I worked as a dishwasher in my first summer job at the camp. Between meals in the rec. hall I had ample time to interact with campers and assist counselors by lifting campers, folding or unfolding wheelchairs, feeding and other helping tasks. My mother had post-polio and was partially paralyzed so I didn't feel like a stranger in this environment or nervous or uncomfortable around people who needed my help, though the majority were more severely handicapped than my mother who was ambulatory. It seemed logical then that when I returned to camp the second summer I was hired as a counselor (and occasionally helped in the kitchen when needed).
Some campers had difficulty speaking; others flailed their limbs in uncontrolled spasms; more needed to be lifted in and out of bed, helped with eating and having their asses wiped or flushing a toilet and having their bed pans emptied and cleaned. One of the most challenging campers had severe C.P. that twisted, racked and contorted his body into excruciating positions to the extent that he needed to be strapped into his wheelchair to keep from falling out. We'll call him Barry. Barry could not speak---his oral muscles were dysfunctional to the point where he could not form words---and while another camper who also couldn't speak had devised a method of pointing to letters on a Ouija Board to communicate, spelling out each word, Barry was too spastic to effectively use that method. Instead he had a wooden board attached to his chair that was seasoned with the dots and dashes of Morse Code. Barry would jerk his head upwards to communicate a "dot" and jerk his sideways for a "dash." Except for a brief period of time in boy scouts I knew little-to-no Morse Code, but I decided that I would try and learn it again, only this time I committed those dots and dashes to memory. Only one other counselor in the entire camp was able to talk to Barry without having to lift up the board on the wheelchair and read each dot and dash (way more time consuming and frustrating) so I felt that I could fill a void here and be the second person to memorize the code and that way there would be two of us working with Barry.
But mastering Morse code did not result in easy communications by any means. I would spend long, sometimes exhausting stretches in hot cabins or outside but separate from everyone, attempting a simple conversation with Barry. Sometimes his head movements would not clearly translate into a dot or a dash, and he'd become livid with anger, not so much at you but at himself and his predicament. His spasms and facial tics would become very pronounced, but he valued me and we worked together because I was only one of two people in the camp who could talk to him effectively, and often someone would come and get me if there was an emergency and Barry had been struggling to convey the problem to a different counselor. His expressions were mercurial and vehement. When he didn't like something---a certain food, or song, or movie---he screwed up his features in a raspberry, tongue thrust out. When something made him laugh his entire face would light up and you heard a bass undertone that was his voice, but no higher range or scale, as if his voice was the bass pedal notes on a church organ with no notes above them. And you knew when he was angry and apoplectic. As with mimes and deaf mutes, Barry needed to draw more heavily on a repertoire of facial expressions and body language to communicate emotion. His violent spasms and facial tics regularly got in the way of parsing the code, words, or gestures of what he'd been trying to get across.
After camp ended I decided I would visit Barry because he lived in Fort Lee, which was about 15 minutes from my house. I met Barry's mother, a cultured and urbane woman. Apparently Barry had told his mother a great deal about me and the other counselor, Jim. When I'd been out to visit twice, Barry's mother praised me for continuing to see him after camp, and she expressed disappointment that Jim hadn't visited at all. I wasn't completely surprised. I lived closed and Jim was somewhere out in Brooklyn or Queens, or farther out in the Bronx and needed to rely on mass transit to get to Fort Lee.
The cause of Barry's C.P. had been scarlet fever. It appeared that his mother gave birth to him when she was fairly old. The father was no longer alive but he'd been president of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation (I believe that was it), and Barry's mother showed me photographs of successful awards dinners and fund raisers in which Barry was a "poster boy," literally, not in a pejorative sense. The mother talked about how dedicated and active she and her husband had been in the handicap organizations. She seemed reasonably well off, educated, and somewhat gentrified. I noticed she tended to speak about Barry and sometimes for Barry, a kind of intimate proxy, which I guess was natural given Barry's handicap. However, he often tried to interject if his mother was getting something wrong or putting words in his mouth. Despite all her good works and "calling" I sensed the mother's loneliness without her husband, and Barry's too. I understood the importance of upstate camp in Barry's life, and during my few visits he and I would leave the apartment and I'd wheel him to a park bench or outdoor cafe'. Needless to say, people stared. People always stare.
It may have been on one of my last visits when Barry's mother confided that they read books together, or more specifically that she read to him. Barry liked best sellers, or mysteries, or maybe a little science fiction, and perhaps in an effort to elevate him to "literature," his mother had read him "The Fall" by Albert Camus. In the autumn dusk that settled over the apartment she asked me if I had read "The Fall" and I had read it.
"It's a grand novel," she said, "so moving and packed with philosophy and observations about life and the human condition. Such a marvelous writer, and sadly taken from us so early . . . Barry didn't care for 'The Fall'" his mother added with some degree of patient indulgence concerning his aesthetics. "He didn't like it," she said, smiling fondly at him. At that moment I looked at Barry and he grimaced and stuck out his tongue, but you could see the laughter in his eyes, the playful mirth. It was a great subjective critique (Camus is important but we're all entitled to our likes and dislikes) and didn't require any Morse Code to decipher. I've never forgotten that look on his face.
