Aid Is Last Hope for Many Recovering Addicts

Just a few blocks from the cozy one-bedroom apartment where Harry Romero lives in East Los Angeles is the park where he hung out during the five years he was addicted to heroin. Back then, he lived in his pickup truck, so strung out and desperate to pay for his $125-a-day habit that he stole from his own mother.

Romero, 46, thought he had put those days behind him, thanks to a monthly Social Security disability check that paid for the rent on his apartment and his methadone treatment.

But as of Wednesday, he will not receive a penny more from the federal government, and he’s worried that he might end up in that park again.

Like nearly 6,000 other Los Angeles County residents, he’s received notice that his benefits will be terminated because his inability to work is related to alcohol or drug abuse.

“I might as well just shoot myself,” he says, sounding thoroughly defeated. “Once I get cut off . . . I’m going to be sick. I don’t even have time to detox.”

Social Security payments to chronic alcoholics and drug abusers--first approved by Congress only a decade ago--allowed many former “street people” to escape homelessness and repeated incarcerations and arrests. But this year, prodded by allegations of fraud and pressure to limit federal spending, Congress reversed itself.

Whether drug abuse or alcoholism truly constitutes a disability remains a matter of debate. Those who receive the benefits will be the first to tell you that they’ve made more than a few bad choices in their lives. They seem to be magnets for bad luck, for accidents and tragedies that have accelerated their descent into poverty and their eventual dependence on the largess of the federal taxpayer.

Yet it is difficult to apply the clear-cut concept of “personal responsibility” to some of these lives. Sometimes addiction created life’s other problems; other times, life’s problems led to addiction.

Arnold Wilkes, a recovering alcoholic, still carries a bullet in his belly from a 1953 shooting. David Frank Million believes that his drinking binges only aggravated the memory loss he suffered after a head injury in the mid-1980s.

And Harry Romero lifts his shirt to reveal the scars left from a stabbing, circa 1967, a memento of the time when street disputes were settled with knives and not automatic weapons.

Four fingers on Romero’s right hand were amputated in a work accident. He traces his arthritis pains to half a dozen crashes on a Harley Davidson motorcycle he used to ride. “I’m a Libra,’ Romero says. “And it seems like life is always tilting the scales for me.”

If those cut from Social Security are unable to find work--a likelihood, since most have a long history of unemployment--they will turn to county-funded General Relief. In Los Angeles County, GR payments are $212 a month, about a third of what Social Security pays.

Romero, like the other men interviewed for this story, has contacted a legal-aid office to help him appeal his loss of benefits on the grounds that he has other infirmities. Still, he may face a wait of a year or more without benefits before a hearing, according to attorneys and officials familiar with the process.

An untold number of recipients with less control over their drug addiction will assuredly allow their benefits to lapse without protest.

Romero has little doubt what these addicts will do next.

“There’s going to be a lot of crime happening behind this,” he predicts. “Once they’re sick, [heroin addicts] don’t care what they do to get money. We’re talking [stealing from] little ladies with their bags, or getting guns and terrorizing people.”

For others, the cuts will mean simply the indignity of losing the few privileges that a modest Social Security check can provide.

Skid row resident David Frank Million uses his monthly $772 disability check to pay the $232 rent on a room at the Golden West Hotel. If he loses his benefits, hotel administrators say they will cut his rent enough to let him pay with a General Relief check.

He’ll have a roof over his head and regular meals, but little else.

“It means I’ll be nothing,” says Million, 52, a former merchant marine seaman. “I’ll just stay in my room.”

Million says he is a recovering alcoholic. Like most of those cut off, he contends that he should still qualify for Social Security payments because other physical disabilities keep him from working.

In 1994, a Social Security medical evaluation determined that he suffered from “memory impairment” and “thinking disturbances.” A box for “organic mental disorders” is checked off.

“I don’t know what it means, but that’s what I got,” he says.

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Million says the problem dates to a work accident on the docks at San Pedro sometime in 1983 or ‘84, when he slipped on a pipe feeding an oil tanker, striking the back of his head.

“I tried to work a year after the accident,” he says. “Those years are real dark. . . . We drank a lot. I must have made myself so numb it was unbelievable. I was a blue-collar worker. We’d all drink beer and whiskey.”

Today, Million speaks with a slight lisp and his disposition is that of a vulnerable, confused, much younger man. He carries in his pocket his old merchant marine identification card, but he doesn’t look much like the mustachioed, confident-looking man in the picture.

“I know my story is strange, but it’s the truth. I got up one morning to go to work and I ended up this way. I was a good worker all my life.”

Before qualifying for disability in 1991, he lived “sleeping on the mat,” drifting from Los Angeles to Seattle, where he ended up in jail for a short time. Eventually, a social service worker helped him apply for disability payments. His life on the streets ended, and he moved to Los Angeles.

To fill his days, he’s taken up a hobby, going to discount stores to hunt for videotapes of old movies. But since he doesn’t own a television or a VCR, all he can do is look at the boxes describing movies and television shows like “Holt of the Secret Service” and “Jungle Queen.”

“This is my little world,” he says. “As long as I can live in it, I can make it.”

Hearing that his benefits might be cut has thrown him into an emotional tailspin of depression and nightmares. He doesn’t understand why the Social Security Administration would want to cut him off.

“My disability hasn’t changed,” Million says. “I still have brain damage, my memory is bad. I have no motivation. If I get on the bus and it’s too crowded, I might get off anywhere. I live right at the edge of life.”

Frank Rudzinski, a 45-year-old former heroin addict, faces a similar dilemma.

Medical evaluations show that he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, an illness similar to autism. Until September, he lived in his broken-down Volkswagen van near the corner of Rose Avenue and Main Street in Venice.

“I just kept pushing the van from one side of the street to the other. It didn’t even have an engine,” he says. For two years he lived this way, paying his registration and any parking tickets he got so that his old van wouldn’t be mistaken for an abandoned vehicle.

After a two-year wait, he received a federal housing subsidy and moved into a Westside apartment, paying his rent out of his Social Security check. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose this if I lose my SSI [Supplemental Security Income, the Social Security program that covers his disability],” he says.

Rudzinski started using heroin in 1968 but says he quit in 1992. He’s done stints in jail for drug sales. “It took all this time to put all my mistakes behind me and I’m moving forward, and all of a sudden Clinton signs this thing and I’m going to lose everything.”

“I’m not trying to take a free ride,” he adds. “I have medical proof that I have a condition. I’m not capable of doing things on my own.”

Arnold Wilkes, 62, takes full responsibility for the years of drinking and the rough-and-tumble lifestyle that finally led him to become disabled in 1975.

A woman shot him in the abdomen on his birthday in 1953, and he was left for dead in a hospital corridor until a passing nurse heard him cough and realized that he was alive. Eight years later he hurt his leg when he got drunk and started “goofing around boxing.”

That bullet lingered in his gut for the years he worked as a barber, “drinking with every customer.” Finally, decades of leaning over his barber chair aggravated the old gunshot wound and he had to stop working, he said.

A recent medical evaluation lists a host of ailments, including diabetes, hypertension, seizures, a peptic ulcer and degenerative arthritis. This year, he had a stroke.

“I’m still an alcoholic, but I’m recovered,” Wilkes says. “One drink calls for a thousand for me.”

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Disability payments have allowed him to rent a $475 apartment in the Crenshaw district that he keeps clean and neat. Pictures of his nine children and his many grandchildren and great-grandchildren decorate the walls. With the impending cuts, he is anxious about the future.

“No one’s going to hire me,” he says. “I’m too old. I can’t stand, I can’t walk. Nobody’s going to hire a 62-year-old man.”

Wilkes says he’s turned his life around and hasn’t had a drink in at least a decade. He’s tried to make amends for the years he spent drunk. “When you’re an alcoholic, you neglect your family. I told them I was sorry. You have to do that in order to stay sober. You can’t carry that burden.”

Harry Romero says he has also tried to atone for the years he was a slave to heroin. Not long after receiving his first disability check, he said, he paid back his mother some of the money he’d stolen from her. He paid his sister for the crystal he had stolen from her.

He bought some furniture for the East Los Angeles apartment, including a rather large television set complete with a cable connection. He watches C-SPAN to keep up with government decisions that might affect his disability payments.

“Yeah, the high takes away the pain,” he says of his old addiction. “You don’t worry about anything. But the next day, you have to do it again.”

Romero has no fallback plan to make money if his benefits are cut. But he plays the lottery twice a month.