It was a Thursday evening in early September when it happened. A friend and I were one, maybe two bottles of malbec in the hole, and he just so happened to live right above a bathhouse. We’d never actually been inside a bathhouse, but for months we would watch out his window as varying types of men entered through a nondescript door on the corner of the block. Young. Old. Skinny. Fat. You name it and we saw it. They would enter, vanish, and reemerge from the nondescript door—it became a fascination for us. On this particular night we found ourselves a little extra curious, and living on the edge. Liquid courage down the hatch and a crisp $20 bill in hand, two doe-eyed twenty- somethings entered the infamous nondescript door hell bent on discovering the truth behind it.
Full of confidence and clearly on a mission, we opened it to reveal a slender counter and…another door? Not what we expected, but maybe that was a good thing. We flashed our IDs and paid the $7 locker fee (no, we didn’t spring for our own room), and the second door buzzed, giving us complete access to what the gentleman at the counter referred to as the “spa.” We quickly realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
We found our locker (which was easy) and, like two timid high schoolers, we donned our tiny white towels and headed further into the unknown. What were the rules? Would we run into people we knew? How far were we willing to go? And most importantly, why were there coffee and snacks sitting out all nonchalantly on a table? (Did people really eat here?)
The club, excuse me…the spa was pretty crowded that night. We passed a group of older gentlemen lounging in their very own tiny white towels watching porn and slowly stroking them- selves, completely unfazed and seemingly unaware of each other’s presence. Weird, but okay.
We continued through the maze and realized that, once inside, every doorway would most likely lead to other men in varying states of undress, doing a wide variety of things to either themselves or a willing participant. We also noticed that no matter who you were, you could easily get lucky if you prowled long enough or stuck your peter through a nearby gloryhole. Thoroughly lost, we parked ourselves in a steamy, cubism-inspired room with a few older gentlemen (most of the men were older, actually) who seemed chill. We sat for a while in silence just processing, feeling their eyes on our skin when suddenly, like a silent Batman signal in the sky, people began to migrate. Like a flock of geese, people moved from their comfortable positions around the spa and filtered into another room…so we followed.
We shouldn’t have followed.
Blithely unaware of what was happening, we were seated in a relatively small room with a large mass of men and a single stage. A light came on, a man stepped on stage, and immediately we knew what was about to happen. This man was about to jerk-off for our entertainment and enjoyment. Please answer me this: How does one politely exit a room during a performance when you are inconveniently seated smack in the middle of things? The answer is you don’t. And you can’t unsee some things.
When the show was over, we surmised that we’d met our due diligence, so there was no need to stick around for finger foods and polite chitchat. The only questions that remained were where was our locker, again? and more importantly where was the exit? In our blind and reckless exploration, we’d failed to leave a trail of cookie crumbs and had no earthly idea where we were inside the spa.
Quick, like a bunny, we moved from hallway to hallway. Whoops, that room seems occupied by three dudes and a swing. Nope, the dude on all fours in that room clearly doesn’t have an exit sign above him. Door after door and hallway after hallway we searched for our locker, and when we finally found it without words, we looked at each other and immediately felt at peace again. We were so close and could see the nondescript door that lead back to civilization.
We took the stairs two at a time until we were back in the confines of my friend’s apartment without so much as a word. For a minute, we just sat on the couch until finally we burst into laughter. Did that really just happen? Oh, it did. But as we sat there giggling like school girls about every detail and weird-looking penis we saw, I realized something—bathhouses aren’t that bad. No one was pushy, we weren’t forced to do anything we didn’t want to do, and for the most part we were largely left to our own devices.
And while I don’t think I will ever do it again (you can say what you want about it), I also realized that the experience will translate very differently for every individual, but you can actually have quite a bit of fun if you’re the type of person who enjoys that type of thing. Hot damn.
