Chelsea Handler - Are You There, Vodka, It's Me Chelsea

I found it ironic, considering my surroundings, that I was the one being cleaned off with a towel, but obviously Memoirs of a Geisha danced to the beat of her own drummer. Or hummer. Whichever. The point is, I was expecting her to make some hand-to-skin contact once she had disinfected me. This never happened. The next twenty minutes were spent in the same manner, with her using a towel to rub me. It became apparent that she hadn’t been cleaning me at all. That this was, in fact, the massage.

I wanted to inform her that if this was the way she gave happy endings, it was no wonder they were empty on a Saturday. If there was any service being offered here it was blue balls… Unlike some women, I can sympathize with what blue balls can do to a man because of some early childhood experiences.

I thought back to when I was thirteen and on my very first date with Justin Ledwith. We were in a movie theater in Martha’s Vineyard and he had put his arm around me, but even with all my advances, he refused to lean in for some tongue. I put my hand on his knee repeatedly, slowly moving toward his upper thigh, repeatedly brushing by his ball sack, over and over, to no avail. By the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit , I was so hard up for some action, I practically finger-blasted myself.

I craned my neck to look back over my shoulder at Memoirs of a Geisha questioningly, to somehow convey to her that this wasn’t something I was enjoying. “You likey?” she asked me.

“No. No likey.” I took the towel out of her hand and threw it on the floor. “No towel,” I said, and grabbed her hand to redirect it to my back. “Rub my skin.”

It was clear she didn’t understand what I was saying because she walked out of the room and shut the door. A minute later Dim Sum walked in without Memoirs, but with another heavier Asian who weighed close to three hundred pounds and may have very well been a Sumo wrestler. My instincts told me that it was a woman, but I couldn’t be sure.

“You no want massage!” Dim Sum yelled.

“Yes, yes, I do want massage,” I told her. “Just not with that softscrub towel.”

“You want sucky sucky! No sucky sucky here!”

“Huh?” I asked.

“This not sucky sucky place, we don’t do that, wesbian!”

“No,” I argued. “I don’t want sucky sucky, I just want a massage. It’s okay if she doesn’t know how to give a massage, but could she at least tickle my back?”

“No happy ending!” she yelled, getting louder.

“I don’t want a happy ending, you hot mess, I just want a little back rub. She can even just write letters on my back, if that’s easier, and I’ll guess what they are. I’m really not trying to be difficult.” It was mildly humiliating to be arguing with Dim Sum while I was lying naked on a table and being called a wesbian.

“Listen, I’m not the police, I’m not going to tell anyone about this place. I don’t care if there are girls giving handjobs in the next room, right this very minute. I just want a goddamn massage.”

“You are bad girl, we have no bad girls here,” she said, shaking her head.

That was it. “Listen, Dim Sum, you little fuck fuck, I didn’t pay a hundred dollars for a fucking towel rub. It hurts!”

“You bad bad girl, you go home, no sucky sucky here!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, whatever,” I said as I got up to get dressed. Before I could grab any clothing, the Sumo grabbed my shoulders, and forced me back down, this time with my back on the table, and then laid on top of me face-to-face. She was heavy, and reeked of beef with broccoli.

My boobs were being flattened and hadn’t been in this much pain since I had hooked up with a thirty-year-old who wore braces. They were the clear kind and I didn’t realize he even had them until he undid my bra and headed toward my areola.

My breathing was becoming strained and my eyes were starting to roll back in my head. “No!” I yelled. Mustering up my last ounce of strength, I put my forehead to hers, grabbed her cheeks, and screamed, “My body, my choice!”

Finally, Tons of Fun rolled off me and they both stood there while I got dressed.

“I’d like my hundred dollars back,” I told Dim Sum.

“I don’t think so, buddy,” Dim Sum replied in perfect English.

“Well, I want my license,” I told her. She reached in her pocket and held it above her head as she walked out of the room and headed toward the front door. Once she reached the door, she leaned outside and threw my license onto the sidewalk. I looked at both of them, horrified. “This is no way to run a business,” I told Dim Sum, and then looked at Tons of Fun. “And you might want to lay off the carbs, you fucking wildebeest.”

I walked outside and called Sarah’s cell phone. She picked up on the first ring. “Are you still in there?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, “are you kidding? I hightailed it. I’m at Whole Foods down the street. I was not about to get a massage there.”

“Oh, that’s nice, thanks for leaving me.”

“I’m right down the street,” she said. “Just walk down here. I thought you’d be an hour.”

“I got kicked out.”

“What?”

“Yeah. They kicked me out and told me never to come back, and called me a wesbian.”

“What?”

“Yeah, and that’s not the worst of it,” I told her. “I think I just got dry humped. By a woman. And paid for it.”

I spent the better part of my early twenties being too much of a weakling to tell my friends that I had absolutely no interest in picking them up from airports, seeing them perform in their improvisation troupes, or, the worst of all three, dog-sitting. I don’t have a problem with animals in general, but I’m just not one of those people who’s looking to pack my schedule with some extra one-on-one time with a friend’s dog.

I also don’t appreciate people who celebrate their dog’s birthday with “dog parties,” and then invite their friends who don’t even have dogs. I understand why people like dogs, and I think they definitely bring more to the table than cats or those godforsaken ferrets, but I don’t think it’s healthy for people to treat their dogs like they are real people. Another thing I take issue with are people who take their dogs on “play dates,” or even worse, people who choose to dress their dogs up in outfits better suited for homosexuals participating in a gay pride parade. Dog costumes are right up there with something else I find particularly offensive: sweater vests.

A friend of mine, Lesley, whom I had dog-sat for in the past, called me to tell me she and her sixty-year-old boyfriend were going away for a long weekend to celebrate the holiday. Why they assumed I had no plans of my own for Flag Day was not only insulting on a personal level, but on a national level as well.

“We wanted to know if you wanted to dog-sit for Pepper and Daisy,” she said to me over the phone while I was trying to figure out the best way to disguise a huge bruise I had on my upper arm from a Yahtzee tournament I had participated in the night before. I wanted to tell her that I’d rather be forced to watch a Lord of the Rings marathon and then be raped by a hobbit than dog-sit for anyone. But I hadn’t had enough therapy at that point to know about creating boundaries, so instead I said, “Definitely!”

Lesley and her father/boyfriend live in a big house in Brentwood and are under the impression that anyone who lives in an apartment would jump at the chance to sleep in a real live house. This is not the case, unless of course you were raised in a shelter. Or if the house you’re pet-sitting in has a pool, butler, steam room, and a closet filled with cocaine. I take absolutely no pleasure in staying at other people’s homes. Even when I go to visit a friend in another city, I rarely stay at their place. I prefer hotels and not having to worry about walking around naked or farting, which happens almost every time I get into a cross-legged position. The biggest discomfort of all is sleeping in someone else’s bed, which is not appealing on any level-unless, of course, penetration is involved.