Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993 TAG: 9312050078
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GORDON DILLOW LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
He was living on the streets then, sleeping in a cardboard box and planning no further ahead than his next bowl of crack, his next bottle of cheap wine. After eight years on the Row, he had become one of those apparently hopeless cases.
Orlando Lee had pretty much given himself up for dead.
What saved him was the love of his little girl - his love for her, and her love for him - and a tough, no-nonsense "restoration and re-entry" program run by a local church.
Now, two years after he picked himself up from a Skid Row sidewalk for the last time, Lee has a job and a home and a future. And in what social service workers acknowledge is a startling accomplishment for a man with his background, he also recently was awarded sole custody of his 3-year-old daughter, Danielle, a daughter born into the squalor of Skid Row.
"If it hadn't been for my daughter, I'd probably still be down there," says Lee, 36, who spent months in parenting and literacy classes to win his child back. "She's the reason I turned around. Now I'm sitting in my house - a real house, not a cardboard house - and I've got a job, and I'm watching my daughter grow up. It's a joyful thing."
"Mr. Lee has accomplished what he has through a lot of guts and effort," says Jeff Murphy, a Los Angeles County Department of Children's Services social worker who has monitored Lee's efforts to gain custody of his daughter. "Unfortunately, we don't see enough success stories like this. What he's done should be an inspiration to a lot of people."
"We're very proud of him," says John Hopkins, pastor of the Truevine of Lynwood Missionary Baptist Church, which operates a program that helped Lee get himself turned around. "He's an example of what can be accomplished with men like him."
A Los Angeles native, Lee grew up in South Los Angeles. He dropped out of high school in the 12th grade, got married at 21, had two sons, and was working as a food preparer for a catering company. But somehow things started going wrong.
"I was starting hanging out, drinking, smoking weed," Lee remembers. "That was when crack started getting popular, and I started doing that. I was getting lazy, missing work, making excuses. I lost my catering company job, and got a part-time job as a cook at a child-care center . . . but I lost that job, too.
"I left my home and my wife and my kids. I was going down, down. People in the neighborhood were talking bad about me, talking me down. Then this friend of mine said, `Hey, let's go downtown.' I wanted to go, because downtown nobody cares what you look like, or what you wear, or what you do."
That was in 1984. Lee would spend the next eight years on the Row, picking up a little money unloading trucks in the warehouse district or working in a liquor store, but mostly living on his county general relief check - at the time, a little more than $300 a month.
He met a young woman and started living with her - and using drugs and drinking with her. When she got pregnant, he says, she quit drugs until Danielle was born - Sept. 10, 1990. He and the baby's mother would pool their relief checks and get a room in a $9-a-night hotel for a week or so, but most of the money went for drugs. When the money ran out, they'd be out on the streets with their baby, living in a cardboard box.
Living on the streets with a new baby, and readily available drugs and alcohol, did not make for a stable relationship between Lee and the baby's mother. There were arguments and fights, and Lee did some jail time for spousal abuse - six months one time, three months another. The baby was often dropped off at her maternal grandmother's house for days or weeks while Lee and the baby's mother got high.
One day several years ago, a friend of Lee's nicknamed Crazy Charlie told him about the True-vine church in nearby Lynwood, which was operating a feeding program for Skid Row down-and-outers. Every Sunday, the church bus would make a run down to Skid Row and bring a full bus back for a sermon and a hot meal.
"When Crazy Charlie said there was a meal in it, that got me," Lee remembers. "I started coming down. I'd sit through the service, waiting for the meal; and then after the meal, it was like, `I'm full, take me back downtown.' "
Perhaps providentially, the Truevine church bus was there when Lee hit bottom. He remembers waking up on the sidewalk after a crack-and-cheap-wine binge - dirty, hung over, feeling sick at heart and sick in body. It was November 1991.
"I was at my rock bottom," Lee says. "That was it. I knew I had to change my life, or my life was going to be over. Then I saw the Truevine bus come by, and I flagged it down and said, `I need help.' "
Since 1988, the Truevine church has operated a program called Truevine Community Outreach Transitional Program for Men, which puts alcohol- and drug-addicted men in a highly disciplined group-home environment.
Lee signed the papers agreeing to abide by the program rules and moved into one of the residence houses. He didn't tell anyone back on Skid Row where he was, because he didn't want to be embarrassed when he failed in the program. He simply assumed that he would fail. His years on the Row hadn't prepared him for anything else.
"I had the shakes for two weeks," Lee remembers. "But then after a couple of weeks in the home, I wasn't shaking any more. It was hard, but I stuck with it. I knew I had to stick with it."
Lee has a full-time job now, at a cosmetics factory, but eventually he wants to become a chef. While he's at work, Danielle goes to a day-care center - where, the proud father says, "She's at the head of her class."
Lee has a few regrets, mostly about not being around to be a father to his two sons from his first marriage; he's trying to re-establish his relationship with them.
For Orlando and Danielle Lee, the future now looks bright. And although he knows it's a never-ending journey, a day-by-day and step-by-step process, Lee knows that he has finally escaped the life he led on Skid Row.
"When you're down there getting high, you've got no worries, no bills, no responsibilities," Lee says. "Now I've got all of those things - worries, responsibilities, bills."
Lee smiles and says, "And I'm loving it."
by CNB