Halfway Back to Life : Recovering Addict And His Mother Establish a Haven Where Others in Need Can Reclaim Themselves

Her unblinking stare never wavering, her voice a tough rasp, JoAnn Stroughter talks freely about when she lost her children: “I was running a dope house.”

But her wide, hard eyes harbor neither anger or defiance, rather a fresh, sober clarity. “My mother called the police on me. Had me raided, and my children were taken away. That was my rock bottom.”

From the streets and now as a counselor at Ina’s Sober Living Home, Stroughter knows her story is not uncommon. So she tries to lead women through the most difficult twists and turns of a journey that many remember only vaguely--if at all.

She knows the struggle toward sobriety, a small skirmish in a larger battle, is as tricky as shadow boxing.

“A lot of time we have problems over problems,” says Stroughter, 30, unconsciously alternating between first and third person. “They’ve been doing so much with their bodies and their minds--to try to trick for $2 or 50 cents just to get that fix, it does a lot to your self-esteem.”

Reclaiming a sense of self, a new emboldened identity, she stresses, is the other, sometimes tougher part of the struggle.

Ina’s sits within earshot of the busy cacophony that is the Santa Monica Freeway, just a handful of paces from the constant blur of traffic along Crenshaw Boulevard. Open only since early May, with eight female residents from age 14 to 40, the house is two shy of capacity.

Two of the women breeze in and out--tending to chores, wandering into the afternoon. Around a coffee table full of magazines and heirloom bric-a-brac, the house anchors--Ina Day, her son, Donald, and Stroughter--sit in the large living room, drapes drawn against the sun.

Within this pool of calm, they share stories of the living dead.

*

Ina Day’s introduction to the horrors of drug culture was Donald’s pernicious problem, an often well-cloaked yet rapid downward spiral.

With a bachelor’s in education from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Donald Day always made a sterling impression. Problem was, the image soon tarnished. There was a glorious array of new starts and then dispiriting dead-ends. He bounced from one stable, well-paying job to the next--from aircraft industry and insurance company jobs to positions with a law firm, and later, a medical firm.

And there was a merry-go-round of rehab programs.

His descent, Donald admits, began innocently enough--during happy hours at a bar with a few grumbling co-workers seeking to ease the sting of a hard day. There, one beer would turn to six, and one hour somehow protracted into four. A few highballs turned to marijuana, Donald says with a shake of the head, and the all-too-familiar cycle began. His marriage became strained, and he moved in with a friend who was more than flirting with crack.

Donald, 40, is still baffled how quickly his own addiction took hold, how rapidly his life upended: “At my first job, I’d received a lot of award moneys, was always there, worked six days a week and came in Sunday to check on my projects, but suddenly, when I started using the cocaine, I wouldn’t call in, I wouldn’t show up.”

The excuses? As thin as the voice that uttered them.

After a parade of rehab programs that sought to turn the tide in 30 to 60 days, Donald spent 15 months facing his demons at Hillsman Drug and Alcohol Center in Los Angeles and has been sober for about a year.

“I still can’t say why I use,” he says, acknowledging that he will always be a recovering addict, “but I can see the mistakes that I made. I came out of that (first) center and back into the environment (where) I was using, right back to the same street, you know, where the dealers were right next door waiting on me. I understand that it is a total lifestyle change. I go into those same areas now, but I have totally disassociated myself from those people. Basically it’s a wave, a hello and a goodby, because we really don’t have anything in common.”

And, he now realizes, “we never did.”

*

Ina, 59, confesses she was a little confused, even dubious, when Donald first told her about his dream to open a sober living home and about her role in it.

“I was brought up in a situation where I didn’t know anything about drugs,” she says. “The women in my family didn’t even smoke cigarettes. When I moved out here from Ohio, CPC was the big thing. . . .”

“ PCP, “ Stroughter corrects with a stiletto tongue before bursting into laughter. “See, she didn’t even know that !”

But when her son got involved with drugs, Ina continues without missing a beat, “I just couldn’t believe it. Not my child. But the Bible says you should forgive people seven times seven.”

The women in her home, she says, “need somebody to talk to . . . ‘cause sometimes if you can just sit and talk to somebody for a minute, it will help and just change their whole attitude about things.”

Still, Ina waited for signs to guide her. Unable to sleep one night, she watched a Christian TV program during which she heard young women talking about life before and after addiction, doing time on indifferent streets. “It was just something that touched my heart,” she says. Soon, she began an aggressive search to find a place to house the dream.

Less than a year later, with six bedrooms, five baths and a sunny kitchen to call her own, Ina Day proudly hung the curtains in her new sober-living home. She unpacked her salt-and-pepper shaker collection, then pulled out her family photos to line the walls.

To spread the word, Donald filed listings with several referral services and traveled the support-group circuit armed with a stack of flyers. Without public assistance, the Days and Stroughter are attempting to provide a refuge for women as well as a structured program to prepare them for life on their own: individual and group counseling, employment search assistance, field trips, career seminars led by community professionals.

The residents, several of whom hold day jobs, pay $275 monthly and provide their own food. The Days and Stroughter make up any difference in the home’s expenses.

Although there are chores, curfews and formal house rules--no smoking, food or men allowed in the rooms--restrictions are downplayed. His mother “wanted a place that would be a home,” Donald says, “not just an institution. . . . We wanted to have something that was a little more caring.”

*

Stroughter, who began her counseling training at Hillsman Center and now serves as house manager, says Ina’s presence, compassion and life experience make the difference:

“You have a house mother who’s really a mother. With a lot of sober living homes the house mother . . . is a lot of times younger than you are.”

But Donald insists that Stroughter offers a different but equally important kind of love--tough love that shakes up an addict and points her toward the next giant step.

“You can’t run a game on me about something that I’m an old pro at,” explains Stroughter, herself sober for two years. “A person just starting to smoke (rock cocaine) can’t tell me that I just smoke every once in a while; you have it everyday, all day long. And once you get clean, you have to deprogram your children and hope that the scars may fade.”

Darlene, a recent arrival at Ina’s Sober Living Home, says she has received “a lot of love and support here. Whatever you’ve done in the past--that’s the past. They don’t look at that, only the present.” But she looks back, now two years sober and 30, and sees an image worlds away from what she has become. “I was way out there. I hooked up with a drug man at 20. It’s hell out there. My rock bottom was Skid Row.”

But she kicked it all--drugs and drink--and says she wants to recast her future: “I wanted to be a lawyer, so I didn’t make that. But I plan to own my own business, a lingerie shop.” Already, Darlene points out, she’s become involved at the home as head of special projects--yard sales, rallies and fund-raisers. “I’m into church, I’m getting back into the family spirit. I’ve come a long way. Basically, I feel free.”

The home has shown the Days and Stroughter a new way to look at serving others: Don’t reach across the globe, just across the fence.

“I told the ladies in church at my last missionary meeting that this is what’s wrong with the world today,” says Ina. “We don’t know what’s going on. There are so many people out here that need our help, but we don’t know where to go and where to get started. If it hadn’t happened to Donald, I wouldn’t have known what to do, and it wouldn’t have interested me one way or another. I would have thought like everybody else: ‘That’s somebody else’s funeral.’ ”

Adds Stroughter: “It’s just a way to give back what was freely given to us, ‘cause it’s so easy to still be out there.”

The climb out, she knows, will be arduous.

“I’m still not speaking to my mother and father; they don’t want anything to do with me. I don’t want it like that . . . but right now I’ve got to go on. And that’s one big thing about being here,” Stroughter says while resting a hand on Ina’s aproned knee. “I don’t have my mother now, but I’ve got Donald’s.”