Help Is Far Off for Black AIDS Patients

That day at the bus stop Cora Weston saw a man walking toward her and for a split second didn’t recognize him.

The man was so thin she could see his bones. His eyes were sunken and sad. Not until he came closer could she tell it was him. Her only son. Now living on the street. Now a crack addict. Now dying of AIDS.

It hurt her so badly she wanted to cry. But she didn’t. She wrapped her arms around him and let him cry. Ma, he told her, I messed my life up.

There are some things even a mother can’t fix. But Weston did what she could. She set about trying to find him a place to live, and then learned how little help there is--at least for people like her son.

Even though African Americans suffer the highest rate of AIDS, only a small fraction of the millions in federal dollars earmarked for housing people with HIV in Los Angeles County has been used to create and support residential facilities in neighborhoods with significant black populations.

The federal money--which is administered by the city of Los Angeles--has helped develop beachfront AIDS facilities in Santa Monica and build apartments in West Hollywood, Hollywood and Silver Lake. Focusing services in these communities ensured that gay white men receive much-needed help in familiar settings.

But as the epidemic has shifted into the African American and Latino population, that practice has resulted in broad inequities.

There is an almost complete absence of AIDS housing in neighborhoods with large numbers of African Americans. As a result, the benefits of drug treatment and new medical advances are failing to reach the epidemic’s fastest-growing group--black men and women in the urban core.

“It always amazes me that [AIDS officials] never identify the fact that they’ve withheld funding from communities of color as one of the main factors contributing to the high rates we’re seeing,” said Earl G. Massey, who runs a drug recovery program in South L.A.

The disparity in housing is an example of what some advocates say is a larger inequity in the distribution of AIDS funding and decision-making power. It is a legacy, they say, of a system that was created primarily for gay white men when they were the most in need--and is still grappling with the challenge of serving others.

Local officials acknowledge the housing disparity but blame a complicated mix of factors, including limited federal funds and the lingering belief that many who were infected did not want to seek help in their own neighborhoods.

In South Los Angeles, the only residential care facility for men is a converted motel on Figueroa Street called the Palms. Its services offer a clear view of the role such housing can play in keeping people alive.

New AIDS treatments enable many people to enjoy longer, more productive lives. But if they are homeless, alcoholic, addicted to drugs or suffering from mental illness, medicine alone will not save them.

Experts say housing, counseling and drug rehabilitation are critical to spread the benefits of medical advances to those now in greatest danger.

Men Who Need More Than Medicine

Cora Weston was determined to see that her son didn’t die on the streets. She learned about the Palms from her son’s doctor. That’s how Derrick Redwood found a home.

At 35, Redwood is watching himself shrink into a “little old man.” At 61, his mother is wondering how she will pay for his burial. Together they walk a road of rising hopes and sagging defeat.

For Redwood, moving into the Palms was an act of confession.

With that decision, he admitted he needed to get away from the chaos he called life: sleeping underneath the Hollywood Freeway. Chasing a high. Sometimes selling his body for it.

All he had when he arrived nearly a year ago were the clothes on his back. I’ll stay one day, he thought.

A month later, Redwood was a full-fledged resident of the Palms, a man with an address and a seat at the dinner table. All 22 men there were HIV-positive. Some had AIDS. Most were referred by doctors, social workers, churches or social service groups. There is a waiting list, and residents are admitted on a first-come, first-served basis.

The disease is not the only monster in their lives. Some are fighting drug addiction and mental health problems. A few have prison records. They are among the most difficult to reach, they need more than medicine to survive and they are the least likely to find help.

Redwood felt blessed to be there. But he was not converted.

“I do miss getting high,” he says. “But it’s no good for me. It tears my body down. This place has been good. I’m trying to stay put.”

A week later he disappears, back to the streets and crack cocaine.

He returns after nine days, and Palms co-owner Kevin Pickett offers to get him into a rehabilitation program. Redwood tells the truth: I’m not ready.

Pickett is a patient man. He has seen turnarounds, the changes that happen by getting men off the streets.

Since Redwood’s return, even the cook, Debra Pickett, has been on him. She is Kevin’s mother, and she talks to Redwood as if he too is her son. Stay off those streets, she says, or next time I’ll come looking for you.

“I’ll be right here in Room 17,” he says, peeping toward the kitchen, “unless I decide to go on another cruise.” He is teasing. He knows she is listening.

“No more cruises!” she shouts from the kitchen.

Redwood is a slight man with wavy black hair who loves gospel and R&B.; He likes to joke, loves his family. He thought about being a writer. He was raised in the Pentecostal Church. His mother worked as a nanny for white Westside families. His father lived in New York. He would call, sometimes send clothes. As a child, Redwood excelled in school and sang in the church choir.

Redwood came of age when AIDS was raging, before people knew using a condom could save your life and crack cocaine could ruin it.

After graduation from Dorsey High School in 1982, he left home and the church, living as an openly gay black man. He worked as a hairdresser, filling the empty spaces in his life with drugs and promiscuous sex.

By 1991 he had contracted HIV.

Today, when his mind is clear, Redwood sees himself as a redeemed man, a prodigal son returned home to share life’s lessons. He is willing to talk about his mistakes because maybe his story will save someone else. “I hope nobody ever has to go through what I’ve been through,” he says.

But he walks the road to redemption with stuttering steps. Crack will not release him.

“I run to that like a security blanket,” he says. “But it’s a raggedy blanket. It’ll make you sell your mother.”

For nearly everyone with AIDS, there are lovers, friends and family suffering alongside them.

Cora Weston could spend every day wrapped in sorrow. But she is a believer in God and prayer. “Without the Lord I would be a basket case,” she says. “He keeps me.”

She asked Redwood to move out of her house, but she could not shut him out of her life. She delivered plates of food to him at crack houses, because if she gave him money for food he would spend it on drugs. She went with him to the doctor, including the day he learned he had HIV. She kept believing that he would turn his life around.

That day at the bus stop she hadn’t seen him for months. It had been rare for him not to call, and she had been worried sick.

On one Saturday morning, Redwood has taken the bus from the Palms to visit his mother.

Before he arrives, she excuses herself from the living room and hides her purse. “I hate to have to do this,” she says, with a pained look.

Inside the sparse apartment, Redwood is a whirlwind, all talk and teasing. About her hairstyle. About relatives. About the Palms. Weston is happy that he is going to church again. That he seems to want to live again. She also sees his fatigue, hears about his aches, and knows he thinks about death. His T-cell count has fallen dangerously low, a sign of the disease’s progression.

“You ready to go?” his mother asks.

“Physically, yes,” he says. “Spiritually, you know I’m not ready.”

When it’s time to go home, Weston gets her coin purse and counts out six quarters--just enough for his bus ride home.

“He looks better since he came off the streets,” she says after the door closes. “His eyes are not set back in his head. But he’s tired. I know he’s tired. I feel like I’m waiting for an execution.”

South Los Angeles Gets Short Shrift

There are 561 residential beds in Los Angeles County for people with HIV/AIDS, some just for the poor, others open to anyone who is sick. According to a city-commissioned report, 41% of the programs offering beds are located in the county planning area that includes Hollywood, West Hollywood and downtown, 18% are in the San Fernando Valley and 23% are in the South Bay.

That leaves very few for South Los Angeles. Besides the Palms, the non-profit Parents of Watts operates an emergency shelter in South Los Angeles with two beds set aside for people with HIV/AIDS. The Carl Bean House, a residential facility with a 24-hour medical staff, is located much farther north, in Jefferson Park.

In contrast, the county planning area that includes West Hollywood, Hollywood and downtown offers 25 different housing programs. West Hollywood is home to such complexes as the Palm View Apartments, with 40 beds of permanent housing, and Harper Community Apartments, with 21 beds. Argyle Courts offers 25 beds, and St. Andrew’s Bungalow Court has 17.

Los Angeles County received nearly $54 million in federal funds to house people with HIV/AIDS from June 1993 through June 1999. Recommendations on how to spend the money are made by the 23-member Los Angeles Countywide Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS Advisory Committee. The Los Angeles City Council has final say over the money, which is administered by the city housing department.

About $10 million has been paid as long-term rental subsidies and emergency vouchers good for 30 days in a motel; $16 million has gone to creating and supporting AIDS housing.

The city housing department has come under fire in recent months from critics who say $17 million sat unused for years before it was earmarked this spring for rent subsidies. State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) this summer requested a Joint Legislative Audit Committee review of the city’s performance. The rest of the federal money has been spent on related services, including care for pets of ailing patients.

The shortage of AIDS housing is a growing concern among African American advocates who, like gay activists, see accessible services as a critical component in saving lives.

The need is urgent in Los Angeles County, where the rate of AIDS among African Americans is 347 per 100,000, compared with 192 per 100,000 for whites. The rate for Latinos is 115 per 100,000 and growing.

Except for New York City, no U.S. metropolitan area has been struck as hard as Los Angeles. As of February, there were 14,618 people living with AIDS in L.A. County: 6,209 were white, 4,851 Latino, 3,133 African American, 310 Asian American/Pacific Islander, 58 Native American. Health officials estimate another 37,000 are infected with HIV but have not contracted AIDS.

Of the 12 new housing programs being developed in Los Angeles County, 11 are located in the Hollywood, West Hollywood and downtown area.

Choosing Between Health and a High

Even for those few needy who find a bed dedicated to AIDS patients, there is no guarantee of peace or stability.

Derrick Redwood lives like a man who does not plan to stay long. He rises each morning and faces a decision. If he spends the day here, his health wins. If he heads to Hollywood to get high, it loses. Redwood keeps a foot in both worlds.

At the Palms he lives by the rules. He is in the kitchen for meals. He is at the nurse’s station, taking his medication and having his vital signs recorded. He attends sessions on managing AIDS and keeping off drugs. He sees his physician and a therapist.

When another resident, Carl Ragsdale, returns from drug rehabilitation, Redwood joins the others, giving hugs and handshakes.

“One day at a time,” Ragsdale says, like a mantra. “Clean and sober.”

“One day at a time,” Redwood repeats. “I been thinking of doing the same thing.”

Debra Pickett encourages him every day. “He is going to do exactly what he says--help somebody,” she declares from her spot in the kitchen.

She has told him how to win. Wherever you are, when crack pulls you, she says, you fall on your knees and call on God.

One night, it happens. Instead of falling on his knees, the lure of cocaine puts him on a bus back to his old life, back to the streets of Hollywood.

But nobody needs him to play the middleman in a crack purchase, and he has no money. Since he has already missed his curfew at the Palms, he begins halfheartedly to walk Santa Monica Boulevard, hoping someone wants him.

A few drivers pause to size up his frail figure. Nobody stops. In the early morning hours, he heads back to the Palms, on a near-empty bus--sober. This night is a draw, and an omen.

A System Devised for Gay White Men

The disparity in AIDS housing and services has its roots in the first years of the epidemic, when most victims were gay white men.

The disease was spread primarily through unprotected sex among gay men. In Los Angeles County, many of those who were first infected lived in the Hollywood and West Hollywood areas.

“Facilities were built in the areas where the cases were, and so those facilities still exist and we want them to exist,” said Ferd Eggan, the city’s AIDS coordinator.

Even in the early days of the disease, African Americans and Latinos from other areas were among the dying, but local officials believed then that they wanted to distance themselves from their neighborhoods.

“Some of those men . . . have gravitated toward Hollywood, West Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley. The places where they would feel safer and, frankly, able to hide the fact that they had AIDS from close friends and relatives,” Eggan said.

But as the disease has shifted more heavily into nonwhite neighborhoods, it formed a deadly alliance with a host of other ills: poverty, drug abuse, high rates of incarceration, homelessness.

In 1991, African Americans made up 18% of people living and diagnosed with AIDS in Los Angeles County. By 1997, they made up 26% of living AIDS cases, even though they made up only 9% of the county’s population. Latinos were 33% of AIDS cases in 1991, but 43% in 1998.

By contrast, the number of whites diagnosed with AIDS declined from 47% to 32% of the county’s total in the same period.

As further evidence of the reach of the virus into minority communities, African American women and Latinas, who together represent less than a quarter of all U.S. women, accounted for 80% of female AIDS cases reported in the 1997-98 fiscal year.

Health authorities acknowledge that the organizations and methods that stemmed the disease’s spread among gay white men are not working nearly as effectively for African Americans and Latinos.

“We’re still dealing with having developed a set of prevention interventions and, in some ways, a health care system that was responsive to the needs of gay white men,” said Charles Henry, director of the Los Angeles County Office of AIDS Programs and Policy. “We recognize that those don’t translate into [other] communities. . . . We have a lot more work to do in Los Angeles.”

Experts say people who are sick may find it impossible to get help, especially if they are drug addicts or homeless. Some may simply go untreated, said Dr. Beny J. Primm, head of the Urban Resource Institute and the Addiction Research and Treatment Corp. in New York.

Drugs Win Another Round

Meanwhile, there is concern that the number of African Americans and Latinos infected with HIV is even higher than current estimates, suggesting a future wave of new AIDS cases.

“Where are they going to go?” asked Dr. Wilbert Jordan, of the Oasis Clinic in Watts. “ . . . They have no resources. Their friends and family have no resources.”

Nobody had to tell Cora Weston something bad had happened. She felt it.

Redwood attended a drug counseling meeting at the Palms in the morning. That afternoon, he asked Kevin Pickett for $2, bus fare to Hollywood where he wanted to have drinks with a friend. Pickett told him he couldn’t give him the money--not for that.

There were no hard feelings. Redwood retreated to Debra Pickett’s kitchen and spent the afternoon talking while she cooked beef burritos.

When it was time for her to leave, Redwood walked her to her car. In a gesture of kindness, she gave him $2. He hadn’t asked. She figured what harm could it do?

That night police stopped Redwood on a Hollywood street. He had a crack pipe. He had not reported to his probation officer or appeared for a prostitution ticket issued months earlier. He was arrested and held without bail.

The Palms owner was disappointed, but not surprised. “He was fighting that battle--the drugs won,” Pickett said.

A few days later, Weston got a ride to the Palms to collect her son’s belongings. Packed into blue plastic bags, they became symbols of defeat. Standing in the parking lot, she cried.

Redwood was in dorm K-11 at the Men’s Central Jail, where homosexual inmates are housed.

Once again, crack has led him to a place where he did not want to be.

“I believe I can stop. I want to stop this time,” he says, sitting in the jail library. “It’s really time to give it up.”

On a gray morning, Weston and Debra and Kevin Pickett arrive at the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

When Redwood’s case is called, his attorney offers an alternative to state prison: Order Redwood to stay at the Palms under a form of house arrest.

“If that’s a viable option,” the judge says, “I’ll consider it.” First he wants to see Redwood’s court file and probation report.

When the deputy brings Redwood out, he is wearing county jail-issued bright yellow pants and a navy blue shirt-sleeve top. He is pale and handcuffed.

The room is quiet as the prosecutor and the defense attorney huddle at the judge’s bench.

Sitting at the defense table, Redwood casts a somber glance at his supporters. Mostly he keeps his eyes closed; his leg shakes nervously.

“I’ve done all I could,” Weston says, staring straight ahead, tears falling.

Superior Court Judge David Wesley announces his decision: “It is the recommendation of the court that you be commended to the Department of Corrections for the middle term of two years.”

Weston is the last to leave the courtroom. “I love you,” Redwood mouths as she passes, placing his hand to his heart.

She manages a small smile and a wave. Then she disappears through the double doors.

Alone at the defense table, Redwood buries his face in his hands.

Outside, the public defender is explaining. With time already served he’ll spend about six months in prison. The prostitution case did it. The judge could not ignore it.

“That’s the end of the story,” Weston says, on the elevator ride down.

In the lobby, Kevin Pickett adds the one bright note before stepping out into the overcast morning. “It’s the end of the chapter. Not the story.”

Last month, Redwood was released from prison, and he has returned to the Palms.

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Times staff photographer Clarence Williams contributed to this story.

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