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During most of the '80s, Joey was in and out of prison. He was arrested for auto theft in 1983. Let out in 1984, he kept violating parole because of his drug habit, and the state kept sending him back to prison. When he was free, Joey would work at various jobs, and from Friday night through Sunday night embark on sleepless, drug-fueled nightclub runs. By then, he knew in his heart he was HIV-positive. But he was too afraid to get tested.
When Julio died of AIDS in 1986, Julio's wife had Joey evicted from the house he and Julio had shared. "She showed up with some lawyers and a 30-day notice," he says. "And I had decorated that place."
Joey was yanked from the closest thing he'd had to a stable life. "All my friends were Julio's friends," he says. "I had no home. Only memories. I was scared. I knew I had it [HIV], and I didn't want to test. I was denying it."
Joey did one more parole-violation stint in 1987 and was released that year. He also finally got tested, which confirmed what he'd known to be true for years: He was infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.
Joey was at rock bottom, an ex-con with HIV and nowhere to live. "You go through a lot when you learn you are positive," Joey says, sipping a coffee at the Pendragon Cafe at Gough and Hayes. "You think, 'My life is over.' Then there's the fear of what's coming."
With no tethers to San Francisco -- only bad memories -- Joey left for San Diego. His parole officer there referred him to the AIDS Assistance Fund, and for the first time he got hooked up with a nonprofit service provider for people with AIDS. The Assistance Fund referred Joey to a nonprofit housing program, Truax House, where he gave up a portion of his welfare check for rent and Truax House made up the difference. After six months he became the night manager. "By being around other people with AIDS and volunteering I learned it was necessary to keep a positive attitude," he says.
Truax House overlooked the San Diego airport. Every morning at sunrise Joey would take the newspaper and a cup of coffee out on the balcony and watch the planes stack up and circle the field. In these moments, he says, he found a peace he had rarely known. "That was my therapy," he says.
In 1990, Joey was diagnosed with AIDS. His life was falling together, but his body had begun to fall apart. He came down with AIDS wasting syndrome and dropped from 265 pounds to 127 pounds.
At first, Joey was denied Supplemental Security Income (SSI). But he reapplied successfully with help from a pro bono legal assistance firm in the San Fernando Valley that helps homeless people with AIDS.
Though he had stopped shooting crystal meth, he still needed to deal with the recurrent cravings and emotional turbulence that had always led him back to the needle. He moved to Los Angeles and checked into a residential treatment center called Our House, which specializes in people with AIDS.
After four months, Joey moved to the Antelope Valley town of Little Rock with some people he had met in L.A. He wanted to get away from big-city temptations. He reunited with a son, the product of a short-lived teen marriage, he'd allowed to drift away in the 1970s.
Living on a 12-acre ranch, he learned to replace the tubes on big-screen television sets from an elderly man he had moved in with. He spent his days playing with the dozen or so dogs that lived on the ranch, recovering from wasting syndrome, and establishing a relationship with his son.
But in 1994, bad luck, as is its wont with Joey, intervened.
One of the people he was living with sold his porn film distributorship to a man in San Francisco. Joey and his friend agreed to teach the new owner the ropes of selling skin flicks at flea markets and corner stores. Riding around in a car lent by the new owner, Joey was stopped by the Oakland Police. The car was stolen, and Joey was found guilty of auto theft a second time. He was sentenced to two years in San Quentin.
Released on parole in 1995, Joey started skidding toward his old habits. He struck up a relationship with a heroin addict and moved into a warehouse space in West Oakland. In May 1996, he was mugged. The beating served as one more wake-up call for Joey. He left the junkie and moved to San Francisco in June.
In July of last year, he stopped in at S.F. General's Ward 86, the health provider of last resort for indigent people with AIDS. He was in tears, lost and alone, and suffering from a gash in the side of his head from the mugging. He met Laura Strauss, a fast-talking, no-nonsense physician's assistant. She started him on a regimen of d4T and 3TC.
Without a place to go, he turned to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which found him housing. "I had nowhere else to stay," he says. "What was I supposed to do, live in a shelter?"
One Wednesday last summer, he went to the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center (TARC) to meet someone from Volunteers of America who helps parolees find the services they need.
There he also met Brenda Goldhammer, a case manager from TARC who set him up in more permanent housing at another hotel in Hayes Valley, where he moved last August. Goldhammer also referred Joey to mental health counselors and a program that delivers a nutritional supplement to his house to forestall AIDS wasting syndrome.
