For a Tortured Soul, a Life of Rage and Pain Ends the Same Way

Convinced that his life meant nothing, Jesse Cole would be amazed to see that his death has made the newspapers. Actually, no one’s taking note but me, but surely we can spare 20 inches of newsprint for the Jesse Coles of the world.

I met Jesse last August, a legless man soliciting money on a Garden Grove street corner. Bearded, sunken-cheeked and weather-beaten, he was ravaged--physically, emotionally and spiritually.

His problems, he insisted, had nothing to do with being born without legs. No, it was just that he’d always seen himself as a survivor. Suddenly, he wasn’t surviving so well.

“I blame myself because I’m the only one to blame,” he said that day. “There’s no blaming God; God ain’t at fault. He gives us the power and ability to do things. I’m under so much guilt now. I kick myself all the time for what I’m not doing.”

What Jesse didn’t tell me was of his longstanding drug problem, hardened by working right up the ranks from pot to alcohol to coke to heroin. I also didn’t know about his problems with police or the pain he caused the one woman who loved him.

All I saw on that street corner that day under an August sun was a man with no legs, three stubs for fingers on one hand, and both hands calloused from propelling his skateboard along the sidewalk. I saw a survivor and wondered how he did it.

L.E. Rose is the one who loved him, a woman now in her late 50s who picked up Jesse in 1980 somewhere outside Albuquerque where he was hitchhiking. For reasons tied up in love and sympathy and hope, she married him in 1984. They divorced after five years but Rose has been the one fixture in Jesse’s life since the day they met.

We sat in her Santa Ana living room Tuesday morning and looked at pictures of a happier, healthier Jesse. Yes, he could be cruel and abusive. Yes, she felt sorry for him. Yes, she genuinely loved him.

“He had the rage,” Rose said. “He had a great deal of pain inside him and heartache and hurt from rejection and family problems.” In the 13 years she knew him, she said, no relative ever phoned or sent him a card.

“To me, he was the most courageous man I ever knew. It took a lot of guts to live in a world without legs. When he was under the influence of stuff, that came out of anger. He was like a wounded animal, with that pain inside.”

True, the money he solicited went for drugs, but he wasn’t running a scam, Rose said. Drugs may have eased the pain, but he always hated himself for succumbing to them.

“I get so angry when people say, ‘If he just wanted to. . .’ ” Rose said. “He really wanted to, he really did. He didn’t have the strength to do it. He was in pain. He needed a drug of some sort to kill the pain.”

In better times, Jesse made legitimate money, most notably from selling portraits of himself. When he came calling, he favored tuxedo shirts and a vest. Rose showed me pictures of him as recently as a few years ago, and he was a respectable-looking man, a far cry from the disheveled soul I met last August.

The original column about Jesse prompted a woman at Leisure World to send him a check for $10,000. Feeling guilty myself, I asked Rose if the woman should feel like she’d been had, inasmuch as some of the money probably went for drugs. “I don’t think so,” she said. “He felt like it was a new beginning for him. It gave him hope, a spark like nothing else had in a long, long time. His body was just in such poor physical condition and he was in such extreme pain all the time. . . .”

Jesse died last Friday morning in the car he bought with some of the money the woman donated. He was parked outside Rose’s house, although he hadn’t been staying with her in recent weeks.

According to Rose, the coroner’s report estimated the time of death at 5:30 a.m. and listed the cause as a bowel blockage, a constant part of the discomfort he lived with. Jesse was 34.

It would be easy to say Jesse Cole had a miserable life, but I’m not sure that’s true. Once, and not all that long ago, he had dreams for himself. He had a plan to buy a van, point it in the direction of the Tennessee farmland he grew up in, and drive all his troubles away.

But by the time the end came last week, he was a man seeking solace from a world he could no longer handle.

In one undated bit of musing, he had written:

“To be hit by a car or to be hit by a stray bullet would truly be a blessing to me. Even death is something I can’t do right. It’s so close, yet so far away. God, I believe in you more than I believe in my own self and I beg of you, please take my life, whether I’m going to heaven or hell. Either one will be a blessing compared to being alive. I am a worthless, hopeless creature that cannot change.”

As an epitaph, you’d have to say Jesse Cole didn’t get too many breaks in life. But in his way, and even acknowledging the harm he did to himself, his sheer survival instinct for 34 years is worthy of more mention than he thinks.

“I would tell him: ‘I see a diamond in there,’ ” Rose said. “He always felt so bad about himself, that he wasn’t worth anything, wasn’t worth saving. I could never turn that around. He had a heart. He had a beautiful heart. He just didn’t know how to tap into it all the time.”