Hammam. Turkish spa. Public bathhouse. However you translate it, hammam is a word that conjures up a relaxing space to decompress in warm water and feel refreshed. This weekend, a few friends and I rented a car and drove to a coastal town where natural hot springs flow right into the sea.
There were five of us: a Romanian, a British-Tunisian, two Italian cousins, and me. After swimming, we decided to go to the hammam, which only Yusuf, the Tunisian Brit, had done before.
After paying, we entered the pre-hammam locker room, which was a bit of a racket. Lots of people were moving all at once, and we were bumbling, asking each other whether to bring this or that, and should I wear my sandals, because everyone else is wearing sandals but mine are, like, leather, not shower clogs, and I don’t want to get them wet. And then I forgot my water in the locker but everything was already stowed away and Yusuf said the locker was tricky to open so I should just leave it. The last thing I did before going in was to buy a kessel, a harsh fabric you put on your hand to scrub away grime while your skin is nice and tender.
When I was all ready to go, I looked over to see the two Italian cousins—for reasons I still do not understand—standing in their socks, which they wore right into the bathhouse. A bit embarrassed to be associated with socked tourists in the hammam, I followed them at a distance into the spa.
Instead of finding an oasis of serenity, however, I walked into feverish, Dove Men’s 3-in-1-scented anarchy. The bathhouse had low ceilings, which concentrated the steam and heightened the general sense of claustrophobia. Every surface was covered with ceramic tiles, including the “massage table,” where a masseuse was scrubbing his client’s skin with all the force of Allah. When he finished with his back, he smacked him hard, and his client rolled over.
The cramped, tiled rooms also meant you had to shout to make yourself heard over the echo of everyone else’s conversations. People called to each other from across the main chambers, the rebounds of their trans-hammam conversation mingling with dissonant grunts, laughs, and whoops to create a single, ambient background of sonified masculinity.
Squinting as if through a cloudy snorkel, I saw the rooms were lined with spigots and scattered with big orange buckets, which people stuck under the spigots and dumped over themselves. Men ranging from three to seventy years old lathered, splashed, and roughhoused with each other. On the floor, two guys took turns “stretching”—interpreted in standard male hammam behavior as contorting each other to the brink of grimacing pain—in positions I have never seen in my life. Ahh, spa day.
Adjusting to my new reality, I made my way to the back room, where the main bath was located. Water dribbled out of a PVC spout in the side of the wall into a murky pool, which was about three feet deep and fifteen feet square. I sat on the edge, dipped my toe in, and immediately reeled—this was no ordinary jacuzzi, but a test of the melting point of human skin.
In the middle of the pool, an old man was performing what appeared to be a rite of passage—interpreted in standard male hammam behavior as the social reproduction of intergenerational trauma—in which he shouted at a boy of about twelve years to go further under and splashed him with the scalding water. The boy, who looked to be on the verge of tears, gritted his teeth and managed to dunk his face under for a moment, at which the old man smiled with great satisfaction and ceased splashing the boy.
Then, the old man turned to me—“Shbik?” What’s the matter? Which I took to mean that it was my turn. I lowered myself, inhaling with a sharp hiss, into the pool, eventually making it up to my neck. I realized that if I was still, it was ok; it was only moving that made it feel like the water was melting my skin right off the bone. And so I was still. I eased myself into a corner and closed my eyes, steam rising around me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was greeted by a pair of pale feet dangling six inches from my nose. I turned to identify the offender, and saw that Dominico—one of the formerly socked Italian cousins—had decided it was high time to peel off his soggy stockings and grab a seat directly above me at the bath.
Bruh. I closed my eyes and tried returning to my former transcendent state, where I could pretend uncensored Italian toes weren’t bursting my delicate aura. Except it wasn’t the same because I kept opening one eye to check if this was really Dominico’s permanent position of choice. After deciding I didn’t really want to pass out from the heat anyway, I tapped Dominico and he courteously extended his legs to let me slide under.
As my body rose from the pool, my spirit lagged behind. If you happened to glance at me through the haze, you would have seen a ghostly accordion of Lucases, buffering in real-time, stretched out behind me. My soul having leaked out of my boiled pores and dissolved in whatever broth I just marinated in, I felt renewed on the inside. Now, I just had to get the Grime of Life stripped from every crevice of my skin at the massage table.
There was a bit of a line at the massage table, however, and after about ten minutes of waiting, my thirst had grown intolerable. I no longer cared about the thought of a relaxing massage, which was clearly not going to happen on that table anyway. So I lay down on the hard tile and handed my kessel to my friend, who scrubbed me down almost as zealously as the masseuse.
Once that was done, I grabbed an orange bucket, filled it with spigot water, and dumped it over my head. It was tantalizing—too warm to be refreshing, but cool enough to make you want more. At that moment, I lost all willpower to stay in the underground fever dream. Between the incessant cacophony, “massages” that leave your skin raw, and the bath hot enough for a Louisiana boil, I quietly wondered what sin of filth had landed us in the hammam layer of the Islamic Inferno of Hygiene.
I floated past Dominico, who had put his socks back on, to the staircase that led to respite.
Except, of course, respite was only a fantasy. My towel was still damp from the beach, so I couldn’t get quite dry. And the room was just humid enough to make air-drying impossible.
I didn’t feel reborn, but I certainly felt changed. No lifeforce had been restored to my body; rather, my inner essence was squeezed like a sponge from every pore in my body. I can’t say I molted—if anything, I entered the hammam like a snake ready to shed, and left feeling like a dry, wispy husk. I had reverse-metamorphosed, like a butterfly who got ala-kazammed into a battered, exhausted insect. Emptied of my spiritual and physical contents, I was ready to receive the world anew.
Driving along the coast at sunset, my soul was restored to my body as a human on Earth. After a meal, I was Lucas again, and by the time we sat around for shisha and tea, I imagine I had even a accumulated thin layer of dust and dead skin. It was good to be back.
Until next time,
Lucas
