The Gospel According To Bruce Lee David Cameron   © Copyright 2026 by David Cameron

Photo of  Republic of Tajikistan stamp at Wikimedia Commons.

Shoving hard, I lost my balance as the door gave way, and my clean clothes tumbled to the floor, tossing everything into a heap. Hearing my nosy neighbor’s door open down the hall, I kicked the pile into my apartment and closed myself in.
My apartment was in the old downtown Sarsfield Hotel, long ago closed to travelers and carved up into a beauty shop and an insurance office on the ground floor and Spartan apartments on the floors above. I didn’t mind Spartan. My building had no laundry facilities, but I was young, single, and well-practiced in schlepping laundry off-site. Luxury wasn’t my thing.

In the morning, when I rushed out the door, my basket overflowed with dirty clothes. In my second week as a pastoral intern at Bethesda Presbyterian Church, I was down to my last clean shirt. Time to wash.

After work, my pockets bulging with quarters, I drove a mile to a laundromat I had seen the day before. Lugging my laundry to the front door, I waited for a patron to exit, caught the closing door with my foot, executed a deft pivot, and entered the steamy interior. Already sweating in the late afternoon sauna, my body’s spigots opened full blast in response to the thermal assault from chugging washers and spinning dryers. 

I was focused on finding an open washer, so I didn’t realize at first that I was not only the lone man in the place but also the lone white person. Then I did. I stood still as a post, waiting for the space/time continuum to splinter from my brazen disregard for social norms.

Why was I nervous? It was 1980, for Pete’s sake; 16 years since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act as an emphatic No! to segregation. It had been three years since Alex Haley’s ground-breaking miniseries Roots gripped the nation with its portrayal of slavery and repudiation of a romanticized Old South gentility. Inroads, baby! Inroads!

Still, having grown up in North Carolina, I knew well enough that, in the South, status quo was king and self-preservation a powerful driving force. Sure, integration got lip service, and celebrations of unity made local headlines. MLK Jr.’s legacy notwithstanding, however, most people in the South still clung tightly to familiar patterns of racial division like a comfortable old pair of brogans.

I had crashed the sacrosanct color barrier in that laundromat. Flinching, I expected bells to clang, sirens to blare, but nothing happened. To their credit, no one in that concrete block sweat palace openly objected to my presence. A tall, thin woman gave me the once-over and then pointed with her chin to an empty washer.

Once I got past the initial shock of my minority status, white privilege kicked in, and I started imagining myself a noble ambassador of racial rapprochement; an ivory Prince of Tide in their ebony Queendom of Clean. Contrary to my lofty self-image, I later learned that my abrupt invasion of their protected space had been viewed either as a sign of the apocalypse or as proof I was one crazy cracker.

I truly don’t know why they cut me slack. If I have to guess, it’s because they were generous and I was clearly inept; obviously inferior in all the ways that counted. For example, addressing the empty washer, I started throwing white T-shirts in with dark Levi’s. That’s when Joan lightly touched my shoulder and said, "Honey, may I make a suggestion?"

As I learned on subsequent visits, Joan was the queen bee of the group and always good for wisdom or a laugh. A big woman with a towel slung over her shoulder to wipe perspiration from her eyes, she radiated kindness but also fierceness. You could tell Joan had seen some stuff done some, too.

James Brown belted out "It’s a Man’s World" over tinny speakers as my clothes washed. Wiping the sweat coursing down her mocha cheeks, Joan grunted, "Huh, it’s a man’s world only 'cause we let it be." She looked at me when she said it, daring my rebuttal.
When night fell, I felt lonely in my new town. My apartment faced the main drag across from a movie theater showing Enter the Dragon starring Bruce Lee, and I pulled my recliner to the large front window. It had finally grown cooler, and I left the lights off to avoid adding even a fraction of a degree.

In the dark, I was anonymous. Snacking on Doritos and drinking Sprite, I watched movie patrons spill onto the sidewalk, practicing the martial arts moves they'd just seen. These are beefy white boys with farmers’ tans and skinny teens in heavy Doc Martens emulating, as best they can, Lee’s cat-like dexterity. There were even a few black faces in the group.

I was lonely, and as I watched insects swarm the street lights outside, a drop of perspiration rolled down my nose. Wiping it with a forefinger, I smiled as I thought of Joan and her ever-present sweat towel, her kind eyes, and her refusal to take life on anyone’s terms but her own.

At this point, I didn’t have any idea what my intern year would bring in the way of new friends and experiences. For example, that first day in the laundromat, I couldn’t know that every other Monday with The Ladies would become one of my favorite things about Camden. But Bruce Lee might have predicted it. Besides being a quintessential ass kicker, he was also a font of wisdom. It was Bruce who said, "You can never invite the wind, but leave the window open."