A friend recommended a massage therapist named Frank.

"He's cutting edge, man. You'll love him."

That afternoon I learned that "cutting edge" referred to the way Frank burrowed his elbows into your pain.

Call me old-fashioned, but I consider massage a time to relax and possibly pass out from ecstasy. Frank has an entirely different take. He believes that physical problems come from muscles attaching to the bone or something. I couldn't hear him over my squealing. So it goes.

Here is Frank's method, and I swear to not embellish: He begins with "deep tissue work," or crushing your muscles till you cry for time-out. At that point Frank knows he has identified a Trouble Area, which of course requires extra crushing. That's where the elbows come in.

"There were 1,500 people in my massage school, and not one of them used this technique..."

I found that hard to believe.

Explaining the true nature of "knots," the kind of thing you learn only by divine revelation, Frank would mount you with his elbows and, over your writhing, tout his acclaim in the world of cutting edge massage.

The pain grew so intense that -- still not embellishing -- I had a bad trip. No kidding. It dawned on me that Frank might not be well. He could have been tortured by faceless men who referred to their cruelty as "massage therapy." I started to get woozy and stood up.

"Need a break?" he said. "I'll get you some water."

When Frank returned, I was dressed, keys in hand. I confessed to a headache that must have come from too much healing. Frank asked if he had gone too deep, and I assured him that he had not. I feared mainly that his water glass was filled with napalm.

As I left his house, Frank waved after me and said, "Trust me, you'll feel great in a couple of..."

But I was already gone. I owed a certain friend of mine some Trouble Areas of his own.

I spend a lot of time apologizing to the plants. It's not that I'm negligent; it's just that there is so much on TV. Sometimes I forget to water a plant for, say, April, and then, to make amends, turn a fire hose on the rest.

And the victims add up: creepers, climbers, berries, shrubs. I even killed a perennial (talk about false advertising). I'm not proud of this, Sierra Club. I feel awful every time it happens. With a short tribute, I bury the plants in Glad trash bags, hoping the angels will water them with their tears.

It's a good thing we can't be tried for plant murder. I could just see the detective on my doorstep: "Broken stems, starved for water, cigarettes in the soil ... Yeah, this is our guy."

When I was a child, my mother said that I had a green thumb. She was, unfortunately, talking about the digit I used to pick my nose. My relationship with nature went downhill from there. In first grade I presented a show-and-tell on the family's "orgasmic garden." Mr. Baker would have stopped me but for the resell value of the video. Later, at age sixteen, a supervisor grabbed my watering can and said, "Uh, Jason, those plants aren't getting any faker." So it goes.

Today my home is a Glad-bag nightmare to plants from all stalks of life. Some have already passed on; others are counting the days. They droop when I enter the room, trying to catch my attention before I find the remote. You can almost hear them gossip among themselves: "Can you believe he left Sylvia dead in the planter? Talk about bad feng shui."

In my defense, the plants also die to insects, climate, and diseases normally confined to the tropics. Some plants, like ex-girlfriends, "just need room to grow"; others are so wasted from dehydration that they must be anorexic. I half-expect to find them shrinking from the sun under tiny plastic parasols.

It is only for love of nature that I keep trying. I enjoy how plants grow up through cracks in the sidewalk and how, like the common nose hair, they always stretch toward the light. When I shop the K-Mart garden section, it is with a sense of possibility, as if I had never killed anyone. I read the containers and carefully weigh all of my options before making the wrong decision. Two months later, you can't tell the flowers from the weeds unless you follow Gallagher's Theorem: "If you water it and it dies, it's a plant; if you don't water it and it grows, it's a weed."

For the record, Sierra Club, I have tried everything. For a time I watered the plants with Dasani instead of tap. Dead. I worked coffee grounds into their soil. Jittery, then dead. I even talked to the poor guys. I ask the plants how they felt about global warming and tension in the Middle East. I think they died to shut me up.

Maybe it's time to introduce plastic plants, which don't pester you with things like photosynthesis. I would have to find plastic plants that appear diseased so as to blend in with the others. Hell, while we're at it, I might as well get stuffed animals to replace those needy living ones.

Or maybe, at the risk of serial murder, I will carry on. Surely the angels will feel for my persistence. In fact, that's it. I am turning over a new leaf (ha). I will redouble my efforts to save this secret garden. Excuse me while I step out to K-Mart for some fresh seeds, a little pesticide, and, just in case, an oversized box of Glad trash bags.