Maybe it’s my newfound six-pack-or my newfound bond with the Cryo Guy-but I see myself becoming something of a cryo convert, or at least a little bit less of a cryo skeptic. Have I finally solved the insomniac’s quandary? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Is Trump still president? I wake up with a burst of excitement, my racing thoughts having slowed to a peppy jog in place. He hits the lights and leaves me to my “energizing” slumber, which I quickly fall into thanks to a series of low, ambient chimes that could double as the soundtrack of a Safdie Brothers movie. Cryo Guy gives me a sleep mask and a giant pair of headphones, and I feel as if I’m about to take off on a first-class trip to Tokyo. I’m led into a dark room, where I lie atop a strangely comfortable dentist chair-like recliner. The next phase of my wellness odyssey is the Wave Table, a sort of waterbed that uses sound wave relaxation therapy to induce the feeling of a 3-hour sleep in 30 minutes. When my stomach is effectively numb, he heats it, and then gives me a lymphatic massage, clearing out the lymphatic system in an ominously named process called “lymphatic drainage.” To prove that he’s not making this stuff up, he takes a measuring tape to my waist and measures me both before and after the procedure. “Are we really freezing people now?” he had said, saying the procedure reminded him of Austin Powers. He tells me he got into cryo as a joke when his friend tore his ACL, routine cryotherapy sped up his recovery from a year to 9 months. He chats with me the entire time, and I feel us forming a specific type of bond as he becomes increasingly intimate with my belly bloat. (The treatment can be applied anywhere on the body, but I figure the stomach was the easiest and least strange place to start.) The man grabs the arm of a big white machine and freezes my stomach, kneading it in and around until my fat pocket goes a bit numb. (?!)Īfterward, my pores clean as Liv Tyler’s, I only catch a few moments of post-treatment bliss before beginning my next, more involved treatment: a “cryo-massage” called “The Skinny,” which would effectively do to my stomach what I have just done to my face, albeit through cryotherapy technology. Somehow, when she slaps my face, it feels good. The facialist gently paints my November-dry skin with a mask of charcoal (there’s something in the charcoal) and moves her fingers in a mystifying trance. (I put off some plans for the week to prevent from straining my facial muscles with excessive socialization.) The facial, however, is less Mean Christine and more evocative of the tender process of pizza-making, as if my skin is a smooth piece of dough being kneaded, stretched, and lovingly doused in generations-in-the-making marinara sauce by a jolly man with a handlebar mustache. I’m about to undergo a treatment called “Facexercise,” a trademarked technique involving “French palpe roule, ancient manual massage techniques, natural physiotherapy, and modern fitness science” designed to “sculpt,” “tone,” and “contour”-which didn’t mean much to me beforehand, other than that I would likely be slapped in the face. I’m led down a long hallway by a smiling facialist, the gray sky over New Jersey inducing in me a pre-treatment state of meditative repose. And yet, it is as if I had already reached a sort of capitalist nirvana, intoxicated by this panoply of glass-it’s my long-overdue first trip to the storied Hudson Yards-that promises a bounty of luxury at every corner. I, meanwhile, am awaiting several spa treatments that have been promised to smooth, even, tighten, firm, tone, relieve, relax, and restore me to a higher state of consciousness. Like Shiv Roy overlooking her spoils from her ivory tower, I tip my nose at the view of what’s below me, a stretch of rail yards lined with trains awaiting their exodus to New Jersey. It’s late Tuesday morning, and I stand on the fifth floor of the newly opened Equinox Hotel, enveloped in a plush robe and slides, sipping a ceramic mug of decaffeinated tea as I watch the fog roll over New York’s West Side.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |