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RSS icon Comments on The Hot, Slippery, Questionably Spackled Elephant in the Room

1

Don't even get me started on that name.

Posted by keshmeshi | January 17, 2007 4:04 PM
2

when my friend katy gets drunk, she starts demanding that we go to tubs.


...


ohshi!

Posted by alithea | January 17, 2007 4:04 PM
3

My single post menopausal mother goes there for massages. Apparantly he is very good and professional. She was not embarrassed to mention this. Take this for what you will, and I will clense it from my mind.

Oh and one more thing, Tubs HAS changed. They went from the B&W checkered exterior cum (ahem) neon sign to the faux stone exterior, lazily or cheaply omited on the west side. For the record.

Posted by Jude Fawley | January 17, 2007 4:05 PM
4
I once soaked inside that weird marble mausoleum, as a child, for a friend’s ill-conceived 4th-grade birthday party.

This explains everything.

Posted by frederick r | January 17, 2007 4:06 PM
5

I know nothing about the place but I am willing to do some research. I'll just put a craigslist personal ad out looking for a "research assistant".

Posted by monkey | January 17, 2007 4:06 PM
6

That place was a straight whorehouse last time I went there (2002, oh college). The hookers weren't half-bad, but expensive. Girlfriends are cheaper.

They used to have some silly messages on their sign too. I remember one very well : "Lost: one-eyed, three-legged dog named lucky" and another, "Come in out of the cold and get lucky."

Posted by James Jones | January 17, 2007 4:14 PM
7

Techie complaint: a lot of Slog entries lately have used extended characters for apostrophes and quotation marks. Please knock this off: it makes Slog render funny in certain news readers and browsers.

Educated guess: you guys are writing your blog posts in Word, then cutting-and-pasting them, fancy curly quotes and all, onto the web. Please turn off curly-quotes in Word or use a different tool.

[Annoyed repeat-comment readers: this is the last one]

Posted by techgrouch | January 17, 2007 4:16 PM
8

My mom used to take me there when I was pretty little. Must have been '85 or '86 and it was still called "tubs," not whatever it is now. I don't know why we went there. I guess she needed to relax her muscles or something. I *do* however, remember that they left you a dish of Hershy's Kisses.

Posted by candyqueen | January 17, 2007 4:16 PM
9

The decor is ludicrously, painfully 1980s Miami and that alone is worth ridicule; but the massage therapists are good and professional (no "happy endings" there, and the paperwork they make you sign specifies that they'll toss you if you try for any such thing), and at least during the day there's nothing skeezy about it. It appears to be scrupulously clean. They could do themselves some favors by changing the decor and the graphic design of their advertising, and I'm sure some people find it terribly titter-worthy that a person might want to soak in a hot tub with their honey or some friends, but the place itself isn't particularly nasty.

Posted by supersoaker | January 17, 2007 4:18 PM
10

It was skeezier before the remodel. I think it changed owners in the late nineties. It was sort a nasty place late before that, but now its just a borin' place.

Posted by Andrew | January 17, 2007 4:27 PM
11

Yup. Prostitutes as this world sex guide mentions: http://www.worldsexguide.org/seattle.txt.html

Posted by Andrew | January 17, 2007 4:31 PM
12

My wife and I go there regularly. When you have six kids, being able to rent a hot tub and a day bed for an hour is a fucking Godsend.

The big downer: no booze. There are huge disclaimers posted screaming "Tubs and alcohol do not mix!" (Fortunately, they don't say anything about weed.) We saw a couple get around this rule by chugging a bottle of wine in their car before walking in.

Posted by The Zero Boss | January 17, 2007 4:33 PM
13

i used to live in a really shitty rental house down the street from tubs, circa Grunge Years. our house was poorly insulated and always freezing and it seemed like we were always getting a window busted out.

my boyfriend mike, our roommate jeff, and i would go to tubs as often as we could afford it -- simply to warm up. they also have saunas!

ok, so we were drunk when we came up with the plan and drunk every subsequent visit but it sure beat that drafty old house. although, we raised a lot of eyebrows with two dudes and one girl.

i haven't been there for over a decade but distinctly remember two things: they would only give you two hershey's kisses upon leaving, even if there were three in your party. secondly, there was a SIGNED photo of STEVE POOL hanging in the hallway. he once said to me, how the fuck should i know? when i asked him about the weather. i've hated him ever since.

Posted by kerri harrop | January 17, 2007 4:48 PM
14

techgrouch: We hear you. We have some educatin' to do, obviously. Give us a couple of days.

on topic: I have friends (a young married couple) who go there regularly. They speak highly of the massage staff. They aren't embarrassed by it (though I am for them).

Posted by Amy Kate | January 17, 2007 5:00 PM
15

Been there with my girlfriend a few times. Sometimes we just sit back and relax, but other (well, most) times a "special kind of hugging" is involved, as Lindy puts it. Every time I've been in there, the room has looked absolutely pristine. I'm sure the place is a favorite of the local hookers/johns, but there's plenty of room for perfectly clean enjoyment by those who just like a hot soak, too.

Posted by tsm | January 17, 2007 5:02 PM
16

Back in the 80s (when its Miami Vice decor was oh so tres au currant) it was pretty notorious for certain kinds of parties, mostly involving the UW greek system. Though it could have been a story about just one party, endless repeated...

Posted by Joe | January 17, 2007 5:07 PM
17

You and your friend are hilarious! Thanks for the funny post! :)

Posted by Suz | January 17, 2007 5:07 PM
18

Techgrouch: get a real browser. Mine renders the glyphs just fine. The meta http-equiv tag is specifying the western european charset (ISO-8859-1) — it doesn't look like they include a charset in their content-type http header — so it shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, in the case of user-provided content “educating” the providers becomes a perpetual investement of mostly wasted effort. If you want to bitch, instead of polluting every comment thread why not ask the webmaster(s) to implement a filter so that the characters that cause you so much trouble get remapped on input, or perhaps just change their charset to UTF-8.

Posted by Ţëčĥŋōĝřőùçħ² | January 17, 2007 5:32 PM
19

Tubs looks like a Vegas-style place, a la Bilagio's. A friend used to work there, and said he left becasue he was tired of going toe-to-toe with scumbags in the parking lot late at night. Obviously the clientele changes with the time of day.

Posted by isabelita | January 17, 2007 6:08 PM
20

I can't believe nobody has mentioned TUBS's nickname: "The soak 'n' poke."

Also, one time I saw their front sign touting "Hydrotherapy Suites" vandalized so that it read "rapy suit."

Posted by Eliza | January 17, 2007 6:11 PM
21

The remodel just made the place more hilarious.

I have a friend -- honestly, just a friend, except for that one time -- whom I will sometimes take to Tubs. We get a bottle of wine, maybe some Taco Bell, some music, and go have a little naked girlie bitchfest in the hot tub. It's a blast. Where else can you do that?

Plus, you stand an 80% chance of hearing a classic Prince or Janet Jackson song any time you visit the Very Fabulous restroom. C'mon. It's rad.

Posted by Violet_DaGrinder | January 17, 2007 6:16 PM
22

In high school we used to joke about being Tubs Jizz-Skimmers, btw. It's true, somebody has to be doing it.

Posted by Violet_DaGrinder | January 17, 2007 6:17 PM
23

We used to have a place just like tubs where I grew up called "Watercourse Way".
Of course as teenagers we called it "Intercourse Way" or even more commonly the "Soak & Poke".
I did go there once with my boyfriend. There was even a bed in our room! Which by the way, we didn't use.. Because we were perfectly content doing it in the hot tub which reaked of chlorine.

Posted by lilyfatz | January 17, 2007 6:59 PM
24

Violet #21 - It's one thing to think about you eating food naked with your friend (yuck) and it's another thing to be eating food naked with your friend in a hot tub (double yuck) but eating TACO FUCKING BELL naked with your friend in a hot tub is just WRONG in so many ways (infinite yuck).

Posted by Explorer | January 17, 2007 7:21 PM
25

i wen to an employee's farewell party there years and years ago. we sat around(outside of the tubs),smoked bud and drank and they threw the departing worker in the tub. some cops even came in and busted somebody in there, thankfully didnt smell the weed from our room.

Posted by lar | January 17, 2007 9:58 PM
26

A lot of swinger types go to TUBS for the fellowship of course.

Posted by Sha | January 18, 2007 5:40 AM
27

This is better than I ever could have expected.

Posted by Meagan | January 18, 2007 7:33 AM
28

You mention that it's a minimum of two people to reserve a tub... you forgot to mention that you get a MAJOR per-person discount for four or more people! Hooray for encouraged group naked tubbing!

But seriously, I *heart* TUBS. It's really not so dirty... they chlorine the fuck out of everything, so it's pretty well sterilized. And it's the only place where men and women can tub nekkid together. And in private. And be sexual. It's a hell of a better deal than owning your own hottub.

I really don't see why people are so embarassed about it, or especially why people are embarassed FOR THEIR FRIENDS about going there.

Posted by L | January 18, 2007 5:19 PM

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