Back From the Bottom

“I’m Mike, alcoholic, addict. I thanked my God this morning for giving me another day. Today is Day 697 and I have another chance. It took 27 police officers to get me into these rooms. I was completely demoralized and I wanted to die. I didn’t care about anything else. I had no concept of what it meant to be alive.”

***

Mike Hernandez appeared to have made it. Here he was, three times elected to the City Council, a tireless advocate for the poor and broken northeast Los Angeles neighborhoods where he grew up. “A rising star,” they called him early in his political career. He was all nervous energy, quick tempered and fiercely loyal to the city’s immigrant community. No longer a scruffy street kid with so-so grades, he now was a member of one of Los Angeles’ most exclusive clubs: City Hall. And he was smart. He played politics only for what he thought were the right liberal reasons. Sure, he could be abrasive and confrontational. But he was a voice for those who didn’t dare--and didn’t even know they could--speak up to City Hall.

On the outside, Mike Hernandez had reached the top. On the inside, Hernandez was bottoming out. His staff took turns partying with their gregarious, fun-loving boss. But they couldn’t keep up. Who could? The councilman was on a secret suicide mission. He left his wife, drank a quart of tequila a night and fed a $100-a-day cocaine habit. He smoked pot, watched porn videos in his office and slept with an aide. Always broke, he borrowed money from close friends and staff members. Eight times in three years, lenders initiated foreclosure proceedings on his home in Cypress Park. His credit was shot. He was sued for failing to pay department stores, even a video rental store. His checking account was closed due to insufficient funds. In the evenings, he traded City Hall for pool halls and bars--the Brave Bull in San Gabriel, the Fourth Dimension in Monrovia, the Golden Cue in Glendale.

By the time he ran for reelection in the spring of 1997, Hernandez could barely maintain an appearance of normalcy. His closest aides and advisors realized that their increasingly temperamental boss wasn’t the ideal candidate they’d once envisioned. At times they couldn’t even find him, and when he did surface, he was terribly moody and sometimes unkempt. Still, Hernandez insisted on running. He said he had much more to accomplish in his district, considered the city’s poorest, and the one with the lowest number of voters. He defended his sporadic behavior by saying he was preoccupied with his mother’s declining health. He also used her worsening condition as an excuse to drink more and to take more drugs. During one of his many binges, about a half-dozen of his aides and political consultants met to talk. They knew Hernandez adored his mother and they knew he wasn’t coping well with her impending death. Without discussing his heavy drinking, they decided two staff members would alternate as his drivers, ensuring his presence at campaign events. They already had endured one embarrassingly awful downtown fund-raising breakfast. Hernandez had shown up 45 minutes late. The group ended up donating to his opponent.

Privately, his aides hoped their precautions would keep their boss from a ruinous drunk driving arrest. Steve Afriat, a top City Hall lobbyist and a Hernandez consultant, tells the story with a mixture of humor and humility. “I think I was somewhat in denial, too,” he says, sitting on a sofa in his corner office in Hollywood. “Here I was getting a councilman reelected when he probably should have been in rehab.”

Hernandez won the primary outright. But that victorious election night in April remains one of the councilman’s least favorite memories. Sitting alone, drinking and chain-smoking menthol cigarettes in a City Hall stairwell long after his staff had gone, Hernandez knew he probably should no longer hold office. But he also knew no other life. He felt desperately alone. He began disappearing for days, visiting his mother in the hospital regularly but spending every other hour drunk, high on drugs or both. He passed out for two or three hours at a time in his car, his office and sometimes at the apartment in Arcadia of a field deputy, Pauline Mendoza. Some nights he didn’t sleep at all.

Two months later, on June 20, 1997, his mother died. In the limousine on the way to her funeral, Hernandez patted the plastic-wrapped ounce of cocaine and the baggie containing three ounces of marijuana in his front pants pocket. He sipped from the tequila bottle he kept tucked inside his blazer. Then he gave a heart-rending eulogy for his mother. Alone, she had raised him, his sister and brother after their alcoholic father left when Mike was 10. Mike loved her very much. Yet his were the only dry eyes in the church. He couldn’t feel a thing.

Funeral over, duty done, he checked into a motel with a case of tequila, plenty of drugs and the overwhelming feeling that he, too, should be dead. It wasn’t that easy. He spent the next two months smashed and stoned, attending council meetings high on cocaine to stay alert and making more frequent forays to the north San Fernando Valley to feed his habit. Yet somehow he showed up to work. He fought hard against the proliferation of liquor stores, abandoned buildings and cheap motels that tend to draw addicts and dealers to poor neighborhoods. He attended community meetings throughout the 1st District, which stretches west of downtown, past Dodger Stadium to the mostly Latino neighborhoods of Highland Park and Lincoln Heights. He held press conferences with other city leaders at schools and parks. He went to the scenes of major crimes in his district, no matter what time of night. Despite his personal problems, he pushed himself to be a legitimate public official, not just a degenerating addict.

It was during this time that someone--either a secret enemy or a secret friend--decided to no longer keep the councilman’s secrets. An anonymous tipster set off a two-month undercover investigation of Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez. Police assigned to L.A. Impact, a multi-agency special narcotics detail barely anyone had ever heard of, watched as he traversed the city 10 times buying drugs from two different dealers.

On one of those occasions, for example, police saw Hernandez visit an apartment in Pacoima and emerge with a clear-plastic bindle of cocaine. With video cameras rolling, they saw the councilman hunched over in his city-owned tan Chevy Blazer for several minutes, appearing to snort the cocaine. He rubbed his gums and teeth with his finger before driving off to a park in his district where he spoke at a community forum. Later he drove to a downtown police station, of all places, where he filled his car with free gas for city officials. Then he returned to City Hall, where he remained into the night.

Police soon stopped following Hernandez. They had seen enough and they knew where to find him. Two weeks later, on Aug. 21, 1997, they arrested the 44-year-old as he left the apartment in Pacoima with one-eighth of an ounce of cocaine in his pocket.

“All I could think of was: It’s over. The nightmare is over,” Hernandez says now. “I can give it up.”

Arrested on suspicion of cocaine possession, Hernandez thanked detectives for saving his life and agreed to enter a residential treatment facility immediately. He waived his Miranda rights to self-incrimination and consented to blood and urine tests. At the Police Department’s downtown Central station, he posted $10,000 bail. His closest aides gathered there while a television news crew circled outside. Accompanied by a friend and two aides, Hernandez checked into the detox unit at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, a facility recommended by police.

He was numb. He was exhausted. But he was lucky. He was alive.

***

“I’m Mike, alcoholic, addict. I thanked my God this morning for giving me another day. Today is my son’s 21st birthday. I’m glad I could be here for my son’s birthday. My father was gone by the time I was 10, let alone 2. I understand now that in order to forgive myself, I need to try to forgive my father. I’ve never dealt with my father’s side of the family. I never really knew him.”

***

Hernandez moved around in the first years of his life--California to Texas to Mexico --and remembers little of it except that sometimes his father was present and sometimes he wasn’t. When Hernandez was 4, the family moved to Tijuana, where the boy spoke only Spanish. Six years later, the family returned to America for his sake; Hernandez was born with a clubfoot and needed an operation to correct it. The family moved to a small stucco house in Cypress Park on the same block where Hernandez lives today. In a childhood filled with painful memories, a particularly disturbing one has returned in his sobriety: He now remembers holding his newborn sister, who had died suddenly in her crib.

His father stormed in and out of their home, returning briefly at one point to demand that his eldest son make a choice: Do you want to live with me or your mother? Hernandez chose his mother but was left with his father’s legacy. “My father was a drunk and he couldn’t stay home. I followed the pattern.”

He entered the fifth grade at Loreto Street Elementary, fortuitously landing in the classroom of Vera Gallant, a matronly teacher who took an interest. “He was such an eager beaver,” she says today, retired after 20 years of teaching and union organizing. “I think he really wanted to succeed. . . . but I could tell there was a struggle going on at home.”

Believing that he needed to help his mother more in his father’s absence, Hernandez carried a good-sized load. With his mother working three jobs, he did the shopping and helped care for his younger brother and sister.

In the seventh grade, he met Sylvia, a doe-eyed girl with a soft voice, to whom he immediately took a liking. She came from a stable family. She went to church every Sunday. They went on to Franklin High School together and he made the football team. But he had his first taste of Schlitz Malt Liquor at 15 and liked it too much. He drank whenever he could. He was rebellious. His grades started to slip and he began hanging out with other boys happier on the street than in school. One night they broke into his old junior high school, vandalizing a classroom.

Unable to deal with him, his mother sent him to rural Lodi to spend a summer with his aunt. There he awoke each morning at 4 to pick tomatoes, working side by side with migrant farm workers. When he returned to Los Angeles, he was more mature and a bit circumspect. He ran into a young social studies teacher, Ricardo Romo, who worked in Franklin’s Upward Bound program, aimed at identifying low-income students with college potential. “He wasn’t the star student,” says Romo, now president of the University of Texas at San Antonio. “But I saw potential. He wasn’t going to graduate at the top of his class, but he was smart, articulate and had a lot of common sense.”

Romo selected Hernandez for Upward Bound, which led to a scholarship at Occidental College. “I still remember this little speech he gave about how we should reach out to our brothers from Mexico,” says Romo. “He said the Mexican immigrant students were having real problems making the transition to our school community and that we, as Mexican Americans, were not understanding.”

Hernandez became politically active in college, graduating in 1974 with a bachelor’s in political science. He and Sylvia married in his senior year and he began working for the telephone company. The couple already knew where they would live: A friend had taken a picture of them in the ninth grade in front of a house on Arroyo Seco Avenue that they often joked about making their own. They bought it, and it remains their home today.

Hernandez turned down a promotion to the phone company’s San Francisco office, choosing instead to help his mother run her fledgling business, Bea Hernandez Bail Bonds in Lincoln Heights, where he mostly worked at a side venture, selling insurance. But that wasn’t enough. He became an officer of the Highland Park Optimist Club, a member of the Plaza de la Raza Cultural Center board in Lincoln Heights and president of the Northeast Los Angeles Jaycees, and he was named honorary mayor of Highland Park. He ran the Highland Park Christmas Parade and Cinco de Mayo celebrations for years. He volunteered on Latino candidates’ campaigns for state and local offices. Finally, in 1986, he ran for the state Assembly against former Councilman Richard Alatorre’s aide, Richard Polanco. Polanco portrayed Hernandez as an outsider, a bail bondsman more interested in making money off crime than in ridding the city of it. Hernandez lost. His wife, home with their two young children, was turned off by the bitter, nasty business. Mike Hernandez found that politics turned him on like nothing else.

***

“I’m Mike, alcoholic, addict. One of the gifts of sobriety is that I’m able to sleep and rest now. If I’m tired, I take a nap. If I’m thirsty, I drink water. If I want to go home and be with my wife, I can do that.”

***

In 1991, Hernandez ran a grass-roots campaign for the City Council seat being vacated by Gloria Molina, who was moving on to become a Los Angeles County supervisor. He learned from his past mistakes. He billed himself as a local boy raised in the same neighborhoods he hoped to represent. He avoided describing himself on the ballot as a bondsman, using businessman and community activist instead. He placed first in the primary, beating six others and winning 42% of the votes cast. He won the runoff two months later, boasting an impressive list of endorsements.

He went to work at a breakneck pace. “I was living the job 24 hours a day,” he says. “I made it more important than anything else.”

If he was passionate about his work, he was equally impatient. He jumped from project to project, forcing his staff to keep up. His office was disorganized. He couldn’t refuse an invitation, attending two or three community functions a night. He was rarely home, and when he was, he had a phone in his ear or a stack of reports on his lap. He was one of the first council members on the streets during the 1992 riots, walking through the ravaged Pico-Union section of his district. He was among the first at City Hall after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, arriving at 4:47 a.m.

In the council chamber, Hernandez was vitriolic, attacking his colleagues and city bureaucrats in a personal, angry manner. He was jumpy, edgy, irritable. “Mike’s attitude was: ‘Which council member am I going to take on this week?’ ” says Morrie Goldman, who worked for Hernandez from his election until shortly after the arrest. “He certainly wasn’t part of the club.”

“We’ve got to be one city” became Hernandez’s mantra, his voice straining as he shouted at colleagues from more prosperous suburban districts. Gradually, Hernandez matured in the job as he began to understand how politics work at City Hall. He toned down the rhetoric, attempting to cooperate more with his colleagues. He needed them. Still, he never became one of the most respected council members. He wasn’t like Alatorre, who worked back-room deals and still maintained strong alliances. He wasn’t John Ferraro, ever-patient, with decades more council experience. He wasn’t Mark Ridley-Thomas, elected at the same time but who more quickly learned the rules of the game.

No matter what they thought about Hernandez, however, no one in City Hall expected his arrest. Many were even more astonished that he could keep his job. The 70-year-old city charter (which since has been changed) called for a council member to be removed from office upon conviction of a felony. Although Hernandez was charged with one felony count of cocaine possession, he entered a drug diversion program that allowed him to complete rehabilitation and avoid conviction.

When he returned to City Hall in October 1997, Hernandez was greeted by a cheering crowd of several hundred constituents and students, dozens of whom, it later was revealed, had been bused in--some without even knowing where they were going. Hernandez’s colleagues on the council were less embracing. Laura Chick and Mike Feuer were the first to call for his resignation; Hal Bernson, Rudy Svorinich and Mayor Richard Riordan later joined them. “I felt that his actions damaged very seriously my own personal efforts and our collective reputation,” says Chick. Feuer introduced a stringent code of conduct, some of which became part of the new city charter, that would have triggered Hernandez’s removal. Riordan, who was arrested in three alcohol-related incidents in the mid-1960s and 1970s, met in private with Hernandez. He was supportive, both say. But afterward, the mayor told a jammed press room that Hernandez should go, as he had become a poor role model for the city’s children.

Today, the passage of time and the realities of politics have reduced many insiders’ outrage. Feuer, who is running for city attorney next year, will say little about the man he once excoriated other than: “Mike seems to have turned things around in his personal life, and I’m pleased for him. My views on the responsibility of elected officials hasn’t changed.” Says Riordan: “I still think he should have resigned because this is the wrong message to kids.”

Last year, the council created a panel to investigate a sexual harassment complaint lodged against Hernandez by Mendoza, his field deputy. The panel concluded that the relationship was consensual. Mendoza has taken a leave and could not be reached for comment.

Three times since his arrest, a group of Hernandez’s constituents has attempted recall efforts that were unsuccessful, mainly because the group was inexperienced and underfunded. “We don’t have a true leader in this community,” says Rudy Tenorio de Cordova, who ran two of the recall campaigns. “I honestly believe he’s just going through the motions [of a councilman] while he’s in rehab. I think he would have done this community and this city a favor if he had resigned. “

Hernandez says his work for the district is better than ever, citing the Lawry’s California Center and Taylor Yard, big, multifaceted commercial projects that will bring jobs to a neglected stretch of northeast Los Angeles. But both are years-old developments that became mired in political and neighborhood disputes. Some criticize Hernandez for taking credit now that the projects finally have been approved--and blame him for the delays. Hernandez says that the projects, though they involved dozens of players, were largely his doing and that it took time to untangle complex problems.

***

“I’m Mike, alcoholic, addict. I want to announce a meeting over the Fourth of July weekend. It’s at 2:30 a.m. We’ve all been up that late before. We can do it again. It’s a Cocaine Anonymous meeting and part of a weekend marathon. I’ll be there.”

***

A month after his arrest, Hernandez stood outside the Criminal Courts Building, faced a media mob and admitted his cocaine and alcohol addictions.

If it had been up to John Schwarzlose, president and CEO of the Betty Ford Center, that press conference never would have happened. He, like others in his field, believes the less said at the beginning of treatment, the better. On the other hand, Schwarzlose and others say the public spotlight sometimes can help recovery. “If I’m a high-profile person. . . . and I relapse and I begin using drugs and alcohol again, it probably will make the headlines,” Schwarzlose says. “I [would] have even more incentive than most people to do well. . . .”

Some of Hernandez’s closest friends and aides say they didn’t believe he would stay sober. “The chances of anyone making it are so slim,” says Steve D., a good friend who met Hernandez at a recovery meeting two years ago. “It’s very easy to talk the talk; the cliches are easy to repeat. And he was repeating a lot of the cliches.”

He still is. Hernandez immediately adopted the AA lexicon. (“I’m living life on life’s terms,” he says. “I have to be the most important person in my life.”) He wears the adages on baseball caps he has custom-made. “Today Is A Gift,” one says. “It’s Called The Present.”

He attends six recovery meetings a week in Pasadena, where he believes he is seen as a drunk and an addict, not as a councilman. He recently attended nine meetings in one week. His is often the loudest voice in the room, shouting greetings to fellow alcoholics as they rise to speak. He speaks at nearly every meeting and exchanges hugs with men and women, clearly comfortable in the setting. He stays until the very end, when the group recites a prayer in unison, holding hands: “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Then, Hernandez’s voice is again the loudest: “Keep coming back. It works, it works, it works.”

“This is my number one priority in life,” he says, sitting on a bench at Las Encinas on a balmy evening after an AA meeting. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a councilman and I do my job, but I have a clearer focus of what’s important in my life.”

Today he has “this fear of going back to where I was” and is “going through the process of understanding how I got there. . . . I recognize it’s a day-to-day struggle.”

He skips district events and declines other invitations if they conflict with AA meetings. For two years, he took twice-weekly drug tests--it was his idea--and the results were made public by the City Clerk. He stopped seeing many of his old drinking buddies and says he hasn’t set foot inside his old haunts. He quit playing pool. Three months after his arrest, he kicked his menthol cigarette habit. It took a year before he could cry over his mother’s death. Now when he describes his childhood, he sometimes blinks back tears. He can feel again.

He has gained 100 pounds since the arrest and says he now needs to deal with that, too. At Las Encinas, he was diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease, which he says accounts for his twitching. He also was found to suffer from sleep apnea, which he says explains why he never got enough rest. He is taking steps every day to rebuild himself, repair his relationships, begin his life anew.

Psychiatrist Garrett O’Connor has not treated the councilman but is a noted expert on addiction. He says the only way for alcoholics and addicts to maintain a sober life is to transform themselves completely: “You literally need a new personality.”

The number of AA members who achieve this radical transformation is elusive since the group doesn’t keep scorecards of success and failure. An AA survey conducted in 1998, however, showed that 27% of the 6,800 respondents stayed sober less than a year, 26% remained sober between 1 and 5 years, and 47% were sober for more than five years. A federal government study last year found that Mexican American men have the highest rate of heavy drinking in the U.S., one-third higher than any of the other groups studied, including Native Americans. Coke, by all accounts, is even harder to kick.

Hernandez knows that every day is a test. He sometimes has “user dreams” and wakes up believing that he has spent hours drinking, snorting coke and smoking pot. He keeps no alcohol at home. He is trying to become closer to his children, who at 23 and 21 remain distant from him and did not want to be part of this story.

Hernandez also is repairing his relationship with his wife, whom he calls his “best buddy.”

They take salsa lessons. He frequently stops home for lunch. They go to the movies every Saturday and have resumed going to the race track, a passion of theirs from the old days. On the second anniversary of his sobriety in August, they took a three-day cruise with nine other sober couples.

Theirs remains a complicated relationship. Sylvia is getting used to having her husband home, finally, and he is getting used to being there. She is sometimes still surprised that he’s paying attention, actually listening to her. She doesn’t know all the details of his troubled years and isn’t sure she wants to. She was hurt and embarrassed by his arrest, then by the public revelations--it mortified her that people at her church and in her tightknit neighborhood and family knew so much about their marriage and finances.

She says she hadn’t known that he was using drugs but she often bought beer to help him unwind. Yet, she says, she had no idea how much he was drinking until, during his 42 days at Las Encinas, she found bottles of liquor stashed throughout the house. “I was totally blind to it,” she said one Sunday afternoon, waiting for him to complete a Cocaine Anonymous meeting. “I knew he drank and I prayed for him to stop, but I didn’t know how much. I was waiting for him to see the light.” Still, she never considered leaving him, and she is surprised when asked if she had.

Hernandez believes his wife should attend some AA meetings to better understand where he was and where he is going. She is reluctant to rehash their problems in a setting that does not seem anonymous.

“I guess I still want to hide from it,” she says.

She looks forward to the end of his council term next year. He won’t seek public office but wants to teach and maybe consult.

“I know he will come out ahead,” she says, smiling, patting his arm.

For his part, Hernandez says he is counting the days until he leaves his $113,377-a-year council job. “I’ve come to realize that I don’t really like going to work,” he says, wearing a cap reading: “Life’s not Hard, It’s just not that Easy.” “I don’t like the scrutiny, the reporters, and I also know the system doesn’t care about the 1st District. I’m always fighting the system.”

In his darkest moments, Hernandez lets slip that while he’s grateful to the police for keeping him alive, perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising that he was arrested. “ ‘Here’s a fellow like Mike Hernandez who’s popular, doing his job, getting powerful. Let’s trip him,’ ” he says, imagining the conspiracy. “Sure, Mike Hernandez contributed to the problem but. . . . it’s not like they found a kilo of cocaine.”

After a pause, he adds: “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone puts drugs in my car sometime. People want me to slip and they want to be there when I slip.”

But he doesn’t think he will slip. He sponsors three other alcoholics and addicts, encouraging them to attend meetings and work the 12 steps. He has a sponsor of his own, whom he calls and sees frequently.

Hernandez spends much of his free time with a group of fellow alcoholics and addicts he met at Las Encinas, who share an old wooden house in Pasadena. It was here where Hernandez found a home after rehab and before he felt comfortable back in his own house. He would sleep for hours on a well-worn chair, nestled in sobriety. One housemate is a handyman, sober for six years; another does lighting for movies; and a third, Keni Richards, was a successful drummer and keyboard player who had gold records until he pawned them for heroin.

“I see a side of Mr. Councilman here that most people don’t see,” says Richards. “I see this amazing, intelligent man who makes a difference. He’s in a unique situation. I wouldn’t want to be in his situation.”

Hernandez nods. “When I use, everyone’s going to know,” he says. “It would be my last conscious sober decision. I’d probably want to die. Again.”

***

“I’m Mike, alcoholic, addict. Our reality is that we don’t know we’re changing. It just happens, and as it happens, we realize we’re getting better. We’re becoming humble. We’re becoming honest.”