Troubled Sanctuary : For 3 People, Unfit Facilities Are Another Hurdle on the Road to a Clean, Sober Life

They had fallen as far as you can go--even to the edge of death. They did whatever they had to do to support their habits. Many had no money, family or friends. But somehow they survived the rigors of formal drug and alcohol treatment. Then, desiring to stay straight, they sought sanctuary in privately run homes offering clean and sober living. Unfortunately, many ended up in homes with neither--over crowded flophouses with abusive, exploitative management. Here are the stories of two people who made it--and one who didn’t.

“My name is Bobi Goodale. Get it? Good. Ale. My dad loved the name, fit him perfectly. . . . And for a while--for a real long while--it fit me pretty good too.”

Bobi Goodale is 43 years old. Her first happy memory of alcohol is sharing a bottle of wine with her mother when she would come home at night from the pizza parlor where she worked. Bobi was 10 at the time.

Two years ago, with a determination she had never known before and a liver so distended that little children would ask if she was pregnant, Goodale vowed to quit drinking.

For eight days she pleaded with hospital detox programs around Los Angeles to take her in. “I just kept calling and calling,” she says. “Over and over, I told them, ‘I need help. I really, really need help.’ ”

Finally, there was an available bed at Redgate Memorial Hospital in Long Beach, and Goodale began learning at last how to live without alcohol. After a month, the gnawing desire for a drink began to lose its edge; even the aching pain in her abdomen seemed to subside.

Bobi Goodale--who always believed she would die a drunk--had made it.

Almost. . . .

A few days before she was discharged from the hospital, Goodale looked for a place to live. After 30 years of drinking and moving from place to place, she had no friends, no family, no one. She dreaded returning to her transient life.

A hospital social worker told her about a nearby sober-living home, the county’s latest answer to the need for affordable alcohol-free housing.

A woman showed her “this really beautiful house.” And asked, “Wouldn’t you like to live here?” Goodale recalls. “It was so nice that I gave her $100 on the spot to reserve my bed.”

But when Goodale was released from the hospital a few days later, she was taken to another house--a house with no heat, no lights and no furniture.

“She said I got in on the ground floor,” says Goodale. “Little did I know that meant I’d sleep on the floor!”

Still, Goodale says, “I was told how lucky I was to be there. And sick as I was, I thought I was lucky. You’re just so desperate. . . .”

Today, she lives with three other sober women in a house of their own. She has a full-time clerical job, and next month she will celebrate two years without a drink.

For addicts and alcoholics on the road to recovery, the quality of a sober-living home can spell the difference between a new life and a life back on the streets.

“At this point, you may be the most vulnerable to relapse,” says Charles Hayes, an expert on services to recovering addicts.

“Suddenly, you are out there on your own, and you need tremendous self-esteem and support to stay out there and stay sober.”

Although there are clean and safe homes in L.A. County, a Times examination of about 50 sober-living houses found many run by profiteers who ignore health and safety codes and exploit the men and women who go to them for help.

People come to these privately run homes from publicly funded treatment programs. For many--parolees, probationers and graduates of residential detox centers--this is the culmination of weeks, even months, of effort to get clean.

They typically have braved long waiting lists to get one of the 788 places in residential drug-treatment programs funded by the county. The average wait is 58 days. And the yearly cost to the county runs from $15,000 to $42,000 per bed.

“To get into treatment in the first place is a tremendous achievement. But when you leave, when you are finally clean and sober, you are standing at an important crossroads,” says Hayes, who notes that the rate of relapse is high.

Sober-living homes have been touted by the county as an economical way of addressing the problem.

Over the past few years, the unregulated growth of such housing has exploded in Los Angeles County.

And so has the exploitation of those who need it.

“The trouble with some sober-living homes,” says Mary Proper, who operates the Beacon House recovery center in San Pedro, “is they seize upon the very vulnerability of those they would help.”

Run-down, overcrowded homes operated by abusive managers send a dangerous message to recovering addicts, she said. “They tell the recovering people, ‘No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, this is the best you can hope for in life.’ And for some of them, that is just not enough and they give up.”

Josh gave up.

His first experience with sober-living homes was in the back seat of a car.

“The car was where they gave me to sleep . . . I (wanted) to stop drinking and doing drugs (so) I didn’t mind there weren’t any beds (available), so long as I had somewhere to sleep.”

Josh, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used, is an athletic, sandy-haired man in his early 20s.

When he stumbled into an AA meeting in a suburb east of Los Angeles, he had been drinking heavily for more than half his life: “Troubles at home--know what I mean? Like real fightin’ troubles that hurt you, hurt you bad. . . .”

To escape, Josh got high.

After a particularly violent bout of drinking and drugging two years ago, Josh ended up in a county-funded treatment program. After completing the program, a counselor steered him to a sober-living home known to officers of the court.

“I thought I was just going to keep (drinking) ‘til I killed myself. Then, it’s like this miracle. This one last chance. I’m not kidding--that’s how it felt. I finally got myself together.”

But after too many nights in the car, Josh left. He went back to the streets and to his habits. “It was too strong--the needs, I mean.”

Then last summer, broke and broken, Josh returned to the same sober-living house where he did odd jobs in exchange for rent. And this time, he got a bed.

But not long ago, he left again. “No, we don’t know where he is this time,” sighed a former housemate. “Maybe he’ll be back, maybe he won’t. Ya never know, do ya?”

Deborah Hollingsworth had hopes of becoming a fashion designer when she came here from Omaha in 1977.

In junior college, she says, she began experimenting with drugs at weekend parties. What began as a lark turned into a full-blown addiction after she settled down with a man who made his living selling heroin.

“He’d sell it and steal and rob, and he taught me how,” says Hollingsworth. For 15 years, nothing--not family pleas, not a near-overdose, not even time in jail--could release her from her slavish craving for drugs.

At 34, Hollingsworth became pregnant.

After breaking up with her boyfriend, she found herself living in an unheated shack behind a burned-out house in Koreatown. Her stove was a garbage barrel big enough for a small fire. Her toilet was a five-gallon plastic bucket. Her food came from dumpsters.

Her dope came from friends or money she made selling old clothes and trinkets on the street. When her son was born March 4, he had cocaine coursing through his tiny veins. Shortly after birth, the baby was placed in a foster home.

“I felt like that was the end of the world,” Hollingsworth recalls.

She had always wanted a baby, and to get hers back she took her social worker’s advice and enrolled in a publicly funded treatment program. “I was so tired, I was ready to take anything . . . I was ready to go.”

After three months in treatment, Hollingsworth was ready to move on. But like Bobi Goodale, Josh, and so many others, she had no place to go.

Her counselor at the treatment center told her about a sober-living home in South-Central Los Angeles. A $20,000 county grant had helped the home open several years before.

Hollingsworth, by then reunited with her baby, moved in. Today, she pays $300 per month to share a bedroom with another woman and the woman’s 3-year-old daughter.

What’s left of her welfare check goes into a checking account. Three days a week, she attends an outpatient treatment program for therapy and job training.

Best of all, says Hollingsworth, the program has allowed her to take home one of its sewing machines. “On my days off, I’m making clothes for children and babies. I’ve always wanted to be a fashion designer. . . .”