Work, ideal. – Any job that does not make you suicidal is a good job.
-Paul Nervy
We had been working together for a couple of years, Paul and I, selling camping gear in a strip mall in northern New Jersey, when I thought, this guy is doomed. He fell apart in stages but this is the image that’s stuck with me through the years: I was coming back from the warehouse with a backpack for a customer, or an armload of packs for an army of customers, when I saw him sitting on the floor, shoulders slumped, back against the counter he usually worked behind, legs sticking straight out, blocking the aisle. Worn shoes. Filthy-looking khaki cargo shorts. Filthier maroon vest, the store uniform. Sickly pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. He looked like he wanted to sink farther still, through the drab carpeting, the concrete, the dirt and rocks, all the way through the earth even, to escape to some other, happier hemisphere. But, lacking the energy for all that digging, decided the next best thing was plopping down right there. He was fired not long after that, for a series of little fuck-ups—customer complaints, I’m sure, and maybe management, sick of this specter sulking around the store, felt it was past time for an exorcism. He hanged himself a year later.
Though we weren’t friends, exactly, we’d both made overtures towards friendship. A few nights camping in Harriman State Park, the nearest network of trails just across the border in New York, a half-an-hour drive north of the store. We camped there regularly then, weeknights even, just to get out of New Jersey, off its highways, to feel free and real in the woods, drinking under the stars in front of a fire. Waking up to sun or rain and the feel of the rocks and leaves and grit beneath us. Paul came once to camp out with a larger group, maybe ten of us. He hiked in the half-mile or so by the blue light of his headlamp. We all brought food to make. An elaborate feast for a night in the woods: kebabs, hot dogs and sausages to grill; aluminum packets stuffed with sliced bell peppers and mushrooms and onions to roast directly in the coals of the fire. Loaves of bread stuffed with garlic and butter lined up to warm along the ring of stones encircling the flames. And there Paul was, struggling up the mountain with a Pepsi bottle in one hand and a box of pizza in the other. Like an intrepid delivery person. It felt decadent, real pizza in the woods. We had a few laughs. It was nice seeing Paul in the world, nice seeing him shed some of that misery and tension he carried around through the workday. But when we all started turning in, dowsing the fire, pissing behind the gray boulders, and finally zipping ourselves into our sleeping bags for the night, Paul headed down the mountain, alone, to sleep in his van beside the road, one blue light bouncing down the trail until it was swallowed by the dark.
Sociology, friends. – (1) One reason I don’t make friends is because you become responsible for helping them. You see that you are the one who can make a difference in their life, and then when their life goes bad you feel responsible. (2) They also expect a certain amount of time from you. An hour a week on the phone times 20 people is 20 hours a week of your free time shot.
In the end, he wasn’t much more than a work friend. Or so I thought. Someone to bullshit with during the slow seasons and middle of the week afternoon hours when the store had four times more employees roaming the floor than customers. He was tall and thin, except for a little bit of a pot belly—a bump made more prominent from the strange way he stood behind the climbing counter, arms crossed and resting on his stomach, hips thrust forward, but with his weight on his heels, like he wasn’t sure if he should hold his ground, attack or flee. He had a thick head of brown hair, long, greasy and combed back, and the hairless ankles of someone who’d suffered through a few years in an office wearing tight dress socks. He ended up in retail after losing his job in tech when the bubble burst in the late 90s. Drifted through different jobs, did some climbing and camping and somehow washed up on the same retail shores the rest of us were floundering on.
We read some of the same writers and thinkers, were attracted to some of the same ideas. Me, as a curious kid, figuring out who I wanted to be in my early twenties. He as a forty-something year old man trying to reinvent himself, to live a principled life working for progressive causes, or at least not in the service of reactionary ones. We talked about Chomsky, linguistics, Pinker, computational theory of mind. About Zinn and Foner and the history of organized labor. About philosophy, Wittgenstein and the positivists and the limits of language. About the need to express something, a need particularly acute in Paul, and the difficulty, even the impossibility, of doing so. And, during these discussions and the many hours explaining to customers how to use carabiners, how to kick and glide with cross-county skis, holding their hands as they labored over which balaclava to buy to look spiffy on the slopes at Killington or Whistler, Paul wrote notes. He was constantly scribbling on little scraps of paper, notes he fiercely guarded, refusing to show them or explain them to anyone. At least, to any of us.
Frequently Asked Questions about Paul Nervy Notes
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- What am I looking at here, Paul?
- Good question. The Paul Nervy Notes are some musings I jotted down. You can read it online. Its[sic] a work of art.
- Why do you write the Notes?
- I keep asking myself the same question. It is not for fame or fortune (although I am not completely oppossed[sic] to either). Your guess is as good as mine.
He’d been living in his car for years. He wasn’t the only one. Three others at the store, in trying to save money, lived in their cars. Called it, attempting to inject some romance into their poverty, urban camping. Paul lived in a pick-up truck first, a little silver, rear-wheel drive Toyota Tacoma. I think he blamed 9/11 for his homelessness, in a way. Before 9/11, he was in, he said, a healthy, long-term relationship, living with his girlfriend in Manhattan. 9/11 understandably freaked them out. It freaked the whole nation, the whole world out. They decided, perhaps less understandably, to leave the city and move seventy miles northwest, up near Middletown, New York. What most city folk would consider a town nestled between the boondocks and bumfuck. He never said why they settled on Middletown. But he blamed the isolation there for the breakup. Stuck in a little trailer with no Manhattan to wander, to walk off their rage when their tempers flared—his, I know, was short and explosive. They broke up not long after. She moved away. He bought a truck and began sleeping in it. Eventually, tired of those fearful morning moments when he was exposed to passersby as he slipped from the bed of the truck, where he slept, back into the cab, a few stealthy strides because it was illegal to sleep in the lots along Route 17, he upgraded to a mini-van. Though he was conscious of the effect this might have on potential dates, so much so that he asked my roommate and I if he could tell people he lived with us. He thought he could drive by with prospective dates and point out the window as proof that he wasn’t living in his car. We said yes, doubting he’d have the opportunity to try it. But this request was just another indication of his crumbling mental health, of his increasing isolation and odd, inept efforts to counter it.
Psychology, pathological, specific, depression. – A person who is depressed may not be sad or angry. This is because depression can deaden the emotions as well as thoughts and drives. All that is left is a person whose only mental content is that they have no will to live. They want to die. They will not report that they feel sad, and they will not appear sad. This is why it is so difficult to help them.
The above text is an extract from an essay included in Kent Kosak’s forthcoming collection, Prose Scraps.
Kent Kosak is a writer based in Pittsburgh. He has recent work in minor literature[s], the Heavy Feather Review, 3:AM Magazine, Always Crashing and elsewhere. His nonfiction chapbook, Prose Scraps, will be published this fall through Map Literary. You can read more at kentkosack.net
