You hear stories of trauma and wonder how survivors ever manage to smile again. Many don’t. Deanmichael Harrod, however, has an electric smile despite decades of trouble and despite the fearsome challenge ahead — what he calls his “last shot” to finally leave a life of hard drinking and homelessness.
Harrod smiles when he speaks. You can see happiness in his face and in the smart clothing he wears. At 54, he’s been getting his life together with counseling and sobriety support at Christopher Place Employment Academy, on the Fallsway in central Baltimore. He has a plan for the future and dreams that run from installing HVAC systems to preaching from a pulpit.
Harrod survived. Others did not. Others never saw, as E.B. White put it, “the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.” They drifted in and out of darkness. Some never left the darkness. Some died from their old wounds.
Bessel van der Kolk opens his bestselling book on trauma, “The Body Keeps The Score,” by citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “One in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
As I prepared to meet Deanmichael Harrod and hear his story, the children of the late Francis X. Gallagher Jr. filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
They say their father, son of the archdiocese’s lawyer in the mid-20th century, was 14 years old when a priest, a seminarian at the time, molested him, suggesting that not even the son of Baltimore’s most prominent Catholic attorney was safe from the creeps who abused Catholic children over decades.
Frank Gallagher lived with that trauma for the rest of his life — through high school, college and law school, into law practice and investment banking, into marriage and fatherhood. His children say the trauma ruined his life and ultimately killed him.
Gallagher had become addicted to methamphetamine while trying to cope with both the molestation and the betrayal of church officials who did nothing about it, his children say. Their tormented father died of a drug overdose last summer. He was 62.
I shared none of this with Deanmichael Harrod, but found it impossible not to make the connection when we spoke the other day. The Catholic Church, for one thing, figures into both stories.
Christopher Place is a longtime program of Catholic Charities, the part of the church that has done so much good over the last century even as the hierarchy engaged in the cover-up and proliferation of clergy sexual abuse.
The other commonality is trauma. In the first few minutes of our talk, Harrod mentioned that his mother had been in an abusive relationship with his father. She left that relationship and ended up raising Harrod and four of his siblings in Northwest Baltimore.
After high school, Harrod tried to enlist in the Navy but came up a few points short of passing the placement exam. That sounds more disappointing than traumatic, but he took it hard. “I really wanted to give up after that,” he says, “because I’d wanted to make my mom proud because she was the one that raised me.”
He was a young man who felt aimless and isolated from his peers. It’s hard to see now because he’s bald, but Harrod had red hair, and he was mocked by other Black boys and rejected because of it. So, early on, he started drinking and doing drugs to feel accepted. Eventually, he sold drugs to others, got arrested and served a couple of years in prison for it.
That’s what the grown-up Harrod says about the young adult Harrod, looking back on many years of booze and dope, broken marriages, failed attempts at sobriety, drunken driving arrests and numerous jobs that he could not or would not keep.
There were times when Harrord had no domicile and slept in vacant houses, on bus stop benches and in his car. His lowest points, he says, were when he had to sleep outdoors.
His last job was helper on a delivery truck at $18 an hour. It was good for a while, until the driver smelled booze. “He noticed the smell coming out of my pores,” Harrod says. “He said, ‘You need to get some help.’ He knew the struggle I was going through. … I surrendered fully to the fact that I needed help.”
And he sought it at Christopher Place.
He’s been there since January, getting therapy, getting instruction in life skills, getting ready for a job in heating and air conditioning. “They do wonderful things for men there,” he says, flashing his big smile again. “You can actually feel the genuine love from the staff members.”
Harrod has turned back to spirituality and prayer. In addition to building a career in HVAC, he hopes to one day be a minister. He will stay at Christopher Place as long as he’s allowed, until January 2025; he knows he needs the support he gets there. He sees it as a matter of survival. “I can’t drink again,” he says. “This is my last shot.” And most likely his best.
