At the Drake Hotel, site of the New Horizons Transitional Housing Program for those recovering from addiction and incarceration, people are eager to change their lives.
Thomas Kaina shows up to the Drake’s weekly meetings, even though he graduated from the program and moved out 3 years ago. “It’s like charging up your phone,” he said. “It needs to be charged.”
Thomas’s father passed away when he was four, and he grew up living with his heroin-addicted mother in the Cecil Williams Glide Community House. His early life is a blur to him, and, of what he remembers, he prefers to direct his focus elsewhere. “I was a youngster, I don’t really remember… juvenile home, juvenile home.”
But he knows he was in jail for half of his life, kicked out of youth authority at 17 and sent to prison for long stretches. He remembers walking past Glide Memorial Church at 15 or 16 and someone saying, “Hey man, you want to get off the streets? Why don’t you come volunteer? Get your mind off the negativity?” And he remembers a fellow inmate refusing to let him kick off a riot: “your mother is sick. You go home. You spend the rest of the time with your mama.”
Thomas did get to go home to his mother before she died. “Right now she’s looking down on me like ‘you did it.’”
“Richard was the one that guided me,” said Thomas. Richard Beal, Director of Recovery Services for Tenderloin Housing Clinic and former addict himself, oversees the New Horizons program.
Every week, the men at the Drake gather to check in with one another. They go around and talk about their upcoming plans, achievements, and aspirations. At one of those meetings I met William Benton.
William is a numbers person. “126 shots in the first 2 years of shooting,” he told me, about the beginning of his ecstasy addiction. William is also a sensitive, deliberate soul. He likes to do things the right way and hates to get in trouble. But the drug habit he developed in high school, after his mother died of a chemotherapy overdose, often got him in trouble.
Still, William got married, had two kids, and worked as a carpenter for his whole life. He and his wife split up very amiably, one of them taking the kids for a time while the other “sorted things out” and vice versa, neither speaking badly about the other. The divorce, he said, “was one of the proudest moments of my life. The judge said it was very refreshing.”
In 2017, William came back to the Bay Area after living in Colorado with his kids. He became a resident manager in Chinatown. As a kindergartener William had been among the first four kids to attend the Chinese American International School, the first Mandarin immersion school in the US, and in this job “I finally got to use my language.” (His mother was Chinese, and his father was Black).
But he lost the resident manager job and his housing after an extended trip to Colorado, and became homeless. It was shortly after that that he found the Drake hotel.
“Today’s the 24th, right? Today is two years. Two years since I am clean.”
“It’s the feeling of being free of something that just… got ahold of you.”
Unlike Thomas, who seems to have shaken off his early life in order to forge into his new one, William is fragile about his past, almost as though the wounds are fresh.
“I’m still processing all of it. I’m still processing my mom’s death.” He said quietly, “You know, what if they hadn’t given her too much of the chemotherapy…”
But Thomas and William have one thing in common: they are in love with life. Both talk about their hobbies as their saviors, with dreamy passion…
“Mannnn,” said Thomas, telling me about what it’s like to bike up the Embarcadero and along the Marina with his biking friends. William carries his electric guitar and amplifier to the Drake meetings, just to hold them, and sleeps with the guitar in his bed.
“From a classical standpoint I’m completely… illiterate. Lost. But I’ve been able to hear what key, what chords… I can’t tell you how rewarding it’s been to sit here with a guitar and play a song that’s on the radio and sing the lyrics… in my own way, you know?”
Along with fellow Drake resident, Robin Jackson, and three other friends, William performed a gig on New Years Eve at Cole Valley Tavern. And this morning, he was strolling around Boeddeker park, guitar on his waist, strumming “Wonderwall” (Oasis) and “Island in the Sun” (Wheezer) and “Don’t Stop Believing” (Journey).
The New Horizons program has allowed these men to start truly living and wondering what more is possible for them. “It gave me the knowledge to keep pushing forward,” said Thomas.
Julia Zrihen is writing a series of profiles about SRO tenants
