Valentine’s Day, 2002. 5 am. Trudging out of the Downtown
office of The Brooklyn Papers are the three remaining members
of the production team. They’ve been on the job for about 19
hours, been awake for close to 21, and are now headed home to
bed after a day and night of computer breakdowns, missed deadlines
and utter pandemonium.
In short, they’ve had a bad day.
Still, one member of the group has a facial expression unseen
on all the others as they piled into a cab. While they silently
stare bleary-eyed ahead, he sits there with what could only be
described as an ear-to-ear grin. Something unthinkable by those
that surround him, including the cab driver who looks at him
incredulously.
"What the hell are you smiling about?" the hack asks.
His answer is brief.
"Tranquility," he says as he settles back into his
seat and gently closes the car door.
It is now 9 am. The alarm sounds and he heads out of bed and
dives face first into a cup of coffee.
"Gotta get the blood flowing," he thinks before taking
the mug with him into the shower.
Less than four hours of sleep does not sit well with him. He’s
used to at least eight, and he’s a bit of a grump as he heads
out to the car. He turns the key and turns up Howard Stern on
the radio. He knows instantly it’s a rerun when he hears the
cackle of Jackie Martling behind the morning man’s voice. (This
is a good thing, as he feels the show’s lost some steam since
the "Joke Man" left some time ago.) The coffee starts
to kick in. Things are looking up. Tranquility is near.
The drive to Bay Ridge from Carroll Gardens takes just under
10 minutes on this sunny morning, when the city-bound Gowanus
Expressway is a parking lot. He zips by the traffic like a Staten
Island-bound pace car, gets off at 86th Street just as the towers
of the Verrazano Bridge come into view, takes it down to Ridge
Boulevard (where there aren’t any meters) and finds the nearest
parking spot he can near 84th Street and Third Avenue – the home
of Pilo Arts.
His body still aches terribly from the day before. His head
is pounding from a hangover that can only be brought on by 19
hours of staring at a 19-inch monitor from two feet away. Everything
inside of him is crying out to just get 20 more minutes of sleep
right here in the car. But he is undaunted. He still moves up
and out of the vehicle. His legs are slowly being pulled uphill,
one at a time. The only thing powering them is one thought –
tranquility.
A year prior, he had paid a visit to Pilo Arts – which at the
time was a bustling hair salon with a spa downstairs undergoing
renovations. Times, of course, have changed. Things have happened.
The salon he was buzzed into wasn’t quite the same. It wasn’t
as loud. It was quietly humming. But he is still greeted with
a smile and the offer of a tasty beverage before being escorted
downstairs to the now redone spa reception area. And there, he
finds what he had been searching for – the whole reason he was
smiling the night before when everyone else was so glum.
His masseuse immediately assesses his situation. He hadn’t slept.
It is clear he is hopped up on coffee. And it is certain he didn’t
brush his hair, which is still wet from the shower.
Seeing that he is scheduled for a sports massage – one designed
to get the client ready for a big event to come in the ensuing
hours – she offers him a cup of hot herbal tea to calm him down,
and suggests a different treatment. For him, deep stretching
of muscles is definitely out of the question. While he sips his
tea, she offers a more relaxing Swedish massage. He gratefully
accepts, and she goes to work.
Within minutes, he is out cold, sleeping soundly as his muscles
soak in the finger, fist and forearm work of his masseuse. He
wakes after what seems like no time at all to be flipped over
like a flapjack, and the process starts all over again.
The massage leaves him loosened like rubber, but still a bit
groggy. Not even an hour-long massage can cure the ills caused
by a day and night of work and little sleep, so he plods into
a second room for a "four-layer facial."
His face is steamed and exfoliated and blackheads are removed.
This is the hard part. Then comes the easy part – a massage of
the face and shoulders followed by the application of a heated
seaweed mask that seeps into his pores for the next 20 minutes.
His snores can be heard by other clients, outside the room.
But after the treatment he is alive again. His brunch order
is taken and he heads back upstairs for a manicure and pedicure.
He sips a mimosa recently handed to him.
Upstairs is now a bit busier and the conversation with his manicurist
is pleasant. She tells him he has nice nails, and he doesn’t
need any polish. He agrees. At last, his hosts have heard something
out of his mouth other than a snore.
The pedicure, on a heated, vibrating chair with a tub of percolating
hot water at the feet, was pleasant, and again, he was sent to
dreamland.
He wakes up to a greeting from his hair stylist who begins a
discussion on what they should do with his head. They agree upon
a trim and some lowlights to tuck away the few grays he’s gained
since the previous year. His head is massaged as it’s washed.
His hair gets expertly cut and subtly colored as promised. He
gets talked into the tweezing of a few of his eyebrows. He’s
sent downstairs to a special room with a comfortable couch to
eat his brunch – a room which was not here the year before. Music
plays lightly as he lounges on a couch. His omelet is served.
Coffee is now acceptable. He slurps it down as he finishes his
eggs. Some four hours after he woke up, as he sits there free
of emotional disturbance, he realizes he’s now ready to start
the day.
He is successfully tranquilized.
Every day should be like this one.
See Pilo Arts in the Spa Directory.
