I’ll tell you a secret about working in a massage parlour: it’s a lot of waiting around, usually late at night. We’d wait, half a dozen of us, in the dressing room as the evening wore on. On edge and exhausted in equal parts, we perched on the low-slung couch, adjusted the straps of our babydolls, listlessly fluffed our hair, ready to spring into action.
Girl, I’m going insane.
Oh please, I’m already there.
Then, we’d hear the front door open, the low murmur of a man’s voice, the chirp of the receptionist from the parlour’s reception desk. Some of us would circle the dressing room door, ready in case he wanted to see the lineup, curious if he had booked someone specific. Then, the methodical thwack of the receptionist’s pumps would sound down the long hallway as the girls swivelled towards her from their respective stations—pulling towels from the dryer, applying lipstick at the vanity, melting into the couch in a cloud of cigarettes and Pink Sugar perfume.
The receptionist would thrust four twenty-dollar bills into someone’s hand; maybe mine, maybe not. “You’re up. Sixty minutes in room four.” For the rest of the girls, the night wore on, dark and still.
Honestly, that’s most of working in a massage parlour: waiting around, wondering how much money you will—or won’t— make on any given shift. I know because I made my living that way for five years.
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I was a university dropout in my early twenties when I started that gig, struggling to find my place in Toronto, a city where squalor and decadence collided behind the glass and steel of the downtown skyline. To get by, I took a job at a massage parlour in the northwest corner of the city, a place where factories stretched several blocks, separated by the odd strip mall full of nail salons, carpet dealers, banquet halls that morphed into after-hours clubs if you knew the right people. The garish yellow “M” of McDonald’s arched high over everything, like a gateway to another world. Because of the way Toronto zoning bylaws work, most body rub parlours are relegated to this part of the city, and after dark, “massage” signs wink and flash from almost every corner. Finch Alley, some people call it.
My regular shift at the parlour ran from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., and I worked anywhere between three and six shifts a week, depending on how the cash was flowing. It was a job that was unbearably tangible at times, an onslaught of surgical scars and sun-damaged chests I rubbed oil over, the soft pallor of flesh under my hands that rarely saw the light of day. Yet it was also predicated on a precariously suspended reality, one I had to maintain with absolute precision to do my job well, to pretend that a profound mutual desire could be found for the low, low price of $80 in a strip mall off a freeway. In real life I wouldn’t dare be so giving. I can’t say I was particularly good at any of this by the time 2 a.m. rolled around, makeup melting off my face, puffiness blooming under my eyes, a rapidly dwindling patience for the reassurance some men desperately sought: So, how was it for you?
The rabbit warren of hallways and thinly-walled rooms felt insular at that hour, the click of stilettos on laminate less urgent than during the day. A dampness I always associated with the night shift hung in the air, mingling with the smell of smoke and coconut air freshener. Night shift did not discriminate, and the men who wandered in after dark were as varied as they come: they were travelling on business or headed home from factory shifts, students taking a break from all-nighters, bros on their way back from the bar. They were tall and short and young and old, of every race and cultural background imaginable. You could never predict who would come in, except to say with certainty that they would want a level of womanly validation I was simply too tired to give. Half-dressed and exhausted, I often didn’t have the patience for their hands on me, the array of intimate requests they crept in seeking—touch me, kiss me, make me an entirely different world than the one outside these doors—when all I craved was the privacy of my own bed. My world outside the parlour was small—just a ground floor apartment in midtown Toronto that overlooked an alley, while a radiator clanked and hissed at all hours of the night and day. But it was a place where my thoughts, and my body, were my own.
Despite the demands of the job, there was a stillness to the nights I found alluring. There was a poise to the velvety darkness of parking lots, the soft buzz of neon lights shaped like palm trees, as if they were also waiting at attention for the inevitable flurry of activity that punctuated those long periods of quiet. People’s needs at 2 a.m. are equal parts fervent and fundamental, somehow stripped of all pretense by the cover of darkness. What do you need if you’re out seeking services at night? Food, sex, shelter. The staunch of a wound. Being part of
