How One Man Finally Found His Place in Life : Profile: After more than a quarter-century of living on the streets with drink and drugs, William Bell Jr. now has a job, a home and a family.

Somehow, it all seems a long-ago night tremor, the kind of bad dream that’ll frighten you awake in the shadowy pre-dawn hours. The kind you’d have sleeping in a cardboard box on Christmas Eve.

Was it William Bell Jr. who lived that life--one of those raggedy, gaunt, hungry-eyed guys begging quarters from people on New York City’s frigid streets?

Was it Bell who drank and drugged to be numb, then drank and drugged some more? Was it Bell who took blankets, food, whatever came his way out on his panhandler’s corner, out on Columbus Avenue and 86th Street?

You look at him now and want to say, “Can’t be so.” But it was no nightmare, that other life.

William Bell Jr.’s is the ultimate holiday story, a story of human faith and the ongoing miracle of birth. The twist is that it was not a child who was born. Quite the contrary.

William Bell Jr. finally, wholly, has become a man.

“Well, we can’t give you a refund without a receipt. But if you want to exchange those boots, we can help you out with that,” he tells a customer at Wal-Mart.

He’s got on a cardigan in a thousand shades of purple and blue, a coordinated tie knotted tightly at his neck. The mustache is neatly trimmed. About 5 p.m., he’ll knock off for the day and climb on a bus headed home.

Home. After more than a quarter-century of living on the streets, where he also once worked roughly from 9 to 5, jiggling a sorry cardboard cup.

He was one of the disenfranchised, the lost. A black male hovering at 40, a Vietnam War veteran who’d built no resume since his return. No address, virtually no connection with his brokenhearted family. A father who had not been at home, had never been there for his daughter.

Too late. Lost cause. Few could have looked at him without presuming these things. But deep in his gut, despite false starts and frustrating failings, Bell never conceded defeat.

Three years ago he found his way to Albany, about three hours from the old life in Manhattan. He was ready to commit, to dry out and make something of his life. He had an address, basic but elusive over so many years. He had a telephone number that people could call, and cable TV. The apartment was subsidized and dingy. He had a job, but it was iffy.

Two years ago, the boat still rocked, sobriety was still an hourly thing. His new relationship might not last. The old reflexes might still kick in.

Since then, though, he has made huge strides forward. Bell and his fiancee, Joan Smith, have moved from his one-room place into a homey row house.

The hunger for oblivion, drugs and drink, has abated. He has passed beyond the day-to-day, hour-to-hour brink. The battles now are mostly about Bell’s tendency to watch sports seven nights a week. Smith misses the honeymoon, when they used to go out on romantic walks.

*

Bell, now 45, takes as the metaphor for his life, as well as for American society, the love and commitment that he and Smith--who has known her share of hard knocks--have brought into being.

“It’s going on three years that me and Joan have been together, and the main reason is because we’ve worked hard for it to work. Not only one of us--both of us have worked hard for it to work,” he says, gazing across the dinner table at his true love, taking in her remarkable smile.

“We both have sacrificed some things for this relationship, one way or another. That’s because we both have been through bad relationships in the past, both have been through situations in life. . . . We understand and are mature enough to know that we both have to work at it for it to work.”

Before he could begin to move forward, Bell had to grasp something basic: Life is hard work.

“You can talk all day. I could stand on a corner and say, ‘Yeah, I want to get a job. . . . Yeah, I want to have my family one day, and all like that.’ But if you’re sitting there on that corner tomorrow, get up and do it! Don’t talk about it. . . . It’s what I do that earns respect. Today I respect myself for being a doer,” he said.

“That’s the message: I’m a doer today.”

Here is what he means:

* He tends to himself first, staying sober with 12-step support and sustaining his spirit through a growing belief in God.

* He cares for Smith and their extended family. Her grandchildren are his now, and he wholeheartedly believes he is both grandfather and role model. What they need, he works to find. A new refrigerator and stove, shelves for mementos and knickknacks, holiday lights around the living room and on the Christmas tree. Most of all, he provides consistency. He is there every day, with hugs and love and laughter.

* He works for a corporation, a full-time employee in the shoe department at Wal-Mart, doing his job so well that he recently was given a raise. Good-natured, reliable, cooperating with others, he takes responsibility day after day.

* He walks proud, not just for loved ones but also for the neighborhood children he passes on the street. “Hey, why you wearin’ that necktie?” a teenage boy taunted him awhile back. “What, you goin’ to church?”

“I said, ‘No, I’m not going to church. Does an African American man have to be going to church to be wearing a tie?’ But you see, they don’t believe that a black man would dress like that for work,” Bell said. “No. They think the workingman only hauls boxes or collects trash. I don’t have to wear a tie to work but I do, because it’s something that’s got to be said.”

Why did this man do what so many others couldn’t, haven’t? What is it that took Bell that extra step? You want a potion, something that could be bottled.

It’s one large part sheerly him, but it’s also one large part that net of social services and support that helped Bell get started, gave him room to breathe and build on what he carried in his heart.

Neither left nor right, neither individual nor collective, the world Bell celebrates, and contributes to today, grew out of an indivisible web: seeds as well as soil, want as well as need. There is no formula to be gleaned.

“All the dreams and ideas that I thought about on that corner. . . ,” he said, remembering life on New York’s streets. “I felt in my heart that I didn’t belong on that corner, that that wasn’t me. I always felt I was supposed to have a better life, better way of living, and that there was better things for me. I never stopped feeling and wanting it.”

But Bell also frets about the world he’s now a part of. His heart breaks for the dangerous segregation, the waste and anger in his black neighborhood, the ignorance and insulation that separate disadvantaged from privileged and make everything so black and white.

*

Five years ago at holiday time, he was cadging nickels and dimes, praying “Please let me live ‘til tomorrow” as he climbed into his cardboard box in Central Park’s darkest night, alone and afraid.

“Last year, my goal was to work here for a year. That was my goal: to be consistent,” Bell said, straightening boxes in the shoe department at Wal-Mart, where he hasn’t missed a day or been late once in the last year.

“Now I’ve been here even longer. I’m taking a paid vacation on Dec. 30. A paid vacation. Ain’t that something? Just the idea of it. There’s this whole cycle--from being on that corner where people were helping me with handouts and money to me helping customers in the store.

“This is my life now. Ain’t it something to see?”

Colored lights blink on in his living room. That’s what it’s all about, he says upon further reflection: “Can I help you? And will you help me?”