Footwork

Don't laugh, but in aromatherapy they warn you never to light a lemon-cinnamon candle at the same time you light a clove candle and a cedar-nutmeg candle. They just don't tell you why....

In feng shui they say that just by putting a bed in the wrong spot you can focus enough chi to kill a person. You can give a late-term abortion with just acupuncture. You can use crystals or aura work to give people skin cancer.

Don't laugh, but there are back-alley ways you can turn anything New Age into a killing tool.

Your last week in massage school they teach you never to work the transverse reflex zone at the heel of the foot or the arch of the left-foot dorsum. And especially not the outer leftmost aspect. But they don't tell you why. This is the difference between therapists who work the light side versus the dark side of the industry.

You go to school to study reflexology. It's the science of manipulating the human foot to heal or stimulate certain parts of the body. It's based on the idea that your body is divided into 10 different energy meridians. Your big toe, for example, it's connected straight to your head. To cure dandruff you massage the little spot just behind your big toenail. To cure a sore throat you massage the middle joint of the big toe. This isn't the kind of health care covered by any insurance plan. It's like being a doctor but without the income. The kind of people who want the space between each toe rubbed to cure brain cancer, they don't tend to have loads of money. Don't laugh, but even with years of experience manipulating people's feet, you'll still find yourself poor and rubbing the feet of people who never made income their top priority.

One day you see a girl you went to massage school with. This girl, she's your age. You wore beads together. You two braided dried sage and burned it to cleanse your energy field. The two of you were tie-dyed and barefoot and young enough to feel noble while you rubbed the feet of dirty homeless people who came into the school's free practice clinic.

That was years and years ago.

You, you're still poor. Your hair has started to break off at the scalp. From poor diet or gravity, people think you're frowning even when you're not.

This girl you went to school with, you see her coming out of a posh midtown hotel. The doorman holds the door open as she sweeps out swinging furs and wearing high heels that no reflexologist would ever strap her feet inside of.

While the doorman is flagging her a cab, you go close enough to say, "Lentil?"

The woman turns. It's her. Real diamonds sparkle at her throat. Her long hair shines, thick, heaving in waves of red and brown. The air around her smells soft as roses and lilac. Her fur coat. Her hands in leather gloves, the leather smooth and pale and nicer than the skin on your own face. The woman turns and lifts her sunglasses to rest on the crown of her hair. She looks at you and says, "Do I know you?"

You went to school together. When you were young--younger.

The doorman holds the cab's door open. And the woman says that of course she remembers. She looks at a wristwatch, blinding bright with diamonds in the afternoon sun, and says in 20 minutes she needs to be across town. She asks, "Can you ride along?"

The two of you get into the back of the cab, and the woman hands the doorman a $20 bill. He touches his cap and says it's always such a pleasure to see her.

The woman tells the cabdriver the next address, a place uptown, and the cab swings into traffic.

Don't laugh, but this woman--Lentil, your old friend--loops one fur-coat arm out of the handle of her purse and snaps the purse open. Inside is stuffed nothing but cash. Layers of $50 and $100 bills. With a gloved hand she digs through these and finds a cell phone.

To you she says, "This won't take a minute."

Next to her your Indian-printed cotton wrap skirt, flip-flop sandals and brass-bell necklace don't look chic and ethnic anymore. The kohl around your eyes and the faded henna designs on the back of your hands, they make you look like you never take a bath. Next to her diamond-stud earrings, your favorite dangling silver earrings could be thrift store Christmas tree ornaments.

Into the cell phone she says, "I'm en route." She says, "I can take the three o'clock but only for half an hour." She says good-bye and hangs up.

She touches your hand with a soft, smooth glove and says you look good. She asks what you're doing lately.

Oh, the same old, same old, you tell her. Manipulating feet. You've built a good list of repeat clients.

Lentil chews her bottom lip, looking at you, and she says, "So you're still into reflexology?"

And you say yeah. You don't see how you'll ever retire, but it pays the bills.

She looks at you as the cab goes a whole city block, not saying a word. Then she asks if you're free for the next hour. She asks if you'd like to make some money, tax free, doing a four-handed foot manipulation for her next client. All you'd have to do is one foot.

You've never done reflexology with a partner, you tell her.

"One hour," she says, "and we get $2,000."

You ask, is this legal?

And Lentil says, "Two thousand, each."

You ask, just for a foot massage?

"Another thing," she says. "Don't call me Lentil." She says, "When we get there my name is Angelique."

Don't laugh, but this is real. The dark side of reflexology. Of course you knew some aspects of it. You knew that by working the plantar surface of the big toe you could make someone constipated. By working the ankle around the top of the foot you could give them diarrhea. By working the inside surface of the heel you could make someone impotent or give them a migraine. But none of this would make you money, so why bother?

The cab pulls up to a carved pile of stone, the embassy of some Middle Eastern oil economy. A uniformed guard opens the door, and Lentil gets out. You get out. Inside the lobby another guard wands you with a metal detector, looking for guns, knives, whatever. Another guard makes a phone call from a desk topped with a smooth slab of white stone. Another guard looks inside Lentil's purse, pushing aside the money to find nothing else.

The doors to an elevator open, and another guard waves you both inside. Lentil says, "Just do what I do." She says, "This is the easiest money you'll ever make."

Don't laugh, but in school you'd hear the rumors. About how a good reflexologist might be lured away to the dark side. To work just certain pleasure centers on the sole of the foot. To give what people only whispered and giggled about--"foot jobs."

The elevator opens onto a long corridor that leads only to one set of double doors. The walls are polished white stone. The floor, stone. The double doors are frosted glass and open to a room where a man sits at a white desk. He and Lentil kiss each other on the cheek.

The man behind the desk, he looks at you but talks only to Lentil. He calls her Angelique. Behind him another set of double doors opens into a bedroom. The man waves the two of you through, but he stays behind, locking the doors. He locks you inside.

Inside the bedroom a man lies facedown on a huge round bed with white silk sheets. He wears shiny blue silk pajamas, and his bare feet hang off one edge of the bed. Angelique tugs off one of her gloves. She takes off the other glove, and you both kneel in the deep carpet and take a foot.

Instead of a face, all you can see is his grease-combed black hair and his big ears, fuzzed with tufts of black hair. The rest of his head has sunk into the white silk pillow.

Don't laugh, but those rumors are true. By pressing where Angelique pressed, by working the genital reflex zone on the plantar side of the heel, she had the man moaning into his pillow. Before your hands are even tired the man is bellowing, soaked in sweat, the blue silk pasted to his back and legs. When he's silent, when you can't tell if he's even breathing, Angelique whispers that it's time to go.

The man at the desk gives you each $2,000, cash.

Outside on the street a guard flags a cab for Angelique.

Getting into the backseat, Angelique hands you a business card. It's the phone number for a holistic healing clinic. Under the number, handwritten, it says, "Ask for Lenny."

The soft leather glove of her hand, the roses of her perfume, the sound of her voice, it all says "Call me."

People have a lot of reasons for getting into giving foot jobs. The idea that you can give your family a better life. You can give your mom and dad a little comfort and security. A car, maybe. A condo on the beach in Florida.

The day you gave your folks the keys to that condo, that was the happiest day of your life. That day they cried and admitted they never thought their baby would ever make a living just rubbing people's stinky feet. That's a day you'll pay for for the rest of your life.

Don't laugh, but it's not illegal. You're doing a simple foot manipulation. Nothing sexual happens except that your clients have an orgasm that leaves them too weak to walk for the next couple of days. Men and women, it doesn't matter. You work the right spot on their feet and they come hard as a seizure. So hard there's a smell when they lose control of their bowels. So hard most clients can only look at you, drool running out of one corner of their mouth, and motion with a trembling finger for you to take the stack of $100 bills on the dresser or the coffee table.

Lenny calls from the clinic, and you get on a chartered jet to London. Lenny calls (continued on page 142)Foot work(continued from page 110) from the clinic, and you fly to Hong Kong. You realize the clinic is just Lenny, a guy with a Russian accent who lives in a suite in the Park Hampton Hotel. You give him half your income.

Don't laugh, but the downside is you never have time to go shopping. The money just piles up. Your uniform is a fur coat. To fit into this new world you get good gold and platinum jewelry. You keep a head of perfect glossy hair. Sitting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, you see a few kids you went to reflexology college with now wearing Armani suits and Chanel cocktail dresses. Kids who used to be vegan bicyde commuters, now you see them climbing into and out of limousines. You see them eating alone at small tables in hotel dining rooms, drinking cocktails at the bar in private airports, waiting for the next chartered jet.

What used to be idealistic dreamers, now lured into professional foot work.

These hippie dreadlocked earth mothers and goateed skater punks, you hear them on the telephone giving sell orders to their stockbrokers. Stashing money in offshore accounts and Swiss safety deposit boxes. Haggling over uncut diamonds and Krugerrands.

Boys named Trout and Pony, Lizard and Oyster, now they're all called Dirk. Girls named Buttercup are all called Dominique.

This flood of people doing foot work, it brings the price down. Soon enough, instead of servicing software billionaires and oil sheikhs, you're loitering in a hotel bar wearing last year's Prada and turning foot tricks for 20 bucks a pop. You're slipping under tables to manipulate the feet of conventioneers sitting in restaurant back booths. You're bursting out of big fake birthday cakes to do the feet of whole football teams just to keep up the payments on your parents' retirement home.

It's just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.

You do all this just to pay the interest on money you borrowed from Lenny and his Russian Mafia. Money borrowed to buy stocks that tanked. Stocks recommended by Lenny. Or to buy the jewelry and shoes Lenny said you'd need to fit in.

You're in the lobby bar at the Park Hampton Hotel, trying to talk a drunk businessman into a $10 foot job in the men's room. That's when you see her, Angelique, walking across the lobby, headed for the elevators. Her hair shining. Her furs dragging on the carpet behind her high-heeled feet. Angelique still looking great. Your eyes catch hers, and with one gloved hand she waves you over.

When the elevator comes, she says she's going up to Lenny's penthouse suite. The clinic.

She looks at you in your scuffed high heels, your fingernails chipped and jagged, and she says, "Come see what the next growth industry will be...."

The elevator stops on the 50th floor, the whole penthouse leased to Lenny. Two pin-striped suits full of muscle stand guarding a door. It's these goons you pay Lenny's cut to, half of everything you make. One guard says your names into a microphone pinned to his lapel, and the doors unlock with a loud buzz.

Inside it's just you and Angelique and Lenny.

Don't laugh, but lonely and isolated as your life is doing foot work--Lenny's life looks worse. Locked up here on the penthouse floor, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe all day, counting his money and talking on the telephone. The only furniture is a desk chair, the seat stained and dirty. A mattress is flopped near walls of glass that look out over the whole city. On a computer screen stock prices scroll up without stopping.

Lenny comes to the both of you, his bathrobe hanging open, wearing wrinkled striped boxer shorts inside, white socks turned yellow on his feet. Lenny reaches both hands toward Angelique's face and says, "My angel, my favorite." He cups her face in his hands and says, "How are you?"

In her high heels Angelique must be a head taller than he is. She smiles, saying, "Lenny...."

And Lenny smacks her, hard, across her face. He says, "You're cheating on me, that's how you are." He holds one hand up, the palm open and ready to smack her again. Lenny says, "You're taking outside assignments, aren't you?"

Holding one gloved hand to her cheek, hiding the red print of Lenny's hand, Angelique says, "Baby, no...."

And Lenny drops his hand. He turns his back to her. Lenny goes to look out the windows, the city spread out right next to his mattress.

"Baby," Angelique says, "let me show you something new."

Angelique looks at you.

She goes to stand next to him, putting her gloved hands on his shoulders from behind, and Angelique says, "Let Mommy show you how much she still loves her baby...."

She steers Lenny to sit on the mattress. Then to lie back. She slips the yellowed sock off each foot.

"Come on, baby," she says. Taking off her gloves she says, "You know I give great foot...."

Then Angelique does what you've never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Lenny's sole. Angelique cups her lips around Lenny's heel, and Lenny starts to moan.

Don't laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worst job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he's found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmont.

We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.

This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Lenny moaned and thrashed. After Angelique mouthed his foot until the one long moment Lenny sat up on the mattress, clutching his chest in both hands and gaping his open mouth at her as she was still sucking his heel. After his heart stopped Angelique pulled the bedsheets up to his chin. She wiped the lipstick off his foot and smeared more around her mouth. She unplugged his phones and told the guards Lenny was taking a long nap.

On the way down in the elevator, Angelique tells you this was her last foot job. This kind of foot hit paid a million bucks, cash. A rival agency had hired her to bump off Lenny, and now she was out of the business for good.

In the lobby bar the two of you have a cocktail to get the taste of Lenny's foot out of her mouth. Just one last good-bye drink. Then Angelique says to look around the hotel lobby. The men in suits. The women in fur coats. They're all Rolfing killers, she says. Reiki killers. Colonic irrigation assassins.

Angelique says that, in gem therapy, just by putting a quartz crystal on someone's heart, then an amethyst on his liver and a turquoise on his forehead, you can induce a coma that results in death. Just by sneaking into a room and rearranging someone's bedroom set, a feng shui expert can trigger kidney disease.

"Moxibustion," she says, the science of burning cones of mugwort on someone's acupuncture points, "it can kill. So can shiatsu."

She drinks the last of her cocktail and takes off the strand of pearls around her neck.

All those cures and remedies that claim to be 100 percent natural ingredients, therefore 100 percent safe, Angelique laughs about those. She says cyanide is natural. So is arsenic.

She hands the pearls to you and says, "From now on, I'm back to being Lentil."

That's how you want to remember Angelique, not the way she looked in the newspaper the next day, fished out of the river in a soggy mink coat. Her earrings and diamond watch taken to make it look like a robbery. Not with her feet fondled to death but dead the old-fashioned way, with a hollow-point bullet to the back of her perfect French braid. A warning to all the Dirks and Dominiques who might jump ship.

The clinic calls, not Lenny but some other Russian accent, trying to send you to clients, but you don't trust them. The guards saw you with Lentil. Up at the penthouse. They must have another hollow point ready for the back of your head.

Your folks call from Florida to say a black town car keeps following them, and somebody calls to ask if they know how to find you. By now you're already running from flophouse to flophouse, giving back-alley foot jobs for enough cash to stay alive.

You tell your folks: Be careful. You tell them not to get massaged by anybody they don't know. Calling them from a pay phone, you tell them never to mess with aromatherapy. Auras. Reiki. Don't laugh, but you're going to be traveling for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.

You can't explain. By now you've run out of quarters, so you tell your folks good-bye.

You work the right spot on their feet and they come hard as a seizure.