7.
Oddly, the last part of the story of his life turned out not to be about Jorge at all. It was about me.
A few days after the grisly events had hit the news and was even beginning to die down, I was having lunch with an old friend.Usually we talked about our work, our wives, about people we knew, even about sports. Today, I was going on and on about the compact, muscular man with the violent tattoos, narrating what I had learned about the last miserable chapter of Jorge's story.
I only caught myself when my friend stared at me curiously. "What I don't understand," he finally said, "is why this has you so bothered. Was he a friend of yours?"
The question took me aback. I mumbled something about feeling guilty because I had talked to Jorge just a few hours before the end, never suspecting what was coming.But that wasn't really it.
The truth is that I felt in some obscure way that Jorge was too big to be covered by the superficial details that were reported in the newspapers: “Hispanic male … unrequited love … shot to death …”
There had to be more.There had to some meaning beyond the facts as reported.
6.
The night before that lunch date, I had finally seen the newspaper accounts covering the story I’d heard as rumors over the weekend. The details were pitifully few. But I learned two facts that surprised me: his name wasn't Jorge, and that the stunning woman he kept company with was called Jezzy.
I'd only ever heard him called “Jorge.” Maybe it was his middle name. Maybe it was a nickname.Maybe, given the tattoos and his threatening manner, it was an alias, protecting him from the law.Or maybe we'd just all misunderstood his name. It’s entirely possible that Jorge had neither the facility in English nor bad manners to correct us.
The facts, as reported, were shocking enough, but surprisingly irrelevant.
5.
I first heard of Jorge's death at the gym on Sunday afternoon. I was mid-way through my weight workout when the whispers first interrupted my concentration. Without really trying to listen, I soon discovered that everyone in the gym was talking about it.
I listened to the rumors repeated over and over, passing from weight bench to weight bench, mouth to mouth, seemingly breath to breath.
I suddenly realized that no one ever talked about Jorge when he was alive.Oh, we talked about the amount of weight he lifted, or the incredible length of his workouts, and not a few of us commented on the how stunning the woman that he coached.But none of us ever talked about Jorge as Jorge.
Jezzy was as integral to Jorge as a body part. They always worked out together. That’s not quite right: they’d been inseparable until a few weeks before, when she was notable for her absence.
Together, they made a startling couple.She was tall, exquisitely formed, and as friendly as a kitten. She seldom spoke, but she projected a friendly smile and a gentle manner. Her voice, when I heard the few words that I ever heard her speak, was deep and smooth.
Jezzy was the perfect partner for Jorge. He was as short and powerful as she was stunning. And just as her soft curves seemed sculpted out of solid marble by a Canova, Jorge was as solid as a steel I-beam.Their appearances were one reason none of us ever talked with them.
Jorge didn't exude friendliness.He was short, bristling with highly defined muscles like a battleship bristled with guns. He sported the aggressively sharp crew cut of a career Marine.I never saw him smile, even at Jezzy. Of course, with Jorge by her side, nobody ever approached the woman.
Jorge’s speech—when he asked if you were done on that bench or if he could work in on a set—was barely intelligible. He spoke a sparse, mumbled English, letting a subject and verb do the job of an entire sentence. The effort to converse seemed to require him to have to summon a supreme effort. It is true that English was not his first language, but when I heard him speak Spanish, it was in the same short, desultory phrases with long rests in between.
So until the day after Jorge made his eloquent statement, none of us knew anything about him but what we could see.
And his name. Which it turns out that we got wrong.
4.
In the darkness of the early morning the day before the gym buzzed with news of his death on that Sunday, Jorge died under the glare of the operating room lights.He’d been taken to the local trauma hospital. Fittingly, gunshot wounds were sent to the Army Medical Center’s trauma unit. In a sense, his last statement brought him home.
The .38 caliber bullet that killed him passed through one hand and then through his abdomen.When I heard about it later, I was surprised that it took only a single bullet to kill him.If anyone looked likely to survive a single gunshot, I would have bet on Jorge.
One of my gym mates, a surgeon, said later that the shot shouldn’t have killed him. But it did. Perhaps because for Jorge, he had nothing left to live for. Or perhaps he died of a single gunshot because it was the ending the story of his life required.
3.
Years later, I would learn what happened immediately before he wrote his final epitaph.
Shortly before midnight on the Friday night that would end Jorge’s life, Jezzy returned to her house from a dinner date with a “friend.” (This part of the story was never told without those scare quotes, perhaps implying that her conduct drove him to his desperate act.) It was said that when she got home, she played the messages on her answering machine. Jorge’s message made her cringe. His voice had been haunting her answering machine for weeks, and now here it was yet again.
He’d been trying to rekindle things. She had been playing for distance. Jezzy treated him like she treated everyone: gently, with consideration. She kept hoping he’d get the message, hoping he’d give up, hoping they could go back to being merely student and coach or maybe even just acquaintances from the gym.Every new message told her the message wasn’t getting through.
Earlier that same afternoon, before Jezzy went out for her dinner date, Jorge had called. She’d acted without thinking and answered the phone. She must have groaned when she heard his voice. She was prepared for more pleas to give him a chance. That’s not what she got.
He begged her to meet him at the gym.He said that he wanted to give her his weight-lifting belt and shoes. She'd asked: “What are you going to do without them? Don’t you need him?” Then she wondered if he was leaving things behind because he’d gotten his orders to return to his Army unit in Honduras.And anyway, what was she supposed to do with a man’s weight-lifting belt and a man’s gym shoes?
His voice was less comprehensible than usual, probably a result of a strained connection. Jezzy could tell whether he’d maybe gotten orders,or maybe not, but in any case he wanted her to have his things. Would she meet him?
Jezzy tried to be patient. No, she wouldn't meet him.She would see him next week, to work out with him at the gym.She didn't want to reject him outright; she didn’t want to come right out and say that he was scaring her with his insistence on seeing her. She didn’t want to come right out and tell him that they could no longer “see” each other: he needed to work it out for himself.
It wasn’t that she was afraid of him, she patiently explained when everything was over and done with and people were no longer afraid to approach her.She never feared for her own safety. She knew that Jorge would never do anything to hurt her. She was just fearful that he might do something stupid.Not that she could ever have predicted that he would do what he did. She took pains to point that out.
But that afternoon, Jorge still wasn’t getting the message. He told her stubbornly that he'd be at the gym that afternoon, waiting for her. Then he hung up.
Now, freshly back from her date, she stood, listening to his voice on her answering machine. Of course she’d failed to turn up at the gym. Now, her palm sweaty on the telephone in the dark house, she frowned with exasperation. How could she tell him any more plainly without being unbearably brutal? She played the message again.
Jorge's voice came across clipped and mumbled, the same as it did in person.“You don't want talk to me,” he muttered.“You don't want nothing to do with me. That's OK. I take care of it tonight. ”The machine beeped to a stop.
She tapped her fingers, wondering when the message had been left.Eventually–disconcerted, uneasy, angry–she went to bed. She repeated when she told the story that she never feared for herself.
2.
Friday night, around 10:00, Jorge walked into the small, decrepit tavern on the south side of town, carrying his duffel bag.He walked alone into the smoky darkness, like a gunfighter facing down an outlaw.Alone, displaced, stood up, and unknown. At least, unknown for a few more minutes.
He swaggered as he walked to the bar, not out of pride or arrogance but because that was the only way Jorge knew how to walk.He stood at the bar, drinking, elbows splayed out, taking up space, maybe looking for a fight.He had a second drink, a third, a fourth.Other than the bartender who was watching him warily, nobody noticed him until he began to carve his epitaph on a life suddenly as blank and featureless as a slab of stone.
The way I've heard the story, Jorge reached into his duffel bag and brought out a handgun.Taking his time to load a clip into the pistol, he fired off a shot at the ceiling.In the stunned silence, the bartender asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Jorge put the gun on the bar, muttered that he was waiting for the police, and went back to his drink.
The bartender backed away, going for the phone.People started clearing out of the bar. Jorge downed his last drink.
As people jammed the door in their hurry to get out of whatever was coming, Jorge reached for the gun again.This time he shot off the rest of the clip, splintering the already ragged walls and ill-used decorations.No one was hit.With his training, at such a short distance, he could of course have found a target with every shot.I suspect he was speaking as eloquently as he could, in the language in which he felt most articulate.
In any case, the police soon arrived. They knew what to expect, and not just from the dispatcher’s call. This was the South Side on a Friday night. A guy with a gun, shooting up a bar,was part of the landscape.
Still, the sight of short, powerful man with the large pistol dominating the abandoned room must have given them pause. Still, the patrolmen knew they could handle it. This kind of thing happened, and almost nobody ever got hurt. If the light had allowed them to see his tattoos, they said later, they would have been less confident in their ability to handle the situation.
Doing their jobs, the policemen drew their weapons as they walked in to confront Jorge. One of the officers ordered him to drop the gun. Jorge ejected the clip from the handgun, letting the officers relax. This was going to be one of the easy ones.
Then Jorge reached down into his duffel bag and jammed a new clip into the gun.He turned toward one of the officers. Jorge raised the gun with both hands, aiming carefully at the officer. The handgun in Jorge's hands was so large that it took both of his massive hands to bring it to bear on this officer.
Why he chose one officer rather than the other nobody ever knew. Maybe this officer was just the unlucky one, or maybe the chosen one. In any case, faced with the huge black barrel sited on his face, the officer had no time to drop and roll or give another warning or to think any thought.
He had time to react. That was all. And the officer with the bad luck fired only once.
The shot hit Jorge dead center. The blow of the bullet slammed Jorge’s dense body out against the bar's dirty floor. He lay splayed out, like a rug spread over a dark stain.
Backup police officers rushed in. Paramedics arrived. They were not in time to save him.
With the police and paramedics came the television news crews. As the paramedics wheeled Jorge out on the stretcher, the television cameras caught a glimpse of the tattoos on each of Jorge's gigantic biceps. The cameras focused in, blowing up the faded tattoos into full-screen sized illustrations, conveniently frozen for the viewers’ enjoyment.
At the gym, we had caught glimpses of the tattoos before, though none of us wanted to get close enough to examine them and nobody dared to stare.Now they were present in all of their bloody detail. On one arm was a tattoo of a skull, blood dripping from its eye sockets, the trails of blood forming the legend, in English, “Death Commando.” On the other arm was a shield with knives and guns, on which was written an army division number and the legend—again in English—“Mercenary Battalion.”
That was all any of us ever found out about his history. That and the epitaph he’d so carefully crafted.
1.
As it turns out, my last sight of Jorge came on the Friday afternoon before his death. I had gone to the gym after a long and difficult day of work. On my way out, freshly showered finally relaxed, I'd run into Jorge sitting on a couch in the gym's lobby. He was dressed in the most civilian clothes I’d ever seen him in:a T-shirt and fatigue pants. At his feet sat a duffel bag.
The whole scene surprised me. I’d never seen him dressed in anything but workout clothes and I’d never seen him sitting. He was clearly waiting for someone, but also clearly waiting to go. For the first time, I stopped to chat.
“What's this?” I asked him.“Are you heading back to Honduras?”
“No,” he answered.“Just waiting. ”His voice might have been sullen, or it might have just been his normal tone. He did not seem to want to talk. I hesitated for a moment and then left him sitting.
Putting the facts together now, it is obvious that he had the gun with him even then and that he was waiting for Jezzy, who was not coming. I wonder now if he was just carrying the gun with the rest of his belongings, or if the bag held only the weight-belt and the shoes that he’d promised her, or if he was carrying the gun for her. I don’t know why it matters.
I walked away with the nagging feeling that Jorge felt demeaned to be seen as I saw him.The feeling has never let me go. I think that he wouldn't want anyone to think of him as sitting, waiting for something to happen—he would want to be remembered as never sitting still for anyone, as never waiting for anyone, as never letting anyone else make the first move.
He would want to be remembered heroically.
He almost made it. He almost lived up to the legends engraved on his arms. He almost went out in a blaze of glory, a hot gun in his hands, his boots on, the name of the woman he loved on his lips.
Perhaps, had Jezzy met him earlier in that day, he would have worked out a different epitaph for himself. But perhaps he would have used the gun to resolve his fractured relationship with her. Or perhaps they would have talked and with her gentle manner, she would have made him understand what she’d been trying to tell him, and he would have gone on to a different life.
I’m haunted by the idea that, perhaps if I had stopped to talk with him, I would have been able to see what was coming and been able to say or do something—
But no. The first lines of his epitaph had been written years before. They were a skull dripping blood; they were knives and guns on a Mercenary shield. The only thing left was to complete the last line of Jorge’s epitaph.
And then, on that last night of his life, Jorge wrote it.