Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [86]
Esteban DeJesus’ last fight was a losing bid for the junior welterweight title in July 1980. By then, he was in the grip of drug addiction, having graduated from marijuana to shooting up speedballs of cocaine and heroin, sharing needles with his older brother Enrique and friends. “In general, you start first with friends and you get so wrapped up with the drugs that before you know it you’re hooked,” he later told Puerto Rican TV. “They take you to parties and you start using the stuff. The worst part is when you open your eyes. It’s too late. You’re already addicted.”
On November 27, 1980, DeJesus mainlined coke before getting in his car to drive to a family celebration. On the way, he became embroiled in a traffic dispute with eighteen-year-old Robert Cintron Gonzalez, and leapt from his car brandishing a .25 caliber pistol. DeJesus shot the teenager in the head. He died four days later. DeJesus was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder and jailed for life.
In 1985, his brother Enrique died of AIDS. Having shared needles with him, Esteban took a test and found that he, too, had the dreaded disease. His brujos could not save him now; nothing could. As his health deteriorated, his jail sentence was commuted to allow him to receive treatment at the House for the Re-education of Addicts, an old milk factory. There he lay on a bed in a room with eighteen men, all former addicts dying from AIDS. Prayer was their only hope.
Days from the end, DeJesus fell to skin and bone. But before his body and will gave way, DeJesus had one last, face-to-face meeting with his old foe. Duran, who had regularly disparaged – and beaten – Puerto Ricans, was not a popular figure in the country, but when a call came that Esteban was dying, the instinctive generosity of spirit that was as much a part of him as macho bluster quickly emerged.
“There was a man who was always around DeJesus who told me that he was dying of AIDS,” said Duran. “He said, ‘I need you to go see him because he could pass away any minute.’ We go to a place, the jail is here and DeJesus is staying across the street from it. When I see him there so thin, my tears run out because he used to be a pretty formed, muscular guy. I start crying and I hug him, and I kiss him and I tell my daughter to kiss him. That was when I won over the Puerto Rican public.”
Duran did more than win over Puerto Rico with the gesture: a love for Duran was culled through his fearless response to this mysterious disease. Jose Torres used to run into Duran at Victor’s Café, a popular Cuban restaurant and Duran’s favorite hangout, on fight weekends in New York City. Torres knew firsthand about death in the ring. He was there to see Benny “Kid” Paret when the beating he suffered against Emile Griffith in March 1962 left him in a coma from which he would never awake. Torres would drive Paret’s wife back and forth from the hospital to see the fallen fighter before his death ten days after the fight.
Almost two decades on, Torres was caught in death’s web again. “When DeJesus was dying in Puerto Rico, I went to see him,” Torres recalled. “Duran went that same day. Duran walked to the bed and embraced him in the bed. He was dying and he embraced the man. You knew he was dying of AIDS, so I would not get that close because we didn’t know that much about AIDS at the time. We knew that you could get it from anybody. I was very concerned about that. He just walked over to him and just lifted him out of the bed. I will never forget that. That made Duran for me as one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met. That attitude there, that move.
“I wrote about DeJesus for the New York Post, a piece about that experience. This is the first time I talk about it since then. It’s funny because every fighter has that compassion. I think that anybody can be that way; you don’t have to be a fighter.”
Fight promoter Butch Lewis added, “He went to the hospital and visited the guy when nobody knew about AIDS.