Keeping in Touch

“No hurt, no help,” says massage therapist Moeul Neak with an infectious, high-pitched giggle. “I’m not kidding.” Neak’s specialty--”deep tissue to get the blood moving”--has made him the masseur du jour at the tony Burke Williams spa on Sunset Boulevard. Not only is Neak booked two weeks in advance, his clients include Elizabeth Hurley, Gabriel Byrne and D.W. Moffett. But there’s no preferential pummeling here. “Some of my clients tell me they are movie stars and ask me if I know them,” he says. “They don’t know that I am blind. I don’t see movies.”

Neak, a 41-year-old Cambodian native, learned massage from his physician father. “Everybody in the neighborhood came to see him when they had pain,” he says. At 22, while working as a masseur to injured soldiers in the Cambodian military, a nearby bombing left him sightless. He came to Los Angeles in 1990 and has since graduated from the California School of Medical Sciences. “I can sense where there is hurt with my touch. It’s better that I feel because you can’t see nerves.

“They told me that people in America like soft massage, but I do deep because it’s better for tight muscles.” Particularly, tight muscles in stiff lower backs. “Everyone has pain in lower back,” he notes. “My clients ask me why they are so tight, but I don’t know. Probably because of job stress. Maybe they are movie stars.”

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Burke Williams, (323) 822-9007