by Alex Gunn
On arrival at the tiny office there is no mistaking what Dr Chan is all about. The room is dominated by a massive, reassuringly medical, diagram of a spine which is hanging on the wall. Next to this, mounted on a small table, is a life size model of a spine in shiny cream coloured plastic, or at least I hope it’s plastic. Taking up most of the room is a large table with proportions that are suspiciously human-like. I carefully avoid the table and sit to one side on a small normal looking wooden chair where Dr Chan has started gently pressing his thumbs into my back and neck.
I am instantly impressed by the warmth and dryness of his hands. It’s not that my hands are cold and sweaty, you understand, but considering the circumstance (rubbing a man’s neck) his hands just feel exceptionally warm and dry. I’m sure that if I had to rub a man’s neck I’d be a lot more nervous and therefore my hands would be a lot more sweaty.
As I sit flinching slightly, and sometimes a lot, I wonder whether he used to have clammy hands when he first started, when he would have been more nervous and less self assured. I wonder whether his hands got drier and warmer with experience and practice, or whether I’ve got this whole warm hands thing the wrong way round. Perhaps he always had exceptionally warm and dry hands and was told he should go into this line of work because of this unusual gift. Perhaps it was an astute observation made by a forward thinking school careers adviser. But then how would he know, unless young Chan had been rubbing his neck!?
I try not to think about young Chan’s school days with the sinister, yet insightful, neck rub seeking careers adviser, so I consider the other jobs which involve one man rubbing the neck of another man. I get as far as homosexual porn star and tattoo artist before I realise that I will have to try really hard to stop thinking about Dr Chan rubbing my neck and all its weird connotations. I don’t really want to be thinking about rubbing men’s necks at all, so I force myself to think of something else. But it’s really difficult. Just when I think I’ve stopped, I think of another job which involves men rubbing each others necks. Wrestlers for example, although it’s more grappling than rubbing I guess, so that doesn’t count. Although I’m sure you could work in a sneaky rub from time to time. Hairdressers, Carnival Face Painters, Male Nurses, Costume Fitters. Like heroin, once you start it’s just very difficult to stop. Tailors.
In an attempt to break free of the “curse of the rubbing neck” let me tell you a little about Dr Chan.
Apart from having very warm hands, Dr Chan looks mean and joyless. He also looks about twelve years old. He looks like a mean, twelve year old Chinese assassin. It’s a bit of a shock isn’t it, as I bet like me, you imagined someone a lot older and kinder looking. But, that’s what he looks like.
He doesn’t look like he does humour very well, or laughing or even faint smiling, which I suppose in his line of work is okay. He’d be the kind of young man that would make you feel miserable in The House of Fun at the fairground. He should be an extra in a film called Young Ninja Assassin, or better still he could star in a film called Young Ninja Assassin Fixes Your Back as they could cut down on production costs and just film him going about his daily business.
After some time, which felt like about three hours but was probably more like five minutes, he stopped rubbing my neck and poking my back. He moved gracefully around the human sized table over to the large medical diagram and unexpectedly snatched up the plastic spine, pointed it at the picture of the spine and said “You have damage, here, to your spy.” He then proceeded to use the plastic spine (pronounced “spy”) as a pointer. He was talking about my spine, whilst pointing to a giant picture of a spine using a life size plastic spine as a pointer. How spine orientated is that!
It all looked extremely funny but at the same time slightly unnerving. It seemed odd that he snatched up the spine in such a cavalier manner, especially as he’s so serious and mean looking. It would be a bit like Don Corleone snatching up a handful of modelling balloons and making a poodle.
Surely spine etiquette is covered at Spine School. During the lesson “Introducing the Plastic Spine” you would imagine a serious minded lecturer in a huge lecture hall full of keen and warm handed students, talking through the various ways that you can introduce “the plastic spine” in your consultations. At the end of the lecture he would jauntily cross the dais, snatch up the spine, point it towards a sleeping student in the first row and say “whatever you do, don’t use the plastic spine as a pointer” and the entire hall would fill with relieved laughter and applause.
You would imagine that had the young Dr Chan behaved in such a cavalier manner in front of his lecturers he would have had the spine smacked out of his hand immediately, accompanied by the phrase, “don’t use the plastic spine as a pointer.” (I just couldn’t resist throwing in that phrase again. I might use it again later on as it’s such a belter, I might even adopt it as a catch phrase and sprinkle it liberally in conversation).
He returned to the medical diagram.
“You have damage here and here, L5 and L4 (pronounced “ew5” and “ew4”)” he said waving his plastic spine around with increasing unrestrained abandon.
“Please, you ge on tabew, take shir off”
He put the spine down (at last) and I took my shirt off and got on the table. Having never had a massage before or anything remotely like a massage, let alone alternative Chinese Medicine, I was unsure of what was going on and what to do next. Which way up do I lie? Face up or on my front? Do I just sit at the edge waiting to be invited to lie down or just lie down?
Before we go any further let me just confirm that, yes, I’ve never, ever had a massage. The few people who I have mentioned this to seem incredulous, almost insulted. It’s as though everybody that lives here has to have a massage, as though it’s an obligatory part of ex-pat Chiang Mai life.
I met one chap who has a massage every day! When I nearly choked with disbelief he got very uppity and said that if he could he would have two massages a day. “Wow” I stammered genuinely amazed. This is so far off my radar of understanding that I just stared at him blankly, trying to imagine a life which consists of lying on a table while strangers rub you.
I always wonder whether they actually mean massage or whether it’s code for something else. Even I, in my archaic, old fashioned world of listening to the radio, growing tomato plants and not having a “smart phone” have picked up that “massage” is sometimes code for sex. Perhaps this is what he meant, that he would have sex twice a day if he could. In which case, why is he telling me?
Realising the level of hostility and incredulity that not having massages seems to elicit and then having to endure a long speech about the wondrous life giving properties of some Thai woman rubbing your back, I have recently taken to pretending that I have massages. Not in any elaborate, showey offee way, but in a way that I hope leaves casual acquaintances thinking that I am not averse to the occasional rub. When they launch into the life giving properties speech I nod sagely and try to look like a man that has frequent and non sexual massages; a man that takes his Chiang Mai massage responsibilities seriously.
I sit uncomfortably on the edge of the table feeling about six years old. Dr Chan is fiddling about pulling stuff out of drawers. He takes off his jacket and I wonder for an awful second whether he is going to try to have sex with me. Actually it’s a lot worse. He asks me how long I have had this condition and how it happened.
“I have had a bad back on and off for just over ten years.”
He is noticeably put out.
“Why you not come to Dr Chan?” he says.
I kind of saw this coming but don’t have any answer. What do I say now? That I’m very lazy? That I think alternative Chinese medicine is probably baloney, memorably described by a good friend and colleague in a state of heightened frustration to a startled first year undergraduate class as “fur lined, ocean going nonsense.” Considering the circumstance I decide not to say this b
ut mutter something about being busy.
“You cannot be too busy to look after yourself,” says Dr Chan sounding like my mum and my wife all at the same time. He also hasn’t forgotten that I haven’t answered the second part of his question, the wily young fox.
“How this happen?” He demands in a way that makes me feel that he is somehow personally affronted that I hurt my back, as though he made it and gave it to me and I’ve just carelessly broken it.
“I was pretending to be a sea monster with my son and I fell out of his bunk bed.”
This is greeted by silence, and then more silence. Dr Chan doesn’t respond but busies himself folding up small white hand towels. Clearly the idea of a fellow man pretending to be a sea monster is too much to take in, a double affront to both assassins and alternative practitioners the world over.
“Put head on this, fay down” he orders, clearly not impressed with my ability to be a sea monster.
With some considerable care I ease myself face down on his table with my forehead pressing down on the towels. I don’t know whether to let my arms flop over the side of the table of whether I should lie them upturned next to me on the table. As if able to read my mind, which for all I know maybe part of the treatment, he says “Arms on table.”
He begins his alternative treatment which seems suspiciously like what I imagine a massage to be like, except a lot more painful. It feels as though he knows exactly what to press and rub to cause maximum pain.
It feels like the obligatory torture scene in every James Bond movie, so quite naturally and without thinking, I say the famous Bond line from Goldfinger.
“Do you expect me to talk” to which he is supposed to say...
“No Mr Bond I expect you to die.”
And then we would both have a jolly good laugh about it.
He would then say “Okay Mr Gunn all fixed, you can get up and go home and have a nice cup of tea.”
But sadly none of this happens. As you can probably imagine he didn’t say anything. He just kept on torturing me like a very boring and unfunny James Bond torture scene. Perhaps he’s more into the later Bond films. Or perhaps he’s not.
After literally minutes of this pain I decide I must do something. I decide to tell him this really hurts. I mean it really does hurt to the extent that I am thinking of getting up and getting out. I decide I cannot take any more.
“This is really hurting,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Yes,” he says. Although when he says it it just sounds like “ye” without the “s” on the end.
Now what, I think to myself? Do I fight back? Do I let him carry on hurting me? Surely this can’t be normal? I then remember that he is an alternative practitioner, so this might well be very normal in his weird alternative pain inducing world.
I really want to punch him hard in the face. In fact I feel like spinning round and getting him in a head lock, which I think I could probably just manage to do by using the element of surprise and squeezing his little mean Chinese head till it went bright red and shouting in his face “not so bloody clever now are we Mr Chan.” But I decide this would not be a good idea and probably ruin the atmosphere.
As I’m thinking about how to get my own back on him he then says “you have many blockages, here, here, here and here.” Each time he says “here” he presses a part of my shoulder which shoots with pain.
“You have bad blockages for 10 years,” he says. “Very bad,” he adds.
“Yes,” I reply, not at all sure what the hell he is talking about. I’m not a drain.
“Your energy has been blocked,” he tells me.
There isn’t a lot I can think of saying to that so I just grunt like a man who has had serious energy problems and multiple blockages. I want to explain to him that I haven’t felt very blocked, that all this energy rubbish is fur lined ocean going nonsense, but I’m in too much pain being unblocked and re-energised.
Whatever he is doing feels pretty heavy duty. Whatever was blocked clearly needs some major unblocking. He is applying the full force of a small, mean looking, Chinese man on parts of my back and shoulders and causing me more pain than I have ever felt in my life. I was in more pain than when my sister kicked my teeth out whilst practising hand stands, or when I fell off the top of Hadleigh Castle just after my mum shouted out “don’t climb up there or you will fall off and hurt yourself.”
I wondered what Mrs Pudding would have made of all this. That wasn’t her real name. I called her Mrs Pudding as she looked like a pudding.
Now I’ll have to tell you about Mrs Pudding.
After about five years of putting up with my occasional bad backs my wife took me to the local Health Centre (it used to be called “the doctors” in my day). After talking to an incredibly young frightened looking doctor who really did look twelve years old, he hastily admitted to me that he didn’t know anything about backs but would refer me to the Health Centre’s lady who came in to see people with bad backs. I’ve no idea what training she had and judging by her treatment neither had she. It was fantastically funny and gloriously useless.
She was a very plump, very small, rosy cheeked middle aged lady who was clearly of a nervous disposition. The first session consisted of asking me to sit down and move different parts of my body while she sat a very respectable 10 feet away the other side of the room making notes. She would say things like
“Mr Gunn, could you raise your left arm straight in front of you parallel to the floor”
“Yes, I can Mrs Pudding,” I would say (although I wouldn’t call her Mrs Pudding) and I would carry out the basic movement.
This went on for the full 40 minutes. The next session was much the same, except this time she very gingerly manipulated my limbs herself like I was a giant useless puppet. Her methods were never revealed nor discussed and I realised when I arrived a bit early for my next session that her other patients were about a hundred and fifty years old. They were the fragile end of elderly. They were the sort of people who did need someone else to manipulate their creaky old limbs.
At the end of each session she would ask how I was feeling and I would say “much better, thank you Mrs Pudding,” although, of course, I would only think the last bit.
She would reply with a rather coy “good, see you next week Mr Gunn.”
There was something about it all that I rather liked. Despite the fact that as a treatment for bad backs it was way beyond useless, it was at the same time strangely therapeutic. It managed to give the impression of progress and improvement without actually doing anything, which we were both keen to promote.
I liked the fact that I could do everything that was asked of me as it all consisted of doing basic movements or even better, just sitting there while she moved my limbs and head through very basic movements. I liked the fact that I didn’t have to worry about going, as I quickly understood that there would never be anything faintly troubling about the whole process. These are the kind of challenges we should have more often in life. It also amused me that two grown people could spend 40 minutes every week and do something so absolutely and unashamedly pointless and bizarre. What’s more, my wife, who is always keen for me to go to meet with doctors rather than explain ailments to her, couldn’t be happier. Everyone’s a winner in the crazy world of Pudding Therapy.
The treatment slowly, very slowly, built up to a great crescendo where she would not only move my limbs, but would inexplicably hold them to her. For example, I would be sitting down and she would stand behind me, lift my left arm, pull it very slightly, although she was worried that it might come off, and just hold it for much longer than seemed necessary to achieve anything at all.
Once, whilst I was sitting down and she was standing behind me she held my head between both her hands as though she was going to try to squeeze my brains out, which would have been a surprise to all of us, but instead she very
slowly moved my head to the right and held it very tightly to her not inconsiderable chest. She had me in a head lock. It was the kind of movement that mothers do with young children when they are relieved that they have escaped death. I daren’t breathe and wanted to laugh so much. I could hear her little plump puddingy heart beating away very fast indeed. Believe me, it was unbearably funny. I wanted to laugh so much that in the end I couldn’t hold it in any more but managed to pretend that I was sneezing and coughing.
Although we both regained our composure and I apologised several times for sneezing and coughing, in case she just thought that I was laughing, we both knew that I had broken the magic.
She never did it again and I realised that everything would just be a watered down version of holding my head tightly to her bosoms, so I stopped going.
Incredibly many months later she wrote me a note which I still have. It simply says
Dear Mr Gunn
Please tell me why you stopped attending my sessions. I need to close your file and submit a final report.
Yours sincerely
Mrs Pudding
And that was it. Case closed. I wondered what the other reports were like:
Session 1
Mr Gunn is very good at lifting his left arm up in the air. He is also able to lift his right arm in the air. He can move his head and wobble it from side to side all by himself. With practice he might be able to move about just like a real man.
Note to self: Aim to hold his head tightly to bosoms in session 8.
Signed
Mrs Pudding.
I would pay the Health Centre good money to see the real reports. What an earth could she be writing? I’m still thinking about what to write back, most of it far too stupid or rude or immature to actually send.
It was the polar opposite of what I was experiencing at the hands of the sadistic and deranged and surprisingly strong Dr Chan who now actually had his knee in the small of my back to give himself extra leverage with which to punch my shoulders. Bastard.