ARTICLES

Never Ask Where People Hurt

WORK IN WACKO WORLD

By James McCoy

Aaa Awesome Massage ... Barely Legal ... California Beach Bunnies Massage ... Dial-a-Blonde ... Exstasy Massage ... God's Peace ... Hotel Massage Service ... wait a minute: "God's Peace"? That wasn't the kind of peace I had in mind!

Actually, won't find her in the Pacific Bell yellow pages, but Stephanie Giuffre is a massage therapist. Her last name means "God's Peace" in Sicilian, so that's one reason why she so named her service.

But there's another reason: Stephanie, 24, a Catholic convert, believes that the Holy Spirit can use her work to help others obtain His peace. Sometimes even His -- with the emphasis on his healing.

"I've been in business for one year," Stephanie said during an interview at a coffee kiosk near the corner of Sixth and Cedar in downtown San Diego. "I used to do full body massage, but I found too many wackos who expected more." Not just "sexual things" but also "healings."

What's a healing? I ask.

"Healings are when people [the clients] believe they [their therapists] have the power to heal. I believe only God has the power to heal."

So now Stephanie brings her special massage chair, which cost $500, to "an office or cubicle. I do an hour mininum." She charges $60 an hour but will take four people for fifteen minutes each. "I never put myself in a position where someone else has the advantage. I never went to people's houses. I don't do nude massage; I do fully clothed."

Within those parameters, however, she uses massage to smooth out her day. "Upon her arrival at the coffee bar, Stephanie tells the new barrista how she used to run up a tab for her drinks: "I would pay with a massage.

"I'm all right with that," says Mike, 28. "I have a pain that runs up my side."

"That's a common area," Stephanie says, and within minutes has set up her chair on the sidewalk.

"I used to do massage too," Mike says. "I went to school."

"That's what I did," says Stephanie. "I used to just do it for friends but I came out here and I need money.... So I got certified. I charge a dollar a minute."

"All right," she says, as Mike eases his face and torso into the massage chair. "Is that comfy?"

She begins massaging Mike's lower back. "It's getting to where I'm actually turning people away," Stephanie tells me. "I'm saving my money so that I can open an orphanage in a few years." Stephanie belongs to a Catholic young adult group which visits orphanages in Tijuana on a weekly basis. Stephanie can be compassionate: her mother died a few years ago.

"There's a lot of abuses in the foster care system, so it's gonna be more of a group home for kids than an orphanage. And we're gonna have Mass every day," adds Stephanie, who tries to get to Mass every day herself.

"I plan to have a priest in residence there. I plan to have it be like home-school," she says, finishing up Mike's massage, "but I would get a certified teacher." She would make a home for "basically whoever God decides I should."

"There's relief," Mike tells me, getting out of the chair and stretching, "no doubt about that. It's at the point where it hurts if I tighten my butt-cheeks. But now it doesn't hurt at all.

"I'm a godly man too," he tells Stephanie. A practicing Rastafarian, he reads a chapter from the Bible a day. "Whenever I give a massage I 'm praying that the wicked spirits are flying. So with you putting in, and the Lord putting in...." Mike punctuates this sentence with a smile. "That's what it is to me, meshing all that stuff."

I asked Stephanie how she meshes praying with massaging.

"I don't do prayers [immediately] before and during a massage," she replied. "I start my day with prayers, though," such as the Rosary. "My belief is that the Holy Spirit helps me when I'm working on somebody. One way in which He helps: "I almost never ask people where they hurt," she went on. "I guess I get it right 99 percent of the time."

Massage therapy has more than its share of unclean spirits in both senses of the term. "Especially as a massage therapist people give you a lot of New Age books," says Stephanie, who although she never read them, recently purged them from her home. "Because of what I do for a living, I do encounter a lot of people on the fringe."

How does she keep from being overwhelmed by them? Stephanie says that she tells them: "This is how I live. I worship this way. Witness is important.... They're confused. They're lost. They need help."

One young woman Stephanie massaged had recently had an abortion; Stephanie gave her a brown scapular and taught her about the maternal mercy of Mary, Jesus' mother, which the woman accepted, even though she is Jewish.

How did Stephanie herself go from being not-even-baptized to full-on Catholic?

"I became a Catholic when I was 17," Stephanie said. "I just had people in my life who were Catholic, and I just wanted to live the kind of life that they lived. I just started going to Mass." Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which had just come out in the U.S., made her realize that "I already believed everything that the catechism said." It was the example of a guy from school whom she really admired, one of her brother's Catholic friends, that drew her in.

Verba docent, exemplum trahit , St. Augustine would say.

"Conversion by example," Mike exclaimed, "that's what I say!"