DEPRESSION, A REPRIEVE, AND NOW, JOB SKILLS

When he was in his prime in the early 1990's, Manny Rodriguez,
inspecting the underside of a car at his auto-repair shop, looked
just like another hard-working guy, earning a living in a rough part
of town.

But the repair shop, underneath the elevated J, M and Z subway line
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, served not just as his place of work, but
as his home - on the nights when he was lucky.

When he was unlucky, Mr. Rodriguez, now 41, slept on the avenues in
Brooklyn named for upstate cities - Rochester, Utica, Schenectady.

"It was very degrading," he said. "It was the rock bottom, the last
place a human being should ever go to."

The problem was that despite a well-paying job aligning chassis, Mr.
Rodriguez, a single man with two young daughters who lived with their
mothers, could never afford rent. He could barely even afford food.

Nearly all his money went to support his cocaine habit, which later
took a turn for the worse when he developed an addiction to crack.
For a year and a half, he slept on the streets and spent his earnings
on gallon jugs of wine and on the two to three packs of cigarettes a
day he smoked. But most of it went to crack, which he bought from men
on a corner of Linden Boulevard. "That nearly sent me to death," he
said.

But Mr. Rodriguez's life changed dramatically one morning in a
friend's apartment when he says he felt the hand of Christ helping
him. "I said, `Jesus, please help me, I don't want to die,' " he
said. "In that minute, it was like all the addictions stopped. I
never felt anxiety again for the drugs."

After that day, he said, he stopped taking drugs. But he began to
face another problem. He developed eczema, a skin condition marked by
itchy white scales and blisters. He had it on his face, his forearms,
his legs and his feet. The grease and grime of the job made his
condition worse. "Being a mechanic is so dirty," he said. "I couldn't
concentrate because of the rash."

So he quit, and searched for a cleaner job. He found one - the
graveyard shift at a photo development lab on 42nd Street near Grand
Central Terminal. But Mr. Rodriguez, who now keeps his auto repair
tools in an exalted place in his bedroom, was not satisfied with the
work. "God gave me a gift," he said. "When I was young, I learned how
to work on cars. I can say that I am an expert in chassis alignment."

With a painful skin condition and a job he disliked, Mr. Rodriguez
became depressed, and his weight swelled to more than 400 pounds. He
lived where he lives now, in a room down the hall from a communal
kitchen on the top floor of a walk-up in Weeksville, Brooklyn. "My
skin was like scales, chunks would fall to the floor," he said. "My
room, at the time, expelled an odor of decaying flesh."

One morning at the photo lab, he threw the cardboard picture mat in
his hands against the wall in disgust. On the subway ride home that
morning, he resolved to kill himself. He was going to throw himself
in front of a train. He prayed, asking God whether he was going to do
the right thing, and then something happened that he describes as a
miracle. "Right then, my beeper went off," he recalled. "It was my
daughter."

He called his daughter Tricia, 7, when he got out of the subway
station. "Her first words were `Papi, I love you,' " he said,
recalling that he began to cry. "That made me strong. I thought,
`What am I doing? I have a family.' "

He quit his job at the photo lab, and sought medical attention for
his depression and his eczema. In April he also sought help in
getting a job from the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of
the seven local charities supported by The New York Times Neediest
Cases Fund.

The agency enrolled him in a program it runs called Pride 2000, which
helps unemployed men and women learn office skills, present a
successful image during a job interview, create a resume and find
work.

A case worker, Miriam Ramos, noticing that Mr. Rodriguez did not have
presentable clothing, took him shopping for large-size clothes he
could wear to a job interview. The agency paid $200 for the clothes
with money from the fund.

Mr. Rodriguez uses the computer at the agency's office to draw
elaborate architectural renderings of houses and office buildings.
"Maybe I have more things inside of me that I have to discover," he
said.