Hotel Retreat, Day 3

Here's my yellow Chevy waiting for me outside Leaf Cuisine, a vegan/raw restaurant where I went to get some lunch to go for Sunday, which is a super busy day at school.  Since nights here are in the 40s, I left the food in the trunk and drove to the Olympia Day Spa, one of the many spas in Koreatown.  I was meeting poet Christine Wertheim.  There are 3 pools at this spa, a mildly hot one for the wimpy, a boil your skin off hot pool comprised of mugwort tea, and an icy cold pool.  When I first arrived and stuck a toe in the mugwort, it burned so bad, I was no fucking way.  Someone in the pool told me to go in the cold pool first.  So I hung out in the wimpy pool, dunked in the cold pool, hung out in the herbal steam room, dunked in the cold pool, then gingerly approached the steaming vat of mugwort, and it felt great, I could stay in it for extended periods of time.  Everybody is totally naked and lunging from one temperature extreme to another.  I'd gone here with Christine last June, so I was used to that part.

This time I booked a Milky Scrub, which is described as, "As you are basked in warm citrus milk, dry and dull skin is sloughed away with gentle strokes."  You like naked on a table covered with plastic, and a middle aged Korean woman wearing a black bra and black panties—old fashioned to-the-waist briefs—scrubs the shit out of you with these exfoliating mitts she wears.  She scrubs every part of you, including the crack of your ass and your inner thighs all the way up to the genitals.  She occasionally throws buckets of water over you, and ends with some creamy fluid that makes you rather slick. My scrubber was friendly and impersonal and I relaxed into it.  I am no longer Dodie, I thought, I am merely a slab of flesh whose dead flakes need to be sloughed off.  The treatment ends with a rather brutal shampoo which by then I totally enjoyed, this woman attacking my scalp with her strong fingers.

Thomas Merton's involvement with the student nurse began in a hospital, when he was recuperating from back surgery.  Margie gave him a bath.  Lying on the plastic table being professionally scrubbed in places where only a lover has touched, I thought of the indignity of being frail and having to rely on these anonymous others to prod and turn one's tender physicality.  Nurse Margie knew who Merton was; they could talk easily.  He could talk to her for hours, as he could with no one else.  I wondered if I were a celibate hermit and this Korean woman knew who I was, had read my writing, understood my world—would her ministrations seem caring to me, would I feel for once my humanity had truly been touched by this other, wonderful, angelic being?  Would I fall in love with her?  I began by lying face down, then on my back, then on each side.  When I was lying on my left side I saw a row of white gleaming bodies lying on plastic covered tables, each with a Korean women in black bra and briefs attending to it.

After the spa, Christine and I headed over to Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant for Stone Pot Bibimbap, which we both love.  Here's Christine admiring the rustic wooden walls.