The Creepy Guys? Q&A

Thursday, March 31, 2016, 4:49 pm, DOLLOP Coffee house, 345 E. Ohio, Chicago, IL, 60611

My friends and my clients ask a lot of the same questions.  I wanted to take this opportunity to answer some of those.

“How do you handle creepy guys?”

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on any creepy guys.  I do a good job of making clear what will and won’t happen during the session.  And, I’m pretty straight forward – if I don’t like a situation I’m not afraid to say so.  Most all of my clients are really nice and more hospitable in my own hotel room than I am.  Because my clients are amazing being away from my friends and family is bearable.

“Have you ever asked a client to leave”  

No, but, I did walk out of a session.  I won’t disclose the city – I received a call as I was finishing dinner:  “Can you come to my apartment right now and deliver a massage to me?  You don’t need to bring your table or oil or anything…just come now.”  I hopped into an Uber and found myself outside a beautiful condo building.  I knew this was going to be a great session – this client had style.

I walked into his apartment with the stride of CRIME SCENE DETECTIVE.   Only in the movies have I seen a place this disgusting.  It was an efficiency apartment which made the space seem worse than it actually was.  There were piles of dishes smeared in week old dried food sitting in the sink and spilling over onto the counter; worn clothes that lined the pathway to the end of the apartment – you had to step over the clothes to get to a bare floor tile; wadded up tissues and napkins that had landed with no ‘waste basket goal’. In the distance I saw piles of haphazardly thrown papers and books that could easily fall over with the slightest wave of sound from the outside roads.

The client wanted me to work on him in his bed.  It was obvious that he hadn’t changed his sheets in probably weeks.  “Do you have any new sheets?”  He sighed heavily and was obviously annoyed at the request.   I helped him spread the new sheet (at least I had hoped it was new) onto the bed.  As he climbed onto the sheet I asked if he was gonna take off his boxers.   “In a minute,” he said.

I stayed standing on the floor working his shoulders – I held off getting onto the bed as long as I could.  I felt my senses on stand to high alert.  Then he slipped off his boxers revealing a very large cyst on his butt.  I inquired about the cyst and asked if he had received medical care for it.  Politely, I told him that I was afraid that it might be MRSA – “if it looks like a spider bite and you haven’t seen any spiders…then it’s best to have it popped and cultured, I can’t work on you.”  I apologized and left.

I  couldn’t wait to get to the lobby men’s room and wash my arms and hands.  The client was friendly and welcoming but as a host, he hadn’t a clue how others saw his space, or maybe because he was paying me to be there he didn’t care what I thought.