Out of the Darkness

Outside, a boy in black baggy clothes stares at each passing car suspiciously, with dagger eyes that seem too serious for a child. He has come to A Place Called Home for the first time because, he says, he has many problems. He doesn’t elaborate, and he doesn’t turn his back on the street.

Inside, a boy barely the height of his pool cue aims and shoots, aims and shoots, coolly slamming down stripes. The building is filled with voices of the young, and Debrah Constance sits among them on a couch with three young girls, who take turns reading from a book about friendship.

Constance, 51, has searched her entire life for this opportunity to live within her heart. She has journeyed through alcoholism, drug addiction, cancer, three marriages, more jobs than she can remember--through the darkest dark. Finally, in South-Central Los Angeles, she has found her place in this life and, she hopes, the next. For her, there must be a couch like this in heaven.

“I never had a dream before,” she says. “A Place Called Home is my first dream, and I always tell the children that my job is to help them find a dream.”

Accredited by the Los Angeles Unified School District, APCH, at 2830 S. Central Ave., offers young people who are not in school a chance to earn high school diplomas and GEDs. It offers programs in sports and recreation, job training, gang prevention / intervention and counseling. It also offers instruction in the visual and performance arts, where actress Jasmine Guy, a benefactor and member of the board of directors, volunteers as a dance instructor.

It also serves as a food and clothing distribution point for the community and an off-site Medi-Cal enrollment center. It does not lend books from its library; it gives them away.

For her work with young people, Constance will be one of five women from around the world honored Oct. 7 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

There are plans to enlarge the school to accommodate the waiting list of more than 100 names. Constance wants to build a counseling center, day-care center, basketball court, community garden, soccer field and a family planning / well-baby clinic.

In her vision, she sees businesses coming to the community so children can buy ice cream cones, see a movie. She sees a world with less violence, fewer guns, where the woman who prepares food at the center won’t have to call home before she leaves work to make sure there is no gunfire on her block.

“I came here because it was dangerous,” says Constance. “I came here because I knew children weren’t safe. I came here because I thought it was unconstitutional how these children were being treated. People didn’t care, and that’s OK, but I care.”

Her life now, she says, “is as good as it gets,” and her problems seem minor compared with those of the past. Earlier in the day, she was told there might be enough funds to keep the center open another couple of months. That has been the case since APCH opened in 1993--another couple of months. She has learned to live with such uncertainty.

In her own life, there have been times when another couple of months seemed an eternity, when she didn’t know whether she could survive even another day, or wanted to. There are vivid memories: sitting alone and afraid in closets, hiding naked in the snow, gazing in the mirror and seeing nothing.

These are the experiences she can talk about. There are others still too painful to discuss publicly. What’s important, is that in helping others heal, she has healed herself--in living through hell, she has found this heaven.

What’s important is that the three girls seated next to her finish reading a book about friendship, that the boy at the pool table sinks the eight ball and that the kid standing outside the center lives long enough to come back inside.

It seems there has always been darkness. As a child growing up in New York, Constance says, she lived in fear of her father and felt she never fit in. She created her own world inside her bedroom closet, where she would sit for hours with her dolls, which in time came to represent love.

Constance dropped out of reform school and ran off with her boyfriend to be married. It was a brutal, terrorizing relationship. During one beating, she tried to escape and fled naked into the Milwaukee cold. At age 17, it seemed that the growing seasons of life had already passed, leaving only winter.

“He broke glass and had me walk on it. I was Jewish, and he was Catholic. He would beat me, then read the Bible to me and say he would pray for my soul because I was going to hell. He was crazed. He killed my cat, my dog, anything I touched. Two and a half years with him and I was dead. I left him when I had nothing left in me.”

She fled to Los Angeles at age 20 to live with grandparents and enter three years of therapy, which, she says, saved her life.

Constance never had trouble finding work, taking entry-level jobs and working her way up. She became manager of a Gemco, a factory supervisor, training people to pack and ship. She worked at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in employee health and security and went on the road with a traveling laser show before embarking on a 17-year career in real estate.

In 1972, at age 25, she married again and had a son, Gideon Haimovitz. He, too, brought new life. She realized that being a mother was the only thing she had ever really aspired to in life and had visions of having half a dozen children. But shortly after her second marriage ended in 1979, Constance found out she had invasive cancer.

“Cancer was just another thing,” she says. “Death was never scary to me. It was more like, ‘Goodbye, I’ve had enough of this planet.’ ”

Constance underwent a successful Wertheim hysterectomy in which the lymph nodes and blood vessels were removed. Then, once again, she set out on a new life. She fell in love again, married again, divorced again. Still, she had not hit bottom.

*

In 1985, she was at her sister’s wedding and remembers looking at her son, then 12, and saying, “I’ll bet you never saw your mother drunk like this.” Before she drove off, she had thrown her shoes and purse at her sister, who called Constance’s psychiatrist and told him she was an alcoholic.

“My sister saved my life. Nobody had ever told me I was an alcoholic,” she says. “Throughout all the therapy, I never realized it. When I realized it, that was the end, the bottom. I tried to give Gideon away. I called the ex-husbands to take him, but they wouldn’t, so I left him with a girlfriend. I went into Century City Hospital hoping I would die. I didn’t go there to get better or to enter an AA program. I went there to leave this world.”

Two realizations saved her. One was that her son needed her. The second was that throughout her life, she thought she was mentally ill. To discover that she was an alcoholic instead gave her a clear solution to her problems.

“I realized that all I had to do to get well was stop drinking and using,” she says. “That was a real turning point.”

But healing came slowly. By the time she became sober there already had been enough pain for a lifetime of tears. Her greatest sadness concerned Gideon.

“I never abused him, but I wasn’t present for him,” she says. “I wasn’t there to sign him up for baseball, to help him with his homework. By the time he was in seventh grade, he was smarter than me, and I was embarrassed.”

Even as an adult, she found that closets provided her with an escape from the world. She would arrive home from work, fix dinner and eat in the closet. As marketing director for the Jon Douglas Co., her specialty was designing plans for selling exclusive properties, mansions. As she would tour the homes, she would peer into closets, drawn to their seclusion.

“Mary Tyler Moore,” she says, “had the best closets.”

With sobriety, however, her life changed again. Another new life. She returned to work in real estate and flourished. At Jon Douglas, she was promoted to vice president, and her salary neared six figures.

Part of her job was to make corporate donations to community projects. She was reading a newspaper article one day about programs for gifted students and came upon the name of Roland Ganges, a teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in South-Central L.A., who has since passed away. She sent cookies and wrote a letter to Ganges stating that the Jon Douglas Co. wanted to help him with his program. Ganges called back: “I don’t want your money,” he said. “I want your time.”

Constance’s first reaction was, “Great, I have a nut on my hands. I was ready to go out and buy a copier or whatever, right? So I went and talked to him, and he explained that what young people in this neighborhood need is a bridge connecting them to the outside world.”

She had been working with nonprofit groups around the city, and, after meeting Ganges, she began involving Jefferson students in her volunteer work, mentoring them and finding others to mentor.

“I saw lives change, just like that. I saw that helping children wasn’t such a mystery at all. One person with another person made such a difference.”

And that was the beginning of A Place Called Home. In 1993, Constance quit her job at Jon Douglas and invested her severance pay to start APCH in the back of a small church, which soon asked them to leave when the center started attracting gang members. The center then settled in at Bethel Church of Christ of Holiness before moving to its current site.

It began with 12 youngsters and has since grown to 1,700. Its annual operating budget is $1.2 million. It employs 27 people, many of them youngsters trying to change the course of their lives and escape their own darkness.

The light she remembers from her childhood has stayed with her, and on the wall of her office are dolls. She creates them, the children write stories about them, and they are sold to raise funds for the center. Sometimes, she gives them away to children who need them. Even now, they represent love in an often lonely world.

*

A van drives by slowly, and the eyes of the young man standing outside seem frozen with intensity. A woman is driving with a young girl in the passenger seat. He watches carefully until it is out of sight.

His homeboys, Miguel and Adrian, stand next to him. Both work at the center and have brought others from their gang, about 15 in all, to APCH hoping they, too, can change their lives.

Miguel and Adrian say they no longer gangbang. They have found reasons to change, and, for that, they are respected by their peers, who have not yet found such reasons.

Miguel, 18, was released from juvenile detention last year and told himself he didn’t want to go back. On Oct. 18, he became a father.

“I want my daughter to have a positive way of thinking about me. My dad was a gangster, and I wouldn’t like her to feel the same way I feel about my dad. He’s been in prison 10 years already. I don’t know him. I don’t like him. He’s never been with us. I don’t care if I have a dad or not. I made it on my own.”

He has one brother on death row, another in a California Youth Authority facility. He has been shot six times. The front of his house is scarred with bullet holes.

He met Constance in 1996, when the center moved from the church into a building near his home.

“I used to be here on my bike. She would talk to us even though she didn’t know us. You don’t see that very often, a white lady coming to talk to us. She said she was building this place and was going to help us, and she kept her word. Whoever needs help from my neighborhood, she helps.”

Constance has learned that there is a small window of opportunity to reach young people. It opens just a crack and only for a moment.

“Miguel represents what my life is about,” she says. “If this center was open for only one reason, and that was to help that kid change his life around, that’s enough reason for it to be open.”

The window can close quickly, a lesson Constance learned the hard way.

“I lose kids. I got kids calling me from prison. I’ve buried kids. I buried a kid in January who was one of my original members. The mother came to me, and she had no money. He was still in the morgue under an alias, and she didn’t have money to bury him.”

His name was Tommy Walker, and he was gunned down at 21. He was planning to return to college. The last time Constance saw him, he was seated in her office with two friends filling out enrollment papers.

“I should have gotten him out of here. I mean, I know I’m not God, but I could have gotten him out of here,” says Constance. “I could have taken a more active approach.”

Shortly after Walker’s death, Constance helped get his two friends into college. Last week, a program that hires young people to build movie sets called and said Walker had applied for a job and they now had an opening.

“I told them, ‘It’s too late. He’s dead.’ ”

The window is open now for Miguel and Adrian. That’s why Constance is working furiously to help them. When they came to her and said they wanted to change, she immediately hired them as handymen and got them working on their educations.

She recently found an attorney and went to court with Miguel to address a list of charges ranging from gun possession to auto theft. They told the judge that he was working hard to change, that jail would interrupt the momentum now present in his life that may never come again.

The judge agreed, and for the first time since he was 13, Miguel has a clean record. He hopes he can make it. Five years ago, he says, he viewed his destiny as either prison or death. Now, he wants an education, a job, a house for his family.

It won’t be easy. The barrio and the homeboys, he says, will always be in his heart. While he no longer goes out looking for trouble, he doesn’t know how he would react if another homeboy died. And, surely, another homeboy will die.

It scares him to think about it, to see so clearly the path he wants to take and the path that might lure him away. The forces unleashed in the streets are swift and strong.

But so is Constance. Her mother, Nan Sherman, works as a volunteer at the center. In a poem, she describes her daughter as “an angel forged of steel.”

And Constance knows that if she can believe in herself, she can believe in Miguel, Adrian and the others who have come to her ready to be helped.

There are many more, and one of them is standing outside now, his eyes constantly searching as he stands halfway between the street and the front door of A Place Called Home.