Let's Talk About.... MOMM (Male on Male Massage)

Hello world. This story begins with a bang! Literally, a car banged into me on the 520 E on the first of February. It was this event that brought me to look for a doctor close to work. My friend, Joel, made a recommendation and I found myself calling Dr Sadri. Joel said that she was "very thorough." When I walked into the office, I must admit that I was very caught off guard. Walking into the waiting room, I could have sworn that I had accidentally crossed some sort of teleport and entered a waiting room in Eastern Europe. Everybody was speaking a different language from Iranian to Russian and I was pretty confident that I was the only "Joe" they had seen since G.I. Joe was taken off the air. After my examination Dr. Sadri asked if I would prefer physical therapy or massage therapy. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, "Massage therapy please." "Great," she replied "I will sign you up with Igor. He is the best, some people pay $150 an hour to be with him. You are very lucky." Lucky. Funny how people have different definitions to the same word.

First day of massage therapy. Enter Igor. I could tell we were going to get along great straight from his icy, “You wait there. 5 minute.” I made my way to the lobby and somehow managed to develop the hiccups in the 8 minutes he made me wait. No worries, I was convinced this would be a funny story that Igor would talk about during his best man speech at my wedding, “Joe good guy, you know. He come to see me, you know. Could not say what wrong with him without jumping like little Slovakian frog, you know.”

He walks me back to his room, asks me to tell him what brings me to see him and asks me to give him the details of my accident. After I told him about my rear end, he instructed me to strip down to my boxers and wait for him under a sheet and that he would be back to take care of me in 2 minutes. I got down to my boxers and realized that due to my incredible skill to shed my clothing, I had some time to kill (on a side note I have recently been trying to do 150 pushups a day) and I figured that this would be a good time to bust out a quick set of 25. Around 18 I thought about what kind of first impression I would make with Igor if he came in and saw me doing pushups in my boxers before I nestled into my sheet cocoon. How would I explain that? "Relax Igor, just trying to make sure I'm as toned as I can be for you before you oil me up." Thank goodness that his time quotes had not become more accurate and we did not have to cross that bridge.

He enters the room, as stoic as a domino, and we get to work. I lay on my stomach and he goes to town on my back. The hiccups end up disappearing and as odd as it may seem, we end up striking up quite the conversation. It turns out that Igor was born in Kazakhstan and moved to Belarus when he was pretty young. I asked him what he thought about the Borat movie and he did not seemed very bothered by it. He said that it mostly caused an uproar with the older population of Kazakhstan, but that he understood that it was meant to be a joke (even though he did not find it to be very funny from a comedy standpoint.) Apparently Igor was also a history/geography buff because he started spewing out dates and directions like nobody's business. Our one difference came when he started talking about the Berlin Wall. All throughout school I've learned that the Berlin wall came down in 1989, Igor disagreed and said that it actually came down in 1990. I did some research when I got home and I encourage others to do the same to come to their own conclusion. We quickly found ourselves gabbing away like two squirrels arguing over a nut. When he was done with my back he asked me to roll over and he would work on my chest/neck. I rolled over and was relieved to see that I wasn't doing a Zoolander impression (you never know...) He finished what he needed to do on my front side and we were done with our 55 minute journey. I was very, very sore and could barely get up off the table. I got dressed, shook Igor's hand and made my way home and thought about my newest adventure.

All in all, I was glad that I let Igor manhandle me. He said that his family has had a special healing power passed down through the generations and I was convinced. I'm glad that he dropped his surly demeanor and became the Chatty Cathy that I have grown to love and I look forward to seeing him twice a week for the next three weeks. Thank goodness for insurance.