Men of ‘House One’ Share Life With a Fatal Disease : Group Helps Provide Homelike AIDS Care
The beige sofas, the brown chairs, even the polished upright piano in the living room are donated. Canned goods filling the pantry are the product of charity. Even much of the rent money comes from the pockets of benefactors.
But while the cream-colored stucco house might not rate the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, nothing looks second-rate. It is a proud home to four men who were united by a virus. Three are afflicted with AIDS, the fourth suffers from AIDS-related complex. All had nowhere else to live.
“It was like coming back to life, coming here,” said one resident, Buddy Timberlake, 41, who moved into the house last month after losing his apartment in the Owens Valley community of Independence and then wearing out the welcome of local relatives. A loner all his life, Timberlake saw AIDS sap his financial, physical and emotional strength and force him to depend on others.
Roommates by disease rather than by choice, Timberlake and the other three men share House One, a sprawling, ranch-style home on a tree-lined street in a central Orange County neighborhood. The home is leased by AIDS Services Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization, which in turn sublets it to homeless sufferers of the disease.
“Suddenly, I had all this support,” Timberlake said of his house mates and of the volunteers at AIDS Services Foundation. “The hardest thing for me has been giving up my pride and asking other people for help. Yet, the minute I started asking people for help, they opened their hearts.”
Housing can be an especially desperate need of AIDS patients, said Parrie Graham, executive director of the foundation. Too ill to work, AIDS patients receive $553 a month from Social Security; people with AIDS-related complex qualify for about half that amount. So patients can afford little in Orange County’s high-priced housing market on their budgets, she said.
AIDS patients resort to living with friends or relatives, but often the AIDS diagnosis creates rifts in families, or the fear of catching AIDS will cause a roommate to move out. In addition, AIDS can produce neurological damage and mental and behavioral problems that tax the welcome of even the most understanding friends and family, Graham noted.
Before leasing the house in September, AIDS Services Foundation lodged homeless AIDS patients temporarily with volunteers or, as a last resort, put them up in motels. Following the lead of San Francisco’s Shanti program, which operates about eight houses for people with AIDS, the foundation dubbed the dwelling House One and keeps the address a secret for fear that neighbors will protest.
So far, neighbors have been friendly and a little curious, but the House One residents have tried to lie low, said Brent, 30, a former hairdresser with a penchant for cooking. “We haven’t gone over to borrow a cup of sugar from them yet,” Brent said with a laugh.
House One residents pay $210 each per month, and 15 benefactors pay $50 monthly to further underwrite the house’s cost, which Graham declined to divulge. Volunteers also care for the house’s expansive front and backyard lawns and do housekeeping, tasks that can aggravate the crippled immune system of an AIDS patient.
Medications to Keep Virus in Check
On a recent day, flowers filled vases scattered throughout the house. A box of oranges, limes, lemons and avocados from a volunteer’s tree nearly overflowed in the kitchen. Plants were thriving in the sunny dining area.
The men of House One quietly go about their daily business, taking medications to keep the human immunodeficiency virus in check, keeping doctors appointments, visiting friends and facing the physical and emotional crises that accompany the inevitably fatal illness.
Ken, 40, was the first to move in. Diagnosed with AIDS a year ago October, he had been living in Fullerton earlier this year with a roommate but moved out when the roommate needed the space for family members. He found temporary lodging by house sitting for friends in Laguna Beach but had no place to call home until AIDS Services Foundation obtained House One.
If House One had not opened up, “I’d have had a big problem because my father all but disowned me,” said Ken, a bearded, thin man with straight brown hair who asked that his last name not be used. Ken said his father will not accept his homosexuality. “That takes higher priority for him than the fact I have AIDS. . . .
“It would have been very, very uncomfortable to live with my folks. I probably would have committed suicide. But when you get only $500 a month, there aren’t many places you can live.”
Brent was the second resident of House One, moving in in early October, shortly after he split up with a roommate. Had House One not been available, he said, he probably would have moved in with friends or be “living in my car.” An accomplished gourmet cook, he now fills his days concocting special recipes for his house mates.
Encouraged Blood Checks
Although he had been a volunteer with an AIDS project in Riverside, where he encouraged members of the homosexual community to get their blood checked for the virus, Brent did not undergo the test himself until last February. Barely breathing, he was admitted to a hospital then and found to be suffering from Pneumocystis carinii , a pneumonia common to AIDS sufferers.
“I would have died that night, but the doctor stayed in my room and helped me breathe all night,” he said.
Timberlake joined Brent and Ken at House One about the first of November after losing his apartment and his possessions. Born in a traveling circus--”my mother swung by her teeth from a rope and my dad was a clown”--Timberlake is proud of his nomadic life.
“I’ve washed dishes in every major city in the country,” he said.
Several years ago he and his wife took off on bicycles from New Orleans to explore the country, but they were hit by a truck and his wife died, he said. Racked with grief, he headed for San Francisco where he indulged his bisexual interests and got “strung out” on drugs, he said.
“Somewhere along the way, I picked up the bug,” Timberlake said wryly. He later “straightened up” his life and moved to the mountains, but in July, deathly ill, he was rushed to a hospital in Bishop, where doctors did not know how to or did not want to cope with AIDS, he said. They transported him instead to Los Angeles, but by the time he was released from the hospital, his landlords in Independence had cleaned out his apartment and “hauled my stuff away.”
“I had no money, no clothes. I didn’t even have a way to get back to my stuff,” he said. He stayed for a while with his sister in Long Beach, then took a bus to Independence to find that of all his possessions, only his car remained. He drove back to Southern California, but his sister was reluctant to let him move in, and a brother in Garden Grove allowed him to sleep on the couch only for a little while.
“I can’t blame them. I was squeamish, too,” Timberlake said. “There’s something natural about being scared of it.” But he was frantic. With no money and no friends, he called AIDS Services Foundation. Within two days he had a home.
“It was like a miracle,” he said.
Tainted Blood Transfusions
The latest addition to House One is Brad, 25, a pseudonym for a former nurse’s aide who contracted the AIDS virus four years ago through blood transfusions he said he received after a near-fatal car accident.
Brad has AIDS-related complex, symptoms that do not fit the AIDS diagnosis but which often is a precursor of the disease. Doctors suspect he suffers from toxoplasmosis, a disease that affects the central nervous system, Graham said. Brain surgery is necessary to confirm the diagnosis, but Brad is too weak to withstand the operation, she said. Currently a visiting nurse comes to the house four times a day to administer clindamysyn intravenously, a treatment that must continue through January.
Before moving into House One, Brad lived with friends, then later moved into a hotel, where he was found one day in a semi-comatose state.
“It’s scary. I didn’t expect this to happen to me,” Brad said.
The four men admit that living in a house filled with people afflicted with the AIDS virus makes them more conscious of their disease because they see their own illness mirrored in their roommates. But more important, they said, their living situation engenders understanding, caring and support, they said.
For example, three days after Brent moved in, he became suddenly ill, barely able to breathe. “If Ken hadn’t been here, I may have died,” he said. Ken got Brent to the hospital, where he was admitted with pneumonia.
Since then, Brent said, “I have this thing that when I get up, I have to see who’s OK and who’s not. . . . I always want to make sure everyone’s as comfortable as possible. It could happen to you next.”
But they are still learning how to respond to each other when one of them gets ill, they said. On bad days, an AIDS patient may just need to be cheered up or left alone; on the other hand, he may be desperately ill but deny the severity of the sickness, they said.
Such was the dilemma that Brent, Ken and Brad faced with Timberlake a few days before Thanksgiving. “We knew he was sick, but it was hard to know how far to go,” Ken said.
An independent type, Timberlake rudely rebuffed his house mates when they tried to help.
“I got horrid,” Timberlake admitted later. “I didn’t realize how sick I was.” But he was scared that if his house mates had taken him to a hospital, he would have had a repeat of his earlier, nightmarish experience in the Los Angeles hospital.
When the other three found Timberlake wandering, delirious, in the house, they persuaded him to go to the emergency room of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, where he was admitted for four days.
New House Mate Dies
The house mates have their occasional problems. One ongoing tiff is over how high to set the thermostat. More recently, they were upset when AIDS Services Foundation, over their objections, briefly moved in a fifth house mate, a desperately ill patient who had been discharged from the hospital and had no other place to go. The patient died at the house within 36 hours.
“It comes down to, is this a house of death or a house of life?” Timberlake asked. But Graham said that if any of the four house mates had exchanged places with the dying patient, they would have understood.
Ken, Brent, Timberlake and Brad started out strangers in the house, but they are growing into their own support group. The three AIDS patients are all on azidothymidine, or AZT, an experimental drug to combat Pneumocystis carinii , and they joke about setting their alarm clocks together to swallow their capsules every four hours, around the clock.
“It’s not a party house, but we laugh, we joke, we support each other,” Timberlake said. “It’s a happy house, not a sad, depressing experience.”
Still, he said, “when you’re told you’re going to die, there are things you realize about life that you’re not going to find out other ways.”
For Ken, that has meant “learning to live one day at a time. It’s nice to make plans, but plans aren’t as important anymore.”
It also means “finishing up unfinished business,” in his case, trying to overcome his ex-wife’s objections to seeing his children and telling them that he is ill, he said.
But Ken will not give up hope. “When I hear ‘AIDS victim,’ that irks me,” he said. “That’s someone who’s succumbed. If I had thought of myself at the beginning as a victim, I wouldn’t be alive today.”
Living in House One has prompted Brent to adopt a goal--”getting Ken to cook,” he said with a laugh. “I never thought I’d see the day I’d be teaching home ec.”
The gibe has a point, though. In the noisy intimacy of the House One laundry room, Brent said he has learned that long-term goals can make one lose sight of life’s important things, such as friendship. AIDS has cost him some friends, he said, “but my relationship with the ones who have stayed is deeper.”
One friend, he said, “reminded me that no one is promised tomorrow . . . so get my ass out of bed and enjoy the day.”
Now, having a cup of tea with a friend is more than a hot drink, “it’s 20 minutes of sharing life,” Brent said.
“Now I appreciate the time I spend with people. Nobody is immortal,” Brent said. “But when you’re confronted with that, that it could be next week, it could be in two hours . . . that makes you look at things differently.”
Minutes earlier he had served coffee and buttery, home-baked shortbread on raspberry-colored dishes that had been donated to the house.
There was a time, Brent said, when he would have been thrilled to have the striking Fitz & Floyd china. Now, “little things” like pretty dishes have less meaning.
“It’s still wonderful,” he said. “But we’d be happy to eat off paper plates . . . just to have the time left.”
