House a Haven for Afflicted Addicts : Residential Program Gives HIV-Positive Residents a Place to Deal With Drug Abuse

The Gerry House looks like any of the others on the block. The garage door is open on most days and several people can be seen lifting weights, repairing bikes or lazily enjoying a cigarette.

But under its roof sleep 12 people infected with the worst of society’s ills.

Before moving into the nondescript Santa Ana neighborhood, they were homeless drug addicts who spent much of their lives in prison, or on the county’s streets. Most are infected with HIV, which generally leads to AIDS. Several are heroin addicts, trying to break their habits with daily doses of methadone.

All are in the drug recovery home at the urging of the Orange County Health Care Agency--or on orders from the courts.

The Gerry House was quietly established by Cypress-based Straight Talk Inc. in 1990 and is largely run on a $300,000-a-year contribution from the county. To avoid the need for a conditional use permit and the public hearings--possibly the public outcry--that would entail, Straight Talk split the house into two, six-bed facilities.

“Most people would scream bloody murder if they knew these people were living next door,” said Len Liberio, the agency’s drug abuse programs director. “But if this works, then people will be asking us how we did it.”

“We are creating our own model with this program,” said Dr. Sanford Slater, program director at the house.

Homeless addicts with HIV pose probably the highest risk to others, because they often turn to prostitution to get more drugs and cavalierly share dirty needles. But they are also the most neglected by the public health system. There is no other residential recovery program in the county that will admit people in methadone treatment who are also HIV-positive.

By giving them a place to recover, officials hope these high-risk patients can bring their addictions under control and thus pose less of a health risk when they re-enter society.

While the program is considered new and is still evolving, its graduation rate is nearly zero.

In the two years of its existence, the Gerry House has seen about 70 addicts walk through its doors. Its first “graduate” left the home in March--only to return two months later, asking to be readmitted.

“I still can’t take care of myself,” said Paul Lithgow, 27, the lone graduate who has been addicted to amphetamines and alcohol for eight years. He was found to be HIV-positive in 1986. But that didn’t put a halt to his promiscuous lifestyle. He believes he passed the virus to at least 20 people.

“How would you like to live with that?” he asked. “But most of the people were drug addicts and scum of the earth anyway. I don’t think they cared.”

Lithgow spent 18 months in the Gerry House before leaving. His ambition was to establish a drug recovery home in Orange.

“I just didn’t have a clue how to do it. I felt that pressure,” he said. He took a road trip to Bakersfield where he used drugs.

Sitting on his bed, periodically reaching up to scratch his head, Lithgow remarked: “Some days I thought the sober lifestyle was wonderful. I felt feelings I have never felt before--like self-esteem. But other days it is miserable out there.”

Lithgow’s apprehension of the outside world is shared by Sue, a 38-year-old heroin addict who grew up in Santa Ana, the product of alcoholic parents. Of the Gerry House, she says: “This is where I find care and love and support. It gives me a structured environment I would have wanted as a kid. The only other structure I had was in prison.”

She is confident as she enters the final phase of the recovery program, but is scared to leave the support system she has built at the Gerry House during the past nine months. “This place is really safe for me,” she said.

“When I was out there using, I had no (idea) I could get into recovery,” Sue said. Her mother, father and brother were lost to alcohol-related deaths. Her sister is a recovering addict now living in Tustin. “My parents and brother died without a clue of how to live life except inside a bottle. I don’t want to die that way.”

When Sue entered the program last fall she was given a “juice card”--a card which allows her to receive methadone doses at county clinics. The picture on the card shows a skeletal face and blank eyes which have seen 26 years of drug addiction and prison life.

Using methadone, a liquid substitute for heroin, she likens to “an alcoholic switching from Scotch to brandy.”

At 12, Sue was caught sniffing glue near the handball courts at Monte Vista Elementary School in Santa Ana. Throughout her childhood, she ran away from home and ended up on the streets. “As a result I became a good manipulator, a good thief and a good liar.”

Five years later, she landed in County Jail. “Sitting in prison at 23 I thought was fun. I used to like the excitement of drugs, robbing and living on the streets.”

She has had five kids, been married to two heroin dealers and has spent her entire adult life either in prison or on parole. Last fall, she was finally ordered by the court to commit herself to the Gerry House. She has been clean ever since.

“Now I look back on all those years I wasted,” she said. In her upstairs bedroom at the house, she has hung pictures of her children, all of whom are in foster homes or institutions.

The Gerry House is not a locked facility, but a dozen counselors and administrators, under contract to the county, keep careful tabs on the home’s residents.

Each day, residents are shuttled between counseling sessions, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, court dates and medical appointments. They also have physical education training, record their thoughts about addiction in diaries, read books and play games.

The three cardinal rules are simple: no drugs, no fighting and no sex, although that’s not exactly the way the posted rules are worded.

Random drug tests are administered about twice a month to make sure the residents are not secretly getting fixes.

Most of those interviewed for this story asked that their names not be revealed. Some said their families don’t know they are HIV-positive. Others worry about sheriff’s deputies with arrest warrants.

New residents are not allowed to leave the grounds unsupervised until they have completed three months in the program. At that point, they get two eight-hour passes per month. And as they approach the sixth month, they are encouraged to look for a job, enter school or do volunteer work.

Their day begins at 6:30 a.m., when residents get dressed and prepare breakfast. An hour later, those in methadone treatment are driven to one of two county clinics. And after breakfast, everybody has cleaning chores.

Cleaning is supervised by Mike, a 38-year-old resident who is in his seventh week of recovery from a drug and alcohol addiction. Mike is well over 6 feet tall and has a tattoo of a cobra breathing fire on his arm. He was elected “The Expediter” by his house mates. “I guess that makes me the king of this place as long as I am not a bully about it,” he said.

There’s a pay phone and a first-aid kit mounted on the kitchen wall. The place is spotless. There are no dirty dishes left floating in the sink. The counters and floors shine. After each bathroom use, residents clean the areas they touch with bleach.

“Because of the type of resident we have, we clean the house daily and have a major cleanup every two weeks using bleach,” Slater said. “If anybody gets sick, they are automatically off kitchen duty and everybody wears gloves while cooking.”

The den of the house has been converted to an office, where the nine counselors schedule their one-on-one meetings with residents. Across the hall is a larger conference room where the addicts hold group therapy sessions to help each other cope with either of their diseases or the problems they have keeping straight.

“I wish I could put my life into a big video for kids and say to them, ‘This is what you don’t have to go through if you don’t use drugs,’ ” Sue says.