Ex-Panhandler Finds a Home for Christmas : Recovery: William Bell Jr. was on the streets for 27 years, his shelter often a cardboard box. But, finally, he has cleaned up his life.

William Bell Jr. is finally home.

His one-room apartment is decorated with paper cutouts and holly, a lavish Christmas tree and photos of his girlfriend’s grandchildren. He is like a kid, bouncing here and there, grinning broadly, talking nonstop. The man is alive, whole, feeling strong.

And it’s a small miracle.

After 27 years without a home, after a lifetime of Christmases spent in dislocation, Bell has made for himself the best gift of all. He has left behind the New York City street corner where two years ago he was wasting away, a scraggly panhandler with a serious addiction.

“I was living in a cardboard box two Christmases ago. Inside that box, just freezing cold. Miserable. Miserable, because there was nobody there. Just me inside that box, looking at a dark space,” he recalled recently.

People around the Upper West Side cared more for Bell than he cared for himself. It was something in his smile, his manner, the way he was touched by children and, unless he’d been drinking, how he always looked you in the eye.

Bell’s story was not uncommon--a childhood marked by drugs and divorce, a stint with the Marines in Vietnam, encounters with racism, a stormy young marriage, estrangement from family and friends and, finally, booze and crack to quell the pain, blot out the disillusionment.

All the panhandlers who once shared Bell’s block at 86th Street and Columbus Avenue are now gone. Smokey, Lisa and the woman known as “Lisa’s sister” have moved on or, as likely, are dead. They have been replaced by a new band with stories of their own.

It is his rare journey back that makes Bell different.

It began with leaving 86th and Columbus, where he earned as much as $100 a day, and where he grasped the first of what he calls the keys to his recovery.

“When I started on that corner, the way people came together for me was unbelievable,” Bell said, his eyes misting. “Everything I wanted they gave me: money, food, clothes. I had three different winter coats that people brought down. They brought me blankets. I was really warm because of everything I had. You get to a point that you don’t want to leave. It’s hard to leave something like that.”

It was this family, the first Bell had known in a long time, that made it both tempting to stay and awakened in him the feelings that ultimately drove him to go, “the dreams I had of a white picket fence, of being a family man.”

The streets were killing Bell, the possibility of a home and life growing slimmer with each day. He was physically weakened and emotionally drained, fatigued with the pressure of constantly watching his back.

He was nearly ready to face the battle, accept the setbacks, do what few homeless and addicted people are willing or able to do--change.

“Today, I am my own man. When I was standing on 86th and Columbus I had to smile, I had to be nice, I had to be looked down on a lot of times,” he said. “Today, my self-esteem is the greatest feeling in the world. I love William today.”

William Bell Jr., 43, is in touch with his mother, stepmother and ex-wife for the first time in years. His grown daughter appeared on “Soul Train” recently, and he proudly watched her on a TV of his own. He does cleanup work at Knickerbocker Arena and hosts 12-step groups Wednesday evenings at his home. He’s even got a bit of a paunch.

The road back wound around bends, turned back on itself many times. He would leave the corner with a bag lunch and good wishes from local merchants and residents. Each time, everyone would cross their fingers.

And time after time, maybe days or maybe weeks later, Bell would be back at his corner. Sheepish, he’d hang his head and you knew. You knew no one could feel worse about the failure than he did.

He tried them all: Phoenix House and Odyssey House, Samaritan House and Daytop, Project Return and Catholic Charities. Around Manhattan, he was known as a “TC”--a therapeutic community--bum.

He wasn’t ready. Finally, slowly, for reasons that are hard to pin down, William Bell Jr. started to feel a change. He saw the keys, little nuggets of insight or a twinge of pride. And he seized them.

At each stop he made, from each program he tried, he grasped a new key, added to his new foundation. At the Salvation Army in Mt. Vernon, he accepted at last that all his old ways, all his poses and assumptions, had to be thrown out. He could not build on what he had.

At Viewpoint in Stamford, Conn., he understood Alcoholics Anonymous for the first time. He understood that it was not enough just to know the steps. He had to work them; live them; surrender to them.

He’d started out silent, sitting in the back at recovery meetings. His counselor prodded him to concentrate on the first step: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.”

William Bell Jr. read those lines every morning, over and over. He prayed long, and often. “Please God,” he pleaded, “show me a way.”

God sent Shirley Gibbs-Bryant, a social worker Bell befriended while at the Salvation Army in Mt. Vernon. She, among others, was always there to point the way. When he began to outgrow a program or feel it was time to move on, Bell had the support he needed.

“There is something about William that has touched all of us,” said Gibbs-Bryant, a woman who has known many Williams, but with this one was compelled enough to climb into her car and drive down to his panhandling haunts when he dropped briefly out of touch.

“He’s a beautiful human being,” she said. “And maybe for the first time in his life, he’d met people who truly cared for him. Maybe that’s what made the difference, the reason he was finally able to grow up.”

With the help of friends, Bell tracked down his ex-wife and widowed stepmother, who linked hands in a growing web of support. The pieces of his life, long ago shattered by rootlessness and self-reproach, started to mend.

By the time he moved to the Salvation Army in Albany, Bell felt strong enough to reach out for what he saw as a final key. Here, life was gentler and temptation easier to avoid. Here, he felt safe enough to face the final legacy of his life on the streets: He admitted to himself and others that he was HIV-infected.

He had avoided the mirror for many years, but no more. No more excuses, small lies, evasions. No more running from who he was, then hating himself even more for standing still. It was time to reclaim himself--all of himself.

William Bell Jr. wanted to be his own man.

“Telling people about my HIV was like breaking the last chain. This is me. I am me,” Bell said, his voice rising at the memory. “I was free.”

Suddenly, the doors flew open. He was himself, and no one rejected him. The Salvation Army in Albany referred Bell to Project SOME, a grass-roots agency that helped him secure a $229-a-month apartment in a senior citizens home with rooms set aside for the “less-advantaged.”

He found a job, a supportive AA sponsor, AIDS counselors, a community full of recovering addicts. And he found Joan Smith, 36, a woman with whom he now shares the kind of commitment neither could have given a few years ago. Together, they practice 12 steps and safe sex. There has been some talk of an engagement ring.

Stanley Feingold, an AIDS counselor in Albany, has watched Bell’s progress with a full heart. It is not that this client is any more special than his others. Still, the veteran human services worker said, “He is an unusual man.”

When it comes to addiction, the odds of a relapse are great. When it comes to AIDS, the clock is always ticking. But where some men might surrender to drugs and death on the streets, Bell has chosen life.

“He’s decided to make every day count,” said Feingold, who works at the AIDS Council of Northeastern New York. “It’s like his greens are greener, the reds are redder. You find yourself unconsciously doing a little extra for him because he believes, and you believe, he’s going to do it, make it.”

Bell thinks often of his old corner at 86th and Columbus. For all the treachery, it was in some ways a blessed life. On that corner, Bell found a family and knew for the first time in a long time what it was to care.

“I get a little tears in my eyes when I think of those people,” he said over a lunch of fried chicken and cold cuts prepared by Joan. “I think they saw that I had morals. I was never a thief, a person who outright lied, a bad type person. . . . But I’d totally cut myself off from life. I was just a nomad out there doing what I had to to survive.

“Today, God has given me a chance to be William, to live by morals that were on the back-burner when I was out on the streets,” he said. “This is the first Christmas, the first time ever, that I’m my own man. I’m a doer today. I’m my own person. I am William. And I love William today.”

William Bell Jr. is finally home.