John needed money when he came in the office back in October. His truck was out of gas, stuck on the side of the road. His tools were in his truck. Without his tools, he couldn’t work. Without work, he couldn’t pay the bills. The story was telling John in the worst way.
John is in his mid-fifties. He’s worked construction for almost forty years. He looks it. The damage on his face is everywhere: lines, creases, bumps, scars, moles, dark blotches, fresh cuts. His teeth are yellow from cigarettes. His fingers are yellow from cigarettes. His eyes are sometimes as red as Mars. He’s skinny and muscular and walks with a limp.
“I been chasing disasters my whole life,” John said.
We were in the lobby on that day, too. My boss was busy, working on a grant. She asked if I wanted to try to do an intake. She gave me the clipboard and the blue form. I gave it to John. He filled it out and handed it back and started talking.
The last disaster he chased was Hurricane Katrina. He’d been working in Florida when the storm hit, so he packed up his tools and headed west. Disasters brought work and big money. In Florida, John had mostly been drinking. A couple times he’d been on landscaping crews, just to make some dough under the table. Two weeks into New Orleans, John had a grand stuffed in an old toolbox he kept locked away in his truck. A week later, it was fifteen hundred, and he was living good, eating meat and drinking whiskey.
“Not rotgut,” John said. “You drink?”
“I drink,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to say I drank. The outreach was not a religious organization but they had religious ties. I tried to imagine myself as John’s therapist—how much distance was necessary? How much professionalism? How many boundaries? How much honesty? I decided to go with honesty.
John said, “Whiskey?”
I said, “Mostly beer.”
“A lot?”
“Sometimes.”
John went back to his story. He worked for one guy in New Orleans but there were other guys, other contractors, everywhere. This other guy offered more money, a lump sum for two months’ work. John took the job. He started gutting old houses, pulling the copper wire. He did that for a while. He breathed in a lot of mold but didn’t worry about it. The foreman moved John outside and up a ladder to the roof, where he nailed shingles with a gun. Then he was inside, doing plaster. John loved to plaster. “It’s my master trade,” he said. All his clothes have paint and spackle on them, rips in the knees and elbows. He wears painter hats. A smudged-up rainbow is dripped across his boots.
While John worked on walls, he didn’t get paid. He lived on the money he’d stashed in his toolbox. That was fine. He slowed down on the whiskey. He started eating out less. He started eating peanut butter right from the jar for dinner, sometimes dipping the knife in jelly. He expected a check for ten grand, more if there was a bonus. There were sometimes bonuses at these kinds of jobs, at these disasters. Two months went by. John didn’t get paid. The contractor said one more week. Then two. John said sure. He stayed on. The contractor asked for another week. Then he upped it again. They were talking four weeks now, three months instead of two.
The price went to fifteen grand. John was going to be fucking rich.
Then the contractor was gone.
The contractor was gone with the crew of guys he brought with him from Seattle and the rest of the guys, guys like John, wondered how they were going to pay the rent at their shitbird motel.
“I was fucking angry,” John said. “I was going to kill that motherfucker.”
John planned to drive to Seattle to rattle that contractor’s head with a hammer but the more he thought about it the more he felt confused. Maybe the contractor said Portland. Maybe it was Tacoma. Everywhere up there sounded the same, green and wet and cold.
One night, drunk, John used his hammer to smash up his motel room instead. The woman running the motel called her boyfriend and her boyfriend, a huge biker, told John he would either pay for the damages or go to jail. John paid for the damages. He paid five hundred dollars, even though he could have fixed the walls for the price of spackle and some paint.
That’s when the depression set in.
Those were John’s words.
“That’s when the depression set in,” he said.
Earlier I said that John was funny, implying he wasn’t always depressed, but John has always been depressed. He’s always depressed, only some days it doesn’t sound like depression because it’s mixed with jokes and stories, sad jokes and stories, but still jokes and stories. John asks questions. If he talks too much about himself, he digs deeper and refocuses and asks about you, about your troubles. But his troubles are still there. Every conversation has a moment where he asks, “I wonder if it’s even worth it?” and I ask him if he’s serious, if he wants to go somewhere, to a hospital, to talk to someone, and he says, “No, I’m still hanging on pretty good.” He always says, “I’m fine, just depressed.”
I’d heard of the DSM, the book doctors and mental health workers use to diagnose disorders, but I hadn’t bought a copy until graduate school. Depression, like so many other disorders, was still a vague idea, a thing from books and TV, from films, from people on the street, people singing to themselves with dead eyes. My grandfather had been diagnosed—by a doctor, not a book—with schizophrenia in the 1950s, and I knew he heard voices, I knew he thought he was Jesus sometimes, and Jim Plunkett, quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, other times, but I’d never
