During the first months of the COVID-19 lockdown, I was blessed with enough time to draft the first in a projected trilogy of novels that I had long aspired to write. The first book, Buddha Goes to Dystrophy Camp is based on my earliest volunteer work at a Muscular Dystrophy summer camp in 1971 when I was 17. For a week I served as the arms and legs of Luis Torres, a 15 year old Mexican-American with duchenne muscular dystrophy, a form of the disease that is 100% fatal, usually before the age of 25.
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We were placed in a cabin with 5 other camper-attendant pairings (this was the condescending terminology at the time and I employ it only for the sake of historical accuracy) as well as a unit leader who had previous experience as a volunteer. Ours was the quick-witted, 12-string guitar playing Denny Harris, who was openly tender hearted about our campers...never, however, in their presence. Denny's wry banter was his superpower and he used it to bring the shy, the wary and just plain depressed campers out of their shells.
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One of Denny's intuitively fine ideas was to invite several of the camp's female nurses to a 'Shower Party' on a particularly sweltering afternoon--we would all be swimsuit-clad, of course. Though I've invented many of the details, the flow of what happened that memorable day is as true to life as anything I've shared with other persons, all of us connected to the mystery of engagement and intimacy in one of life's rarer moments.
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The Bath House, a misnomer since it only housed showers and toilets, sat a hundred yards to the right of Cabin P and was connected to us by a path once filled with crushed gravel. After years of neglect only a few stones remained embedded in the path’s hardened dirt. The Bath House itself was entered by an opening that lay six feet to the right of center and comprised two rooms. On the left an expansive area opened up to six shower heads, three on each side and a sloping floor that channeled water toward a single large drain in the floor’s center. A commode chair with wheels on it for easy maneuvering sat below the first shower head. Next to that we found a plastic shower chair, its four legs firmly set on the concrete floor. To our right was a smaller room containing three toilet stalls whose doors had been removed sitting opposite two sinks and two porcelain wall urinals that ran from just below the floor up to chest height and were fed by pipes connected to an automatic flushing system, also made of porcelain, mounted three feet above the urinals. The whole arrangement reminded me of state parks.
We weren’t initially discouraged by the absence of any nurses and released some of our pent-up energy by turning on all six showers and directing their spray onto the campers’ chests. Ricky Bowman wanted his shower aimed directly on his head. He closed his eyes and reveled in the cooling falls. Phil Macak asked Scott to hand him his washcloth and soap but Denny said, “Not yet,” as a way to signal his future hopes for our campers. This came to fruition when Sue Beeson entered the Bath House toting a combination AM/FM stereo radio and cassette player with silvery 4-inch speakers built into each end of the unit. She was wearing a floral one-piece over her naturally tan skin and carried a colorful striped towel over her shoulder. She also sported pink nylon shorts that became see-through the minute they got wet. Accompanying her was Nancy Adams, a thirty-something nurse with long, dark brown hair whom we had only seen before at meals. Her one-piece suit was pink and she wasn’t wearing any shorts over it. Nancy had a slender, mature woman’s body that compelled attention. This didn’t trouble her as she moved naturally across the shower room to set her towel down on a bench seat that had been built into the far wall. Sue Beeson spoke first,
“Don’t tell me the shower party’s started without us!” Luis bolted upright in his wheelchair.
“No way!” Sue smiled at Luis’s unrestrained excitement.
“This is Nancy, everyone.” Nancy gracefully raised her hand to shoulder height.
“Hi, guys.” John Lianos tried to be funny but ended up being obvious.
“Can I call you Nancy the Nurse?” Nancy treated the question as if it were genuine.
“Of course you can.” Denny now introduced each camper by name to Nancy. Well before he was introduced, Charlie Hrbek had turned mauve in the face. At his turn, Ricky Bowman harped back to his great worry.
“I’m not taking off my swimsuit,” he rasped. “You need to know that.” We all laughed pretty hard at that one. Sue set her towel and radio/cassette player down on the bench seat and flicked it on. She had it preset to WLS 890 on the AM dial and we could hear the ending strains of Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy”. Sue cranked up the volume just as DJ Fred Winston began his patter over the thrumming piano chords of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move”:
“This is Music Radio WLS 890 and nothing ever came easy to me except maybe for tornadoes and, dare I say, earthquakes…” Winston hit his mark perfectly as Carole King’s usually tender voice took on extra urgency through the imploring rhythms of her own beat.
I feel the earth move under my feet.
I feel the sky tumble-ing down.
Sue Beeson had already grabbed Charlie Hrbek by the hand and was dipping and dancing in time to the song, all while the shower was spraying into Charlie’s lap. This was when Sue’s pink shorts got wet but she didn’t care and danced around and through the cool shower. She paused briefly to exult,
“That feels so nice!” Nancy meanwhile had brought her arms up and was snapping her fingers over her head as she jungle-stepped over to John Lianos, mimicking the earthy rhythm of King’s song. John was swaying right and left when she grabbed his right hand and moved him, chair and all, in a wide arc out of, and back through, the pulsating water. To a man, we attendants stood back and clapped to the song, amazed by what we were seeing. That’s when Dino Kudron of Junior Staff strolled into the Bath House. I felt like we might get into trouble, that we had broken some camp rule. I was wrong.
“I heard there’s a shower party going on and that only the coolest people are invited.” Denny fielded this.
“You’re right on both counts, Dino, so jump right in.”
Dino wore a powder blue bra, part of a two-piece, tied up behind her neck with cut-off jeans. She hadn’t bothered bringing a towel and immediately did as Denny asked, heading over to Ricky Bowman, who could only arch his right wrist in offering his hand to Dino. Dino picked up his hand and started twisting back and forth, shouting “Whup! whup!”, no kidding. Ricky moved what he could, bobbing his head furiously forward and back in rock and roll delirium. At the song’s bridge, our Naiads switched partners, Sue with Luis, Nancy with Billy Blake, and Dino with Phil Macak:
Ooh darlin’, when you’re near me
And you tenderly call my name,
I-I know my emotions
Are something that I just can’t tame…
A few seconds later we were all chanting along with Carole--”Uh huh, huh! Oh, oh, oh! Uh huh huh! Oh, oh, oh!” right on through the last verse. When the song ended, WLS went right to commercial, but we attendants clapped and jumped and kept watching our Shower Party Angels--our name for them for the rest of the week--mixing it up with our campers.
All three women were extraordinary but Dino embodied most of the finest attributes of anyone I ever met at camp. One of her absolute best was the ability to put campers, attendants, parents, anyone, at ease by chatting them up. She would sometimes laugh at her own questions or else comment, “You probably think I’m silly for saying this, but…” But she never was silly at those moments. She was charming and accessible and kind and open and wonderful, and Ricky Bowman and Phil Macak had been the sole object of her attention while she danced with them. We attendants had never experienced anything like her. Our response was combined awe and respect. And we could feel a growing rapture rising from our campers as well. Dino spotted Mark pulling out Charlie’s plastic soap dish and a washcloth and immediately reacted.
“Hand it over, bub,” she said in a mock serious tone. Then she encouraged Sue and Nancy to join her.
“Let’s soap these boys up!” Sue paused ever so slightly, glanced at Nancy who held her hands up as if to say, “Well, we are nurses,” and then proceeded to grab John Lianos’ soap and washcloth while Nancy approached Billy Blake. When Nancy asked Billy if he wanted help showering, Billy became embarrassed but remained calm and genuine in his reply.
“No thanks, I can wash myself.” Nancy switched over to Ricky Bowman who restated his primary worry:
“I’m not going to get naked, you know.” Nancy reassured him.
“Of course not. Let me just get your shoulders and back.” Ricky gladly acquiesced.
Denny turned the radio down to facilitate conversation. We barely heard Fred Winston introduce Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” when Dino shout-sang:
Jeremiah was a bull frog!
He was a good friend of mine…
and then leaned Charlie gently forward so she could wash his back. I couldn’t help noticing and Charlie certainly saw that his face was less than three inches from Dino’s left breast. And then Charlie’s weight forced Dino to readjust her legs to keep him from falling forward. That’s when Dino had to push her chest squarely into Charlie’s face to right him. And right him she did, totally unselfconsciously, because she was reacting naturally to protect a camper.
“Whoa, Charlie. You alright?” Charlie was pink with health at that moment.
“Uh…I mean, yes.” Dino brushed off what had just happened even as she acknowledged it.
“Sorry about that boob to the face. I didn’t want you to fall forward.” Charlie replied sincerely,
“That’s alright.” It was a total understatement as our cabin recap of this event would later point out.
Dino moved on to Phil Macak while Nancy Adams gently and carefully washed every part of Ricky Bowman not covered by his swimsuit. Sue Beeson cordially asked Luis, who was still agog with hormones, if she could help lather him up.
“You bet!” It became evident in short order that Luis had a full-on erection that Sue studiously ignored. For safety’s sake, she concentrated on Luis’s shoulders and back after briefly swiping his chest, which had caused Luis to close his eyes and moan a little. Three Dog Night kept on with an appropriate chorus:
Joy to the world,
All the boys and girls.
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea,
Joy to you and me.
Dino had been singing quietly to herself but now she loudly proclaimed:
“Well, ladies, looks like our work here is done.” She looked to Denny. “You guys can rinse and repeat if you like.”
“No need,” Denny replied. And then he raised his voice above the din of showers and the radio. “This was beyond nice of you ladies. Cabin P is, and will always remain, your grateful servants.”
“Slaves, too, if you need one,” John Lianos added. During our group laugh Dino rinsed her hands and then stood full under a shower to allow her hair to flow onto her back. Sue and Nancy only rinsed their hands but were fairly drenched by this time. Then our campers’ dance partners said their good-byes, grabbed their towels, Sue also picking up her radio/cassette player. Our farewells to them were filled with genuine appreciation. Phil Macak once again put the end punctuation on the event.
“Come back anytime.” We attendants had been struck dumb and we wouldn’t have spoken anyway, knowing our female attendees might still be close enough to the Bath House to hear us. Scott broke the silence several moments later.
“Did I just witness what I think I did?” Denny was philosophical.
“It depends. What do you think you saw?” Charlie's attendant Mark answered for him.
“Shower Party Angels--that’s what I saw.” Denny smiled.
“If you had said anything but that, I would have told you off.” Denny scanned us briefly in full satisfaction over making the special moment happen and in discovering a name for our water nymphs. “Alright, let’s rinse and dry off so we can put on dry clothes back at the cabin. Sweltering Arts & Crafts is next.”