Body Business At Tokyo House
Sam Corey is making a fortune from scantily clad girls, body oil, and talcum powder. For a man who almost became a priest, is that enough?
(Page 2 of 2)
The visitor is led to a small room with a folding partition for a door and left there alone. Inside he sees a rub-down table, a small, plastic clock radio, and a metal table holding folded towels and plastic squeeze bottles of various sizes and, apparently, various contents. In a corner a wooden chair stands righteously straight. The visitor disrobes, folds his clothes on the chair, selects a towel from the stack on the cabinet, and casts a wary eye toward those squeeze bottles. He sits nervously on the table, but it's so high his legs dangle in the air. Off the table, he leans back against it which proves uncomfortable as well since it cuts into the small of his back. Still he can't sit on the chair because that's where his clothes are. So, while the radio blares bubblegum musak, the visitor paces back and forth, a towel so discreetly wrapped around his middle he feels absurd. During his pacing he is met at one wall by another of those Amazon paintings.
Then a girl slides back the accordion-like partition and closes it behind her. She is short, about 20, with thick little legs, round brown eyes heavily mascaraed and shadowed, and rather stiff, orange-blonde hair. She is preoccupied. She walks past the visitor and gives the table top a pair of quick pats. That is the only invitation the visitor gets; the girl has turned her attention to the row of plastic bottles.
The visitor crawls onto the table. Without turning around the girl says, "Lie on your stomach first." The visitor obliges and turns his head away from the shelves in much the same way he was trained not to look at the needle the doctor was about to use. He sees himself, lo and behold, staring straight into a mirror. Behind him the girl is already squeezing some kind of liquid into her hands. Then, holding the bottle over the visitor, she squirts a stream straight onto his backbone.
"Aggghhhhh!" he cries.
"Something wrong?"
"It's cold."
"Oh. They all say that. I always forget to warn 'em."
They all say that. They. Among the most consistent and universal male fanstasies concerning prostitutes, topless dancers, B-girls, masseuses, cocktail waitresses, go-go girls, can-can dancers, torch singers, and strippers is the belief that the girl the man has paid to get close to actually prefers him to any member of that slobbering, lurid, leering multitude of hard-ups who pay the girl for the same services. Each visitor to the Tokyo House, during those nervous moments in the lobby and while waiting naked in that little cubicle, must be searching his very being for that key phrase, that certain lilt of lip and tooth, that languid dangling of limb, that will separate him from all those theys. But one squirt from a plastic bottle proves how hopeless that self-searching is. Customers are they's, never he's. Maybe there really is something to that course in Psychology of Men.
The girl, however, will talk if asked: "I was working as a keypunch operator and wasn't making much money and I had this girl friend who was working in massage. She said it wasn't so bad so I came here and Sam's been pretty good to me. Bought me some clothes and gave me some money to get my hair done. I get about $800 a month. Sam says a lot of crazy things and does a lot of crazy things, but that's just the way he is.
"It's a nice place to work. The cops come in here a lot, checkin' us out and stuff. But you can always tell who they are by the way they dress and the way they act. They try to get you to do stuff to 'em and they keep after you and after you. They offer you a whole lot of money but you just have to keep tellin' 'em no. You get all kinds of wierdos in here, not just cops. Some men come in and they've got on women's underwear and a couple of men y'know, do themselves while you're working. But I just decided that if that's what they want to do, it was all right with me. They weren't bothering me any. And then some men just like to talk to you. They tell you all about their wives and their jobs and their kids, how they learned to bowl, anything. I just listen, or talk if they want me to talk. There aren't too many who come in just for massages. There's nearly always some other reason."
All those conversations, though, mean more to the men than to the girls and sometimes that causes problems. Fred was a man who came to the Tokyo House partly because his marriage wasn't working and partly out of boredom. He was employed as a clerk in a very large office and spent his days shuffling papers from one file to another, filling in blanks with the proper checks, pulling staples and putting them back in, a job, in other words, that left a lot of time for idle interior fancying. After a few visits to the parlor, Fred began, like many other regular customers, to ask for a particular girl. Betty.
Betty wasn't at all fond of Fred, but he did come in regularly. Since the girls are paid by the massage, he did assure her of steady commissions as well as giving some generous tips. And he wasn't particularly difficult to manage. He mostly just talked, told her how much he hated his wife, said Betty was beautiful, a wonderful girl, he was so lucky to have found her. All in all Betty was willing to go along with the arrangement and let him say what he wanted. Fred did get a little ardent now and then, told her he loved her; but that was his problem. Other men had done that, too.
But Fred was not content with the status quo. He had convinced himself that he did love Betty. His appointments with her became more frequent and he called for her constantly. Once he tried to follow her home. When she confronted him about it, he became paralyzed with shame. He'd never do it again, didn't know what had gotten into him. Nevertheless, he began calling for her still more frequently. "Who's she with now?" he would ask. "How much longer does he have with her?"
One afternoon he called for an appointment with Betty. It wasn't his regular time but something had come up and he wasn't going to be able to make it then. Could she see him right away? Betty had a customer and wouldn't be free for another 45 minutes. Fred calculated 45 minutes plus another 45 minutes for the massage. An hour and a half, too long, he'd be late. No, he had to see her now. Impossible, he was told. Fred slammed down the phone.
A few minutes later he burst into the Tokyo House, rushed past the receptionist, and in a heated fury began pushing back the doors to cubicle after cubicle looking for Betty. She was indeed with a customer.
"I caught you," Fred shouted. "You are with another man. You are two-timing me." Then followed a list of expletives. Fred told Betty, she was scum, he hated her, she was dirty, filthy. Then he burst into tears.
The man whom Betty was massaging must have been somewhat upset at all this; but Fred's anger had given him, for once, some kind of power over other men. The man just lay there. But that temporary power did not extend to women. Betty knew her own expletives and let fly with all the disgust she had repressed for the sake of Fred's regular visits. Sam, hearing all this, got his ponderous butt in gear , hauled Fred bodily into his office, and barred him from coming to the Tokyo House again.
But sin is followed by contrition. Fred began calling. He was prostrate with grief, begging for forgiveness. Sam, the former novitiate, could not resist such pleas. A subdued Fred is back having a regular massage with Betty and isn't any happier with his wife.
Such contretemps, although Fred's case was extreme, are not unusual. Customers bring the masseuses gifts, suffer agonies when their regular girl is sick or on vacation. Often a man who has been patronizing one girl will find another catching his eye. He wants to make an appointment with her. But what about the other girl? Can he leave her? Would there be talk around the parlor? How could he face the girl he's left if he runs into her in the lobby? Sometimes these fears prevent the customer from changing girls. If he has come for contact with some woman besides his wife, he then finds himself in the sad position of being discontent with the new woman as well, while the girl he thinks could bring him real happiness is rubbing some lucky fellow in the cubicle right down the hall.
The masseuses generally find all this either funny or boring. As a group they have seen a fair amount of the underside of life not only at the parlor but before. Most of them have been married and divorced, some more than once. Many have children. Before coming to work for Sam they have been keypunch operators or cocktail waitresses or car-hops or file clerks or telephone solicitors, mostly dull jobs with little pay. Their education, in its varying degrees, doesn't give them much hope for something better. They come to work for Sam, learn to put up with some things that might take a little getting used to, acquire a skill (the instructress is a registered nurse), and earn enough money to support their kids, buy some clothes, whatever. They like their work. Considering the nature of the business, Sam's employees are remarkably loyal; some have been with him for most of the three years he's been open.
Meanwhile the visitor has had his neck kneaded, his back and chest pounded, his legs squeezed, his arms pulled, pushed, twisted, and rubbed. Finally, the girl wipes off the lotion with a fresh towel and says, "That's it."
The visitor extracts his wallet from the pile of clothes on the chair and tips the girl. Thanking him, she leans against the door jamb looking more demure than he would have suspected possible while he fumbles through his disrupted pile of clothes for the ratty pair of underwear fate had led him to stumble into that morning. Another shorter, yet demure smile and the girl leaves the visitor to dress in peace.
In the lobby, several men are waiting their turn. They peer at one another through the privacy of their reflections. Silently the Amazons on black velvet stare down at them. The television, now with its sound turned completely off, flickers in its corner. "Sherry," the receptionist is calling. "Sherry, you have a customer." Sam is on the telephone talking about his political future: "I came in third in that mayor's race. If I'd started sooner I might have come in second, even first. I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to run for the state legislature. I could turn Austin upside down."
The visitor, his skin made so sensitive to touch that his clothes seem a burden, finds himself at odds. The relaxation of the massage has been defeated by the titillation involved; the pleasure in talking to the girl has suffocated in the heavy, musty mood of the lobby. But once inside his car, he forgets his own warning. "I think," he says to himself, "that girl really did like me."
Pages: 1 2
My Library
