I spent my birthday in the normal fashion
You can’t go to most onsen in Japan if you have tattoos, and I have a lot of those, so the one time I wanted anything approaching an onsen experience I found myself in an institutional-feeling municipal bath near the Tsutenkaku in Osaka, where I would say there was water but it was not entirely relaxing, and isn’t that the entire fucking point of going to an onsen. I yearned, and yearn, for the real thing. There is a hole.
King Spa comes close to filling the hole. It is a temple of Korean pseudoscience in the inner-ring suburbs of Chicagoland, next to an H Mart because they know their demographic. It is not easy to get to by transit, but it is easy to get to by both rideshare & bike. Admission is $28 through, bafflingly, Groupon. It is 24/7/365, because time stops in King Spa, as if you were in a Vegas casino of self-care. Unlike most spas, once you’re in, you’re in for effectively unlimited time. (You have to pay for another round of admission if you happen to be there at 3am.) Its café is lowkey one of the best Korean restaurants in the metro area.
King Spa as secret handshake, as shibboleth. There is a specific class of person – queer, millennial, deconditioned, slightly feral, covered in tattoos – for whom the invocation of King Spa brings about an instant love language, a barrage of detailed, excited opinions about what rooms are best, what times to go & not go, what kinds of people you see there. The director of my yoga studio once came over to my home for a meal, and her phone had one of those wallet cases on it. The frontmost card was a King Spa VIP pass. I pointed at it; we smiled & wordlessly nodded, both of us surely filling the Dragnet theme song in the background.
No list of “things to do in Chicago” will include King Spa. It is far from everything, in a parking lot behind another parking lot. The closest landmark of any note – other than H Mart, of course – is a one-sixth-size replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, routinely featured on every “weird landmarks of America” listing.
And yet everyone who is cool either knows King Spa or is about to. It is passed around like lore. Brief six-hour stays are scheduled among close friends. Every time, the legend begins anew.
Bringing your same-sex pals to King Spa is great because within five minutes of arrival, you are all fully naked in a hot tub together. If you’re an embodied dude, you are surrounded by Korean grandfathers, Polish bodybuilders, and the sort of men who go on cold plunge retreats, listen to Fleet Foxes, and do morning pages. I cannot speak to the other half of the wet spa because I have never been there. Regardless, all pretense is dispensed with, and you are all instantly the same, a fact that has always been true but now you all know it.
There are three pools in the wet spa, and one of them – always a different one each time – is thermonuclear hot. You know which pool is the really hot one because the sensitive retreat men and the Koreans are all in there. The bodybuilders are either to the side, in a room-temperature “cold” pool; or in the steam room, natch.
Move around pools, why not. Steam room to shower to pools, why not, tell your story. After a half-hour of this, you are ready to exit the wet spa, throw on your cult-grade robe, and enter the main spa.
Nothing can prepare you for the first time you walk into the main spa. The décor is like if a Bennigan’s ate mushrooms and turned into a two-floor vaulted temple. The walls are covered with urns, taxidermied heads of African mammals, suitcases, sundry Eastern gods, seashells, fragments of wooden boats lost to time, amethyst crystal geodes the size of a tall man, and at one point, until sometime in the the middle of 2017, at the very top center of the main wall, oil paintings of Barack & Michelle Obama. You are then presented with rows of oversized recliner chairs surrounded by a series of (mostly) heated rooms that you can meditate in. One of the rooms is a pyramid encrusted in gold leaf that claims to heal your skin with “far anions.” Another room asks you to lay down on a slab of volcanic rock that purports to relax your muscles. (Admission costs $5 extra; in practice, only newbies pay the fee.) A third room, called the “Bul-Gama Dream Experiment Room,” is described thus:
Bulgama room effectively helps to remove stubborn toxins from the tissues, lowers blood pressure, kills bacteria and cures back pains. Contains amethyst crystals, and a unique living stone called elvan. This room is very hot to maximize the healing benefits of infrared rays.
Okay.
There is a room made of himalayan salt, a room made of charcoal & amethyst, a room only called “ochre” that possesses “yellow soil,” and an “ice room” that helps you cool off from all of the aforementioned. (The rooms are hot.) There is an oxygen room, where they pump so much oxygen into the atmosphere that I swear I can feel my third eye opening every time I go in there.
I am certain that all of this is connected to Korean culture in a way that I do not fully understand, and in many ways cannot fully understand. The goal, then, is to suspend disbelief, keep an open mind, and walk into the golden pyramid.
The problem is that when King Spa is crowded, people are always making out in the pyramid. Wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t, of course, because you have scruples & shame, but look, it’s a golden pyramid, and everyone is already relaxed into a puddle, so you can’t exactly blame others for this. As a result, one must take the day off in order to do King Spa properly, in a way that honors the whole thing, including & especially the ding dang pyramid. King Spa doesn’t care about your time or commitments. It costs money to enter, but it is resolutely anti-capitalist in this way. King Spa on a Wednesday in the middle of winter hits different, and everyone knows it.
And then, in the center, looming over the whole affair taller than anything else, is the fire room. A few times a day, they close the room, build a fire in there, and leave it go for an hour. The ambient air hovers between 180º and 240º. You can keep your cold plunges; I’ll have the fire room. You are exhorted to stay for a maximum of five minutes, and honestly I have no idea how anyone could last any longer than that. You leave your stuff outside, bring a rug in to keep your feet from burning, and then you sit down and don’t move. Moving means more air. Nobody talks. It’s effectively soundproofed in order to keep the heat in, so it is also silent, and given that your entire body is thrown into a state of heated shock, sound feels so different in the fire room, so magnified, like an ASMR video. You hear everyone’s breath & swallow, their bodies shifting like bodies do. Within 30 seconds you are aggressively sweating. I always bring a 40oz water bottle in, and within a few minutes I drink almost all of it. You always know when to leave. You get up, shirt soaked, open the door, and walk into another world.