Chapter 51: Outdoor Advertising
At the official party after the glorious ride, Kaitlyn and I set up our massage stuff for brief public freebies by way of advertising, selecting only fully nude WNBR riders, giving them a mixed oil-and-sunscreen magical healing massage, replacing each from the thickening ring surrounding us until we ran out of riders and broadened our selections to nude spectators.
To the clothed, we only handed out business cards and flyers. When we explained to one of these that only naked people can get a free massage, the guy stripped off right there, so we let him jump the queue. It was too delicious!
Start to finish, we recognized only two of the bare onlookers in our audience.
“Sandra!” I heard my wife cry out from her position astride the back of her latest freebie client. “Robbie!”
When the Wellingtons came over and greeted me in turn, the pair wearing only the same sort of cheap-and-cheerful bodypaint job they’d sprung for last year, not a patch on the Alexanders’ ostentatious presentation, I observed, “We didn’t see you on the ride.”
Sandra said, “We did ride, but we got here just in time to sign in and hop on our bikes to catch the tail end. We saw you at the head of the pack, but we didn’t try to chase you down the street.”
Kaitlyn asked, “You want us to fit you in?” while waving her oiled hand meaningfully at the loose ring of onlookers, proceeding to persevere in palpating her penitent’s protuberant posterior.
Sandra looked at the scene then down at our boxes of marketing materials and said, “No, it looks like you’re working now; we’ll wait for the after-after party. But I wonder, could you work an old neighbor of ours in? He’s on one of the pro sportsball teams up here…”
Robbie interjected a name I took to be that of a team, but that didn’t help me any. Was hockey the one with the funny egg-shaped ball, and how many innings do they have in basketball anyway? I’m hopeless when it comes to that sort of thing.
Sandra continued dismissively of this unimportant tidbit, “Right, right, them. Anyway, you know how those guys are, always getting strains and sprains and torn whatzits. We were wondering if you could take a look? He’s benched and so could get down to Moab easily enough, but since he’s here, we were hoping you could take a quick look?”
Kaitlyn raised an eyebrow at me and shrugged, so I said, “Sure, we’ll see what we can do for him.”
“Oh, thanks, you two! He’s called Alan Rowen, but everyone calls him Big Al. You’ll see why.”
Ten minutes later, a very large dark-skinned man walked up to the circle of our onlookers then turned his back on us to sign autographs demanded by a gaggle of followers. He was turning back to us when more autograph seekers came up, but these were politely ushered back by a couple of hired goon types: dark summer suits, sunglasses, ear bugs, shaved heads.
The guy came up and said, “Hi, I’m Big Al. Robbie said I should come over?”
I didn’t need my Gaia senses to know that Kaitlyn was grooling. If Athens had been in Subsaharan Africa, this is what the classical age statues would have looked like. Every single muscle was chiseled from dark chocolate marble, easily two skin tones darker than mine. It was hard to tell from my kneeling position over my latest client, but he had to be six-eight, easy, and his shoulders looked about half again as wide as mine. When he reached his paw down from the stratosphere to grasp my slim computer geek hand, I decided he could choose to palm my head like a basketball and shake my whole body thereby if he wanted. Probably wouldn’t raise his heart rate by more than 2 beats per minute, either.
We shook, me somewhat trepidatiously, him firmly, well shy of crushing, clearly in full control of his might.
Through the bond, Kaitlyn felt my invitation to a four-handed massage. She dismissed her current client so quickly she forgot to give him a card and flyer, so I took care of that while she got started on Big Al.
Our dismissed therapy patients didn’t push through the audience circle to join the party as prior ones had done: they turned to become the new front ranks of a thickening crowd, held back in large part by the stony faces of his goons.
Any time a camera came out to peek between the heads of the onlookers, one would point at the lens and shake his head in a “Don’t make me beat you about the head and shoulders with that arm of yours” sort of way. These cameras disappeared quickly, but like a game of Whack-a-Mole, another kept popping up through the crowd. I was unwilling to lay odds on whether the goons’ restrained menace or the crowd’s voyeuristic tendencies would win out.
Kaitlyn said, “Come lay down here, and let’s see what we can do for you.”
He smiled tiredly and said, “Yeah, naked womens’ always tryin’ to straddle these hips.”
That wasn’t a joke, I realized. I didn’t know whether to be jealous of his lifestyle, irritated by his humble-brag, or empathetic for his plight.
My wife fenced back, “Tell you what, Mr. Rowen, you keep yourself under control, and so will I, saving you a trip to paparazzi hell.”
“Too late for that,” he smiled back, “but that’s my own damn fault for runnin’ roun’ naked in public, innit? I’m probably all over the celeb blogs already.”
“I have a small amount of experience with that myself, from last year’s ride. It got so dicey for a while there I thought I was going to lose my job.”
“But then you came back,” he observed, looking puzzled, leaving the obvious question unasked.
Kaitlyn beamed. “Not only did I win my battles, my boss and three of my coworkers from the office are here with us today!”
“Oh, I like you! You’re my new hero! Can I have your autograph?”
She laughed delightedly then said, “My name’s Kaitlyn. That there is my husband Davie,” she added, pointing to me. “So, get yourself down here and let’s talk about how we might help you.”
The big man folded himself down to the ground with a wince, then lay chest down upon the grass, his head pillowed on his stacked hands.
I’d already sussed his major injuries out using my Gaia senses, so I wasn’t surprised when he said, “I took a flying leap in the game a few weeks ago and pulled something in my back. It screwed my balance up enough I landed badly and went down hard, probably making it worse. I walked off the field without any help, but I was listing 20 degrees to starboard, I was! They tell me I just need time to heal, not surgery, and they’re giving me some great painkillers in the meantime, but it’s not enough. I know you can’t heal a torn muscle or tendon or whatever with massage, but if you could loosen me up so I can back off on the drugs…? I really really really don’t want to get hooked on that shit. That’d be a great way to blow my pro career.”
My wife said, “I do believe I can help you, Mr. Rowen.”
“Only people in business suits have to call me that. People in birthday suits get to call me Alan D. My middle initial, you know.”
“Certainly, Alan D. Now just relax and let’s see what we can do.”
Through the bond, I sent, «A guy this famous and professionally cared-for must have more medical records on file than any normal person under sixty. You can only do work that could plausibly result from massage and rest.»
Her mouth corners turned down a bit, but rather than words, she sent back feelings I interpreted as, “Stop try’na teach mama how to cook!”
I thought of something else, so I added, «Besides, would fully healing him even be ethical?»
«Of course it would! We swore an oath!»
«What of sports betting? If we heal him, we throw off the sportsbook odds on his team’s games. That may be fine as long as we are not betting on his team, but then we have a temptation to place some bets, knowing he’ll be back in the next game’s lineup.»
«Fair point,» she conceded, but continued working on him without change, trickling only a tiny bit of magic into him, focusing on reducing inflammation rather than accelerate his healing.
I sent, «Okay, okay, I concede that mama knows how to cook just fine,» then I raised my hands in surrender, eliciting a smile from her, bafflement from a few spectators.
Once we’d pushed the pain well down, me following Kaitlyn’s lead, she slid off his back to the far side, and I mirrored her movements in a four-handed massage, wresting groans of delight from the big man.
We spent a good hour on him, knowing this one client would pay better PR dividends than all of the prior freebies combined. Indeed, we could see some big video cameras peeking over the crowd; the goons were not running these guys off, but they were keeping them back from our working spot.
Kaitlyn noticed too, and she sent, «We should accept an interview when we finish here.»
«Yup. Good for business.»
«Potentially great, even.»
«You know what this means, of course.»
«Oh yeah I do: my bare buns will be in the newspaper again!»
«Not to mention all over the Internet.»
«Oh holy shitballs, Davie. I don’t know whether to be grateful to the Wellingtons or very very upset with them.»
«Trust in Sandra,» I intoned, sending my deep belief in her judgement through the bond. «She was in PR before retiring, remember?»
Kaitlyn admitted, «Yeah, she probably knows what she’s doing, doesn’t she?»
«She left us a tornado to lassoo, if we can. Rider up!»
Yeah, dear reader, this Indian immigrant knows rodeo slang. Comes from living for years in the rural southwest.
Once we let Alan up and said our good-byes, he dragged most of the sportsball-crazed news media after him like gravitationally-bound moonlets.
One newspaper reporter stayed to interview us in some depth while her camera guy continued the photo snapping he’d been doing since they arrived during Alan’s massage. We made sure to get our commercial and pro-Gaia plugs in, and she seemed to leave satisfied.
We returned to doing free massages, but our pool of willing recipients dried up when one of the TV camera crews came back and began gathering B-roll for tonight’s news program, so we packed it in about the time the camera crew got bored and moved on.
Kaitlyn ended up quite right: her callipygous ass was all over the newspapers the next day.
And the TV news.
And the Internet.
My buns, too, for that matter.