A Chance to Savor the Gifts of Fatherhood

By DUANE NORIYUKI

Nov. 1, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In body and spirit, Cage Garrett Jr. had withered like an old, crooked elm in the dead of winter. He could barely lift his head or speak, and his T-cell count was dangerously low. He didn’t know the day of the week, but that didn’t matter, because each seemed molded by the same gray agony.

It was almost Thanksgiving, 1998. Homeless and HIV positive, Garrett sought shelter at the Salvation Army Bethesda House in downtown Los Angeles.

“I have a son,” he said quietly during his intake interview, emphasizing that it was not an option for the two of them to be separated.

In Los Angeles County, the Bethesda House, on James M. Wood Boulevard, is the only HIV/AIDS residential care facility--and one of the few such facilities in the state--that accepts single men and their children, according to the state Department of Social Services.

Though most residents who come with children are women, since 1995, 38 men and their children have resided at Bethesda. “I think we’ve stereotyped the type of person whom we expect to see in the AIDS community,” says Anne Calvo, former executive director of the Bethesda House and now the Salvation Army’s divisional health advisor. “For some reason, they [single men with children] have slipped through the cracks.”

Bethesda has 16 units and can accommodate up to 50 residents. It is, says Calvo, the largest residential care facility in the state catering to homeless individuals and families affected by HIV and AIDS. Next year, it will move into space at the Salvation Army’s new $9.3-million Alegria complex in Silver Lake, which upon completion will be one of the largest facilities in the nation catering to homeless families affected by the deadly disease. The new complex will offer permanent and temporary housing.

Bethesda, located near Staples Center, is not a hospice. Rather, it is a place where people learn to live with the disease. There is a rooftop playground and day care. Though a nurse is available 24 hours a day, the presence of AIDS is largely silent, overshadowed by the sounds of children playing and the encouragement of staff.

Many residents are also recovering from alcoholism and drug abuse. Some suffer from mental illness. Many of the women have been victims of domestic abuse.

Men and women at Bethesda face many of the same challenges and fears, says director Doug Loisel. The goal is to bring stability to their lives, assisting them with the rigorous medication needs of HIV and AIDS patients and with job training and education to facilitate independent living.

Parenting skills are stressed. “They have opportunities to interact with their children without having to worry about the whole plethora of peripheral problems,” says Loisel. “So what we see is parents learning to be better parents. We have high expectations in that regard.”

But just outside the three-story building, people sleep on the sidewalk next to shopping carts filled with the harvest of gritty streets, a reminder to Bethesda residents that their pasts are never far away.

Scars Are Reminders of Wasted Years

Garrett Jr., 53, lifts his shirt to show where a blade was thrust into him in 1986. Richard Marquez, a recent Bethesda resident, would rather not discuss the jagged crease that trickles down the left side of his skull. For both men, scars run deep.

The scars are reminders of what they describe as wasted years: drugs, booze, prison, streets that lured and nearly claimed them.

“Positive.”

It’s the only word Marquez heard when informed of the results of his HIV test in 1992. When he heard that word, he says, the world turned silent. The doctor continued talking, but Marquez couldn’t hear. “Positive.”

Garrett Jr., who grew up in Santa Monica, expected it. He could see it in the mirror. By the time he was diagnosed in 1995, tuberculosis had also set in. He had lost considerable weight. His T-cell count had dipped to near zero.

A heightened sense of mortality changed both men, and what they share now is a commitment to faith and fatherhood, a longing to do this one thing right with their lives.

Garrett Jr. and his teenage son, Cage Garrett III, 17, lived at Bethesda for 10 months. And the older Garrett, whose health has recovered significantly due to the effectiveness of current medications, still returns to Bethesda, volunteering his time to help with cleaning and landscaping.

“It feels good to be here,” says Garrett Jr., who now lives with his son in a subsidized apartment overlooking the Santa Monica Pier.

Garrett, who has a sharp wit and a friendly, outgoing demeanor, struggles to make sense of his life. He wonders why a person who has squandered so much time has been given so many chances to live. There are vast mood swings, moments of depression and loneliness. But at Bethesda, he is upbeat, radiating hope.

“There’s a lot of support and understanding here. I don’t know where I would be, or where my son would be, without this place.”

It was when his son’s mother fell on hard times three years ago that Garrett stepped in and took a more active parenting role. Eventually he and his son came to Los Angeles, with nowhere to go until they were accepted into the Bethesda program.

On the weekend before they moved into Bethesda, Garrett Jr. finally told his son he was HIV positive. “I knew he was sick, but I never knew what it was,” says Garrett III, a junior at Hollywood High School. “He used to always tell me, ‘I’m not always going to be here, Son,’ and I would wonder why he was telling me that.”

When they first arrived at Bethesda, the younger Garrett was upset about leaving his home in Moreno Valley. At school in Hollywood, students cracked jokes about AIDS and made comments based on myth and misinformation. He told no one about his father.

At Bethesda, he made two friends, cousins, whose mothers were HIV positive. Now they live in the same Santa Monica apartment complex as he does.

On the other hand, communication with his father has been difficult. “I worry about what my dad goes through mentally. We have problems that regular teenagers have with their fathers, and sometimes I don’t tell him things that I should be talking to him about because he’s sick, and it might put more stress on him, but a regular kid could talk to his dad about it.”

Garrett Jr. has another son, Sean Garrett, 31, a first-year teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Garrett Jr. is trying to do for one son what he failed to do for the other.

“I’m ashamed of how I lived,” he says, “and there’s times when it tries to suck me back down, but I refuse to go out like that. . . . I want to be counted for something. I want my life to stand for something good.”

Hoping to Reunite the Family

On the walls of their small room at Bethesda, Richard Marquez hung his 4-year-old daughter’s paintings of a butterfly and fish. His bed slid out from beneath hers. If she tumbled in her sleep, he would break her fall. Each room has its own bathroom, but residents share a dining room and entertainment room.

In the mornings, he would lay out her clothes, make sure she brushed her teeth. They ate breakfast together, but she rarely had an early morning appetite.

At 8 a.m., he walked her to preschool, then returned to make calls, meet with counselors. He was interested in going to school to learn to make dentures. And he hoped that he, Richelle and her mother, now living with family in Santa Fe Springs, would someday be together again.

The two lived at Bethesda since June, but two weeks ago, they left unannounced, apparently to be with Richelle’s mother.

Marquez, 45, who has HIV-related illnesses, was a resident at Bethesda twice. He and Richelle’s mother, both HIV positive, were living in the streets in 1994, when they first made the Bethesda House their home. While living there, the woman became pregnant. “I told her we couldn’t bring a child into the world,” he says. “We couldn’t take the chance [that the baby would be HIV positive]. I said, ‘I’m against abortion, but this is one time. It’s up to you, but I prefer you not have the baby.’ ”

The woman disagreed. “The baby’s going to be all right,” she said. “The baby’s going to be perfect.”

And she was right.

Richelle was born free of the virus. Soon after her birth, the three of them moved out on their own, but in June, Marquez and Richelle’s mother had a falling out, and Marquez returned to Bethesda with his daughter.

Marquez was diagnosed with HIV in 1992 while incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail awaiting transfer to prison on drug-related robbery charges. “I made up my mind that I could continue living the life that I was living or I could live a clean and healthy life,” he said before leaving.

Since his diagnosis, there have been no more drugs, no more crime, he says. His focus is clearly on his daughter. “Richelle is his life,” says Marquez’s son, Richard Marquez Jr., a 24-year-old warehouse supervisor in Las Vegas. “He lives for her.”

Children weren’t always a priority for Marquez, who grew up in Compton and has a total of four children with three women.

“I’ve changed a lot. I’ve learned to take life a lot slower,” he says, “a lot more seriously. I have respect for others that I never had before. I have self-control. That’s what I’ve learned from all those years.”

It’s difficult for him to speak of the past. He is a private man trying to gain control over a life that has been out of control for so long. His tough exterior softens only at the mention of his daughter.

Bethesda officials hope Marquez stays on track. They would not comment on his departure except to say he was doing what he thought was best for Richelle.

They left without their possessions, mostly clothes, a few toys, a video of “The Lion King.”

And on the wall, the paintings of a butterfly and a fish.