Lydia’s Blog

Dear Reader: This is an essay from about a month ago. More Graz action fer yer pleasure…
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For the rest of my life, I imagine I’ll refer to the spring of 2006 as the “Amex Holocaust”. Basically, I am unable to get cash from either my American or German accounts, so I’ve been living off advances from my fee at the opera (which is shamefully little), and you guessed it…the princess card.

The princess card began as a visa application in my mailbox, my freshman year at Oberlin. I applied, was accepted, and got to find out first hand what hypothetical money looks like (and it was fucking sweet).

After dozens of tearful apologies to my stultified parents, we let the princess card expire at about the time I moved to Germany, opting instead for good old-fashioned checking accounts. Mine in Berlin, and a reserve one in West Hartford, where my Mama could throw some green if I ever ended up really, really fucked.

About a year ago, I got sick of calling my Mama for her Amex digits in purchasing big ticket items like intercontinental plane tickets, and decided to get one myself. I was in the U.S. at the time, and it seemed most logical to name old 39 Pheasant as the billing address (because envelopes that end up in 70 Remsen are never seen or heard from again).

Thus, the unintentional rebirth of the princess card. However this time, a guilt that borders on nausea accompanies every use of that slick piece of plastic. It’s a strange little object, both the source (especially now) of nearly every meal and/or tube of toothpaste, and therefore largely what is sustaining me at the moment. It’s also a torture device, a constant, barbed reminder of the fact that, although I’m working my tits off, I’m not making nearly enough to live even a shitty, pale imitation of comfortable middle-class life. As much as I’ve achieved, and as far away from the insidious idleness of West Hartford as I’ve come, I’d be destitute were it not for a sweet, patient, mid-to-upper-middle-class couple back at old 39.

Which brings me to the second part of this post, inexorably intertwined, at least in my mind, to the former part: Therme Nova.

After six weeks of grueling work for which I’m being paid basically enough for pop rocks and jolly ranchers at the nearby deli mart, I got to feeling right shitty. It was Andrew, my main homo des cettes semaines (or whatever), who mentioned to me that I had begun limping several days ago. Frank, our lighting designer, who will, by the end, only have worked a full five days for more than twice what I’ll be making, concurred.

This happened in grad school. I ignored it ended up in physical therapy for several months. Ugh. Well, I looked into chiropractors and massage therapists around Graz. Expensive. Then, coincidentally, a stagehand named Erwin whose one out of five words I can understand mentioned a wellness spa very close to Graz.

I labored over the decision. It would entail a serious misuse of the princess card. More serious than most. Still, my back was looking like an LP left in the back window of a car on a hot day…and I’d already burned through most of my Zanaflex and Advil in these past six weeks.

So I went. One night with full use of all utilities. It was—nice.

I arrived at about four in the afternoon, and went straight to my room. It had a great balcony looking out on the Tirolean Alps, and the quaint yellow houses dotting the mountainsides. I found CNN on the tube (whoa Mexican-Americans…big day, n’est-ce pas?) and contemplated my next move.

After sliding into my complimentary robe, I padded off toward the spa, which is in a different building from the hotel. They provide a little choo-choo monorail so that you don’t have to actually wear clothing to go outside.

I’d been in something like the Therme Nova once before (a hotel in Dessau about five years ago). Yeah. Nakedness + Unselfconscious comfort = Not exactly American. I did my best.

The robe came off, and I shimmied my unbathed ass under an outdoor shower so as to enter the 95-degree-celsius sauna (that’s fucking hot, to you imperial-system-addictees).

For some reason, I always forget how much I hate mega-hot saunas until I’m in there. I come from the side of my family that turns into a panting immobile heap when confronted with extreme heat. It’s funny, because when I’m in there, I actually can’t sweat. It’s like my sweat glands are so shocked and resentful by the affront, that they go on strike, leaving parts of my face, and definitely my knees, to cook—without preventative marination as it were.

After only a few minutes, I’d had enough, feeling potential blisters beginning to raise under the skin on my knees. Just as I moved to leave, a relatively well-muscled (for his curiously unidentifiable age), tall, mustachioed, beef-jerky-colored German man strode into the scorching wooden box. He’d hung a no entry sign on the glass door.

No exit was also implied.

“Gruss Gott” he said to the twelve or so of us who sat or lay there sweating ourselves into unconsciousness.

“Gruss Gott” the others chirped back, in an odd nude custom the charm of which I still fail to find.

Then, the conker-colored man began what I can only qualify as the strangest ritual I’ve ever been unwittingly forced to participate in. First, he threw more water or wood or oil or whatever the hell you throw on the hot-makin’ apparatus in a sauna to suddenly make the temperature jump up 10 degrees centigrade. Then, he threw a festively colored towel over one arm (the long way) like a wing and began to slowly turn around the cramped space…creating a dry, unbearably hot “breeze” in the sauna.

I could feel my eyes begin to sizzle…the tears bubbling at my lids like that place where egg whites touch grease in a frying pan.

He proceeded to enact a series of little magic tricks with the towel, including flicking the damned think hard over each of our heads, so that a rush of boiling air strikes you all at once.

It was all but impossible to bear. My head began to swim. I tried to focus my eyes on something, anything, to keep from fainting. After a few minutes, I realized that the point I’d chosen was the oddly-colored scrotum of the Mediterranean man sitting immediately across from me, who was apparently growing a bit appreciative of the attention. I snapped my gaze away, head reeling.

So. (bright red mullet)

Many. (saggy tattooed tits)

Naked. (complexion like rawhide chew toy)

Austrians. (sweat dripping from ungroomed pubes)

I heard applause. The others in the sauna were applauding the beef-jerky-colored man, who was turning and bowing, displaying his relatively well formed buttcheeks not unflatteringly. The sound pulled me out of my faint. After the applause died down, he asked his audience if they thought they could handle more.

“Ja”, I heard a woman say on my right. Her motion was seconded. And then thirded. And so on.

I stood up, wiped the bubbling sweat (or drool?) out from between my tits, and marched out the door, without a word.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.