I’m lying on the bed, naked, as Dylan generously slathers locally harvested honey and mango-papaya butter all over my bare buttocks. Wait! It’s not what it looks like! Maybe I shouldn’t start the story here. Let me go back to the beginning.

It all starts with the fact that this year is really stressful. Colleges say that this is when it matters, and I should be coming up big. It seems like all the kids around me are rising to the challenge. My math tablemate is fluent in six languages and heads 17 academically oriented and meritorious clubs. This girl in my Spanish class routinely captures squash tournament championships. Even the token pothead I see sometimes at break swears he’s increased his THC intake by at least 37%.

I try not to worry, but frankly, I’m overwhelmed by it all. Sure, Thomas Edison of the Inventors Hall of Fame didn’t go to college — but neither did Darnell of the 15th Avenue Cardboard Box.

I don’t mean to sell myself short. My own personal resume of 2008 includes such accomplishments as “all socks matched — thirteen weeks running” and “clipping left big toenail straight to prevent ingrowth.” My mom tries to relieve the pressure, but every morning when she tells me to “take it easy, honey” as I walk out the door, the look in her eyes tells me that she really means “Blow this one for me, buddy, and consider yourself academically castrated.”

Finally, weak from exhaustion with dark bags under my eyes and saliva pooled in my ear, (how did it get THERE? I sure don’t know!) I realized I just needed to relax.

There are two methods I know for kicking back. The first one I like to call the “Snoop Doggy Dog School of Relaxation.” The curriculum involves bleezies galore and an excess of extremely attractive African-American women (I think ol’ Snoop uses a more derogatory term for them). A member of said school partakes in such activities as “rolling on dubs” through violent neighborhoods, an activity which might appear at first glimpse to cause anxiety, but is actually quite soothing due to the inebriation of the subject.

Unfortunately, my Volvo doesn’t accommodate these “dubs,” so I was forced to use my other, more sissy backup plan: spa treatment.

Next thing I knew, Clifford and I were standing inside Banya 5, a Russian bathhouse located in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. The man at the counter connived me into spending 40 bucks on a mineral salt wash, telling me it was “to die for.” But I had the last laugh! He waived our price of entry when we told him we were reviewing the spa rather than merely exploiting it for cheap humor.

Clifford and I didn’t know what to try first. The saltwater pool, heated to a comfortable 80 degrees and measured to the precise salinity of Puget Sound? The cold plunge, maintained at a frigid 55 degrees to renew, refresh, and revitalize your organs? We finally decided on the sauna.

The sign on the large wooden door read, “Sauna,” and had several Russian lines underneath which I now suspect translates as, “Foolish Americans only. Do not enter if you value your life.”

Needless to say, as non-Russian speakers we walked right in. “Whoo!” Clifford exclaimed. “This would be GREAT for losing weight for wrestling.” He was right — sweat was pooling in every nook and cranny of my body. My belly button could have served as a hot tub for head lice. I felt like I had just been born, but out of a womb filled with sweat instead of amniotic fluid.

The sauna was a compact brick room with an iron hearth in the corner. It looked like it could have been a room of torture during the communist regime in Russia, used for making evil capitalists sweat, a lot. Across the sauna from where Clifford and I sat, a bald Russian man gave a young woman, apparently a novice at the spa, a kind of brutal massage using branches. He told me this was a Russian custom known as venik. Later, we looked it up and discovered it comes from the ancient Russian venik, meaning “massage” and nikkus, meaning “intended to violently whip gullible foreigners with tree branches.”

When the heat became too much to bear, we got out and jumped in the cold plunge. It felt pretty good, apart from the temporary paralyzing effects of the cold. That really knocked me out of it. I’m not sure how long I was in the pool — minutes, days, no idea. But at some point Clifford told me it was time for my mineral salt scrub, so I got out.

This is when I first met Dylan (“he’s AMAZING with his hands,” the man at the front desk had said). I walked back into the washroom, stepped behind a curtain, and there he was waiting for me. “I’m gonna step out for a minute,” he told me. “Take those off, lie down and we’ll get started,” he said, nodding at my shorts.

So that’s how Dylan came to be caressing my bedonk with tropical fruit butter. He finished with my backside, and told me to turn over as he stepped out again. Dylan was a pro, so of course, I complied.

I wouldn’t have used a towel to cover up, but I didn’t like what that cold plunge had done to my physique.