Everything ordinary was cast out of the room, except for the wall-vibrating angry words and the sobs. Victor Pasillas and his fiancé, Jasmine, were at it again about the old devil that had haunted him. Spittle flew from their mouths as they yelled at each other in the dimly lit kitchen.
Hell, you could hear them blocks away.
Piercing the torrent was the small hand of a diapered sage tugging at Victor’s fingers and tiny, pleading eyes staring up at him. It caught Victor by surprise. His face turned porcelain white. His lower lip quivered.
“Stop Daddy! You just gotta stop!”
Pasillas was unsure the first time he heard it.
Then again, “Stop Daddy! You just gotta stop!” Then again, with his fingers being yanked to strain out the emphasis, “Stop Daddy! You just gotta stop!”
That marked the last time Victor Pasillas took drugs.
Pasillas’ three-year-old son finally got through to him.
In 2014, no one else did. Pasillas (16-0, 9 knockouts) was a blip on the boxing landscape, someone well known in the Southern California boxing circuit as a talented fighter with a past that shadowed him like death.
The youngest of a drug-addled, drug-dealing mother who was in and out of jail and endured beatings from a cadre of passing men in their lives, Pasillas was a prodigy that almost blew everything by getting hooked on the very drugs he once sold.
On Saturday night, Pasillas, a junior featherweight, gets to take another step toward redemption and away from his smoky, sordid past when he fights Ra’eese Aleem (17-0, 11 knockouts) in a 12-round bout for the interim WBA title on the first Showtime Championship Boxing (9pm ET/6pm PT) telecast of 2021 from the Mohegan Sun Arena, in Uncasville, Connecticut.
Pasillas’ drug use never reached the point where he was a decomposing walking corpse, hanging meat on bones, ready to be nailed into a coffin and swallowed by darkness.
