Women on the Run

It’s the kind of place where you’d expect to hear a lot of crying, not chitchat, laughter and the happy squeals of children.

I figured to see women huddled in corners struggling with their memories and paralyzed by their need for a fix. Just getting by. Coping.

The Prototypes Women’s Center is, after all, a home for victims of multiple problems. Drug and alcoholic addiction are just two. Rape, incest, AIDS, prostitution and domestic violence are among the others.

They come to the center looking like something the dog dragged in and feeling worse. However they get to the place--through the courts or some other public agency or with a phone call--they’re on the run.

I don’t mean that in a literal sense. The running is within. They’re escaping from something that claws at their lives from the past, something huge, something ugly, something terrifying.

By the time they leave Prototypes, they could be walking again, not looking back anymore, not tasting the rusty fear that has characterized their existence, not running from the ugliness.

“All I want,” a woman named Janette told me, “is to be able to close the back door on the past.”

This is the place for it.

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Sprawled over four acres on a side street in Pomona, the Prototypes center is one of 15 program sites throughout L.A. County. Others are involved in outreach work. This is the only live-in.

Complete with a swimming pool, a computer center, classrooms, counseling rooms and dorms, it offers the faint impression of a college campus rather than a rehabilitation center, except for the kids.

Children ranging from a few months old to about 10 add a level of sound and life that elevates the center to a plateau beyond institution, and that’s where the name Prototypes derives.

Created 10 years ago by psychologist Vivian Brown as a private, nonprofit center, it was the first of its kind to allow women to bring their children while undergoing the type of therapy that benefits them both.

The homey atmosphere is deceptive. Pain runs through the lives of the “residents” like a river of molten lava. Even as they struggle to close the back door on their past through therapy, training and hard work, it’s evident to most that the door is easily reopened.

“I’ll tell you frankly I don’t know if I’ll go back,” a heroin addict named Emmy said when I asked if she’d ever return to drugs. “But if I do, I know I’ll end up dead or in a mental institution.”

A trim, articulate woman of 35 with a college degree, her appearance says she ought to be lunching with the girls rather than struggling through rehabilitation, except for the intensity in her eyes, the look of an animal in peril. Emmy is still running, both from the addiction and from brutal beatings administered by a boyfriend.

“Being arrested,” she says, “was the best thing that ever happened to me. It got me here.”

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“They’re not on vacation,” Carol Nottley assured me as she led the way through the center. She’s the director, a woman who managed to emerge from her own past to start again.

“They have schedules to keep and responsibilities to fill. This is their home, but if they don’t follow the rules, there are consequences. . . . “

Nottley was married at 16, had three children by the time she was 19 and was abandoned by her husband at 22. She came here to deal with her own problems and stayed.

“They have to work at learning or relearning a new way to approach life,” she said. The shouts of children filled the air. Women pushed infants in strollers. Nottley watched them, content with the happy noises. “This is their chance,” she said.

What everyone is looking for, Emmy explained, is self-esteem. “There’s a huge sense of worthlessness when you’re strung out.” She managed a faint smile through her intensity. “You’re just a junkie, nothing more.”

Emmy symbolizes in a way what the center hopes for its residents. Self-awareness, restraint, an ability to deal with life’s fundamentals and the capacity to face rather than run from the past.

“I’ve grown here,” she said. “They’re teaching me how to walk.”

When Nottley was asked what one word described the center, I expected her to say hope. Instead, she said, “Success.” It’s the lesson they teach. The reality of hope lies in destination: the slow, hard walk to a new life.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com