Debbie Wilson's refuge isn't listed in the phone book. It gets no government money. But in her North Tampa boarding house, people try to overcome together what they can't seem to beat alone. There are no declarations of victory, only progress she counts in "baby steps."
By RON MATUS
Published November 27, 2003
[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]
Sarah, a 20-year-old adult dancer, plants a kiss on Debbie Wilson’s head. Although they are not related, she calls Debbie “Mom.” Go to photo gallery
TAMPA - Today, Cody wants fried okra. Sarah is thinking pumpkin pie.
Rich will carve the turkey, if his strength holds up. Mike might scrape plates, if the holiday blues don't sink him.
Maybe John won't get high. He'll watch football on the couch, next to the dog, heroic Harley, and Brittany will beam her smile through the dim rooms and cigarette smoke.
Tom might drop by for conversation about the cosmos, if he's still out of jail.
And then the phone will ring, long distance from North Carolina. Everyone will huddle for news of Debbie's week-old grandbaby, born at Fort Bragg, the daughter of a soldier in Iraq. They have long since memorized her name: Finn.
It could happen. Thanksgiving in this North Tampa boarding house could unfold as it does in other people's homes - with good food, laughter and peace.
Peace, not fainting spells or crack pipes or another lost job. No desperate quarts of beer, guzzled in secret so people who care won't cry.
Today, especially, Debbie Wilson is counting on peace.
In January 2001, she bought a 1,700-square-foot house in a middle-class neighborhood off Bearss Avenue. Right away, it became a refuge. She keeps four to eight boarders at a time - teen-agers with parent issues, recovering drug addicts, men wasting of chronic disease. For $100 a week, and more often for nothing, they get clean beds, home-cooked meals and a family.
"I don't take care of the easy ones," says Debbie, once homecoming queen at Chamberlain High School. "Those aren't the ones God sends me."
She calls her sanctuary Home Away From Home.
It isn't listed in the phone book. It gets no government money. People simply learn of it from others.
One boarder thinks he's a reincarnated dolphin. Another outlives a grim prognosis from his doctor. A third steals Debbie's pain pills, though she needs them to tame her own demons.
Years ago, when her life toppled over, Debbie learned the power of baby steps. Day after day, she pushes, pulls, cries, rails, hugs - whatever it takes to get her charges back on their feet.
If they stumble again, she picks them up, again.
They need her, and in a way she needs them, too, needs them to make sense of her own struggles.
This Thanksgiving, she can't be here. Her son-in-law leads an Army platoon. Her daughter might have faced childbirth alone.
"Don't worry," the boarders began promising months ago, in the middle of a summer that seemed especially hard.
"We'll be fine," they assured her.
Debbie wants to believe they'll all be okay.
Even Tom.
* * *
The Dolphin has slipped away.
His real name is Tom Almond, but at night, in his dreams, he finds water and fins. Others have seen his feet in bed, rhythmically moving together.
Years ago, doctors diagnosed him as delusional. Now they're exploring his multiple personalities.
Those around him also worry about his use of crack cocaine.
It is the end of May and he has come into money, a $40,000 settlement paid out after he hurt his back in a car crash delivering pizzas. He has vanished into a neighborhood of transients and drug holes.
"I'm real scared," Debbie says. "He was flashing money in the ghetto. That's a good way to get killed."
Tom, 40, moved into her place in the spring. He was living with his mother a few doors down when he first met Debbie outside the boarding house one morning at 3 a.m. She was planting flowers, and he was walking his dogs. She made tea but ran out of sugar, so Tom went home for more.
He kept finding reasons to come back.
Now he's gone.
Debbie, her 17-year-old son Cody and some of the housemates scour the dark side of North Tampa for Tom's weathered red Chevette. They cruise motels on Nebraska Avenue, drug houses near 22nd Street.
They find only rumors.
Tom is on a binge, they hear. He's handing $20 bills to random strangers.
The next night, Debbie heads out at 10 with a heroin addict, a friend of Tom's, to continue the search. After midnight, they pull into the driveway of a bare brick house near Fletcher Avenue and 15th Street, the kind of place where figures peer from shadows, looking for signals from passing cars.
Tom's dealer might be here, Debbie thinks.
She waits in the car, all 5 feet 2 and 115 pounds of her, blonde and blue-eyed, while a man rides up on a bicycle. He talks to Tom's friend in Spanish.
No, the dealer says. No Tom.
Debbie calls police to file a missing persons report. She fears the worst.
* * *
When she tells her own story, her voice is sober with a tinge of betrayal.
It was 14 years ago, the summer of 1989. Debbie was nearly 36. Cody, the youngest of her three children, needed a diaper change, so she went hunting for a wet paper towel at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Attalla, Ala.
She was a part-time law student who had just taken a job as a drug abuse counselor. She lived outside Birmingham and was married to a man who sold swimming pools. He had business near Attalla. Debbie, Cody and her daughter Summer went along for the ride.
Debbie never saw the 1972 Ford pickup backing up in the parking lot, or the 16-year-old boy behind the wheel. Not until it was too late.
The tailgate slammed into her face.
The back of her skull smacked the asphalt.
Debbie, in a pool of blood, faded in and out of consciousness as a priest performed last rites.
"God, keep me alive, so I can raise my little boy," she remembers praying.
Doctors in a small-town emergency room kept her only eight hours before releasing her and telling her she would be fine.
But her brain had been brutally shaken.
A few weeks later, friends and family worried that Debbie was having a nervous breakdown: She couldn't fold towels. She couldn't tie shoes. Her memory shot, she began leaving sticky notes everywhere. "Brush teeth," the notes reminded her. "Turn off coffee pot."
She resisted more medical care until, finally, her husband and a co-worker sedated her with sleeping pills to get her admitted to a psychiatric ward, she says. Two weeks later, after a battery of tests, a doctor concluded Debbie was not mentally ill.
She had suffered brain damage.
She would realize, in time, just what that meant.
Gone was the invincible Debbie, the girl voted "best all around" at Chamberlain High, the cheerleader for Jacksonville State University, the woman who juggled a family, a career and law school.
In her place was someone who had to relearn how to pick up the telephone and say "hello" at the same time. A stranger called her "retarded" for forgetting how to write a check at the grocery store.
At work, she could no longer remember the simplest of tasks.
Her boss told her: "You're useless to me."
And things were going to get worse.
* * *
On June 30, Tom calls. He wants to come home.
He's in jail.
Temple Terrace police have found him and two others at a local motel, allegedly with marijuana and cocaine in the room. Tom is charged with possession.
Two days later, Debbie calls a house meeting. In the kitchen, everyone stands as she fills plastic cups with ice and Kool-Aid. Cheese ravioli boils on the stove. Garlic bread crisps in the oven. Hot butter overpowers the clingy smell of cigarette smoke.
"Okay, here's the deal," she begins.
With a steady voice, she describes Tom's plight, then waits for the response. The residents already know the question: Do they want Tom back?
Cody speaks first.
"As long as he stays clean and somebody keeps an eye on him," Cody says.
This house is an enlightened dictatorship, not a democracy, but John appears to second the motion. "I'm all right with it," he says.
A Robin Williams movie, Death to Smoochy, plays on the TV, but no one laughs. The discussion continues, serious.
As long as Tom pays the $800 he owes Debbie, it's all right, says Mike, who had shared a room with Tom.
Other residents nod.
Ten minutes later, all but Cody walk away.
Debbie lights a cigarette.
"Tom is a big responsibility," she tells Cody. "And heaven knows how much more mental issues he has from the past month."
They both know Tom pretty well.
He once filled his brain with books: the campy science fiction of Douglas Adams, the spiritual exploration of William James. Now he gorges on mind-wobbling nitrous oxide, converses with his dead father and assumes a fake British accent.
They know Tom has the number "666" tattooed on the back of his head.
Maybe his return isn't a good idea, Cody says. There are other places Tom could go.
"And they'll take care of him like we do?" Debbie asks.
Cody doesn't speak.
They both know the answer.
Column
The boarding house is a storm's eye. Weathered lives wash up like driftwood.
There's Mike Holt, 60, a retired optician dying of lung disease. He tells people he was once held hostage in a locked room at a public housing complex. For months, he says, a girlfriend forced him to cash his disability checks so she and her friends could score drugs.
He was Debbie's first boarder. They met at an assisted living facility where she volunteered.
Debbie bought the three-bedroom house, in a residential neighborhood near Buchanan Middle School, intending to rent out rooms. In time, she converted the back porch and Florida room into sleeping areas.
The beds seemed to fill themselves.
Rich Maxson, 50, is a handyman and a former music teacher. His long face droops. His eyes suggest a nap. Years of alcohol abuse helped push his liver to the verge of collapse.
One day last fall, he was waiting in a hospital lobby for painkillers. He intended to down them all at once, with three quarts of Olde English malt liquor, to kill himself.
He noticed a woman across from him who kept nodding off.
The woman was Debbie, waiting with Mike, whose blood pressure had spiked.
She took Rich in.
"I wanted to die," he says. "Now I want to live."
Some of the boarders, afraid of losing jobs, won't share their whole stories or names.
A 20-year-old adult dancer lives here. They call her Sarah.
A truck driver named John, 44, fights to stay off cocaine. He says he used to smoke it with his son.
Others have come and gone.
Brittany, 14, moved in with her parents' permission, after tensions at home and sinking grades. A few months later, she made the honor roll. Debbie saw the report card.
Robbie Fisher, 20, consumed methamphetamines every day for years.
At Debbie's house, he stayed clean and found outlets for his energy. With her help, he sought justice for two out-of-state relatives he said had been molested by another family member. Meanwhile, he gardened feverishly, leaving Debbie with roses and elephant ears, cactus and hibiscus.
Here, among strangers, Cody grows up.
He is a young man who goes out of his way to say hello to homeless people.
Until a few months ago, he occasionally streaked wood glue through his hair to sculpt a foot-high mohawk. Now he talks about becoming a carpenter. Or maybe a radiologist.
His father, a sheriff's deputy in Alabama, died when Cody was 4.
Cody started calling everyone "Grampa" a few years later, when his mom and her third husband, the pool salesman, opened their Alabama home to recovering alcoholics. It was an early blueprint for Home Away from Home. After they divorced, Cody never saw much of his stepfather.
His graffiti-littered bedroom draws a steady stream of teens. Debbie asks them about school and work, and whether they're getting along better with parents. Here, nobody razzes them about haircuts or cigarettes, although, in the past, neighbors complained about loitering and trash. Debbie told the kids to be neat and polite, and they listened.
Cody and his friends often plug in guitars and turn the bedroom into a jam room.
Sometimes, the boarders join them.
Sarah sings. Rich plays bass. Tom soars on the piano.
"We're like a big Partridge family," Cody says. "But on drugs."
* * *
The man Debbie thinks deserves another chance emerges from Orient Road Jail on July 3 with a new tattoo on the back of his stubble-covered head: a skull with skeletal wings, flapping ear to ear. The logo on his shirt says "Contents Under Pressure."
"So there you are," Debbie says, offering Tom the slimmest of smiles.
He says hello, then asks, "Do you want to hear about my vision quest?"
Debbie has withdrawn $300 from her checking account to bail out Tom, but only after he agreed to give her power of attorney over the remnants of his settlement money. She was afraid he would continue to spend it on drugs.
On the way home, Tom is sullen.
"Do you think you'll have a problem coming back to a normal life?" Debbie asks.
"No," he says. "But I've never had a normal life."
At first, he denies he was on a binge. But when Debbie presses him, he concedes crack was part of his vision quest. So were sleep deprivation, random acts of kindness and a rented U-Haul. So were a nitrous oxide canister he called the Holy Grail and real people he dubbed The Reaper, William Tell and Andre the Black Giant.
As they pull into the driveway, Debbie tells Tom she called a house meeting to talk about him.
Tom doesn't ask. He stares out the window, at the yard where he met Debbie planting flowers in the middle of the night.
They want you back, Debbie says finally.
Tom responds softly.
"I was wondering about that."
* * *
Debbie's first crippling seizure came in December 1992, set in motion in the Alabama parking lot but triggered, she believes, by stress.
Cody, then 6, nearly choked on a piece of meat.
Her husband grabbed Cody.
Debbie lost consciousness, then woke up minutes later on the floor.
For a year, medicine had staved off milder seizures. They first appeared while Debbie slept, monitored, in the hospital psychiatric unit in 1989. Later, they came while she was awake, causing her to lose track of chunks of time.
But they had finally grown to full power.
Early on, there were as many as 50 a day, mostly small. Now, she has several a day, occasionally with blackouts.
She can tell the seizures are coming.
Her eyes glaze; her speech slurs; her stomach gets queasy. Confusion sets in.
Harley, a German shepherd trained to detect seizures, senses the shift in brain chemicals. He pins back his big ears and puts his head firmly in her lap. If others are around, he'll do the same to them, one by one, until he's satisfied Debbie will get help.
Cody calls Harley a miracle.
When Cody was 8, he learned to pierce the back of his Mom's thigh with a syringe and inject her with anti-seizure medicine.
Now Debbie takes pills that usually keep her from passing out. Her crash helmet and a soft rug are never far away. Since the seizures began, she has suffered a dozen concussions and has broken her hand twice.
Debbie shrugs off the seizures ("They're only a few minutes of my life," she says), but she also writes verses to the "Brain Monster."
His size is a little unclear, but he seems massive.
His shape is a little hazy, but overwhelming is the word that comes to mind.
The Brain Monster made law school impossible.
It cost her jobs.
It tagged along as she followed work and family between Florida and Alabama.
For a time, she was a felony probation officer at a Department of Corrections office in Tampa. She took up for the mentally ill, frustrated at delays in their therapy. When she complained to her boss, John Williamson, she usually started off with a smile.
"Then she'd get that look of determination in her eyes," Williamson says. "That look of, "I'm going to get this done.' "
But she couldn't carry a gun and supervise unstable offenders, when a seizure might paralyze her at any moment.
Instead, in the late 90s, she ran a fish camp in Alabama. Next she managed a restaurant on Busch Boulevard in Tampa.
Through it all, the Brain Monster never let go.
At the boarding house, she took in enough rent to pay her $806-a-month mortgage.
The seizures didn't matter so much. People were around to help.
In exchange, she gave them hope, though doctors held out little for her.
Debbie was rejected for surgery that might have eliminated her seizures.
Her brain was damaged in too many places.
* * *
Four days after Tom returns from jail, John is drunk.
It's after midnight, and he wants to pick up his $517 paycheck from Perkins, where he's a cook. Rich, the boarder with the failing liver, offers to drive, but he has also been drinking. Cody stops them.
"You drunks aren't driving," Cody says.
Tom steps up to the plate. He's not drunk.
Well, okay, Cody agrees.
Tom and John take Debbie's car, a teal-green Taurus with 158,000 miles, and promise to be right back.
At 1:30 p.m. the next day, Debbie is on the phone with police, filing a stolen-car report, when Tom walks in. She and Tom drive to the 131st Street apartment where John is holed up, inhaling his paycheck through a crack pipe. He comes outside to meet them.
You're supposed to be at work at 4, Debbie reminds him.
"Come home," she pleads.
John, stocky and sad-faced, shakes his head.
We'll get you cleaned up, Debbie promises. We'll get you ready for work.
She cries. She begs.
One little baby step, she thinks.
But today, it's no use.
The crack is more persuasive.
* * *
There are moments of less drama, ordinary mornings of coffee and evenings of supper.
Tom helps Cody write essays for school.
Debbie goes out on dates with guys she meets on the Internet.
Mike paints portraits, sometimes on the back of donut boxes. One is a self-portrait: him in the 1960s, a hippie flashing a peace sign. Another shows an angel, radiating light - inspired by Debbie, he says.
One day, Mike gets up first and makes coffee for everybody. In near darkness, he sets out cups and saucers, then leaves a note, silver ink on black paper. "Dear folks," it says. "I'm out back using the pool while the sun is low in the sky. Enjoy your morning coffee."
Sometimes the president of the neighborhood association drops by to see how Debbie and the boarders are doing. Last Christmas, he brought them a turkey.
In his room, Robbie feeds hibiscus flowers to his pet iguana, Zeus.
Debbie helps boarders fill out paperwork.
They take turns driving each other to appointments, usually in Debbie's car.
If the boarders aren't working, they fix up the house instead of paying rent.
Over the summer, Rich put down new tile in the kitchen. John and his son painted. They made the walls turquoise, to bring out the color in the Coca-Cola bottle prints on the otherwise red ceiling fans.
Birthdays mean cakes. Holidays mean family.
Last Thanksgiving, Debbie and Mike drove to a gas station where Cody knew homeless people hung out.
They found a man named Angel.
"Just standing there, kind of lost," Debbie says.
Angel, in his 60s, wasn't homeless but he was alone. He accepted their invitation.
Before supper, Debbie said grace.
After supper, Angel sang love songs in Spanish.
* * *
John returns home at 9:30 a.m. the day after he disappeared with Tom. He falls asleep on the couch. His clothes, neatly packed, wait in Debbie's car.
He's sure she's through with him.
Debbie has already called Perkins, trying to salvage John's job. But it's a no go.
That evening, John wakes up and sits across from Debbie at the kitchen table. It's his turn to cry.
Debbie relents. She thinks John is sincere. She thinks he is close to quitting drugs.
On her computer, she types out a "Contract for Living at Home Away From Home." It's written specifically for John.
No more alcohol. No more drugs. No more disrespectful references to Sarah's dancing job.
No picking up paychecks without Debbie.
No visiting your son without another resident.
"Realize that this contract is so you show me you are serious about straightening out your life," it says. "Also know this contract is being done because I love you enough to try and save you from your own self-destruction."
Violate the contract and you're out, it says.
* * *
Small victories give Debbie hope.
She had never left the boarders alone for more than a few hours, but over the summer her family has a reunion at St. Pete Beach.
For three days, the boarders cook and clean for themselves. They want to show Debbie they can handle it.
After John's binge, he stays clean. He gets his driver's license back, passes a drug test and eventually lands steady work with a dump truck company.
Mike cleans the pool. He was in hospice care when he met Debbie in early 2001. A doctor told him he had 6 to 9 months before emphysema and congestive heart failure would kill him.
One morning, Debbie pulls aside window blinds.
Outside, Mike is belly deep in sparkling water, his shirt off, hair a tangle, fingers pulling leaves from a dripping net.
"He's found the fountain of youth," Debbie marvels.
Another day, a letter arrives for Debbie.
It's from Robbie, the former boarder who landscaped her yard.
Debbie had helped him tell authorities about the sexual abuse in his family. She had helped him re-establish ties with his biological father.
The letter is a thank you.
You taught me things always happen for a reason, and we just learn by them, and no matter how bad, we will always be ok in the end.
I learned that people do things that hurt us, and we should just forgive them, and look at it as a lesson for both us, and not hold it in until we explode.
I learned a lot of things, like job skills, but the most important thing is that life is a gift, and there are people who care for you, when you don't care for yourself.
* * *
Just before midnight one night, Mike wakes up Debbie. Tom is on the phone.
He has been badly beaten by a man nicknamed Roach, who says Tom owes him $1,000. They're at a shopping plaza at Fletcher Avenue and 15th Street.
When Debbie gets on the phone, Roach intervenes.
"You bring me $1,000 cash or I'm going to kill this guy," she remembers him telling her.
Her response: "Buddy, use your brain."
Where could she get $1,000 at midnight, she asks. Roach suggests she cash a check at a nearby Amscot.
A Hillsborough County sheriff's deputy pulls in the shopping center just ahead of her, answering a call about men fighting. Debbie slows as she passes him and mouths the words, "Watch me."
Seconds later, Roach emerges from the shadows. Tom is behind him, face swollen, shirt torn.
Roach repeats his demands.
Minutes later, he is under arrest, charged with extortion and battery.
Paramedics take Tom to the hospital. They suspect his jaw is broken.
By 11 a.m., he is ready to come home.
While Cody and Rich drive to get him, Debbie calls the bondsman. She knows Tom has violated the conditions of his release from jail by disappearing.
Back at home, Tom doesn't say thank you. Never offers an apology.
He drinks a glass of sweet tea and goes to sleep.
A few hours later, he leaves the bedroom in handcuffs.
* * *
On the second Thursday of October, Debbie wakes up at 1:30 in the afternoon, still reeling from an all-night migraine.
She tries to be cheery, showing off a lamp Brittany bought for her birthday - an antique with spindly rods of metal, topped by two crimson hearts.
Debbie sits at the kitchen table with Mike.
Her eyelids begin to sag.
Rich is resting on the couch. He's withdrawing from the pain pills he had been stealing from Debbie. Days earlier, she confronted him.
On TV, in a movie, screaming people fall out of a burning skyscraper.
Suddenly, Harley is in motion. Almost as suddenly, Debbie is not.
As she has done so many times before, she surrenders to a rug beside the kitchen cabinets. With equal practice, Rich comes to her side.
Debbie murmurs something. Her eyes close.
Rich strokes her hair. He places a pillow under her head, and another between her head and the cabinet.
Less than a minute later, Debbie's left arm jerks away from her body. Her head shakes. Her legs twitch. She inhales loudly, violently, as if catching a last breath.
Rich holds her arms while Harley stands at her side, head over her body, ears pinned back.
"It's okay, Harley," Rich soothes.
Mike throws a tennis ball into the living room, so Harley will give chase.
Debbie is still again. Thirty seconds. Forty-five seconds.
Another wave crashes. Her arms stiffen. Her back tenses. Hands ball into fists.
"Hey," Rich says, calling her back home, back to him and Harley. "You're in the kitchen."
More spasms. More desperate slurps of air.
Then, more stillness.
Debbie's eyes open. Meekly, she finds words.
"Can I get up now?" she asks.
"You can sit up," Rich says. "Want some tea?"
Debbie drinks for a long time and puts the cool glass against her forehead.
Rich and Mike help her to her chair. Harley's big ears relax again.
* * *
This is it. The big day. Nov. 16.
Pork chops broil in the oven, while, on TV, the Bucs are losing to the Packers.
Rich steps away from the stove, where he's tending to corn and potatoes. He points to the clock. "See, 5 to 5," he tells Debbie, alluding to a promise about when supper would be ready.
"I know," she says. "Y'all are going to do good."
Everything is set.
Debbie has her train ticket. She'll get Harley's at the station.
She picked up a three-week supply of medicine for herself and gave Mike enough money for bills. She bought fixings for Thanksgiving, too, but forgot the stuffing.
"Rich'll have to get that," she says.
At 7 p.m., John tells her the car is loaded. Debbie takes a deep breath and stares at the kitchen table.
She had thought Tom might have come by. He's back at his mother's house, fresh from another stay in jail. He's on another crack binge, his mom thinks.
After the Roach episode, Tom avoided Debbie's house for weeks, but remained in orbit. He e-mailed, called, then began visiting again. Debbie wouldn't take him back as a boarder but couldn't write him off completely. "You're always part of the family," she told him.
In a few days, Debbie will see Finn's birth. She'll cut the umbilical cord. She'll know her son-in-law's joy by his phone calls to the delivery room. She'll repeat what he shouted to soldiers near him in Baghdad: "I've got a baby girl - 7 pounds, 6 ounces! Twenty inches!"
Soon, Debbie will be alone with Harley on the train platform, on her way to a daughter in need.
"Don't make me cry," John will say, before he leaves her there.
For a few minutes, she'll seem in control, laughing, joking.
Then she'll feel herself shrinking into the concrete, rattled by the strangers in motion around her. Heart racing, she will bury her fingers in Harley's coat, as if squeezing him will make her less confused.
For now, she's in the kitchen.
It's already dark out. Her train will leave at 8:25.
She slips into the passenger seat of the Taurus, Harley at her feet. Cody comes to the window for a last goodbye, then disappears into the house.
She had hugged all of them, one by one.
Each had muttered a promise.
Cody had said he'd take care of everything. John promised to call her if had the urge to use drugs.
And Mike.
There he stood, standing alone, watching, as she and John backed out of the driveway.
"Remember," she had told him. "I'm just a phone call away."
"I know," Mike had said. "Everything is going to be just fine."
- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Ron Matus can be reached at 813 226-3405 or matus@sptimes.com
About this story
For six months, St. Petersburg Times reporter Ron Matus observed the lives of Debbie Wilson, her son Cody and the boarders who share Wilson's North Tampa home.
Many events in this story were observed first hand. Matus accompanied Wilson when she bailed out boarder Tom Almond. The reporter witnessed some of Wilson's seizures. And he attended the house meeting about Almond's fate.
Other events, including the hunt for Almond, were reconstructed from interviews and law enforcement reports.
