“Over here” is Bailey House, a residence for homeless people with AIDS. In 1986, after lobbying by the AIDS Resource Center (ARC), the City of New York bought a renovated six-story hotel on Christopher Street-and turned it over to ARC. The AIDS epidemic had created a new kind of social institution. Residences such as Bailey House, which is funded by both public grants and private money, are neither nursing home nor leper colony. To qualify for admission, applicants must be homeless and diagnosed with AIDS, but not bedridden; often, hospital social workers recommend patients for residence after they recover from an AIDS-related illness. Once they’re admitted, Bailey House caseworkers help residents apply for disability benefits. Once the checks come in, Bailey House takes more than half. In return each of the 44 residents has a private room, three meals, in-house nurses, drug counselors and recreational activities.
Bailey House’s social mix might be volatile in the streets, but differences fade in the dormitory like atmosphere. The house is a litany of the nation’s most intractable problems: racism, child abuse, teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, prostitution, crime, overcrowded prisons-all culminating in homelessness and the devastation of AIDS. A visit with some residents of Bailey House:
Elise Henry probably got AIDS from sharing a needle with another heroin addict sometime in the last decade–but in many ways, the critical moment occurred when she was a little girl. When Henry, now 46, was growing up in Harlem, her mother sent her to live with her grandmother. Henry’s cousins, two women in their 20s, also lived in the apartment, and the grandmother asked the little girl to keep an eye on them. One time she saw the cousins go into the bathroom with two men. Watching through the keyhole while the men shot up heroin, she got caught. “One of the dudes came out and brought me into the bathroom,” she says. “He asked me, did I want some of this?” The man skin-popped a small amount of heroin into Elise’s arm. It was her first high; she was 8 years old.
Henry says she used drugs only occasionally until she got hooked for good in junior high school. After ninth grade she dropped out of school; she was a mother by 17. Her baby girl died at 19 months. “They said it was crib death,” says Henry. After that, she had only her habit to support. She “boosted clothes”-shoplifting items from stores to sell on the street. She had a second baby, Rose, taken from her at the age of 2 when she got into trouble with the law. Barely out of her teens, Henry fell deeper into the spiral of drugs and crime–“prostitution, forgery, perjury, robbery”–and prison. “I’ve been in and out of jail all my life,” she says.
In the late ’80s, after drug dealers booted her from her Harlem apartment, Henry lived in shelters and welfare hotels. Off heroin for more than 10 years, she became addicted to crack. “Welfare hotels are so disgusting, just to live in them, you got to be on drugs,” she says. “People die there and they let them lay stinking for two or three days.” But Henry was rescued from that life-by a diagnosis of AIDS. After she had to be hospitalized earlier this year, her social worker helped her get admitted to Bailey House.
Though she wound up in the same place as Elise Henry, Leslie Cooper, 48, started out life in a vastly different world. The daughter of a Madison Avenue advertising executive, Cooper was “the product of a progressive education in the best private schools” in New York City. But when she was 15 she began to hang out in beatnik clubs in the Village and learned to shoot up amphetamines. By 1961, when she was 18, she had moved on to heroin.
With the help of her parents, Cooper kicked the habit and was clean for more than 10 years. “I switched from being a professional junkie to a professional student,” she says. But by l975 she was hooked on cocaine. She later moved in with an African boyfriend, who eventually abandoned her to go home. Needing money for her coke habit, Cooper, at 40, became a prostitute. “I was a lousy hooker,” she laughs. “I dressed wrong. I always wore my knapsack and big hats.” Once she tested positive for AIDS in the mid-’80s, “I stopped everything. AIDS scared me clean,” she says. Cooper, who has lost her equilibrium, now has to use a wheelchair. “I’ve had this disease so long,” she says. “I’m tired of it.”
Since many of the residents are parents, it’s not surprising to see children of all ages around Bailey House. Addicts living in the streets are likely to be estranged from families, and sometimes AIDS brings parent and child back together. While her grandmother in Spanish Harlem raised her two children, Evelyn Colon, 32, was homeless–“I slept in a box near the U.N., and later in churches,” she says–and panhandled for money to buy food and drugs. When she was hospitalized with AIDS-related tuberculosis her weight dropped to 68 pounds. Near death, Colon says her 16-year-old son came to the hospital and encouraged her to fight back; now her weight is in the 80s and climbing, and she credits the boy with her recovery.
A few still cope with the square-one problem of admitting to their families that they have AIDS. Cesar, 45, is divorced but stays in close touch with his son. He tries to be an involved father: when his son was having problems in seventh grade last year, Cesar visited the school repeatedly to meet with teachers and counselors. But he lies to his son and ex-wife about his illness: “I tell them I have stomach cancer,” he says. He also pretends that he lives with his mother, who knows the truth, and his son sometimes visits him there on weekends.
Cesar may have to confess. He used drugs during his marriage and may have been infected with the virus then. His ex-wife has remarried and has a new baby girl. Cesar knows that both of them should be tested for AIDS-but he’s not sure how to tell her. “I’ve been pounding my head with that one, too,” he says. “I’ve thought about saying, ‘Why the hell don’t you take the test? You don’t know what [your second husband] has been doing’.,,
Some residents have lost touch with their families, probably forever. When Kathi Iazzetta’s daughter was 3 years old, her father came to see her on her birthday–and took her away. “I never saw her again,” says Iazzetta, 39. “He told me, ‘I’m going to tell her that her mother died a junkie on the streets’.” Because she was an addict and a prostitute, she had little chance of getting her daughter back in a court fight. Iazzetta later had a son by a boyfriend. The lover’s father agreed to raise his grandson–on the condition that Iazzetta never come near the boy. Since she developed AIDS, Iazzetta wonders about her children: “My daughter is 17 now. I’d love to find out where she is and hide across the street. But it wouldn’t be fair to go up to her and say, ‘Hi, I’m your mother and I’m going to die’.”
At Bailey House, residents have been able to discover unexpected talents. In the past many struggled to survive in the streets and shelters, or in prison, and spent most of their energy thinking about their next high. “So much fear and mistrust on the streets,” says Larry Conklin, 40, who’s still on a methadone program. “Living here gives you a chance to know yourself for the first time.” The father of a 14-year-old daughter, Conklin found he communicated well with teenagers. Now he travels around the city to speak to minority youths in churches and schools about his experience with IV drugs and AIDS. “I’m going to keep talking to kids until my time is up,” he says.
Not long after Bobby Flood moved in last year, he sank deeper into depression. A doctor’s son from Bergen County, N. J., Flood, 35, had worked for 10 years at a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. After he was diagnosed with AIDS, he says, his boss fired him. His roommate was no more supportive. Flood moved out–and eventually came to Bailey House. With a counselor’s help, Flood has pulled out of his slump. “You have to accept AIDS,” he says, “but you can’t let it take over.”
For years Flood would work the late shift, party until dawn and then sleep through the afternoon. Since coming to Bailey House he’s taken up painting and photography - “things I should have done years ago.” He even finds time for a little revenge: Flood occasionally goes back to the bar where he worked. “I like to turn the screw,” he says. “I want them to see I’m still here.”
From Shea Stadium to Broadway, Bailey House’s recreation program is designed to keep residents distracted from their illness. Sometimes it’s weekly bingo games or barbecues; other times, an excursion to a zoo or museum. Residents find themselves in unexpected places. At the restaurant owner’s invitation, recreation coordinator Vann Ribblett once took a group to Tavern on the Green in Central Park. During lunch one resident leaned over and said, “I want to thank you. I always wondered what it was like to be here. I used to live under that tree out there.” Some occasions call for red carpets: when it became clear that one especially well-liked man didn’t have long to live, Ribblett arranged for him to see his first Broadway show. After the theater the two climbed into a limousine that had been donated for the evening. Now where? said Ribblett. The young man said: “145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. I want [my relatives] to see this.”
But no one stays distracted for long. People with AIDS have to get used to the vagaries of their condition–and the relentless deterioration of their immune systems. “You learn not to plan anything farther ahead than next week,” says Stevan Lustica. Some residents who lift weights or go on retreats may feel well because of salutary drug therapy; but others have progressed to blindness, loss of motor abilities or dementia. Those who don’t need hospitalization during the final stages of AIDS can stay on at Bailey House. Some residents have survived for several years, but the average stay is six or seven months. According to residence manager Claude Winfield, “Most die peacefully in the rooms.”
“When you’re talking about AIDS,” says resident Kevin Mosley, 40, “you’re talking about death.” Since the identification of the epidemic in the summer of 1981, much has been written about the courage of people with AIDS. In fact, courage exists in abundance at Bailey House, in its silent form and at its most spirited. But most of the people who live there have no desire to be exemplary: “I don’t want my 15 minutes for having AIDS,” said one resident who refused to give his name. These are men and women, at an average age of 38, living in extremis, a condition that strips life of many of its complexities. What is uppermost in the minds of many of them is simple and forceful, like a child’s wish. “I want peace,” says Elise Henry. “These are my last days. I want to enjoy them as much as I can.”
