Muscling Your Way Into a Free Massage

Shafts of bright sunlight streamed through the classroom windows. The air was thick with the smell of oil and sweat.

There I was, stripped down to my underwear, sprawled out on a massage table with my face pressed into a padded doughnut, not able to see a thing except my masseuse’s painted silver toes.

The masseuse, a sweet woman named Ann Marie, is an apprentice--learning her craft at the Touch Therapy Institute on Ventura Boulevard. I was there for a free massage--albeit a public one.

As Ann Marie kneaded my shoulders, the other students at the institute stood around jabbering. “Who is that guy?” “What’s he writing about?” And, “Why has he got his underwear on?”

All the attention made me feel coiled and tight, the polar opposite of what I had been hoping for.

I could only guess what Ann Marie was feeling. She had shown up for class expecting to learn a few basic hand strokes and how to rub people’s feet. The next thing she knew she had to give some stranger a massage in front of everybody--and on the record. Her hands were trembling and she kept fussing with my sheet.

But massage students are a dedicated breed and Ann Marie was not going to let me escape with a tight back. Massage is not just a profession, I learned. It’s a way of life.

“When you’re touching somebody, you’re getting in touch with yourself,” said Christian Smith, a massage instructor. “I like my students to think of themselves as true healers.”

*

My experience with the healers began with a simple quest: Is there anywhere in the Valley you can get a free massage?

I always wanted to try one. Countless folks have said how great it feels to have your back worked by a trained professional who, armed with a pair of strong hands and a little bottle of oil, can wring out aches, pains, stress, even foul moods.

That’s when the idea of a massage school came up. After all, barber colleges have offered free haircuts for decades (though I’ve never actually met anybody who has been to one). But getting a massage from an amateur is riskier, I thought. Maybe I’ll get pinched, pounded the wrong way, left forever with a crick in my neck.

But such risks come with this line of work.

*

My first stop was the North Hollywood branch of the Massage School of Santa Monica. As alternative healing techniques have become more mainstream, interest in massage has mushroomed. When the Santa Monica school opened in 1967, there were around 15 massage schools nationwide. Now there are more than 800, dozens of them in Southern California.

The first thing that struck me when I walked in the school and saw the students laid out on the padded tables was how intense the massage biz can be. Few spoke, and the bits of conversation were nearly drowned out by watery synthesizer music, the kind of beat-less New Age stuff people order from catalogs without ever hearing it.

The room was dark, with pastel prints tacked up on the wall and a rubber skeleton hanging in the corner. With shadows flickering on the walls and the row of bodies wrapped in white sheets, still as death, I felt like I had just stepped into a morgue.

“Does that hurt?” one student whispered to another as he squeezed the bottom of the other’s foot.

“What?” the guy groaned.

“You got a piece of glass in your foot.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s been there for years. Just rub around it.”

These students were finishing up a 150-hour course, the city of L.A.’s minimum requirement to be a licensed massage therapist. As of Jan. 1, 2000, that requirement will shoot up to 300 hours. The requirements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In Orange County, you need 500 hours of training before you can start rubbing people down. In New York state, it’s 1,000 hours.

The typical 150-hour massage course costs around $1,200 and begins with the basics: anatomy, physiology and a dozen or so hand strokes. Students practice on each other and learn some business stuff along the way--paying taxes, insurance, advertising, etc.

One rule is never put “body massage” on a business card because it may get confused with another type of service. Instead, use the term “massage therapy,” explained Smith, an instructor at the Santa Monica school.

“That’s a problem for us,” said Smith, who with his ponytail, wide shoulders and hands as big as oven mitts looks like the Stephen Seagal of massage. “People still associate massage with prostitution.”

The Santa Monica school has a policy that students work only on each other, I learned. So off I went to the other major massage school in the Valley: the Touch Therapy Institute in Encino.

While the Santa Monica school is solemn and serious, Touch Therapy is light and bright. In a second-floor classroom with huge sunny windows, a beginners’ class played massage’s version of “Simon Says.”

“OK, everybody, hands on your trochanter,” said the instructor at the front of the class.

Half the class fumbled around to find a spot on their hipbones.

“Good, good, now let’s see your occiput,” the instructor said.

The students diligently put their hands on the bony ridge on the back of their heads.

“OK, guys, think you’re good? Show me your transversal process.”

The class was stumped.

After the warmup it was time for me to get my free massage. Touch Therapy does take people off the street, though usually they have some connection to the school, like a student’s spouse or prospective student.

“It’s good for students to work on strangers,” explained Maria Grove, founder of the school. “That way they’re prepared to show up at a person’s house for the first time and not feel uncomfortable working on them.”

Ann Marie, who asked that her last name not be used, seemed a little uncomfortable when she started working on me. A mother of twin girls and a former clerk at Blockbuster, she got interested in massage because her friends told her she had a great touch.

“I like to heal,” she said. “I like helping people relax.”

I eventually relaxed and her hands eventually stopped shaking. The key to an enjoyable massage, I’ve concluded, is just to zone out.

I closed my eyes, tuned out the jabbering students and tried my best to soak up the sensation of having my back kneaded muscle by muscle, fiber by fiber. Stress slowly seeped out of my shoulders. A soothing feeling washed through me. I almost fell asleep.

Sure, there were a few jarring moments where Ann Marie forgot about the whole oil issue and her fingers pinched a tad and I felt some friction.

But a half-hour later, I bounded to my feet alert and relaxed, an unusual combo for me.

And that was just the beginning. After Ann Marie, I was matched up with a man named John Burton, an advanced student, for a full-body one-hour massage, the kind that usually costs good coin.

I’ll be honest. When I first conjured up this story, I worried about getting matched up with a masseur. I had girl friends who had given me back rubs before but never guy friends.

I was told a lot of men go through this, apparently some residue of old-school machismo.

But I learned that day in a classroom that smelled of oil and sweat that massage doesn’t have to be creepy or intimate. Yes, it may be sensual but it’s not sexual. You’re being worked on by someone whose job it is to put their hands on others for a living. They don’t connect touch with affection.

One massage is all it takes to figure that out. My advice is start with a massage school and see if they need a willing stranger. It’s 10 times better than letting a rookie barber practice on your head. In the world of padded tables and strong hands, dreamy electronic music and flowing oil, there’s really no such thing as a bad touch.