Like a desert caravan, the vehicles slowly made their way into the camp parking lot. We sat there like UN relief officers checking in children with our doctor so their preocupied or weary parents and guardians could leave to probably hit the first truck stop lounge or bar they came across. We smiled broadly across the table and stacks of paper work that separated us from the the children’s parents. The sunlight was muted and typical of a Oregon summer. Through the haze above us occasionally a jet soared towards the near by airport, punctuating the sincerity of our wilderness .
I was waiting for a kid to check in whose name was on my list for my cabin. I was then to take them and their parents to the cabin, assure the parents of my sterling responsibility, get the camper moved in, and the parent or guardian on their way to the nearest truck stop lounge or bar.
An older woman unloaded an overwhelmed mix of children from her Winnebago in the parking lot. The children wore dirty cotton attire from various charitable sporting events, “The Shamrock Run of 1987”. The bounty of thrift stores. They listlessly held on to each others hands as they made their way to the front of the line.
“ My name is Helga Goetler and this is Reuben, Carson, Mike, and Angel.” she said with out looking at her onterage, or specifying which was which. They squinted at their surroundings. “I am very sorry, but I am in a great hurry.”
“Yes of course,” sad the doctor as he led them into the examining room.
They were in there an unusually long time, and the rest of the line became restless. Being the ever chipper camp counselor, I pulled out my guitar and took requests from a kid I knew from the year before with Cerebral Palsy. Helga came out from the examining room in a flurry, with a bouquet of paper. She noticed me.
“Reuben mustnt listen to the headphones, Carson mustn't drink too much milk, Mike needs his food blended, and Angel likes to run.” She declared in a German ascent.
“Alright... ummm. Which is...”
“Here.” She took a paper from her bouquet and gave it to me. It had evenly printed descriptions of the children’s routine. She turned and headed for her Winnebago. I noticed Mikes file was in my pile for campers in my cabin. His picture was ancient. It looked candid and rough like the type included in a ransom note. He wandered out of the examining room.
“Mike?” He didn’t respond. He had wide eyes that seemed unfocused. He kept a dirty hand in his mouth. His file said he was twelve, but he looked nine. His pants were held up by twine. I took him by the hand and found his stuff from the pile in the parking lot and headed for Coyote cabin.
Making small talk has always been easy for me, because I have a self involved streak. Mike was easy to talk to, as he was apparently biologically incapable of responding. His unfocused eyes made him look like he was deeply pondering what I was saying. As we hobbled towards the cabin, I introduced myself.
“Sup, Mike. Mu name’s Elvis. Yup. Naw I aint dead. I sorta run this place. You ride with me, you meet all da fine lady, know what I’m, sayen?”
We entered the dark cabin, made darker by the bright sunny day outside. I made Mikes bed with his sleeping bag, and took inventory of his stuff as he rocked back and forth on the floor.
“This is some sweet stuff you got here,” I noted a lack of essentials, and about six diapers, enough for maybe a day and a half. Mike howled and began to conduct a symphony. “Well, I guess your a light packer. I like that. Ever traveled with a woman? You always get stuck carrying their house paint and bricks.” Mike rocked on. Hands fluttering. I guessed he was happy. The concrete floor was cool, and it was a hot humid day. I lay next to him, and took out my harmonica. The floor’s coldness felt good on my tense back. I played a poor blues riff. Lucky Mike was a connoisseur of the classics, and not of blues harmonica. My lack of ability didn’t faze his rocking.
My fat co-counselor, Bud came in with a perfectly round kid. The kid looked down on me, just barely able to see me over his belly. He put his hands on his waist, and said as If I were disagreeing with him, “I like to dance.”
“It said so on your file, son.” I nodded. “It also said, lock up your ladies when he hits the floor.”
“That’s right.” He gave me a sassy nod.
“This is Guss,” Bud said. “He said he’s going to teach me his moves.” I hated Bud. I’m not sure why. Probably because there isn’t room in one cabin for two martyrs. Martyrdom was the only thing the camp really had to pay you in, though. Hell, it was enough for us. Mike rocked on.
“I get tired when I dance.” Guss furthered. “Im tired now.”
“Well, lets chill then.” I could smell Mike’s urine. I got up to change him. I hoisted him into the air. He weighed about sixty, I guessed. This sudden gain in altitude made Mike smile. He closed his eyes, and his sunburned face wrinkled. He put his arms around my neck like I was his mother. As I walked him towards the designated changing bed, he began to try to give me a hickie. “Mike, I just met you.”
When I got his diaper off, I took much of the skin on his bottom as well. This diaper was apparently an old friend of Mike’s. Mike smiled on. I replaced the diaper, and waited for the rest of the parents to clear from the parking lot so I could take mike back to the doctor. Through the door, I saw Helga drive up the path towards the first truck stop lounge or bar.
The doctor said it was fairly serious chafing. He noted it in his file, and medicated Mike. Mike laughed like he was on a ride in Disney land. We went back out into the world to flaunt Mikes new ability to strut with a medicated bottom. We hobbled towards the lodge, across the giant field, Mike with his hand in his mouth humming his next symphony, I with my battered guitar on my back.
“How’s that butt of your’s treating you Mike? I’m jealous, man. That nurse in there is pretty hot. She’s kinda old, though. Maybe she ought change her camp name to Mrs. Robinson. I’d like that. I’d like her to medicate my butt too. Yeah, I’m a fetish man.” Mike stumbled at the thought of this. I helped him up. He seemed bewildered by the ground’s sudden lunge at him. “You look like I did this last Saturday night.”
The lodge had a long bench on it’s porch at which I was known to haunt with my guitar and camper. A new camper ment a new angle and dynamic to idle time. “This is the spot, Mike. Just in there is the bathroom were not allowed to use, but that we’ll use when ever we damn want. In there too is the juice and cookies and coffee. Not just anybody can go in there, man you can wait outside of this place all day trying to get in like it was best nightclub in London, but your with me, were getting, or were gonna make CNN”
Settling back onto the bench, mike began to rock. I settled back too. Across the field the poor schmuck of a counselor who said he wanted to work with younger kids was chasing a kid with a cold fusion engine of pure attention defecate. Summer bugs and dust drifted in the idle wind. I could hear the distant yelling of a couple hundred disabled people settling into their new surroundings. Mike stopped rocking and had a look on his face like he just realized something. I sniffed the air.
“Aww Mike, I just changed you.”
An outsider might mistake the sounds from the men’s bathroom in the morning as the coming of the apocalypse. Chaos is cumulative, one howl begats another, and so on. Howling is met by shouting, “Robert, I’m not going to listen to you when you howl.” Shouting, although distinct from howling, has little positive effect, besides begating more howling. Any threat is rendered mute if the one making it completely indisposed, shouting through a stall door, or awaiting the fruits of an enema. Case in point, Robert can howl as long as he likes, and indeed as he will soon discover, put his arm down the toilet, until he is personally seen to. This week at camp, I wasn’t taking the scene seriously. It was just me and Mike. Somebody else would have to free Robert.
“Watch this mike,” I stood atop a toilet and howled, “The potty is bad, yes, bad!” Everybody was so busy, I didn’t get noticed. I began our duties. “Fairy tales, can come true, it can happen to you. If your young at heart.” I sung as I changed Mike and engaged in the elaborate choreography of the bathroom. So little space, and so many bodies and medical equipment made for savvy sidestepping. “You can sail to extremes, and impossible dreams...” I caught the eye of another counselor who threw me the box of gloves, and put them on in a swift motion; the customs patrolman who is jaded by his job “...if your young at heart.” Throwing the box t the next needy counselor, I hoisted the cleaned nude Mike into the air over an older gentleman with cerebral palsy, “And if you should survive to a hundred and five... excuse me.” I put mike in the shower and turned on the temperature controlled luke warm water, Mike giggled, “...think of all your derive out of being alive.” As I washed him, I sang on, “Here is the best part. You’ve got a head start. If you are among the very young at heart.”
“Oh shut up.” Said the autistic Guss, in the next stall.
“Fair enough.”
Outside in the morning air, Mike shivered a little. He had goose bumps. He also had an absurd hair style, sort of Vanilla Ice-eque. A fantastically attractive coworker of mine named “Nut” walked by and said, “Nice hair.” She had a rhythm to her walk that demanded attention.
I gave my Sean Conery half smile and said, “Thank you.”
“Not you.”
We made our way to flag raising, for our cabin had the honors of raising the flag and singing a song of our own selection. I put Mike on my shoulders, and we began the old camp favorite “Gopher Guts” as we rose old glory. “Great big globs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey’s meat, little dirty birdies feet...” No one joined in. A breeze went through Mikes wet hair, and he hummed with his hand in his mouth. “Shall we begin again? It was Mike’s idea. Great big globs...”
Camp is about routine. A cadence of too late of nights, and too early of mornings. Its a beaded necklace of tiny crisises. One night I was awaken at three a.m. because Robert from the next cabin was making death threats. Wearily, I sat with him on the picnic bench between cabins, turning the vehemency in his voice to playful punnery, then idle stubbornness, then talk of perfect sleep.
“Boy, I’m going to hurt you.”
“Your going to burp me?
“I’m going to hurt you.”
“Why would it hurt me, to burp me? I’m only awake because of gas.”
“Boy, the way I’m gonna hit you, your gonna more than burp.”
“Fart too?”
“Listen Mr. This isn’t any game.”
“Perhaps it ought be, ‘The Burp Fart Game’, I’ll put a word into the camp director for you.”
“No, no, no. I’m going to kick your butt, Mr.”
“Is that how you’ll make me fart? All these years of suffering bloating, and it was just that simple.”
“Your impossible.”
“Yeah, I can really tire you out,” and so on.
The next night a lumbering young man with Downs sydrom named Rodney was intent on taking a late night stool to the camp directors cabin to tell her a very important secret. Not being able to get him to confide in us, and not wanting to disturb our all important source of paychecks, we were at a loss as he dashed for her cabin. In a stroke of genius, a counselor named Shady absolutely banished Rodney from ever being able to go back into his cabin again.
“Rodney, you may never go back to your cabin again, you dirtied it for the last time.”
“I wanna tell Boss a secret.”
“Rodney, We’re serious. Never again.”
“Secret.”
“I don’t know where you’ll sleep from now on. You can’t go back to your cabin.”
Rodney slowed to think. As he reached the door of the directors cabin, we were sweating profusely. Rodney decided he could annoy us better by going back to his cabin. “Na naaa. I’m back to cabin.”
After each one of these late night escapades I’d return to the cabin to see that Mike had awaken and was rocking in his bed with his hand in his mouth. I’d lay him down, get into my own bunk and fall sleep before my head hit the pillow.
Slowly the stress of the week wore one down. Sitting down for breakfast one morning, I noticed my reflection in a window near by. My eyes were unfocused, I was slouching, and had food on my shirt. Mike looked like a smaller version of me sitting next to me. Only he was grinning.
In exchange for taking Nut’s camper’s while she showered, I convinced her to skip a few activities and chill with me and Mike on the stoop. We traded massages and poop stories, averting our eyes when the camp director swooped by. Her camper was named Elie. She had a fantastically deadly bite. She would sit in her chair, eyes unfocused, waiting to strike, like a predator in a coral reef. She needed constant supervision, lest another one fall pray. One day, while I was working on Nut’s lower back, Mike’s fore arm somehow made it’s way into Elie's mouth. Elie must have liked the way Mike tasted, because she didn’t break the skin. Mike cried though.
Later that day I saw Shady getting a massage from Nut. Me and Mike decided those two girls were bad news, and decided to steer clear.
The last night of the week, the stars shone fairly well for how close to the city we were. After bed time, me and Mike sat on the big log in the field in the dark and batted at mosquitoes. I found the big dipper, and the little dipper. A bird or a bat or something flew above us, then a 747. I heard people asking other people if they’d seen me or Mike. I reluctantly led Mike back to the light.
The next morning, after hurried packing and heigne catch-up, our campers were ready to check out. I hate to make the holocaust analogy, but there they were, in tidy lines, waiting to see the doctor one last time. I waited in line with Mike. We looked stoically forward, shuffling along as the line moved.
“How’s the bottom, Mr. Mike?” The doctor peeked down his shorts. “Looks all clear, nice bottom maintence, Elvis.”
I led Mike out of the cool office into the harsh sunlight. Helga was collecting belongings and loading her Winnebago. She loaded Mike in much the same matter. I shuffled back to the bathhouse, looking at my feet, my hand still a little wet and snotty from his hand. I gave the bathroom wall a good punch, trying to wake up a little, shake the feeling that Mike was hot in the back of the Winnebago. My hang hung funny on my wrist. I laughed at the prospect of the coming pain.
I got my guitar, put in the back of my car, and headed up the road, away from camp. I’d have to get Nut to bring me the rest of my stuff later. Not quite the ride into the sunset I’d always liked to have made. Before driving to the emergency room, I stopped at a truck stop lounge and denied my new memories. I sort of sucked on my hand and hummed as I drank. It was swelling. I couldn’t hold Mikes hand with it anymore.
