EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Darryl Taylor
  When Darryl Taylor graduated from high school with high honors, he was looking for the next challenge, the next adventure. Darryl was 19 when he joined the Navy. The fourth of six children, he seemed to be creating a good life for himself. He left the Navy with an honorable discharge after 4 years, was married and had three children. Life looked good.
But in his early twenties, Darryl began to hear voices. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his alcohol use, which had begun while he was in the military, escalated. He went from drinking a six-pack a day to drinking a case and a half.
After periods of abstinence and experience floating in and out of detox programs, Darryl was divorced and became disconnected from his children—a disconnect which would bring him a great deal of pain and loneliness over the course of the next few years.
In 1989, Darryl tried crack for the first time. It soon controlled him: “The crack had me do things I would never do,” he says now. “I slept in places I never thought I’d sleep, and ate in places I never thought I’d eat.”  He describes the experience of scavenging in dumpsters to survive.
He was cut off from his entire family. “They gave me a thousand chances,” he says with forgiveness in his voice.
Darryl eventually joined Narcotics Anonymous. In June of 2003, he went into the Safe Haven residential program. He connected deeply with Gordon Jenkins, the supervisor of the program. For the first time in many years, Darryl got his own apartment—the apartment in which he still lives. The same year, he joined the Allegheny County Board on Homelessness, trying to give a voice and a face to the issue of homelessness. He began volunteering at a food pantry and the soup kitchen run by a Presbyterian Church.
Darryl has reconnected with his three children, now grown. Describing how far he’s come, Darryl says that when his two daughters, Sasha and Noelle, were in high school, he paid for the prom. They are now both in college, and one of the girls calls him “every Sunday night, like clockwork.” Darryl, Jr., his 27 years old son—a loan officer at a bank, he says with a smile—is very involved with his father’s recovery.
Life’s not perfect. Darryl’s mental illness is still a daily reality. “The voices come and go,” he says, resigned. He goes to the VA for medical and mental health support. But he hasn’t been hospitalized since last October.
When Darryl speaks about homelessness these days, he says that he just wants policy makers to listen. “It’s an epidemic,” he tells me, his kind, gentle face taking on an intensity I had not yet seen. “Homelessness is not a choice. We’re human beings,” Darryl continues, “Give us some rights.” Then after a pause, he adds, “I came from the pits of hell,” and lets the words linger in the air.
“Any kind of housing, any kind of way,” Darryl puts forward as the way to solve homelessness. “If you give people a roof over their heads, they can run with that.”
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