September was the cruelest month: A dear friend died in Chicago, leaving her daughter behind. There were many terrible details to deal with. And just as my adrenaline ran out, I was hired to help run a rather large company in New York. By October, I'd shifted into full-on manic mode. I'd stopped going to the gym. I'd stopped sleeping and eating. I chain-smoked instead, drank my dinners, and lost 20 pounds or so. Late in the month, my 34-year-old body began to give out.
"Daddy," I whimpered on the phone. And my father, who'd been an athlete back in the old country—a race-car driver and a fighter-pilot-in-training in the Soviet Air Force—made a very Russian suggestion: "Go schvitz," he said.
In the old country, the schvitz—which the Russians also call a banya—means more than an occasional visit to the public baths. In Russia, the banya is woven, deeply, into the fabric of everyday lives. A great many Russians frequent the baths once or twice a week; they go with their friends, their families, their coworkers, and (occasionally) their dates. Setting aside the sorts of body-image issues that plague my gym-going friends, they strip, steam, and sauna to rid themselves of whatever bane they might have imbibed. Then they get massages and take platzas, in the course of which they are beaten with brushes made from branches of oak or that most Russian of trees, the birch.
Because New York is also a miniature Moscow—or, at least, a micro-Minsk—there were banyas all around me: secreted in basements near Wall Street, standing in the shadows of the Citigroup building, taking up the better parts of entire blocks in the outer boroughs, or plumb in the center of our rapidly gentrifying East Village. And so, armed with my father's advice and flush with the first full-time paycheck I'd seen in some years, I began pulling my friends out of their everyday lives and exposing them to the full Russian treatment.
First, I took my friend Jo to the Wall Street Bath & Spa on Fulton Street. She is braver than I by far and immediately took a dip in the ice-cold pool just outside the steam room. Russians believe that bracing shifts from hot to cold and back again are just the thing to shock one's system into sobriety, clear the cobwebs, and kick the circulation into gear. We ate black bread and blintzes. We drank some vodka. We chatted with young Russian women with improbably high cheekbones and gawked at the babushkas applying what looked to be sour cream and blubber to their bodies. And then we made our way to the pool-slash-hot-tub room, whereupon the few couples quickly untwined. Later, in the steam room, a pair we couldn't quite see, but heard (ever so clearly, oomphing and squealing away), were revealed as a husky woman walking back and forth across the back of a slight middle-aged man. Jo and I sat there feeling very clean, and just a little bit dirty.
I slept well that night, and the following day I took another friend, James, to the Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village—an ancient (115-year-old) institution everyone seems to simply call the Tenth Street Baths. This was a far more monastic enterprise—underground and crowded, with an army of masseurs who maneuvered, capitalistically, for clients. This Old World hustle offers a last authentic glimpse of the East Village's origins, and explains the baths' resilience in the face of increasingly trendy surroundings. James and I drank some Baltika beers and checked out the (mostly American) patrons.
But Brooklyn is where the bath reveler is free to really spread out, leading me to Sandoony USA, in the Midwood neighborhood, a spacious banya with a full-service restaurant. My friends and I gulped blintzes with caviar, salty lamb soups, and Siberian dumplings with sour cream and vinegar, washing them all down with shots of Smirnoff. At the banquet table across from me, a dozen Russian men ate a last supper of sorts: middle-aged guys in terry-cloth robes, who looked straight out of The Sopranos but turned out to be engineers and livery cab drivers—old friends who'd incorporated Thursdays at the banya into their weekly routine. We heard a lot of "Za Vashe Zdorovye!" ("To your health!") and a great many cuss words. (Russians have more words for shit than Eskimos have for snow.) Aside from my friends, the only American at Sandoony was a 16-year-old baseball player from Staten Island who, gunning for the major leagues, had already abused his body enough to necessitate his own weekly visit.
The grain alcohol had given me enough courage to agree to my first platza, which turned out to be one of the more physically intense nonsexual experiences of my life. The beating wasn't bad: a massage of sorts, with verve and rustle. But the heat was all but overwhelming. My platzeur, Maxim, who'd been a karate expert and skier in Moscow, used the brushes like batons, gathering the heat in the room and funneling it directly toward my feet, legs, arms, and torso. Ten minutes on my stomach, followed by three dips in the ice-cold pool, followed by ten minutes on my back, followed by another dip in the icy cold. I barely made it through, and my friend Sam—who'd spent a good 20 minutes relaxing in the sauna before his fiery lashings—bailed after the first cold dip. "The lesson here," he said, "don't sauna before you really sauna."
Three days later, my girlfriend flew into town. She was almost as fried from work as I'd been. Having become something of a convert, I took her to Okeanos in Manhattan's East Midtown on the last day of her visit and with the chill of winter just sweeping in.
Okeanos, the swankiest banya by far, uses Swiss-like efficiency to re-create the Russian experience for American health nuts and hedonists. No hairy patriarchs or sallow-faced Russians here. The spa provides complimentary vodka, complimentary toothbrushes, and complimentary bathing suits. It also provides those strange-looking felt Cap'n Crunch-style hats I'd seen at Sandoony but forgotten to ask about. (It turns out that they hold the heat in and drive the sweat out.) The facilities were first-rate, the service extraordinary. The two hours we had to kill before driving back to the airport felt like 10, and as we drove, we talked about the ways we Americans tend to view physical upkeep as another isolated chore to fulfill, while Russians treat it as the very opposite: a ritual as deeply committed to the communal as it is to the individual body, to the regenerative purging of toxins as it is to the pursuit of earthly pleasures. Life produces enough stress on its own. The rest should go up in steam.
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