Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [57]
I remember Bill, that July, walking back from a session with M., passing my garden with a dreamy look on his face, and when I asked how he was he answered, “My whole body feels like a penis.”
By the time I encountered M., back in town after a while away—a failed affair, a dark season in the East Village—I was doing better, overall, though I still felt fragile and, most frustrating, was unable to sit for any length of time. No writing at my desk, no restaurants, no movies, only the barest minimum of driving. He gave me his card—Mind/Body Massage—and explained that his work was emotional as well as physical, focused on releasing emotion stored in the body.
Days later I was due for another trip to New York. I’d planned to fly, tried to make it as easy on myself as possible; I felt, if I was careful, I was up for it. But the morning before, ironing a shirt, I felt my left hip start to throb, a deep ache, and I knew I’d never handle the plane, carrying even the lightest bag, if I didn’t do something.
M. could see me that evening, and said in fact he’d been wondering if I would call. My first session with him—initial encounter of a series which would change and deepen my life, entirely unexpectedly—was a revelation that happened unassumingly enough. I arrived at his cottage, at seven, a tiny place behind a huge emporium of tie dye and bongs and all manner of objects with skulls on them, one of the last remaining head-shops (in the world?) which has mutated into something less sweet and optimistic than the way I remember those places. No Donovan there; the prevailing mood is heavy metal. Down a little alley to one side of the building’s Boschian murals—Alice gone through the looking glass into the Garden of Earthly Delights—M.’s cottage was a single room dominated by the folding table of his profession.
He himself, in fact, also took me back twenty years—twenty-something, with shoulder-length hair, wire-rims, and a choker of beads, he looked like the men I used to hang out with in 1971, when I was first in college, and then—odd doubling—like my students look now, their retro gestures gleaned from—where? Old album covers? Deadhead tours? The culture reaches back toward a time which feels more innocent, now that it’s easier to edit out the past’s risky, disturbing edges. M.’s place—polychrome images of Krishna and his beloved Radha, incense burners and wind chimes—made me feel oddly at home.
He explained a little about his technique and study, how he’d begun studying massage in high school, traveled to ashrams and workshops, his own sense of vocation. And then, undressed and half-covered by a sheet in the warm room with its vague smells of incense and unguent, I began to surrender.
Touch, among other things, makes the body real to us; confirmed by another, making contact at the boundaries of our skin, we come back to ourselves, experience ourselves—contained, uncontainable—anew. Some lines of Lynda’s, about sex:
…making love was a way of saying yes,
I am here, these are my borders, hold me down
a little while. Make me real to myself.
Something about M.’s particular brand of touch—working at the muscles, pulling gently, opening out the closed spaces in the body—makes my muscles feel three-dimensional, awake.
And there’s some imperceptible descent, a process I can’t quite trace, through which the mind moves from awareness of the pleasure of being touched into a kind of effortless introspection. A paradox, that being stroked all along our edges should move us further inward.
The tension in my arms, beginning to loosen, makes me think how hard I worked, how long, to hold Wally in a space of relative safety, a zone in which it was possible for him to live as long and well as he could. My