J.R. ... The Boy of Summer

(Photo by Karalyn Dorn)

J.R. Trujillo.

We started out as reporters together in the mid-1980s at the student-run Monday, Wednesday and Friday paper, The Mirror, at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Already shooting for the top, J.R. applied for and got the Editor-in-Chief position and hired me as his News Editor.

With black hair so sprayed and lacquered it shone like a ’65 Impala low rider, J.R. had an arrogance about him borne of burgeoning talent. His dark eyes flashed when he talked about The News, which he ate, drank and slept.

Behind those eyes an even deeper darkness lurked. From Grand Junction, he’d hint late at night in the newsroom about a mom who was in a nursing home there, and who wasn’t going to get better. I don’t ever remember him going home to visit her, or the working class family he had left behind and appeared to want to be shed of.

We had several things in common … News, Nicotine and Novas … His Chevy was yellow and mine blue, but they were of similar vintage, and J.R. was forever coming up behind me as I typed at my desk and borrowing two of my Camel unfiltered cigarettes. One which would go in his mouth and be set ablaze, and another which went behind his ear until he shifted it to his mouth and came sniffing around later for another.

We made a good team. He was a better reporter than I was and I was a better writer than he was and we learned from each other. A natural lady’s man to my nerdy shyness, he once called me and a reporter that I had been sleeping with, and who had broken up with me, into his office when it was getting in the way of the work. He told both of us together that we needed to work it out. Privately he told her that if it came down to firing her or me, he would fire her. Privately he told me to quit sleeping with the reporters unless I was going be enough of a print pimp to keep them in line.

A year ahead of me in school, it looked like J.R. was on his way to Bigger and Better when he applied for an internship with the San Jose Mercury News in California the summer between his junior and senior year. Competing with candidates from across the country to work at one of the more well-known and respected papers on the West Coast at the time he made it to the final rounds of interviews, but ultimately wasn’t selected.

It was stumble on his career path from which he would never recover his balance.

That fall, saying “presidents don’t take cabinet positions,” J.R. wouldn’t work at The Mirror. I continued writing and editing at the paper. He dropped out of school. He was talented enough as a reporter that he was getting stringer and freelance gigs with some of the local dailies, but when he started pushing for a staff position they told him he needed to get that degree first.

He had also begun to develop what was appearing line by line to be a growing addiction to cocaine. Liking coke and weed and booze plenty myself, I was happy to spiral down the shiny slide of substance abuse with him … to a point. I remember both of us being out of money, and looking for a high, and grinding up Vivarin caffeine pills and snorting them one night. Now in retrospect I’m not sure if that makes us more pathetic for our need for a high, or an indication of how naïve and nerdy our junior junkie ways were.

Since we weren’t going to school or working together, I saw less and less of J.R., but I still heard about him. A mutual friend who said he had found him nursing a drink and brooding one night at the bar, complaining bitterly about the shit-hole amenities of a press box at a local high school where he had managed to cage an assignment to cover a football game. I heard he had gotten a gig covering Weld County for one of the dailies, but that his car had broken down, and unable to fix it, he had simply let the State Patrol tow it away and now was being buried by impound fees.

I consciously distanced myself from him. I didn’t answer my phone when I heard him on the message machine, knowing all he wanted was to borrow money. I was in the final push to get my degree, and I saw him less and less and honestly thought about him even less than that.

One morning I was awakened by a call from my parents. They had seen a story in that morning’s paper about the former editor of The Mirror that had killed himself. The story didn’t name who it was, “pending notification of next of kin” and my dad said he couldn’t dial the phone fast enough, in fear that if he didn’t, it would ring.

J.R. had hung himself in his bedroom of the house he lived in with several other guys. They said he had watched some ESPN SportCenter with them, drank a few beers, then said he was going to bed. When he didn’t come out the next morning they finally went in to see what was up.

He was. Against the wall. With a belt around his neck. He was 22.

I remember at the time of his death not seeing it as a cautionary tale as much as a poetic prediction of where things may be headed. Where I may be headed. I saw way too much romanticism in him choosing to kill himself, too much torment.

In true shark smelling blood in the water journalistic tradition that would have made J.R. proud I managed to get a freelance assignment with the Denver Post’s Sunday magazine writing about his death. I turned in this 10,000 word story that was as much a manifesto about college journalism as about him. After I sent it to the editor J.R. came to me one night in a dream. He was impressed that I had scored a gig with The Post, even if it was over his dead body, and asked, "How long was it (the story)?" When I told him, he said, "Oh man, that's way too long."

He was right. The editor wrote back and said it was obvious that his death had deeply affected me, but “the story just wasn’t something they were looking to publish.”

As the years went by, I put J.R. away, pulling him out of my emotional baggage every now and then, but for the most part, life went on. That's why I was excited in 2005 to hear just before leaving for Lake Powell for a vacation with Lesli and the girls and her parents that a reunion was planned for late August of staffs of The Mirror from the mid-1980s when I worked there. Quickly it became evident that part of any revisit to this time would have to be a coming-to-terms with J.R., who for two decades had lain beneath his native Grand Junction soil. Grand Junction was always the overnight stop on the two-day drive to Powell.

I had been to J.R.'s grave in Grand Junction once before, almost 20 years ago shortly after he died while I was doing research for the story that never ran. Through all the years, it had stuck with me how the cemetery was off 'Unaweep' Avenue. What hadn't stuck with me was how to get there again. As soon as we hit Grand Junction on the return trip from Lake Powell, I started trying to find directions. Despite the fervent and somewhat hostile pronouncements by many Grand Junctionites that there was "no damn cemetery off Unaweep," I eventually discovered there was, and how to get there.

At dawn, on Father's Day, Lesli and I left the girls sleeping with grandma and grandpa at the motel and headed out to the Orchard Mesa Cemetery. I've always had good graveyard karma with Lesli. When we were younger, we spent an entire afternoon drinking beer with Billy the Vault Installer at Buddy Holly's grave in Lubbock, Texas. The years haven't diminished her enthusiasm for such adventures, nor her sense of humor. As we pulled into the Grand Junction cemetery - with gravestones and trees stretching to the horizon - she actually laughed when I said: "It was by a tree."

It was Lesli who first saw Ernie. It was her that approached him and told him our story. Ernie didn't work for the cemetery, we got the impression that maybe he was doing court-ordered public service but didn’t want to probe too deeply, but for whatever reason he was out cutting weeds around headstones with a weed-whacker at dawn on a Sunday for the city of Grand Junction. While officially he couldn't be of assistance, he was sympathetic to our quest.

"Could you come back Monday," he said?

"No, we're going to be heading back to Johnstown in the next couple of hours," I said.

Ernie would have none of that. He said he knew where they kept the grave registration cards in the cemetery office. He led us to the office, where drawer after drawer of 3 x 5 card holders lined one wall and maps of plots lined another. Lesli asked what J.R. stood for. I realized it was "junior" and that he had been touchy about his real first name. But time had smudged the memory enough that I couldn't read the handwriting in my mind.

So we began a melancholy trip down the card catalogue of Trujillos that lie in eternal rest at the cemetery. Old Trujillos. Baby Trujillos. Wilfred Trujillo.

"That's it," I said. "Wilfred."

We wrote down the plot number, Ernie figured out the area on one of the maps, and the three of us headed in that direction.

Ernie found it. I remember it being at the bottom of a small hill, but there it was, near the road, under a tree. Ernie, proud as any superhero, went back to his weed-whacking. Lesli hung back and I sat down on the grave.

Like a wave, the past 20 years, the good and the bad, all came over me. Lesli. Our marriage. Living in New Mexico. Moving to Johnstown. The girls. The paper. All these things washed over me as I realized that J.R. would never get to experience any of this. He was frozen in the amber of a time, sitting on my psychic shelf like a trinket bought at an interstate truck stop during a summer vacation that I pick up, and forget, at a whim.

I realized though, standing there, weeping at my friend's grave, that he's also likely been along for the ride all the way - as the spirit has moved him and me. I thought about whacking a chunk off his headstone to take to the reunion, but I was afraid Ernie might get in trouble.

Now, looking back at J.R.’s story three decades later, I’m not even sure he meant to kill himself. According to the coroner, he had tried first looping the belt from a plant hook, but it had pulled out of the ceiling. For years I pictured him so desolate, with plaster in that hair of his that he used to scream like a queen if you touched, then grimly looping the belt again to something more substantial, and the pain in his soul that kept him from putting his feet back down on this earth after he pulled them up.

It’s just as likely in my mind now that maybe he was just trying to cut off the oxygen to his brain and then releasing it at the moment before you pass out. I still feel sad, but now for the potential wasted chasing a cheap high, not the romance of the torment and tragedy of it all, that back then I think now in retrospect, I wore like a reflected badge of honor.

Either way: It's. Just. Damn. Sad.

A couple of years ago, just before I got clean, I decided to get a bracelet tattoo on my right wrist of “Day of the Dead” skulls, most of them tweaked in some manner to honor someone in my life who has died. One of them is of J.R. I told the tattoo artist I wanted something primitive and basic. Blacks and whites and simple lines. “I want it to look like I got it in prison,” I told him.

Now, when I hold my hand up while I’m writing, on the inside of my wrist, J.R., a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his initials on his forehead and RIP on his chin, stare back at me from behind greaser shades. It’s a reminder of him, but also an admonition to me about the dangers of taking yourself too seriously, or looking in substances for an escape from the ghosts that haunt you.