O.C. Hospice Embraces Forsaken Sufferers : AIDS: Annie’s House is a haven of caring for those whose personal support systems have crumbled.

The framed poster hanging over the fireplace is of an empty wooden chair. Its title, “Remembering Absent Friends,” is a message with a dual meaning for those who live here at Annie’s House, a home for AIDS patients with nowhere else to go.

Beyond a sunny, spacious family room, a few friends sit on a patio as a mild breeze ruffles the foliage in the tree-lined back yard. The conversation is relaxed, laced with laughter and teasing, but the words are mostly serious.

These are people whose personal support systems weakened as their disease took hold; for them, “family” is now defined less by bloodline and more by a virus. Annie’s House is their home and, for the most part, roommates there are friends and family.

AIDS “has completely destroyed my world as I used to know it,” said Antoinette Daniels, a wisp of a woman whose five male roommates call her “Rocky.”

“This is my community now,” she says. “I would be foreign with any other type of people.”

Annie’s House is also an AIDS memorial of sorts. Opened 13 months ago, it was founded by Ray and Noreen Maiorano, a couple who lost one son to AIDS two years ago and who now have another son dying of the same disease.

“I won’t let it be forgotten,” says Noreen, “that my children died of AIDS.”

AIDS service workers across Orange County say Annie’s House is helping to fill a pressing need. It is being kept afloat by modest rents, occasional donations, and the Maioranos--so far with no government help.

“I think the efforts of Ray and Noreen have been absolutely valiant,” said David Reid, the resident’s manager at Huber House in Santa Ana, the only similar project in the county. “They started this up from their hearts. It’s been a tough go.”

In a way, the Maioranos’ sons were lucky, having parents who cared for them while also reaching out to others with AIDS. Some parents have shunned offspring who test positive for the virus.

“It’s very depressing because that adds to their isolation. They have the stigma of their diagnosis, plus the isolation,” says Reid. “Family becomes a dirty word sometimes.”

Antoinette Daniels’ bedroom at Annie’s House is darker than the airy family room. Her night stand is cluttered with nine medicine bottles, a glass of orange juice and a pack of cigarettes. Across the room, flowers wilt in a vase.

Never would she have imagined herself in such a situation five years ago when she and her husband were living in a pleasant Riverside apartment.

“We lived like in the mainstream of life,” says Daniels, 33. But then her husband got sick. Antoinette says she didn’t know what was wrong with him until a relative suggested she be tested for HIV shortly before he died three years ago of AIDS.

“I figured, ‘Why would I have AIDS, of all people?’ but the test came back and it was positive,” she says. “I didn’t believe married women got it. I thought it was a gay man thing. But, apparently, it isn’t.”

Her being HIV-positive was something her family “just couldn’t cope with,” says Daniels, who began losing hair and eventually shed 30 pounds. Her days slipped into a downward spiral which included alcohol and cocaine abuse and, eventually, life on the streets.

“I felt like the Lone Ranger with a strange disease,” she says. “I was just roaming the streets.”

That was when she met James Warlick Jr., the manager at Annie’s House. By then, Daniels says, she was wrestling with a number of maladies, including uterine tumors, intestinal problems, thrush and night sweats. “I just couldn’t function anymore,” she says.

“You could see the pain in her eyes,” Warlick remembers, and he told her to let him know if she wanted some help. Daniels took him up on it, enrolling for a week of detox followed by a 90-day rehabilitation program. Then, in May, she moved into Annie’s House.

“I figured, if I was going to die, I didn’t want to die like that,” she says. “I wanted to have a clean, decent place like I did before.” Recently, Daniels had a hysterectomy, also as a result of AIDS. This time, she says, Noreen Maiorano was there to give her “a little prayer to take to surgery.”

Although her mother has stayed with her during her sickest days, Daniels says the AIDS is still difficult for her mother to accept.

Annie’s House, she says, “did for me what my family could not do.”

Fran Carman, who founded the Orange County chapter of the support group Mothers of AIDS Patients, or MAP, says she talks to many parents who don’t know what to do with grown children with AIDS. Often, the son or daughter is hospitalized before the parents learn they have AIDS. After an acute bout with the illness, the patient may have no place else to turn.

But the parents sometimes draw back, hesitating to take in their children for a variety of reasons. They may fear losing friends, becoming infected themselves or endangering other family members. Marriages can suffer, especially when one parent wants to reach out to the ailing loved one and the other will not.

“Very often, that’s the way it is,” Carman says. “The mom is accepting and the dad isn’t, especially if he is the biological father.”

Craig Metcalf, another resident of Annie’s House, says he is one of the lucky ones who still has family support. He could sleep on his mother’s couch, he says, but she lives in a trailer and he doesn’t want to burden her.

Metcalf, 39, who grew up in Newport Beach, says he never sees his old friends anymore, but he doesn’t care.

“I cling more to these people,” he says. “If it weren’t for Ray and Noreen, I would probably have been dead.”

If death is a constant possibility for AIDS patients, the days are not all dreary at this Costa Mesa home where shelves are stuffed with books and puzzles and a poker table dominates the game room.

Annie’s House residents work at creating a sense of closeness by trying to eat regular meals together and joining together to celebrate one another’s birthdays.

“We are a family,” Daniels says. “That’s the good part.”

This, however, is a family where emergencies are commonplace and stress is a given. A home where the residents can become suddenly, critically ill.

When someone needs a quick trip to the hospital in the middle of the night, they wake up Warlick or call the Maioranos. When Metcalf awakes with muscle cramps, Warlick walks him around the house until his muscles relax.

Warlick copes with his own tension by lifting weights from a bench in the grassy back yard.

“It’s just the helplessness and the hopelessness that you sometimes feel,” he says. “There’s just so much you can do and the rest you’ve just got to hand over to God.”

The Maioranos learned of the need for such housing while attending MAP meetings. The loneliness of AIDS was again impressed upon them when, while their son Liam Meuse was in the hospital and they watched two people die with no response from their families.

Ray Maiorano says they contacted about two dozen people before finding a landlord who would allow them to open such a facility. The couple leased the house for $2,000 a month and spent $6,000 to refurbish it, painting both inside and out, installing new carpet and repairing leaks.

MAP mothers donated the furniture. The decorations are mostly Noreen Maiorano’s treasures, including knickknacks that had belonged to Liam, who died two years ago. They named it Annie’s House, after Noreen’s mother.

“She always had an open door and no one was a stranger,” Noreen Maiorano says. “She loved her grandchildren whether they were gay or not.”

It’s not easy to assess the need for housing for those with AIDS in Orange County, where at last count more than 1,200 people were living with the disease.

“Any (number) you get will be a pure guess,” says Pearl Jemison-Smith, chair of the county’s HIV Planning Advisory Council, which is attempting to gauge such housing needs to decide how to disperse federal funds. “Many times the people you want to get the information from are those who are out of the loop.”

Reid of Huber House says that facility always has a waiting list, sometimes with as many as 15 names. Annie’s House now has a waiting list of seven people. And county officials say their surveys project a growing need for such housing.

“Huber House and Annie’s House don’t cut it,” says Penny Weismuller, disease control manager for the Orange County Health Care Agency. “We need to develop more placement along those lines.”

Although Annie’s House, which opened 13 months ago, and Huber House, which has been open for six years, provide similar services, Huber House is bolstered by state funding and money from AIDS Services Foundation, which runs that facility.

To enroll at Annie’s House, patients must be HIV-positive and financially needy. Substance abusers are referred first to a detox center.

If Annie’s House has been a godsend for these people, it has been a financial strain on the Maioranos, who say they have used up their retirement fund to keep the center going. Ray Maiorano, 61, who had retired, has now gone back to work. He opened a distribution consulting firm in Santa Ana called Onora where he also coordinates fund raising and finances for Annie’s House.

“We realize now we’re novices at attempting to do something like this,” he says. “It’s like being in a lake with your boat and you didn’t bring oars. What do we do now?”

Financially, at least, things may soon improve for Annie’s House, which is in line for some federal grant money after the first of the year. While funding for AIDS housing has been scarce in the past, Weismuller says new federal funds will soon be available which could help the Maioranos next year.

In the meantime, having Annie’s House to tend to somehow seems to strengthen Noreen Maiorano. On a recent break from her son Kevin Meuse’s bedside, she says she will never give up working with AIDS patients. And for a moment, she sounds angry.

“There’s a part of me that’s screaming inside,” she says, her voice trembling slightly. “I want to kick the wall. I want answers to the disease that’s taking all these young lives.”