Ambling for AIDS

Adam F. Jarrold Arizona Daily Wildcat AIDS walker Louis Figueroa cools off his feet after a long walk. He began in May 1996 in Bangor, Maine, and arrived in Tucson last week. He is walking to raise money for AIDS awareness.

But people ask him that a lot.

"I'm walking across North America against AIDS," the 31-year-old, clean-shaven New Jersey native replies, waiting for the inevitable, incredulous stares.

Having arrived in Tucson last week, Figueroa's cross-country footbound odyssey is an ardent plea to promote awareness of the disease that claimed his brother's life.

"I get a quiet support," he said of his ongoing Maine-to-California trek. "But AIDS is still a dirty word. It's like wait ƒ Reagan's been out of office how many years now?"

Yet the tenacious walker has more to handle than 3,800 miles of solitude for a cause that he champions. He's HIV-negative but has been diagnosed with leukemia, a possibly lethal side effect of a childhood bout with Hodgkin's disease.

Forced to take six months away from his journey as the disease came out of remission, he still remains optimistic about the quest.

"It seems that people pay attention to the long walk," Figueroa said of the $300,000 his 10-month walk has raised for local AIDS organizations, like the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, thus far.

In between, he has also found himself in a Maine marijuana haven and a Canadian go-go bar, among other misadventures.

Over shish kebobs and a six-pack Tuesday night, Figueroa told how the impetus for his personal odyssey came late in 1995, as his youngest sister's untimely death brought siblings and distant relatives together at his parents' New Brunswick, N.J. home.

With them was his elder brother Jimmy, who had already developed the late stages of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

"I get a big hug from my aunt, and Jimmy got this tap on the arm from her," Figueroa recalled. "Then my brother Abe got a big hug."

Jimmy already had visible skin lesions induced by the disease, so when he and his brother went out for dinner, the AIDS stigma reappeared.

"There was this guy staring at Jimmy with open disgust Ü like 'how dare they let an AIDS patient eat in a public restaurant?'" he said. "It was the first time I had ever gotten to see how the disease affected his life."

He decided there to fight the social taint AIDS patients fight on a daily basis.

"That 50-pound load on my back symbolizes the stigma HIV patients face," he said, pointing to the soft-shell backpack he has carried since embarking from Bangor, Maine on May 9, 1996.

Figueroa recalled one of the most uplifting experiences during the trek. In Rochester, N.Y., an old and craggly man drove up near dusk and stopped where Figueroa was trudging along.

"This was the last guy I expected would have empathy," Figueroa said.

The man told him AIDS was a horrible disease and took out his wallet, handing the stunned walker two of the three dollars there.

"That random act of kindness touched me," he said.

A nationally-ranked marathonist in high school and college, Figueroa's legs had already carried him once across the country during a 60-day run in 1982.

"I'm the original Forrest Gump," he joked, telling how a 9-year-old New Jersey cancer patient sparked his run.

"He looked at me and said, 'I'll never be able to run again,'" Figueroa recalled. "Joking around, I said, 'If you fight this, I'll run across the country.'"

Figueroa later had a change of heart.

"At that age I was still naðve enough to think I would never break a promise," he said. "He died fighting, so now I have to fulfill my end of the bargain and run across the country."

"When I got to the Golden Gate bridge, I took out a can of spray paint and wrote 'For Bobby, From Louis,'" he added.

Unlike the team that traveled with him in 1982, Figueroa is now walking solo, helped along by a number of unofficial corporate sponsors and some motel and restaurant chains help him out with rooms and meals on the house.

In every town he passes, Figueroa also seeks publicity from local media, promoting three goals:

- To erase the stigma of AIDS

- To urge safe sex

- To raise money for these causes

Everywhere, he asks residents to give time or donations to grassroots AIDS organizations.

"Gay bars really raise a lot of money," he said, chalking that fact up to increased awareness of the disease.

"Now I'm trying to break into straight society," he added.

In Tucson, Figueroa has talked with each television news station along with the Tucson Citizen . He's also done a fund raiser at O'Malley's On Fourth and at Ten's, an East Speedway Boulevard topless bar.

"People are afraid of getting involved," he said, urging more Americans to volunteer, even if just for an hour at a time. "It's amazing the love you get back," he added.

Despite his almost angelic quest, Figueroa is a modest soul Ü with a past. Having kicked a nasty cocaine habit, he still smokes a Camel Light cigarette about every five miles.

"I've been smoking too much," he acknowledged, adding that his three prime passions are good Mexican food, beer and Julia Roberts.

"Unfortunately, I can only get two out of three," he quipped, adding he hoped Roberts might be on-hand for the final San Diego leg of his journey.

In a twist of fate, Roberts starred in Dying Young, a movie where one of the characters was partly based on Figueroa.

A normal guy who is not without faults, he is walking because he sees it as a laudable thing for humanity - and he's definitely on the homestretch now.

Planning to wind up his trek in San Diego at Thanksgiving, he reminisced about truly singular experiences he had while on the road, or more accurately, on the highway shoulder.

Out of money in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Figueroa walked into the Sundowner Inn, a totally nude go-go bar and explained his predicament to the manager.

"Suddenly this voice came over the p.a. saying all dancers please report to the dressing room," he recalled. "You had all these guys thinking, 'Where the fuck did the women go?'"

Figueroa soon found himself encircled by 50 nude dancers, who pitched in almost $600 in AIDS donations and road money.

"If I had known all it would take to be surrounded by 50 beautiful, naked women was to walk across North America, I would have done this a long time ago," he said grinning.

Yet exotic dancers paled in comparison to illegal drugs.

Staying overnight with a farmer in a tiny Maine town, the farmer's grown son took Figueroa to a secluded silo to show him a real cash crop Ütowering marijuana plants.

"This is how I'm subsidizing the farm," the son bantered.

When he heard Figueroa had been to Alaska, he became excited.

"You gotta get me some 'thunderfuck' seeds," the son crowed. Apparently, thunderfuck is extremely potent Alaskan-grown marijuana, Figueroa said.

Aside from the shadier side of walking though, the news media also provided some moments of levity.

R-NEWS, a 24-hour Rochester, N.Y. news station, filmed his trek through town, including an hour of Figueroa singing along to a Stevie Wonder tape.

"I sounded just like Michael Jackson," he said, almost shaking with embarrassment.

Yet awkward moments aside, walking solo has been toughest.

"The hardest part of the whole trip is not the miles and not the desert heat," he said. "All that pales to the loneliness."

Still, this modern-day Kerouac with a mission truly revels in life. While riding a bus on Speedway Boulevard Tuesday, Figueroa jumped up salivating at the sight of an old New Jersey standard just east of Euclid Avenue.

Greasy Tony's, now a Tucson standard, originated in New Brunswick, N.J., the walker's hometown.

"We gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go," Figueroa yelled to the other people on the bus.

"I felt like I was in the New Jersey embassy of a foreign country," he said later, after swapping stories and with Tony himself, who sponsored some of Figueroa's high school track and field competitions.

Cheesesteaks aside, the AIDS walker remains an optimist in the face of odds perhaps greater than he imagined. Jimmy, the AIDS-stricken brother who inspired the walk, died as Figueroa walked through Burlington, Vt. Still, Figueroa continued on, per his brother's dying request.

"He told me, 'You keep on walking so someone else doesn't end up in this same fucked up position,'" Figueroa said.

Perhaps that is Louis Figueroa's greatest power. He is a human completing an almost inhuman journey.

"I'm not anybody's role model," he stressed, but the marathonist turned AIDS runner ought to think twice before making that statement.

Though perhaps not in all actions, Louis Figueroa sets the standard for outlook.