IN THE CITY'S BUSTLING CORE, A DIFFERENT KIND OF SUCCESS

Recovering addicts measure their lives in days. As in, one day at a time.

It's dangerous to think too far ahead.

But sometimes an addict can look behind and find to his surprise that the
sober days have accumulated into a good-sized pile.

Stewart Smith is a recovering crack addict at the Charlotte Rescue Mission.

As of Wednesday, he'll have been clean for a year.

He doesn't walk solid just yet. The recovery groups urge him to let his
feelings out. But bringing up his past reminds him of the urges it took so
long to tame.

"Right now, talking about it, I'm getting that feeling I used to get,"
Smith says. His fingers drum the side of a Coke can. "I don't know if it
ever goes away.

"But back then I was different. I was never at peace. Now I've got peace in
my heart. Now I'm strong enough to beat it back."

Smith is the kind of guy who's hard to spot in ZIP code 28202.

During the day, you can walk through uptown Charlotte and pick out the
double-Jaguared bankers. At night, you can look in the corners and find the
homeless men who can't scratch up a dollar.

The heart of any big city draws those extremes. But even here, most people
live in the in-betweens. And guys like Stewart Smith quietly reassemble
their lives.

Except for the first few days in detox, Smith has spent the last year at
the Rescue Mission.

The old building crouches at the edge of Third Ward's fresh condos, just
down from the Carolina Panthers' practice fields. The mission takes in the
homeless and the addicted, giving them food and therapy and job training
and the Bible.

"We have a lot of people come in and out," says Colleen Klintworth of the
mission. "Seeing somebody like Stewart get so far reminds us why we got
into this field in the first place."

Smith is 45 and was on some sort of drugs for 31 years. He carries a pack
of smokes in his shirt pocket, blurry tattoos on his arms, a sizing-you-up
squint in his eyes.

But his voice is calm and strong as he tells his story.

He grew up outside Columbia, the son of a preacher. When he was 9, somebody
told him that preachers' kids were supposed to be wild. That sounded good
to him. He smoked cigarettes for a few years. Then, at 13, he tried marijuana.

He smoked pot, kept a pint of Southern Comfort in his dresser drawer. He
smoked pot, worked in the back at a string of restaurants. He smoked pot,
got married and fathered two kids. He smoked pot.

"I worked the whole time," he says. "Actually, I always liked to work. But
I also needed to keep that money coming in."

Six years ago, a friend stopped by the restaurant where Smith was working.
The friend had a hunk of crack. Smith lit it up and took a draw.

There went 1996 to 2001.

Every payday, he cashed his check, got a motel room and used the rest of
his money to get high. Some weeks that money wasn't enough. It's a point of
pride to Smith that he never stole from family, only from friends.

His parents had divorced, and Smith was living with his dad. Both parents,
both stepparents, everybody knew what was going on. They tried to help, but
it didn't take.

The last night he got high was like all the others -- paycheck, motel room,
crack. But on this night, he scraped bottom. It was OK with him if he
lived, OK if he died. Either way.

The next morning he drove to his mom's to do some work on her house. When
he got there, his sister called. She talked to him one more time, said she
could get him in detox if he would go.

He's still not quite sure why. But this time he said yes.

He did the detox in Columbia and told his counselor he wasn't ready to go
back on the streets. She found him a spot in Charlotte at the rescue
mission. He went through the 90-day program, an extra 45-day session, then
moved to the halfway house next door in December.

He can stay as long as he wants because he's now a staff member -- he's
dispatcher for the delivery trucks at the Rescue Mission's thrift shop on
Albemarle Road.

He's not sure when he'll be ready to go out on his own for good. For now he
works, goes to recovery-group meetings, talks to his counselors, prays at
chapel.

"I'm 6-1, and I had been down to 140 pounds," he says. "Now I'm up to 173.
My relationship with God is better. My relationship with my family is
better. I'm just so grateful for the counselors here, for all the people
who reached down and pulled me up."

Those days since last Aug. 7 have gathered into something larger. But Smith
doesn't plan much of a celebration. A year is a lot to grasp for a mind
that spent so long living moment to moment.

Besides, he doesn't consider the one-year mark to be a big day.

"The big day was that first day, the day I decided to live," he says.
"Every other day is just leaned up against that one."