“You have to get the Mango Sugar Glow, it’s absolutely amazing.”

I had just remembered that advice as I finished scheduling my “treatments” at Tucson’s Canyon Ranch, a very high-end fat farm that has a gym, hundreds of classes geared toward getting you to ear right and exercise, and a dozens of massages for people who forget to go to the gym and blow off diet class (which applies to 98 percent of the people here).

“OK, you’ve got the Hot Stone Massage, the Shiatsu Massage, the Swedish Massage and the Watsu Water Treatment Massage,” said the woman at the front desk. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, there’s some sort of Mango Massage, a sugar glow thing?” I said.

“You mean the Mango Sugar Glow? It’s absolutely amazing.”

“Yeah, that’s it. The Sugar Glow.”

“OK, let me print out your schedule for you,” she said as a machine below the counter began to hum. “You’ll need to arrive 15 minute before the appointment, just come back here to the waiting area and your masseuse will come out to get you.”

“Sounds perfect,” I said, pulling on the cottony soft belt of my plush white robe. Every guest here wears a robe and slippers because most of them are at some point getting a massage, and it’s just cool to walk around as if you’re at the Playboy Mansion. It’s amazing how quickly you stop worrying about robe gappage, since most people are strolling around in bodies you wouldn’t want to look, so voyeurism is about as much a part of this place as fried food (there are guys at the Ranch’s gated entrance whose job includes turning away pizza deliveries as well as any unauthorized food ordered by guests dying to eat something other than 2.5 ounces of boiled halibut served on a few sprigs of lemon grass, oh my God, don’t you people have a conscience?!)

“Wait, I forgot one thing,” she said, scribbling something on the schedule. “For the Mango Sugar Glow, go through the men’s locker room to the sauna area. Tell the attendant what you’re there for and he’ll take care of you.”

“Ok, no problem,” I’d already been to the men’s locker room, where you can toss your robe in a wicker basket and get a freshly laundered robe at absolutely no extra cost, though it’s probably factored somewhere into the $2,288 per week charge. Did I say meals are included? Because they are. That’s several ounces of fish and vegetables thrown in for free, a $12.18 retail value.

No matter, because it’s all about the massages. Well, except for that Hot Stone Massage, which consisted of an older woman hoisting smooth rocks from a crock pot and placing them on your body in places you don’t even think about until someone places a hot stone there. Near the end this rubless treatment, the attendant (she can hardly be called a masseuse, since that implies a massage is taking place) wedges small skipping stones between your toes. Perhaps they found this practice on the Abu Ghraib website.

It was nearing time for my Mango Sugar Glow, so I slid into my slippers, closed my robe and walked the quarter mile to the men’s locker room, passing the gym where the only sound coming from inside was that of crickets and the whisper of a tumbleweed.

I sat in a plastic chaise lounge next to the hot tub currently being shared by two large, sweaty, please-don’t-forget-your-robe men sipping in ice water with a wedge of lemon (damn, where’d they get the lemon? That could’ve been lunch). Men in robes occupied the other four chairs. Looked like the Mango Sugar Glow was a popular treatment.

I snagged a white fluffy towel from one of the 12 stacks of white fluffy towels strategically placed so that you would never be more than an arm’s length from cottony comfort. I put the towel under my head since I really couldn’t think of another use for it, and with the resort filled with such towels, it would be just wrong not to use one. Hey, it’s free. And now someone has to wash it (doing the math later, I discovered that of the $2,288 per week, $2,200 goes to the laundry. The rest is split between the kitchen and the guy who bitch-slaps the Domino’s dude).

“Mr. C--?” said a man who had emerged from the back. A white T-shirt clung to his wiry frame, sinewy muscles rippling along forearms that once belonged to Popeye look. His white pants lent to his clinical look, save for the snake tattooed on his left bicep, the serpent dancing as he swung his long arms by his side while walking toward me.

“That’s me,” I said. Leaning forward, I grabbed the towel and threw it into a small wicker basket that, I assumed, was for soiled linens. On its way to the basket, the towel was intercepted by a laundry attendant who, and I swear this is true, suddenly appeared as if out of a wormhole. As he disappeared into the back, I could swear each of the towel stacks raised the height of one more towel.

“Good, I’m Jim, nice to meet you,” he said, crushing my hand. “Now let’s see, you want the, uh, the Mango Sugar Glow?”

“Well,” I said, hesitating because the way his voice went up at the end of the sentence. It started as a statement, ending as a question. “Yeah, the, uh, Sugar Glow.” Had I just said “Sugar glow”?

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Could you just wait here a few minutes? I need to go over to the ladies’ side to get the mango, uh, glow.”

The two sweaty guys in the hot tub looked at me. Smirking. The other guys sitting in the plastic lounges pulled their robes a little tighter, eyes glued on their magazines that included Maxim, Sports Illustrated and Popular Mechanics (Popular Mechanics? Who knew that was still around?)

“Ladies’ side?” I said. “Why?” Just asking this seemed to rub more Sugar Glow into the wound.

“It’s not something we offer on the men’s side,” said Jim, emphasizing “men’s.” “Don’t worry, it’ll just take a few minutes.”

Before my testosterone levels dropped to levels from which they could never recover, I waved him off.

“No, that’s OK,” I said. “I really don’t know anything about this mango thing. A friend suggested it. A woman. So it really isn’t that important to me. At all.”

“OK, if you’re sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“If you’re still interested,” Jim said, “what we do on this side is a sea-salt scrub.”

“Definitely, then let’s do that,” I said. “Yup, sea-salt. Scrub. That sounds perfect.”

“It’s pretty abrasive,” Jim said. “But it’s a great exfoliate. Your skin will really breathe when it’s over.”

Exfoliate? Hey, Jimbo, doesn’t that belong on the women’s side?

“Sounds perfect,” I said.

Jim smiled. Not a warm “Welcome back to the men’s side” smile, but a “You say that now, but just wait” smile.

Whatever. Bring on the sea salt, baby. I looked at the two guys in the hot tub, hoping they had heard. About being rubbed with sea salt. Not about it being an exfoliate. But they’d closed their eyes, perhaps dreaming of a different ending for “Mango Boy” – “So this big beefy attendant has to go to the woman’s side because this guy insisted on being slathered with some kind of sugar lotion, can you just imagine his humiliation?”

Jim pointed to a door past the sauna. “Go in there and take a shower. Don’t dry off, though, just like on the table and drape this towel over yourself. I’ll be in in just a few minutes.”

White spotless tiles covered every square inch of the walls in the small room. A nozzle jutted from the wall, opposite a drain in the floor. A thinly padded massage table took up the rear half of the room, under which was the familiar stack of fluffy towels.

I twisted the knob underneath the nozzle. Needles of water splashed against my skin, and I turned slowly to soak myself. I turned off the water, grabbed and towel and stretched out on the table, waiting for Jim.

A few minutes later he entered with a clear plastic wide-mouthed bottle. He tipped it toward his palm and shook, a rattling sound echoing off the tiles.

“What I’m going to do,” he said, standing over me, “is rub this salt over your skin, removing the dead cells and reviving the skin underneath. All you need to do is relax. Oh, and let me know if I’m a little too vigorous. Some men have, you know, a lower tolerance for the scrub.”

You mean like men who ask for Mango Sugar Glow? Of course he meant that. Do your best, Salt Man, because I was about to prove I was no Mango Boy.

I closed my eyes as he started on my arms, a burning sensation that could only be caused by intense chafing. I could actually hear my top three skin layers say goodbye. What I could not hear was the distinct buzz of the power sander he must have been using.

“How’s that?” he asked, the salt creating its own wounds in which to be rubbed.

“Really nice,” I said, trying to remember if Jim had said this would take 30 or 45 minutes.

For the next several hours (I was surprised to find the clock had moved just 50 minutes during the procedure), Jim was careful to find every patch of skin previously exposed to air, removing it with the efficiency of a man who nearly had to go over to the ladies’ side, seeing his life flash before his eyes.

The worst was the inner thighs, where his hands came dangerously close to body parts never meant to experience salt crystals, let alone have them ground in. The towel did not stop Jim’s ruthless pursuit of skin cells more than a few days old. As he continued to scrape my inner thighs, I wondered if this was a feeling similar to that of a marathoner in the last mile of the race, his flesh rubbing together to a point where friction should set his shorts on fire.

“Everything OK?” Jim asked.

“This is great,” I said. “I can’t believe I’ve never had this done before.”

“Yeah, it really stimulates the skin.”

That made me feel good, indicating I still had skin left.

When it was over, I was glowing – a very bright red. I shrugged into my robe, a once comfy outer layer that now stuck with a million tiny barbs. I walked gingerly with legs spread, as if I’d just spent the last eight hours riding naked on a horse through Death Valley.

“A lot of guys are surprised how refreshed they feel after a sea-salt scrub,” Jim said. “All that dead skin was just suffocating.”

Yes, exposing muscle and sinew to air was certainly preferable to being suffocated by several layers of epidermis. At least that is what I expressed to Jim as I left, thanking him for his strong hands and determined nature.

“Yeah, it’s great to be able to breathe again,” I said. I just never thought I’d be able to do it through my inner thighs.