on for dear life.
I had no idea what might have caused the reaction. I thought I must have injured it while sleeping and hoped if I gave it a few days it would recover. But I discovered, day-by-day, that the most basic things I took for granted—running, riding a bicycle, driving for more than a few minutes (my right foot extended and held to the gas pedal), walking more than fifty yards at a stretch, wearing jeans or boxer shorts—could, and usually would trigger a relentless, tidal pain to spread from that part of my body and engulf me as I tried to fall asleep at night. I’m also convinced the male body releases some sort of fear hormone when the testicles are threatened. As if the crippling pain wasn’t enough to convince you to protect these oblong carriers of your bloodline, a completely separate dose of raw, undefined terror rages through your system. At night I would lie on my back in bed immobilized, unable to rest on either side or my stomach without setting off the response, looking at the ceiling fan as it spun in the dark room, and trying to convince myself that yes, I would be able to have sex again someday.
As it turned out I would, but not for several years. Along the way to recovery I visited doctors and urologists (they had no answers), a chiropractor (some relief lasting for no more than twenty-four hours), learned to drive my car relying on cruise control whenever possible, and switched from boxers to briefs for the support and from jeans to baggie pants or shorts to reduce constriction. What finally saved me was running across an old friend who’d just started teaching Pilates. A few days after I began working with him I went to a practitioner of deep tissue massage. As traditional forms of medicine had failed me, I was looking elsewhere, anywhere. Almost overnight everything changed. Though I was far from 100%, I found myself able to, among other things, drive my car normally or walk a quarter mile without suffering pain, terror, and flopsweats all night long. Soon that right testicle began to shift back toward its proper position. As near as I can tell by what helped and what didn’t, my physical problem seemed to lie with knotted or strained tissue where my right gluteus maximus met my upper thigh, and how that troubled an L-3 vertebra. Nerve stuff. It expands radially. Point X affects Point D.
Whatever. I was just happy I was improving and had a means a to deal with it. The means took me to and through a series of body workers. It took me to Jonah.
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I moved from Texas to New York City for the third time in my life in 1998 chasing dreams and memories and hopes, but really satisfied with nothing more than living under that skyline again. I had my physical therapy down rote. I owned a Pilates mat and barrel and knew a solid routine. I now could walk, run, ride a bike, and yes, have sex again provided I attended to my Pilates twice a week and visited a good bodyworker every month or two. Upon arriving, finding that bodyworker was one of my highest priorities.
Jonah was referred to me through a mutual friend. There are many terrific forms of bodywork, but Jonah’s was shiatsu. He worked out of a martial arts studio on 14th Street. I followed him into a small space inside partitioned by a bamboo screen. He was maybe 5’ 10”, an inch taller than me with curly brown hair starting to recede and a dancer’s body. He spoke softly, asked me what was going on, and I told him about my injury in shameless detail. He nodded, then I lay before him on the mat, one stranger to another. He lit a scentless candle. He circled a hammer around a small ancient looking hand gong and the tone flowed out like water. He closed his eyes and went to work.
It was over a year before he dropped his first overt clue he might be gay. I’d just scored a rent-stabilized apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and wanted to find a bicycle I could ride in my neighborhood. I asked him for recommendations. He was a runner as well as a bicyclist, and he guided me to a small shop on 10th Avenue run by a man from Puerto Rico. “I remind him of Celia Cruz,” Jonah told me proudly, if somewhat shyly. “Tell him Celia Cruz sent you.” Which surprised me. I didn’t think Jonah looked like Celia Cruz at all.
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After he moved from that first studio I visited him in a room he rented in a chiropractor’s office. For a short period afterward he took the subway to the Upper West Side and the apartment I was subletting. My small, green parrot adored him, trilled and puffed up and rested on one leg while Jonah worked on me on the floor of my livingroom. Finally he chose to use his own apartment. He told me he’d decided to cut back on his clients so he could do better, more focused work, and since we would be in his home he wanted to be picky about who he brought into it. I was glad to have made the cut but hardly thought about it. I only consider it now. Some clients exhausted him, he said, but I clearly didn’t, even with whatever worries I brought in. Before we began a session I’d sit on the mat and he’d listen as I described where my body hurt, where it was tight, what was happening emotionally in my life since the last time he saw me. By his way of thinking it was all connected. Then I’d lie down, he’d dim the lights, press the CD player to play ambient music (this I think was one of his systems for timing a session), and start. He’d lay his hands (they were always surprisingly warm) on my belly, close his eyes, and I’d begin to float away. He once explained that the belly informed him of where to go next, what part of the body he should address. I can only describe his state as a kind of trance. If moments later I realized I’d forgotten to tell him about a pain somewhere and blurted out the oversight he always looked startled at my voice, maybe at the fact that I was even in the room with him. But he’d recover, nod and say “okay,” then close his eyes and we’d begin the float again.
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I’m almost ashamed of how little I paid him. When once I asked him if I should pay more he told me that he wanted to keep his price down so I could afford to come often. The sessions lasted an hour and a half, and usually two. This was, I realized fairly quickly, not about the money for him. It was a spiritual practice. It was how he served. When once I asked him how else he paid the rent he told me off-handedly he did some teaching at Circle in the Square and also something called “clown therapy” for hospitalized children with the Big Apple Circus in New York, as well as for another group in Germany where he spent half the year with his partner. Jonah never gave me that much detail. I think part of that was his natural instinct to keep boundaries in place with clients, but more so I think he just didn’t like to talk about himself. He was a body person and that’s where he spoke first, and possibly best, through his hands and movement, while each session I’d blather to excess about politics, my writing, or a woman who’d hurt my feelings. He’d fly back and forth between Germany and the U.S. When he was gone I visited other practitioners working other disciplines.
From Jonah’s perspective there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about what we did. He was a theater artist from Canada, a specialist in movement, physical acting, mime, and shiatsu, cobbling together a meaningful life and meaningful relationships in Germany and New York City. Our friendship that developed over the eight years before he died was simply a logical and natural experience. He was a healer. It’s what he did. But for me, going once every month or two to a gay man’s apartment and giving over my body to him was a foray into new territory, and one I only wish I could return to.
“Touch” was originally published in The Pinch, Spring 2012, and reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXXVIII
—Photo WarmSleepy/Flickr