THE HELPER

As an Alcoholic and an Addict, Charles Harbaugh Took Himself to the Very
Edge of the Abyss. Now He Finds Purpose at Charity Hospital's Detox Unit
Helping the Addicts, Having Walked Many a Mile in Their Shoes.

The parents of the heroin addict were late. Charles Harbaugh looked at his
watch, took a sip of coffee, and fished a pack of Pall Malls out of his
shirt pocket. He was on time, of course. He likes to follow instructions,
likes to have structure to his life, and the night before he had made a
promise to meet the parents of the troubled woman in front of Charity
Hospital. So he was here, and they were not, and he was waiting.

Harbaugh, 48, had waited here before. On a night in early April, unable to
check into Charity's medical detox unit until morning, he spent hours
waiting outside the hospital, drinking wine until he fell asleep on an air
grate. His hair was long and tangled then, his mouth full of rotten teeth,
his body broken down by 30 years of drinking and his mind set on one thing:
dying.

He was trying to kill himself, Harbaugh tells people now, because the pain
surrounded him like water and only alcohol helped him stay afloat. This is
why he waited all night to get into detox and why later, weeks into his
recovery, he started showing up at the detox unit again -- not for
treatment this time, but for companionship. He didn't want to be alone with
his thoughts.

The nurses, weathered to the lip service and lies of patients who vanish
without notice and reappear with the usual explanations, didn't expect
Harbaugh to keep coming. But he did. A couple times at first, then almost
every day. He came back to talk to patients and hold group meetings. In
group, he felt at his best, like he was making connections, even if the
addicts assembled in the room slept or drooled or dry heaved as he spoke.
Someone might listen, he thinks, even though he knows half of them will not
complete their stay in detox and many will be back again soon.

Outside the hospital, waiting once again, Harbaugh checked his watch and
sipped his coffee. It was a Saturday morning -- gray, damp and quiet,
except for the man begging for change, and not finding any, among the few
standing on the street. Harbaugh shrugged, lit a cigarette, and opened the
black satchel that held his Bible, his meditation book and the notes about
the heroin addict he had taken during a telephone conversation with her
parents the night before.

Kelli, he had written at the top of a pad of paper. Addicted to heroin . .
. family is Christian-based . . . tired of lip service . . . care, but want
to see action . . .will meet me at 10 a.m. in front of the hospital with
fruit and clothes . . . have a lot of love.

Harbaugh was supposed to bring the fruit and clothes to Kelli, a
22-year-old woman now in her sixth day of detox. But looking up Tulane
Avenue, and seeing no sign of her parents, he decided they weren't coming
and gathered up his belongings: the notes, the satchel, the bag of candy
and soft drinks he had bought for the recovering addicts. Then he walked
inside the hospital, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and pressed the
buzzer at the doors of the detox unit. A nurse appeared in a small square
window.

"I'm Charles," he said.

"I know," she answered.

Rhonda Green keeps an obituary pinned to the bulletin board in her tiny
office on the fourth floor. The man in the picture is 38, outgoing and
personable, a hard worker and a former patient, a man addicted to opiates.

Green, the section manager of the unit and a registered nurse, last saw the
man on a Friday this summer. He had just completed a 28-day rehabilitation
program and, like many former patients, he came back to detox to tell the
nurses he was doing well. He was perky that day, Green thought. His eyes
had cleared up, he had gained weight and he said he planned to come back on
Monday to talk to the group about his recovery. He never made it. On Sunday
night, he died of an apparent overdose.

The obituary, now fading to yellow, is part memorial to the man and part
reminder of the challenges that Green, the nurses and the recovering
addicts face every day -- as if they need a reminder. They know the
statistics: that 50 percent of the 1,200 people who come to detox each year
will leave without completing treatment, that 40 percent of those will be
back again and that roughly 10 percent will stay clean for good. They know
the stories, too. There was Ronald, who came to detox, finished
rehabilitation and came back to give rousing group talks until he got
arrested for sleeping in a church. There was Edward, whom they lost track
of until he appeared in the newspaper, wanted for armed robbery. And there
was Henrietta, who completed treatment and came back to detox for five days
in a row until she, too, vanished.

"Either she'll be back with us again or she's in jail or she's dead," said
Green, because these are the possible endings, as she sees it, to the
patients that walk through the doors of detox. "They get treatment and get
better, or they go to jail, or they die."

In spite of these odds and these stories, or perhaps because of them, Green
and the other nurses return to the detox unit every day, hoping to
recognize the "frequent flyers," as they call returning patients, from
those who are truly ready to tackle their addictions. They will be there
for the withdrawal, for the hallucinations and tremors, for the vomiting
and anxiety. They watch over the heroin addicts, attached to IVs, and the
alcoholics, who can suffer seizures and even die of heart problems if not
medicated properly.

Then, if the patients stay long enough to wash the toxins from their
bodies, the nurses will refer them to one of several rehabilitation
programs that can last anywhere from 10 days to 21/2 years. They usually
know who will make it and who will be back for another extended stay of
sweating and trembling and sleeping curled up beneath white sheets in the
ward where first names are enough. "It's just gut," Green said. "You just
kind of know."

Everyone had a feeling about Harbaugh.

"I waited for your parents, but they didn't show up."

Kelli nodded. "Thanks," she told Harbaugh. Then she wandered down the hall
to the conference room in the detox unit and sat down among several others
slumped over the table in pale blue scrubs. Outside the door, Harbaugh
walked the floor, trying to wake the others. He said:

"Good morning."

"How you feeling?"

"My name's Charles. I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict. I came here this
morning to bring you a message of hope. We're going to have a meeting in
about five minutes, if you'd like to come."

They said:

"What?"

"I'm tired."

"Thank you."

When he was drunk, he would yell, his eyes twitching to avoid the gaze of
others as he plotted new ways to pay for his next drink. Now, hands in his
pants pockets, Harbaugh rejoined the handful of others in the conference
room, stood up at the head of the table and spoke in short soft sentences,
reminding himself to make eye contact with the people eating chocolate with
trembling hands.

Few looked up at him. They stared instead at the table, at their feet, out
the fourth floor windows into the gray morning. They were a typical bunch:
black and white, young and old. They snort cocaine. They sell heroin. They
want their kids back. They want their jobs back. They have criminal records
and financial problems and dreams. John doesn't want to miss his son's
wedding next spring. Rodney doesn't want to die selling drugs. David
doesn't want to lie to his grandson anymore.

"I'm still Charles," Harbaugh told them. "I'm still a recovering alcoholic
and addict. I want to give you a quick, brief rundown. A little bit about
my background . . ."

"Who's Charles?" Kelli whispered to the woman next to her.

"You're so loaded," the woman replied.

Harbaugh kept talking. He told them about his failed marriages, about
serving time for stealing cars in the 1970s, about the three children he
had with a woman in the 1980s and how he once considered killing all of
them, then himself. He told them how he didn't do it, how he got help, got
clean, then relapsed, then moved to Harvey to live with his sister. He told
them how the mother of his kids came with them, then left him, how he
married another woman only to have her leave him in July 2001 and how this
final failure launched him into what he called his "last episode" of drinking.

"Lord, that's the worst story I've ever heard," Estella Johnson thought the
first time she heard Harbaugh tell it. It was early April then and Johnson,
a registered nurse in the unit, was leading the group. She was hoping to
get people to open up and share their stories because she wanted them to
see they could find strength in their failures. Harbaugh had been one of
the quiet ones at first. Now she couldn't get Harbaugh to stop talking or
writing in his journal.

April 4: "Ate breakfast at 8 a.m. and ate like a cow. Still have trouble
thinking clearly and focusing on things concerning my kids and my home
situation."

April 6: "Laid back day. Went to two meetings and got a lot out of them.
People like my attitude and when I voice my opinion. Played spades and did
some reading and thinking."

April 14: "I've seen people lay around like zombies, vomit on themselves
and urinate. Watched them go through their withdrawals with a lot of pain .
. . It has taught me that I don't want to be in their shape ever . . . I
know what I need to do to be sober and clean and I will honestly try to do
the best I can this time around and hope that, with my faith in God and his
love for me, I should be able to recover successfully."

Shortly thereafter, Harbaugh wrote:

Dear Liquor,

After 30 years of pain and hurt, anxiety and desperation, you have taken me
to the limit. You have broken up my relationships, separated me from my
children and tried to kill me.

I need to end this now because I need to start a new life and try to
rebuild what you have helped tear down. I need my self-esteem back and my
family. Most of all I need my sanity. I need God.

Good-bye.

Harbaugh asked the question and watched Kelli roll it over in her mind:
"Why do you want to change?"

His hair was trimmed now, his bad teeth pulled, his eyes peering out from
behind new glasses. The glasses had been a gift from the eye care center
whose staff found out he was getting clean and going to college to study
social work and substance abuse counseling. The change had been his own.

"He is a seed planter that's planting seeds, and I may never see the fruit
grow on the trees from the seeds that he's planted, but I'll tell you
this," said a 44-year-old recovering addict who met Harbaugh during his
stay in detox. "Once you meet him, you have no more doubt about what you
need to do for your recovery. You know what you need to do for your recovery."

It began, Harbaugh told the group, the day he walked back into the detox
unit after weeks of rehabilitation. He had vowed never to return, he said,
but as he sat on the porch of his sister's home and watched his father
drink beer, a voice kept telling him: "Come back. Come back."

"The staff welcomed me with open arms," he told the patients on this
particular Saturday. "They asked me if I would chair a meeting, and I did.
And at that moment, I knew then that this was where I was supposed to be
for the rest of my life. Something came over my whole body. I can't explain
it. I just knew this was where I was supposed to be."

He had answered the question. He knew why he wanted to change. He wanted to
be a social worker and substance abuse counselor. He wanted to help others
overcome their addictions, and the nurses in the detox unit had encouraged him.

They referred him to the eye care center that gave him free glasses and
helped him figure out how to enroll at Southern University at New Orleans.
They loaned him money for bus fare and, knowing he couldn't live on loans
forever, helped him get a job as a patient escort at the hospital, where he
makes more than $6 an hour. Now he was leading the group in detox, where he
felt most comfortable, and it was Kelli's turn to answer the question.

"I want my family back," she said, her sad, distant eyes studying the table
top. "I came here and nobody knew I was here."

Harbaugh nodded.

"And I'm tired," she added. "It's like this dude I was running with . . ."

Her mumbling voice trailed off into a rambling tale about paranoia and
drugs and stealing to buy drugs and running with this man, this dude, she
hardly knew, and how he would get high on cocaine and heroin and get
spooked and she would get aggravated because she had legal charges pending
against her and dreams to be a good mother, a better person, and yet here
she was once again: high next to a skittish stranger who kept saying, "I
don't like that truck right over there."

"I'm sick of it," Kelli said, and her tale rambled on, to her mother and
the Bible and talk about the end of the world until it finally came back
around to her once again and she said, "I really do want to change."

Harbaugh thanked her for sharing. Two days later, Kelli left.

They tried to stop her, Green said. The nurses surrounded her and told her
they supported her, even if she felt like no one else did. But Kelli,
defiant after an argument with her mother on the telephone, walked out,
vowing to go get loaded.

"You have to want it for yourself," Harbaugh cautioned a patient in the
detox unit a couple weeks later. "You can't do it for anyone else."

The 24-year-old heroin and cocaine addict sat on his bed and looked up at
the man who once had L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed across the knuckles of
his hands. It was the thing to do in prison in the 1970s, Harbaugh said.
But somewhere along the way the L-O-V-E faded from his right hand, leaving
only H-A-T-E on his left hand, which Harbaugh now slipped into his pants
pocket as he spoke.

"You know the saying in Alcoholics Anonymous?"

The man shook his head.

"You've got jail, institutions and death. You're in an institution now.
Ever been to jail?"

The man paused. "Yeah."

"Well, what's left?"

The man paused again. He knew the answer, of course, just as Harbaugh had
known the answer months earlier and, really, still wakes up to the answer
every day as he gets on the bus to go to school or to work for another day
of sobriety.

"I'm scared," the man said.

"That's a good thing," Harbaugh replied. "It's good to be scared."