ADDICTION LEAVES HIS LIFE IN PIECES

TAMPA, Fla.

ONE of his haunts looks like the Wild, Wild West, with dozens of
crack dealers and addicts roaming the streets in a cocaine frenzy.

The other is a row of homes along a tree-lined street so quiet even
the chirping birds were a nuisance.

These are the two worlds Darryl Strawberry has lived in. The denizens
of both say they understand him.

"The true sign of death is birth," said Jim Jolly, 59, of the city's
College Hill section, where friends spent several days searching for
the troubled baseballer after he left his drug rehabilitation center.

"He's smoking to ease the pain he has over his colon cancer," says
Jolly, who was also diagnosed with the disease several years ago.

"When you have cancer, you start to say to yourself, Why the f- - -
should I worry where I am or what I'm doing?'"

The Wild West show plays out along 29th Avenue and Lake Street,
stretches of road where roosters roam the street like tumbleweeds.

The dealers, in groups of three or four, line the streets waving at
cars, like revelers at the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

"He's a grown man. Let him smoke as much as he wants," one says.
"There are plenty of [people] out here smoking dope. He's just
someone who's well-known."

The tough-talking dealer was distracted by a scraggly addict who used
one hand to hold up his beltless jean shorts and the other to grasp a
$20 bill.

The dealer, three tattooed teardrops under his left eye, doesn't care
about the young man's pathetic state or the pain that the drug he's
selling is inflicting on the young man's family.

Several miles away on the quiet, tree-lined street, the reformed drug
and alcohol addicts at Health Care Connections were worried about and
protective of the washed-up baseball player.

"When you're dealing with an addiction, plus cancer, you have no idea
- - it's really tough," said one of Strawberry's comrades, who has
known the player for the past five months. "He's really a part of us
here."

Health Care is made up of seven unattached bungalow-style homes
tucked away off a main thoroughfare. No signs announce the
residences; these men want to rehabilitate themselves in peace.

Next-door neighbor Willie Carr, 37, saw Strawberry at peace last
month when he saw the slugger playing baseball with two of his kids.

"He seemed happy," Carr remembered.

Keshia Murphy, a clerk at the nearby Citgo gas station and mini-mart,
remembers seeing Strawberry performing the ordinary task of buying a
hot dog and a pack of Newport cigarettes.

"I know you, right?" Murphy asked Strawberry.

"No, no, no. You don't," he told her.

"He looked like an ordinary person, like he didn't want to be known," she said.

But last night, Strawberry was in a third haunt, called St. Joseph's
Hospital, and almost certainly headed to a fourth - prison.

These are the in-between places it seems Darryl Strawberry will haunt
until the day he dies.