It’s been a week now since Josh Quirk left this world, and among the thousands of turbulent emotions running through my head in the intervening time, the one I keep coming back to is that there’s one less person in this world who’ll tell me how full of shit I can be. It was a role I very much needed him to take, and by good luck, one he relished.

I knew the guy 30 years and now, after his death from organ failure at age 50, I can say with certainty that I never met anyone quite like him. Oh, I knew more than my fair share of oddballs and miscreants through the years — that’s a given when a man comes of age in a place like Chapel Hill, North Carolina — and there were those with more tattoos, crazier hair, nuttier political opinions and more obscure tastes in music. But none of them ever got under my skin, and stayed there, in such a persistent and endearing way. As I have written elsewhere, he could rub people the wrong way or alternatively be a perfect asshole whenever he wanted; but somehow, the guy had a way of making you love him for it.

We met as undergraduates at UNC in the fall of 1994 — I a reserved small-town Southern kid, he a hybrid Midwesterner with a brash sensibility and a penchant for punk rock and old-school hip hop — and we hit it off, although it took awhile. He seemed to have adjusted much more readily than I to the college scene, made friends more easily (and enemies, even easier) and provided something of a blueprint for a guy still trying to find his voice and get his feet fully underneath him. It would be a mistake to say that Josh was a role model — I can hear him laughing his ass off right now at the very suggestion — but he represented a new way of looking at, and interacting with, the world. Not too many years removed from high school, where being perceived as an intellectual meant that, at a minimum, you were regarded as something *other* by the majority of your classmates, the notion that Josh and others represented — the idea that the smartest guy in the room could also be the coolest motherfucker on the block — proved enticing, and something to strive for. (Thirty years later I may not always be the CMFOTB, but I’m usually in the top three.)

He was a complicated fellow, for sure — stubborn, acerbic, sharp as a razor, in your face, uncompromising, detail-oriented when it came to others, sometimes a bit sloppy when it came to himself. Josh was the kind of guy it would have been easy to look at and dismiss as some kind of poser — unruly hair, gold loop earrings, willfully shabby dress, one hand on a cigarette and the other on a 40 — but it was an image that only masked, and temporarily at that, a deeper humanity that made him a natural at connecting with people. It was this essential humanity, which he worked incessantly to conceal, that made us friends; he could sense what you needed and do what he could to help you out, even while grumbling, wisecracking, playing the irascible, unregenerate grouch. As my Dad was known to say about another family member, so it was with Josh: he was the kind of guy who’d give you the shirt off his back, and cuss you the entire time he was doing it.

And so we became friends, at St. Anthony’s (the student organization to which we both belonged) and later as young adults out in the world, even if that world at first extended only to the ramshackle lower-cost housing in the neighborhoods a few blocks north of campus. With Doc, the third member of our rough-hewn triumvirate (known to the Chapel Hill ages as the Dirty Three) we spent hours playing cards, shooting pool at the downtown saloons, getting into minor acts of mischief and propping each other up through our various trials, setbacks, unlucky love affairs. A lingering memory of those years are the many nights at Josh’s residence at 705 North Columbia St., the old brokedown palace that he shared with Becca, Donald, Jonas and a rotating cast of others; we’d generally wrap up the weekends by gathering at 705 on Sunday nights to play cards, unwind, watch The Simpsons at 8 (incredibly, this is still on the air), King of the Hill at 8:30 and The X-Files at 9. (And the damnedest thing is that I didn’t even like the X-Files. But I loved being with my people.)

So this is an elegy for youth, I suppose, as much as it is for Josh; for a lost world from before the planes hit the towers, when as young men and women we weren’t worrying about much of anything and if we were, were worrying about things that ended up being not so consequential after all. I left Chapel Hill (though, as it turned out, not for good) in the spring of 2001 and we all went on with our lives, reconvening every so often, less and less as time went on. And the faces are growing a bit dimmer in memory, the setting a bit more unclear. I haven’t been back down North Columbia Street in a while, to look at where that ramshackle old house at 705 used to be. I can’t recall the last time the Dirty Three played three-card together. We all went straight at some point, and that’s all right. Because I always knew he was there (I in Hillsborough, Josh just across the way in Durham) if I ever needed him.

But some doors must close, whether we want them to or not. Paraphrasing the noted writer Gordon Lachance, upon hearing of the death of his boyhood friend Chris Chambers, stabbed to death at age 37 while trying to break up a fight in a fast-food restaurant: though I hadn’t seen Josh in a long time, nor hung out with him in years, I know I’ll miss him forever.

In need of a bit more of a road map for mourning, and looking for something of a fresh perspective, I ran all this by my main man and co-worker at the Transit Authority, Caleb, a member of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, who calmly offered the following:

Whatever one thinks about the Christian view of afterlife, or the generalized beliefs in the sasha and the zamani (look them up), the key concept here is that Josh was possessed, as are we all, of an immortal soul. It is this soul that existed from the beginning, that took shape within his mother’s body, but that separated from his mother, as it must for survival. And it is that same soul that separates from us, those he loved and who loved him, now; but just as the love was established from his birth, the moment of physical separation from his mother, so that love remains now as he passes into the next world.

And though the separation must happen now, as it did when Josh was born, separated (and yet, still connected through love) from his mother, neither that soul, nor that love established from the beginning, built and nurtured throughout his life between him and us, can ever be destroyed.

……………

Josh, my brother, you were one of a kind. I wish to the rest of my days that Doc and I could have one last talk, one last game of three-card with you. These might have to wait, but I’m hoping we’ll get a chance to do that again, somewhere, someday. The Dirty Three will do our best in the meantime.

We’ll look after Meg and Vera. We’ll keep the party going. And wherever you are, you’re probably muttering about how full of shit that long-winded so-and-so R.J. can be; but it’s time to face facts. You know you liked listening to me.

And so, fare thee well, sir; fare thee well. I assure you, we love you more than words can tell.

R.J.

(April 17, 2025)