LIFE is full of little ironies. There I was a few weeks ago talking about Hugh Whatsisname's indiscretion on Sunset Boulevard, and on Wednesday evening at 8.30pm what should happen? I find myself in a massage parlour. The Sunny Paradise Sauna and Massage Parlour, if you must know, on Lockhart Road in Wan Chai.
The Sunny Paradise is not one of those dodgy places with boarded windows from which journalists make careful pre-coitus excuses and leave. It is a truly legitimate establishment which offers essential services as diverse as, obviously, sauna and massage for $310, 'Feat Knead Scrape' ($30), or the tempting 'Clean Ear' ($40). Go on, spoil yourself. Let a complete stranger stick a cotton bud in your ear.
To describe the Sunny Paradise is to describe a building out of its time. Architecturally-speaking, it must have taken its inspiration from great Chinese hotels of the 1960s, of which there are none. The spectacular lobby, with chrome trimmings, plaster-of-Paris fountain and alabaster pillars, is Early Shenzhen Economic Zone Period.
The imitation leather easy chairs I had also seen before, in the foreigners' waiting room at Shanghai Railway Station. Here you can slip out of your shoes and into a pair of plastic sandals provided by the staff, who are all charming, but mostly elderly gentleman in white shirts and bow ties who move at the speed of a tectonic plate.
The other thing about Sunny Paradise is that it provides a wealth of opportunity for cultural misunderstandings; for the kind of Canto-gweilo confrontation I have not been party to since a landlady tried to convince me that a 30 per cent rate rise was in my best interests because it would guarantee my tenancy for a further two years. In the event, my tenancy was guaranteed a further two minutes, long enough to pack a suitcase and do some surreptitious but hopefully expensive damage to the kitchen fittings.
My first Sunny Paradise faux pas began in the changing room and lasted until the spa bath. With no one to turn to for help, I was unable to work out what state of undress was acceptable at Sunny Paradise.
I walked confidently through the swing doors to the bathing area, ripped off my towel, and found myself in the company of 30 or 40 men who were all as naked as the day they were born. I still had my underpants on. Even worse, they were Wing On specials. Ninety-nine dollars for a pack of four and one size only - big enough to cover the modesty of a jumbo jet.
My second free and frank exchange took place with a man whose job it is to scrub you down before you head for the massage area. You lie prone on your back on a psychiatrist's couch, totally in the buff, while he uses a loofah to remove any particles which may have attached themselves to you in the jacuzzi. This, like stomach trouble and prickly heat, might be billed as a genuine Asian experience, but one I was unable to work up much enthusiasm for.
Even without my spectacles, which I had removed because of the steam, this gentleman looked like Igor in shorts. With my spectacles he would have been a real horror. Not the kind of man you would want hosing down your wedding tackle, I reasoned, and headed straight for the massage area.
The massage itself was a life-affirming experience, if only because the pain of it reminded me that I could not possibly be dead.
The lady chosen to administer to me was not, as it turned out, the woman of my dreams. She looked like Adolf Hitler, but with a fuller moustache. There is, I surmised, a shortage at Sunny Paradise of masseuses who look like Claudia Schiffer but have the hands of Bruce Grobbelar.
After 30 minutes of something that just fell short of torture, she asked me why I was not asleep. Sleeping through this would be like sleeping through a Leon Lai concert. At one point she took my legs, threaded them both through the fly-hole in my boxer shorts, bent them backwards behind my head and then forwards through my nostrils and out my ears. That's a slight exaggeration, but it's what it felt like.
Every so often she pushed my head back on to the couch and said 'relaxee, relaxee'. I tried to think of palm-fringed beaches, of gin fizzes at sunset and of maidens with coconut shells where their bras should be. For some reason, all I could conjure up were newsreel images of the Third Reich.
The closest we came to a sexual encounter, since you ask, was when I turned on my back for the second half of the ordeal. The masseuse, no doubt amazed at the oil drum proportions of my pectorals, burst out laughing. She tugged a tuft of something on my chest that resembled hair and said: 'Sexy.' In the sexiness stakes, this was up there with, well, with what? An MTR station? Martin Lee? No, something even worse. Dinner with Damon Hill?
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