He was high, homeless and in and out of jail in S.F. before Pelosi, Breed and others hired him

Most people who’ve interacted with the charismatic, upbeat Gary McCoy as he’s climbed San Francisco’s political ladder — working for then-Supervisors Scott Wiener and London Breed, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — never would have guessed he nearly died on the city’s streets as his drug addiction ravaged his body.

For 10 years, he slept wherever he could find a private patch of pavement or dirt — behind a pump house in a Chinatown park, in the bushes in Buena Vista Park, under an overhang at Beck’s Motor Lodge in the Castro.

He couldn’t shake his addiction to methamphetamine, and he and his friends would score free drugs by helping dealers inject safely or by trading sex for them. He ignored his HIV diagnosis, skipping his prescribed medication because it ruined his high.

Abscesses covered his skin, and Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions — the purple spots common among AIDS patients — covered his arms, torso and even the inside of his esophagus. He shrank to 110 pounds. He had just four T-cells.

“I wanted to kill myself, but I didn’t have the strength to jump in front of a car or off a bridge,” he said. “I hoped that the next time I used would be the time I killed myself.”

Thankfully for McCoy, his husband, the bosses who rave about him and San Francisco itself, he dodged a deadly overdose — the fate that’s killing two people in the city every day, but which hasn’t grabbed the attention of the city’s leaders like it should.

McCoy reached out a few weeks ago asking whether he could share his story with readers. He’d talked about his homelessness and drug addiction, but he’d never publicly shared that he’d been in and out of jail throughout those awful years.

But now, he said, he wants to divulge the whole story. Partly because he doesn’t want to keep secrets anymore. Partly because he has a new, not-so-political job as the director of public affairs for HealthRight 360, which runs residential substance abuse treatment programs in the city. And partly because he has ideas for how San Francisco can begin to pull itself out of its depths of despair.

“People are frustrated,” said McCoy, 42. “As a city, we haven’t tried everything yet — we really haven’t. A lot of things have been put on hold.”

McCoy grew up in a conservative family in a conservative place, Norfolk, Va. He was closeted as a teenager and hung out with an older crowd to try to fit in. He dabbled in heroin, and it quickly became an addiction.

“I didn’t care,” he recalled. “It helped numb a lot of pain that I was going through.”

He’d shoplift items, return them and use the cash to buy drugs. On one such escapade at Walmart, a friend tried to steal a computer, and police arrested both of them. McCoy was charged with grand larceny.

He got three years’ probation, but kept failing to show up for the required checks and drug screens. That eventually led to a year in jail. When he got out in late 2001, he headed to San Francisco in hopes of starting fresh, but life got even worse. Within months, he developed a meth addiction and an HIV infection. He said drugs are easy to find anywhere if you’re desperate, but they’re especially easy to score in San Francisco.

And he quickly got picked up by police — again — for drug possession. He was diverted to drug court, but again struggled with the required check-ins. He said drug court could have helped him if it had promoted harm reduction, but the deal was abstinence in exchange for wiping his record clear, and he couldn’t manage it.

Years of homelessness, addiction and misery followed. In 2005, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Finally, when his T-cell count plummeted to four, he told a caseworker at San Francisco General Hospital’s famed Ward 86 for AIDS patients that he was ready to enter a treatment program so he could start taking his HIV medications again.

“That was my only goal,” he said. “Just to get into a routine where I was taking my HIV medications.”

SOURCE:

sfchronicle     https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/He-was-high-homeless-and-in-and-out-of-jail-in-16143241.php