I now know, for I was at the Kiva spa place yesterday - where, allow me to say up front - according to all persons talked to, This Sort of Thing Is Not Normal.
Now, Kiva I've learned is a really sweet place just off Water Street in Santa Cruz. I'm tempted to call it a bathhouse, but being a fan of bathhouses of the Asian variety, I'd withhold that descriptor.
The bathhouses I've frequented have lots of showers and sit-down scrubbie stations where, in short, you bathe. There are also employees who, if you ante up, will obligingly scour several layers of dead skin off your body. And then there are the hot tubs and warm tubs and cold tubs and dry saunas and steam saunas. Fancier places offer massages and facials and cups of sea salt for taking into the steam room, and jugs of ice water with lemon slices and iced dishes of sliced cucumber, and low-level mellow new-agey sounding music. But to be sure, even the most basic kind of establishment fine by me. As long as the sauna is seriously hot, it's golden.
But being ever-ready for the new experience, and having heard good reviews of the Kiva, off I and the Other Michelle (the OM) went. And the reason for not wanting to call it a bathhouse, is that although there are showers there - well, a single one but big enough (and set up, plumbing wise) for 2 - that's all there is to taking-a-bath part.
One of its perks is that the tubs are outdoors, and the sensation of sitting in a huge jacuzzi tub of warm water with jasmine flowers floating in it that have fallen from the surrounding plants, on a nice cloudy chilly coastal day whose temperature caused steam to rise off the water's surface was sublime. This tub is near the exit from the changing rooms and adjacent to a station where there is hot tea and cold water. Next to is a grassy lawn, where you can sit on a bench or lay out a blanket and have a little picnic. Continue to walk back along the stone pathway, and there is a smaller hot tub and a cold tub; they both look like giant half-barrels buried down into the ground.
Always all around are these beautiful plants, and further back still is the dry sauna. It's really big, with 3 levels of seating you can choose from. It could easily hold 20 people, probably more. It smartly has a vestibule so that every time the door opens, the hot air doesn't easily escape. The shape is interesting - the ceiling is domed, and the room is round; it was quite nice. And very hot. Awesome. After getting all sweaty you can go right outside for a cold shower, or walk further to take a dip in the cold tub, or do what I did, which was to spread the towel on the grass and have a sit down in the garden and just enjoy the oxygen.
They also have private hot-tub rooms, one of which I got to enjoy because - as I remarked in the title here - there were police and a not-wanting-to-leave-naked-man in the bigger, warm tub there by the changing rooms.
When the OM and I had arrived, we were the only ones there, which was totally fabulous. But during the time we both had our massage, I could hear voices and the sounds of more people opening lockers downstairs, so I took a look outside to see what the situation was. The massage room I was in had a window affording a view of the back where the tubs and all were. And that's when I saw some uniforms. Hmmm.
They were talking to the guy in the warm tub, who was fully submerged except for his arms which were resting along the edge and his head which was resting upon his arms. He was talking to the police. Hmmmm.
You might think, "what the hell was a naked guy doing there in the first place? how did you >know< he was naked?" I should say more about how the Kiva rolls. My previous bathhouse experience always had it such that if it was co-ed, men were in one wing and women in another. Or, if there were not separate wings, then only men go on some days and only women on others. Or, if men and women attended together, then it was clothing-mandatory - an option that, to my mind at least - really doesn't enable one to reap all the benefits of going to a sauna.
Anyways, another thing that makes Kiva special is that it is co-ed, men and women share the same spaces, and clothing is optional. When I read the information on their website, I interpreted "clothing optional" as meaning that all options would be exercised. But it was indeed as my friend Jack explained last Saturday: everybody is naked.
Thus: naked man in the warm tub. Other men, too. Some not naked. Those would be the police.
(And in case you might be thinking, "what the hell were YOU doing in a place with strange, naked men in hot tubs?" I just have to say, you don't know me as well as you might think.)
It is a safe space. There are signs about warning people off of doing things like unsolicitedly massaging their neighbors, and in the women's dressing room a sign that says if anything at all happens that causes one to feel uncomfortable, to report it to the staff. So, upon viewing the scene downstairs, my first thought was that this guy had caused a woman some discomfort.
I stood up there for a few minutes, but the situation downstairs didn't look to be changing. So I wrapped myself up in my towel, and went to the dressing room where the door was open to the outside and I could hear a little better. The guy in the tub was saying something like, "I have as much right to be here as anybody," and "If you want me out, you have to come in here and get me."
Hmmmm.
So I went out into the lobby. The receptionist was profusely apologetic. This guy had come in, didn't pay the admission fee, and went and stationed himself after undressing in the big tub. So she called the cops. Good move.
It just seemed the cops didn't know quite what to do.
The receptionist offered to let me use one of the private rooms, until the situation resolved. I didn't know where the OM had gone to; I looked around inside for a bit, but then took the receptionist up on her offer for the private room, which was pretty cool. It's also open, up top, to the outside, with its own hot tub and a steam shower.
But after a few minutes I got bored. And right there, just a few feet away, was something pretty bizarre that really deserved to be checked out.
So off I trotted, back to the women's changing room, where I had a big bag of sliced up fruit stored in a locker. I grabbed me a little snack, and stationed myself there by the exit door to take in the show.
There seemed to be more uniforms. Some were outside, and some inside, on the men's changing room side. They were all wearing these blue latex gloves. Two of the fellows outside were helping the man who had been in the warm tub down the steps from the deck. There was one on either side of him, and he slipped on the stairs. I heard a few moments later one of them say, "the ground is level here, you can walk safely."
I thought, "Is he blind?" How on earth does a blind man manage to evade a receptionist, undress, find the jacuzzi, get in, find and harass a woman all before the police arrive? The policeman right next to the women's door leading outside caught sight of me, and asked me to go in and close the door. I guess that was the decent thing to do. So I did. But the dressing rooms are right next to each other, and they're open to one another along the top, so you can hear everything that goes on next door. The police were asking this fellow which locker was his. He thought it was the third from the left on the bottom. They'd know it was his if they found the candy and cigarettes.
Candy and cigarettes? This is not getting any less weird.
But by this point, I figured the show was pretty much over, so I took my bag o' fruit and went back to the private room, and shortly after was joined by the OM. She had been braver than I, and after her massage had towelled up and walked around the scene outside and back to the sauna where folks were all a-twitter about the situation. One person had said, "Can you imagine if this was the first time you had ever come to the Kiva?", and Michelle was, "uh, yeh, I can!" And then they were all apologetic about it, too, stressing that This is Not Normal, and Michelle was, like, no worries.
She had heard the police asking if the receptionist could drain the hot tub. They were trying to figure out a way to get the naked (and possibly blind?) man out, without any of them having to get in. The receptionist declined. Hence the bunch of standing around - what, it took on the order of 30 to 45 minutes? - before he was extracted. The naked man had also, it seems, acted to fend them off by throwing candy at them from his stronghold there in warm tub. There were, as I found later, indeed several multi-colored bits all over the ground, kind of like confetti. I think they were Nerds.
The rest of the time there was just dandy. The people were all really friendly and nice. It would probably be traumatic if you went in full of body-image issues, but then maybe it's a good place to go if you are, to get a lesson on just being, and not hiding behind multiple layers of baggy clothes. There was more eye contact there, than if clothed in a low-cut dress.
But now to the answer you've been waiting for: it takes 7 policemen, and a bottle of pepper spray, to get a recalcitrant naked man out of a hot tub. So: he wasn't blind after all; they had sprayed him to be able to incapacitate him, and that's why he couldn't see. And he hadn't harassed any women, but just had refused to pay the entry fee.
No comments:
Post a Comment