Transitions

Is it me?

Ten years after a brain injury and six months into a new career, Denith Harrigan awaits his first home sale.

[Times photo: Cherie Diez]

Denith Harrigan takes in the view as he and other agents viewed a condo listing last Monday.

[Times photo: Cherie Diez]

R.W. Caldwell real estate agents Ricka Nassikas, from left, Patty Carter, Denith Harrigan, Nelda Hamm and Desi Caldwell McCarthy ride an elevator up to view a condo listing.

ST. PETERSBURG - Quite often, when he is talking to someone for the first time, Denith Harrigan will interrupt the conversation to say, "Excuse me, I have a speech impediment."

This isn't a detail likely to have escaped people's notice. Harrigan talks intelligibly, but with the kind of slack-muscle slur one associates with stroke victims.

Of course, it's one thing for him to mention this disability during a relaxed encounter at the park, as part of the story about his motorcycle accident 10 years ago when he was in the Air Force in Texas, how the van turned in front of him, how he was unconscious for months, how few people expected him to recover.

But it's quite another thing for Harrigan to find a graceful way to weave it into a sales pitch with a prospective real estate customer.

He has handed out more than a thousand business cards. He visits several new listings every Monday. He has even shown a few houses to people.

But six months after he earned his license to sell property in Florida, Harrigan has not sold his first house. The only money he has made in real estate is the occasional $5 from the business card drawing at the weekly sales meeting.

Many other people, for reasons of ego or income, would have quit by now. Harrigan says he is not worried.

"I know I'm going to be successful," Harrigan, 32, said. "Quitting is not in my vocabulary."

People love this confidence. It's what makes them want to help him achieve success in a field in which most people fail. But his confidence sometimes comes off as arrogance, a belief that he doesn't have to do things the way everyone else does.

The longer he goes without a sale, however, the less people's desire for a happy ending will matter. Pretty soon the business world will demand an objective measure of success.

Before too long, Harrigan is going to have to figure out if it's his disability holding him back or if it's him.

Harrigan's most obvious injuries after the accident in May 1993 were to his left hand, which was nearly severed, and serious fractures of his elbow and shoulder. But by far the most dangerous injury was hidden inside his head.

He had been wearing his helmet, but the force of the collision had sheared many of the nerve fibers that interconnect the major centers of his brain. Studies have shown that as many 87 percent of patients with brain injuries as severe as Harrigan's die or remain in a persistent vegetative state.

But Harrigan began to show improvement after several weeks. Even in the dry diagnostic language of his medical file, it is possible to hear the doctor's amazement.

"He was actually witnessed to have written his name," one doctor wrote.

Doctors transferred him from a hospital in Texas to the James A. Haley VA Medical Center in in north Tampa. After months of continued improvement there, his doctors decided his recovery would benefit by being closer to his family in Connecticut.

The injury and the ensuing coma wiped out nearly two years of memories before the accident, including his wedding day in June 1991.

"I was like a 23-year-old kid. I had to relearn how to talk, how to walk," Harrigan said. "I couldn't tell when I was hot or cold. I couldn't smell. I couldn't tell if I was hungry. I had to write it down to remind myself to eat."

A year passed before he was able to walk without assistance. To practice his speech, he would read aloud to himself, Makes Me Wanna Holler, by Nathan McCall and I Make My Own Rules, the autobiography of hip-hop singer LL Cool J.

By 1995, he had progressed to the point that he enrolled in a local community college as part of a vocational rehabilitation program run by Easter Seals.

"What he's overcome already has been awesome," Dr. Barbara Rhein, a cognitive educational therapist, said in a story about Harrigan in an Easter Seals publication. "But the cognitive part is harder. He has to come to some resolution about what would constitute success for him."

He had toyed with the idea of accounting, even taking some classes and doing internships at different offices, but he didn't want to spend the time it would take to become a certified public accountant.

Mapping out his future became even more difficult when his marriage failed.

"One day my wife told me she didn't love me anymore," he said. "It ripped my heart out."

But once they were divorced, there was little keeping him in Connecticut and the prospect of another New England winter made him despondent. In 1997, he moved to Florida, a state in which he had no friends or relatives and where he had spent most of his time unconscious.

He has changed since he came to Florida.

Harrigan would say the most important change is that he became a devout Christian. He came to look at the date of his accident as his second birthday.

"I was resurrected, not as I was," he said, "but as he wants me to be."

He changed the way he looks.

He still walks with a slight limp, and he cradles his left arm. The bent fingers of his left hand are so splayed they look like they're trying to escape one another. But he has the biceps of someone who spends hours a day on a weight machine. His closet is full of old clothes, tweed jackets and corduroy pants that are 5 inches too big in the waist.

He has a ponytail, two studs in his left ear and a toe ring he likes to show off by wearing sandals. Sometimes, he'll pull up the cuff of his trousers to reveal his ankle bracelet, saying playfully, "Oh, behave!"

For all the change, however, some things remained unresolved, namely he never found that career he said he wanted.

Harrigan doesn't have to work. Between his check from the Air Force and his disability check from Social Security, he receives about $2,000 a month. It's enough to pay the mortgage on his sparely furnished home in Lakewood Estates and put gas in his white Jeep.

When he has needed extra cash for purchases such as the Bowflex exercise machine in his Florida room he has delivered pizzas and worked at a discount store. But they weren't jobs for the long term.

"I wanted to be a productive member of society," he said.

About a year ago, Harrigan met a man in Bay Vista park, which is not far from his house. Gerry Horah, who is 62, is a real estate person and has come to trust his instincts about people.

"He's smart," Horah said. "He's got that demeanor people like." Also, he detected something in Harrigan he calls a "positive arrogance."

"Which I like," Horah said, "because if you don't like you, who does?" And this quality, along with Harrigan's background in accounting, led Horah to suggest Harrigan become a real estate person himself.

"What could it hurt?" Harrigan said.

With money from a friend in Connecticut, Harrigan enrolled in a local real estate school in December. Two months later he took the test for his license.

"I failed by two points," he said.

More than half of the people who take the test fail it the first time. But Harrigan couldn't explain why he was among them, so he paid another $45.50 to take the test again.

"I failed again," he said. "I asked myself: "I've read the book diligently, meticulously. Why am I not passing this test?' "

He asked God what he should do. God told him to spend another $45.50.

"This time I passed."

Not long after, he signed on as a salesman with R.W. Caldwell Realtors, a longstanding agency in Gulfport run by Poul and April Hornsleth.

The Hornsleths met at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s where they absorbed much of their generation's idealism. But their fathers were each prominent in the business world. So they came to believe that capitalism and social justice are not incompatible, hence their recent award from the local NAACP for "outstanding commitment to civil rights."

Denith Harrigan is the kind of underdog challenge that they have devoted their lives to.

"Here was a very bright man, who had served his country in the Air Force, who had persevered despite his impediments," Poul Hornsleth said. "He was eager to be given a chance. And I was happy to give him that opportunity."

They helped him with the cost of his business cards, his membership with the Board of Realtors. The Department of Veterans Affairs kicked in some money for the special key he needs to access houses for sale. For his part, Harrigan took short courses at the Pinellas Realtor Organization to fine-tune his sales skills.

But weeks turned into months, and Harrigan had nothing to show for his efforts. As an independent contractor he is paid only if he sells a house.

Hornsleth thinks there's more than inexperience at work here.

"People have not been able to get beyond the handicap to give him the chance he deserves," he said. "Denith has a lot of friends, and I understand he's active in his church. I'm hoping they'll give him a chance to serve them."

But Harrigan's difficulties selling homes may have as much to do with his own behavior as with the public's prejudices.

Harrigan isn't going to church anymore. He says he doesn't like listening to people who don't share his interpretation of the Bible.

Though he can be friendly and often funny, Harrigan admits, "I have very few friends. I choose not to go out. I know what is out in the world."

And he doesn't take rejection quite as well as he might. Hornsleth once suggested he write a note to a man who had said he wasn't interested in Harrigan's real estate help.

"I told Poul I'm not going to kiss somebody's a-," Harrigan says. "I have dignity. I'm a man."

Dignity, yes. A closing date, no.

Harrigan went to his 21st consecutive sales meeting last week.

The 14 other salespeople vied for the floor to talk about price reductions on homes that were lingering unsold. But Harrigan sat quietly in the corner.

When April Hornsleth asked for new listings to put on the board, Harrigan had none to contribute.

After the meeting, he and a handful of other Realtors toured a couple of properties that had been newly listed with Caldwell. The caravan helps familiarize the agents with what's available out there. ("Unseen and untold is unsold," Poul Hornsleth likes to say.)

Periodically during the tour, agents would peel off for cell phone calls with customers. Harrigan's never rang.

When they got back to the office, the agents jotted down notes about the properties, giving their impressions of the houses and the price they think it ought to be listed at.

Harrigan wrote, "Very nice!" about a condo overlooking the Sunshine Skyway and "No comment" concerning one that had a lime paint job he didn't like and a distinct odor of cats. Ted Graham, the agent who had introduced Harrigan to Caldwell, wrote "need to deodorize, but good potential" on his sheet.

"I'm a novice," Harrigan said when asked why he didn't offer more detail. "I'm not sure how much my opinion is valued."

Harrigan doesn't know when he will sell his first house.

"I've done my part," he says. "I have gone to school. I have passed the test. I have handed my cards out. I would like to be out there showing houses now, but it's not going to happen until it's God's will."

Without getting into a debate about free will and predestination, it's unclear whether God chooses to involve himself in each of the universe's real estate transactions. Perhaps more immediately crucial to Harrigan's fate as a Realtor is the support of the Hornsleths. And though it pains them to say it, they know they cannot carry him indefinitely.

"I look for an agent who averages about a sale a month. I need production from that position," Poul Hornsleth said. "There could be a time when he might want to try something else. But right now he wants to be successful. And that would mean a lot to me."

Later in the day after the sales meeting, Harrigan went to the park and handed out some business cards. Then he came home and waited for the phone to ring.

"Transitions" is an occasional series exploring turning points in people's lives. The stories - a judge's investiture ceremony, a salesman making his first call after months of unemployment - focus on those decisive moments when lives change, sometimes for better, sometimes not. If you would like to suggest subjects for future stories, please call Bill Duryea at 727 893-8457 or e-mail him at duryea@sptimes.com

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