A few weeks ago I woke up with a familiar pain between my shoulder blade and my spine, this time on my left side. A pinched nerve was my immediate inexpert diagnosis. They usually last four or five days, no matter how much I do or don’t do about them.

Unfortunately, this one was different. As the days went on, the pain got sharper, my muscles on my left side clinched tighter and a disturbing burning began in my left elbow. I had a friend in town the weekend after it came on so I tried to play through it the best I could. 

The day after he left, I got a massage.

The option I pointed to on the menu said “Combination Swedish/Thai Massage- 60 mins.”

It should have said “One Hour Hell Ride Through Searing, Mind/Body/Spirit Breaking Pain.” But I suppose that would have looked funny on the sign.

A small Thai woman came out to the lobby. I tried to explain my plight, but there was a bit of a language barrier. Despite that, I could tell right away that she really didn’t like me. She spent the next hour confirming my suspicions. 

I admit I didn’t know much about Thai massage and I still don’t. But after this session, my guess is it’s a series of increasingly dangerous MMA submission holds. And maybe a few pro wrestling ones, too. I’m pretty sure she had me in The Camel Clutch at one point. 

I usually enjoy the ambient new age soundtrack you get at these places.

But as elbows dug into me and nerves sent red hot fire through my left arm, the tinkling piano drone seemed inadequate and maybe even a little cruel. 

My mind turned to a song I associate exclusively with a vicious ass whipping. “Atlantis” was a big hit for Donovan in 1969, peaking at number 7 on the Billboard chart. 

But for me the song barely exists outside the context of the famous Billy Batts beatdown scene in Goodfellas in which Joe Pesci’s diminutive hot tempered Tommy DeVito knocks made man Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) off his stool and proceeds to stomp and pistol whip with some help from his pal Jimmy (Robert De Niro) in a moment so nasty and beautiful that it set the bar for graphic film violence for me when I first saw it.

The hurt and humiliation Pesci conveys through the punching and stomping and swearing is what makes the scene so unforgettable. Batts’ “shine box” taunts took him back to a time when he was actually vulnerable and maybe even a little scared. “Atlantis” swells as the beating intensifies, a technique Scorsese employed first in Mean Streets. You gotta be able to hear the music and the punches.

“I didn’t mean to get blood on your floor,” Tommy says to Henry like a kid who’s sorry for sneaking wine and spilling it.

We were ten minutes in when I realized no matter how much I moaned she wasn’t going to stop. Wasn’t going to ask me if I was okay. I had to ask her to stop for a minute.

While I caught my breath, my mind wandered to Porno Goodfellas. I don’t mean that as a slight. Boogie Nights takes the sleazy rise and fall template of Goodfellas and moves it to the San Fernando Valley and of course we all love it. Both movies paint an idyllic portrait of the characters’ salad days and then take a sordid turn when cocaine enters the picture. 

Boogie Nights also contains a scene of bitter and violent retribution when Rollergirl stomps (skates on, of course) her tormentor. This scene takes place toward the end of the film when almost everyone’s got the booger sugar blues and the dream of glorious sex on film had been replaced by low resolution video taped smut.

I was loathe to bring up the line, “You could at least jack me off,” in an article that is at least partially about me getting a massage. Let me assure you, dear reader, this ain’t that kind of party. But it’s the line that sets the violence in motion. This venal drunken frat boy they have picked up for a pornographic stunt in a rented limo is also the boy who tormented Rollergirl with obscene gestures when she struggled in high school.

When he files this charming complaint after his failure to take any sort of constructive direction from the great Jack Horner, it sends Rollergirl into a rage so pure, the current insult melding with the ones of the past to fuel a truly righteous thrashing.

And not to make it about me, but I couldn’t help but think that maybe my “therapist” was thinking of some guy who had done her wrong as she kept poking the wasp’s nest in my shoulder.

At some point, I don’t quite remember when, I just started seeing bright flashes of color. I was wondering if I was having some sort of epiphany, if I was transcending to a higher plane through physical suffering. Then delirium hit. I wanted to laugh. I was able to stifle it, the last thing I would want was for her to think I thought something was funny. 

Which brings us, of course, to Batman.

This scene is obviously the least known in this piece, so I’ll just say if you haven’t seen the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, it rules. It’s currently on YouTube. At the end of part one, a now 55-year-old Batman takes on the massive leader of the Mutant Gang. This is a rematch, in their first meeting Batman mistakenly thinks he can just beat his opponent with strength, as he always has. He was wrong. This time, he is methodical. With perfect technique, he snaps the leviathan’s limbs one after another.

“You don’t get it, son. (I love that this old fart knocker Batman calls him ‘son’). This isn’t a mud hole. It’s an operating table. And I’m the surgeon.

Oh yeah, I thought of that scene while her knee was in my forearm. Like inside my forearm. 

Cool Hand Luke is one of my favorite movies ever. Maybe I should have stayed home, put a fresh ice pack on my shoulder and watched it instead of visiting this house of torture.

Paul Newman’s Luke takes an unholy prison yard beating at the hands of his greatest enemy and soon to be best friend/sycophant and is offered redemption through physical suffering. George Kennedy’s Dragline implores him, “Stay down. You’re beat.” 

“You’re gonna have to kill me.”

He takes his crucifiction like a good ol’ boy and after that, Luke is pretty much road gang Jesus. He even hits the Jesus Christ pose when his buddies lay him on a table after he performs his greatest miracle, eating fifty eggs in an hour. 

Just then, she thumbed a tight band of muscle that ran across my back and said, “I’m gonna do the whole thing. Gonna hurt.” I stifled another laugh. This woman was trying to kill me and I was coming back with a crazy handful of nothin’.

Randall “Tex” Cobb is a former boxer whose blood was let by the pint at the hands of heavyweight champion Larry Holmes in a beating so brutal that Howard Cosell never called another professional fight after it. 

Three years later, Cobb’s face was still a mask of cruel fistic sculpture from that and fifty other fights when he embodied evil as bounty hunter Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona.

He was a surrogate for the wickedness that needed to be expunged from our hero, H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage).  A sort of PG rated precursor to Anton Chigurh, if you will. 

H.I. is a good man deep down. His worst crime is how bad he is at it. At the film’s climax, he takes his pummeling like a man, the man Holly Hunter wants him to become and is able to pull the pin of Smalls’ grenade and obliterate his id monster. 

And then she was through with me. Her hands came off. She said, “Okay,” and left. I didn’t know how to feel because I had never been pulled inside out spiritually by a massage. I stifled one last laugh when I was told I needed to pay 85 dollars for what just happened to me. 

“Every once in a while, I’d have to take a beating. But by then, I didn’t care. The way I saw it, everybody takes a beating sometime.” -Henry Hill

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