Scraped Clean

Stepping outside of my comfort zone to celebrate a decade of marriage and ring in the new year

Fair warning: if you’d rather not read about some of the more sensitive portions of my anatomy, feel free to skip this week.

Is he going to scrub my balls?

I am in a Korean bathhouse on the Friday after New Years Day. Tiffany and I have treated ourselves in honor of our 10th wedding anniversary - we got married at the Dekalb County Courthouse, with our two best friends as witnesses, on January 15th 2015, shortly after moving back to Atlanta from a year in Austin.

In addition to the saunas, UV therapy, and hot/cold tubs that come with the price of admission, I have opted for a full-body scrub. Tiff, who has been here before, got one and sang the praises of the experience.

“You feel fresh and smooth, like a baby,” she told me.

“Are you naked?” I ask. I’ve gotten many a massage, and they always tell me that I can undress to my level of comfort - which for me means underwear still on.

“You have to be naked in the bath area.”

I’m nervous about that, though not opposed. The nudity itself doesn’t bother me. As I’ve aged and matured I have fewer hang-ups about my own body - 40 in particular felt like a cleanly demarcated “Who gives a fuck?” point. Though growing up as a midwesterner and spending the bulk of my adolescent years under the weight of an intense if completely self-imposed sense of religious shame has nevertheless left me with heavy vestiges of self-loathing. Like the outer layer of skin falling away under the abrasive scrubbing I am about to receive, these inhibitions have sloughed off only to sometimes grow back and re-callous.

I have a lot of questions for her about the spa in general. It’s a new thing for me. Where do I take my clothes off? Should I be barefoot? How can it be co-ed if everyone is naked? She patiently explains to me that there are separate locker rooms. You should probably keep your socks on if you didn’t bring flip-flops or Crocs. Everyone is dressed in the shared areas.

We do the saunas together and share a plate of dumplings from the food court before adjoining to our respective steam room areas - her for a foot massage, me for my full-body exfoliation. I check in, undress, and am told to shower before entering the room that contains the baths.

It is as unsurprising as it is perhaps pathetic that this all feels somewhat familiar to me because of my exposure to it from movies. Viggo Mortensen, naked as the day he was born, fighting for his life in Eastern Promises; the weary spirits soaking and schvitzing themselves in Spirited Away; nearly the entire filmography of Tsai Ming-Liang. All of these flash at different points through my mind as I rinse off the communal body wash that is on offer (wondering at what point it will break out the overly sensitive skin that I am nonetheless about to subject to a vigorous scouring) and slide into the heated water. I am soon summoned from the hot tub in which I’m waiting and instructed to lie face down on a padded plastic table in an open room divided from the bathing area by a pebbled glass screen. “Face up,” my attendant, Tony¹, says. I comply, and a damp towel is placed over my eyes and a second (seemingly much smaller one) is laid atop my genitals. I am focused more particularly on the one over my face I’m more nervous to not know what’s coming than I am about being fully exposed in a context within which everyone else is as disrobed as I am. I am hit with an extended splash of water and then the scrubbing begins - a textured glove that feels like plastic sandpaper begins to run up and down my arm before moving elsewhere.

I think again about the towel over my face. Is it there so that I can’t see what’s going on, or is it because it makes it easier for him to do his work if he dissociates from my personhood? The latter is maybe a projection; that would certainly help me. Part of my intensity of focus on this aspect is that part of me wanted to be able to see what got scrubbed off; I’m disappointed that I can’t get that visual satisfaction, merely the occasional sensation of hard pieces of flesh flaking onto the table I’m lying on before being washed away in another pouring of warm, soapy water. Very early in the process I think of a fish lying on a table in an open air market getting hosed down as it is descaled for consumption. It takes me a surprisingly long time after that to think of a corpse being cleaned and readied for embalming on the slab.

Are they trained for this, or is it just part of the job? Tony was also the man who registered me for the service. He was fully dressed at that point, and told me that it would be a forty minute wait, which I was fine with. Five minutes later he came into the baths, having changed into shorts and flip-flops, and signaled that I could go ahead and come over. I think of when I worked in pizza shops and had to sometimes hop on the line or man the dishwasher when we were short-staffed. It’s an amusing notion to me that one’s job could incorporate a last-minute subbing in to scrub a customer’s naked body.

But what a beautiful act of service, also. Even more so, frankly, for the fact that it is not presented as some spiritual or sacrosanct ritual, but for it’s quotidian nature. It’s just a job well and efficiently done.

Every so often Tony will, usually after moving or revealing a new part of my body, make a comment to his colleague in Korean that I of course cannot understand. Sometimes it is accompanied by laughter. Occasionally the towel protecting my manhood will slip a little bit, only to be carefully replaced by someone who will also, nearly halfway through the procedure, use it to lift my scrotum out of place so that he can indeed scrub underneath. A completely new sensation for me, at 42 years of age, to have an abrasive cloth scrubbing away the dead flesh around my perineum.

“Face down,” he says shortly after, and now that previous feeling of having pushed through a personal comfort zone is matched when I flip over and find that this time there is no towel, no pretension of modesty. Just the open air. And while a culture designed and dominated by cis male heteronormative insecurities has conditioned me to believe that there is nothing more frightening, more dangerous, than an exposed and vulnerable asshole, I am pleasantly surprised to realize that I’m not that concerned. Perhaps because I know what I’m in for - I’m neither surprised nor particularly abashed at this point when he reaches between my cheeks to scrub within them.

It’s appropriate, I realize shortly before we finish, that I am doing this as part of an anniversary celebration. Ten years ago would I have dreamed off doing something like this? Like most things I’ve done since we met, let alone were married, I have become brave enough to do it because I have someone to encourage and, yes, sometimes shame me into doing things that I would have heretofore been too uncomfortable to do. It’s a mark of how far this relationship has brought me, and the extent to which it has inspired and facilitated the growth of a very sheltered young man.

It also feels right to be doing it at the start of a new year. After a half hour or so, Tony simply says “Okay!” I thank him, and when I walk back out to the baths and assess his work, I find that Tiff was right - I feel scrubbed clean and completely smooth. It feels, in its own way, like a new beginning, however small.

-cs

1. I will not indulge in any of the hand-wringing I sometimes see from men online over having, god forbid, a man massage or scrub you down because 1) grow up and 2) I have had many massages from either gender and I have found that there are few experiences that are less sexual to me no matter who is doing them.