I was just 9 months out of the hospital in 1983 when I got a job at a hot tub joint called Watercourse Way. I was hired from a vocational program to work there three months and then they would rotate another client in-but they liked me so much they kept me there four years alongside another guy.
It was basically a medium size, two story building with 9 private rooms on the first floor and two massage rooms and a room with an isolation tank on the second floor. It was owned and run by a young couple in their thirties and they had 6 employees who ran the front desk, me and the other client and 12 masseuses. It was in Palo Alto, California which is an. affluent city near Stanford University. It was the 1980’s and there were a lot of rich, young yuppies who came there; a bunch of Stanford Graduates who could afford it.
It had 9 private rooms with each room had a hot tub and a dry sauna or a wet sauna, a shower with soap and a bed. the place was legitimate but everybody knew the couples who came there were having sex in the rooms, I mean you could hear them, lol. It was an interesting place to work, I was hired as a maintenance worker and later I worked at the front desk or taking the people back to their rooms and explaining the rules. It was a family business and the two owners used to have outings for the employees. Once they took me and Larry, the other guy from the vocational program up to the Greek Theater in Berkeley to see a reggae concert. That was nice. Once we had a big picnic up in a park in the mountains and we played frisbee and baseball and the owners and some of the employees smoked pot. Another time they treated everybody to a dinner in an Italian restaurant in the North Beach district in San Francisco.
I had a lot of interesting experiences there, I remember a couple of times the boss lent me his BMW to drive around. He used to have me pick up his lunch from a nearby shopping center and treat me to lunch also. He later hired another client from the vocational program but the poor guy ended up killing himself. It was 1983-87 and I started off making about $4 an hour and got a 25 cent raise even six months. I would never do it again but the boss was paying me under the table for a couple of years.
Incidentally, in 1983 for two people to soak in a tub for an hour it was $5.75 & $7.50 for a larger room. I was just on their website and see it’s now $40 an hour per person per room for a small room and $55 an hour for a larger room.
Yeah, I went through some stuff while I was there. I was addicted to crack my last year and a half there. They used to let the staff cash checks there so I would party in East Palo Alto all day and drive to Watercourse Way multiple times at night and cash $20 dollar checks to buy rocks. Actually, they changed their policy because I bounced 4 or 5 checks there one night and they abolished the practice of cashing checks for employees. I also got busted by the women boss for being high on crack one night when I went there to cash a check, that was mighty embarrassing.
I moved like 7 times times while I worked there, living in supported housing. Yeah, it was an interesting experience working there, I still remember a lot of stuff about it. I was in my early 20’s while I worked there, I can remember what it’s like to be young.
