Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

45 страница из 67

Within a few years, de Jesús was so ill that his sentence was commuted on the condition that he remain in an AIDS clinic for treatment. “The doctors tell me that I have anywhere from one to four years to live,” de Jesús said in a television interview in February 1989, “but I hope God will support me longer.” There would be no reprieve for the magnificent lightweight whose troubles—combined with his losses to Durán —would permanently overshadow his career. Three months later, he was dead.

A few weeks before he died, however, an ailing de Jesús received a visit from Roberto Durán, whose empathy brought him to Puerto Rico from hundreds of miles away. Durán met his ex–rival for the fourth and final time in a weathered milk factory converted into a makeshift sickbay.

During the late-1980s the growing AIDS epidemic sparked a national panic. Before that, however, before the number of AIDS deaths spiked from hundreds in 1982 to more than fourteen thousand in 1989, AIDS was virtually a taboo subject. It took the death of Rock Hudson, ex-Hollywood leading man, to bring sharper national focus to the AIDS crisis. Best known for his roles in Douglas Sirk melodramas and Doris Day comedies in the 1950s and ’60s, Hudson was the first recognizable face of a mystifying disease too often thought of as the bane of the underclass. Hudson, rich, famous, and preserved forever on celluloid as a handsome young man, died in 1985. By the late 1980s ACT UP, playwright Larry Kramer, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Aids Memorial Quilt (unfurled in front of the White House in 1988) raised awareness of an illness that had a near-apocalyptic air about it. Even then, however, AIDS victims suffered discrimination and the process by which the disease spread was still shrouded in ignorance. Under any circumstances, it seemed, AIDS was something to fear with almost pathological intensity. But Durán immediately moved in to embrace de Jesús. “When I see him there so thin,” Durán told Christian Giudice, “my tears run out because he used to be . . . a muscular guy. I start crying and I hug him, and I kiss him and I tell my daughter to kiss him.”