I was sandwiched between girls in spandex dresses in line for the better part of an hour as bouncers shuttled in betterknown couples and groups of girls ahead. I was meeting my new friend Anna and the friends she grew up with. They were inside already; I was late. I avoided the eyes of the girls in line who were eyeing me, the lone white girl, suspiciously. My mood was sour by the time I reached the bouncer and showed him my ID.

Inside, I spotted Anna and she led me through the foyer into the back room, where Spanish dance music was blaring from the speakers. It was packed; I told her I’d meet up with her girls in a second and headed straight to the bar. I ordered three shots of Patron, planning on sharing, but ended up taking them all myself.

The tequila helped. I pushed my hair into a messy bun and joined the ladies. There was Valentina, the voluptuous diva; Kristina, the sweet one; Beba, petite and with hearing aides; and Anna, the leader of the pack. We danced and Val cornered a dude in a black button-down and black slacks, pushing his back against the wall and grinding her ass up against him. These girls were wild.

After a half hour or so we stepped out for air and already I was ready to go.

"Let’s go get something to eat," Kristina urged, but Anna wanted to stay and dance. An older man who caught her eye as he was entering the club had led off Beba; he was working his game on her against a fence a few feet away. I wanted to eat, too. The club was too hot and crowded, and I liked listening to the girls talk—their slang was infectious, part Spanish, part ghetto. In this group, I was the timid one, and that was a role I rarely got to play.

We left Anna at the club, and I walked with Val, Beba and Kristina to a chicken spot a few blocks away. In the dark, the Bronx looked like the rest of New York. We were in Longwood, although I wasn’t sure what that meant. The air held a static of heat and excitement—I had hung out with Kristina twice before in Manhattan, and she was the one I knew the best. But it was July of my first summer in the city, I didn’t know anyone yet and I was determined to live.

"Girl, you sweet," Val told me as we munched chicken and fries, fielding glances from a group of guys in the booth across from ours.

Beba was texting a couple of guys she knew, Dominican dudes, asking them to pick us up in their car. We were in heels and we didn’t want to go back to the club, but none of us were ready for the night to be over. They agreed to come through.

The guys in the booth across from us got up to go. One of them, a short Mexican, walked up to me, squeezed my arm, and looked right into my eyes.

"Thank you," he said. I looked back at the girls. "What was that?" I asked.

"It was probably for the stiffy you gave him," Val said, and we all laughed.

The Dominican dudes pulled up. The driver was big, with long cornrows. The passenger was smaller, with a buzz cut. The four of us squeezed into the backseat, our chests vibrating to the Reggaeton pulsing full blast out the open windows.

We cruised up to a gas station and parked on a side street. Val was playing with Cornrows’ braids; Beba and Buzz Cut, who had some kind of history, were flirting. I was confused about why we were parked, but no one else seemed to notice.

Then a man popped up at the passenger side window, with two large Sunny Delight jugs. Cornrows reached over Buzz Cut to hand him a bill and took the two jugs. "It’s Nemo," one of the girls said, and they start rattling off what may or may not be in it—Everclear? Rum? It was a red frozen punch, whatever it was. They filled Styrofoam cups and we drank as we weaved through traffic onto the Cross Bronx Expressway. I turned the concerned part of my brain off and gulped down the frozen punch, wind in my hair, Reggaeton blasting in my ears.

Half an hour later, with three more dudes in the car and a big red stain on my white lace dress, we pulled up to Cornrows’ house. The night was turning into a gray pre-dawn, and a cop car was parked out front. I was buzzed, puzzled. No one seemed to mind the two skinny cops, younger guys, who stepped out of the patrol car.

"Fuck you, motherfuckers!" Cornrows yelled at them, and they smiled back, following us up the stairs and into the top-floor apartment. There, the guys cracked open Coronas for us and started rolling blunts. What the fuck is this, cops just chillin?, I thought.

I walked out onto the balcony and looked out over the rooftops at the pink sunrise. Sipped my beer, smiled to myself. Buzz Cut came out. "What are you?" he asked.

"Me? What do you mean?" "What’s your ethnicity?" "Oh, I’m Persian," I said. "A virgin?" he asked. I laughed. "Yeah. A Bronx virgin."

 ”Is that the thing with the bushes?” I ask. I’d heard some rumors about brooms and beatings.

“Ahh, it’s really not too bad,” she assures me, so I sign up for 3 o’clock and head into the bath.

While there, I see the masseur in action in the steam room, rubbing his 2 o’clock client with salts. I heard his accent in there, and I imagine at the end of the massage I’ll look at him and ask, “What’s your name?” And he’ll coldly reply, “Igor.”

After spending some time in the steam room, I get some water and sit in a lounge chair with a direct view of the hot tub and the cold plunge pool. I’m kind of lost in my head when I see the girl ahead of me come out of the Russian sauna. She sits with her feet in the plunge pool and “Igor” disappears for a minute. Then, Whoosh. Igor throws a large bucket of ice water right against the girl’s back. Picture the winning coach after the Super Bowl. I gape. Nobody told me about the bucket of ice!

I’m still nervous when the masseur directs his client to lie next to me. She reclines in her robe on the lounge chair, and he wraps her head and feet in towels and rubs them. “Take a nap,” he commands.

I look at him. “You’ve got me scared,” I say.

“Why?” “Because I’m your 3 o’clock and nobody told me about the ice water.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says and smiles.

We start in the steam room on a black table covered with towels. He comes in with a pho soupsized bucket of salt. “What’s your name?” he asks. “I’m Ben.”

Ben? Surely this man is an Igor.

I mean, OK, he’s pretty scrawny, with tattoos and long, brown hair. He kind of resembles your local video store clerk (when those existed).

He proceeds to rub me down with the salt. He’s telling a joke— presumably to the couple of other men sitting in the steam room— but I miss the point. Maybe it was something sexist. I’m trying to focus on his hands, kind of giggling at the awkwardness. He leans into it. He rubs as if the salt wasn’t there. It doesn’t hurt like I was afraid it might. Although I had shaved my legs a couple days beforehand, the salt only leaves a slight sting as he rubs.

“Is this an angel?” he asks, pointing to the large tattoo on my ribcage. I nod. “Why is she so lonely?” “She’s just thinking,” I say. After the rubdown, I shower off and wait for about 10 minutes outside the bath, cooling my body off. I see Ben preparing the two bushels of oak leaves. He looks up at me, and we head into the stone-walled sauna. It’s 185 degrees.

He has sheets and towels covering the wooden planks, and he throws buckets and buckets of cold water on them. He instructs me to lay face down. It’s almost unbearably hot.

He wraps my head in a cold, wet towel.

I teeter between the idea that this is an invigorating, wild experience, and the idea that it’s the kind that might kill you—like those hippies in the sweat lodge.

But I’m in here. And there’s no turning back.

He soaks the leaves and lets them hang over me and drip. Then, th-WACK. Slaps against my back. Brush-brush, th-WACK. My pores are open from the salt scrub and the extreme heat and beating of leaves. He pulls my bikini bottoms halfway down my ass and beats the bushels of oak leaves, with varying degrees of pressure, up and down my back.

Then he douses me with cold water.

It’s shocking, but my body is thankful. My flesh is like putty, supplicating, waiting for him to re-soak the cold towel. He douses himself with half of a bucket of cold water, and I lean forward, thinking the rest is for me. But he uses it on himself.

I ask him if he’ll soak my head towel again, and he takes it away, places his knee between my legs and rubs my back as I lay face down, with his hands covered in coldwet mitts. He asks me to sit up and face him, bare my chest.

TH-WACK th-WACK th-WACK. “Arms up!” TH-WACK th-WACK th-WACK. “All right. Let’s go.”

He walks me out and leads me to the pool. I know what’s coming, but I don’t mind as much as I thought I would. I’m really fucking hot and totally overwhelmed. I put my feet in the cold pool.

He pours the ice water on my shoulders first, and then tosses the rest against my back. He instructs me to get all the way in the cold-plunge pool, so I dunk my head. After I step out, he wraps me in my robe and guides me to a lounge chair. I recline as he rubs my head and feet and wraps them tightly with towels. That’s when he says, “Better than sex, right?” I just look at him. Actually, no, it was nothing like sex. But all this body-numbness makes me feel like I’m on some sort of drug.

He says, “You should take a nap.” Then he covers my eyes with a towel, and I half-nap, half-bask in the feeling.

Afterward, I dress in the locker room, and when I’m done Ben’s waiting for me outside as I walk out. He’s smoking a cigarette, holding one for me. He asks to buy me a drink, and I wonder if he usually does this. But I let him buy me a bourbon at the Mexican place next door.

That’s when he tells me that, before he came to America, he used to traffic porn into Iran from Turkmenistan. He said he gives 10 platza massages a day sometimes, and he’s harder on the regulars. I think about how intimate that experience was— the heat, the pressure. Does it feel like that to him every time?

I don’t know why, but I give him my number and tell him to come see my friend’s band play in a couple weeks. But I know I don’t really like him, though, and I won’t go.

I’m so sore that night I can hardly move. I sleep hard and wake reinvigorated. I know he’ll be texting me. But no matter what, I won’t go back.