Johnny A. gives recovering addicts a serene place to change their lives

By Jeremy Lyverse
Friday, October 21, 2005 7:12 AM PDT

Johnny A. has a new fix to feed. A new addiction that screams for his attention from the moment he wakes up until he collapses at night. Johnny's new addiction is saving lives.

"I hit the ground running at 7 a.m. ," he said. "I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I need more funding, I need more money, I need more homes."

Johnny A. has been in the "trenches of hell" of treating the disease of addiction in the Napa Valley and beyond for the past 10 years as CEO of Serenity Homes of Napa Valley .

"It's a life or death situation," he said late one afternoon as he kicked the dry, dusty dirt patch that will be his front yard once again. It seems every house that Johnny owns is in some state of repair or upgrade; that's part of the plan. Buy the houses. Fill them with recovering addicts. And give the recovering addicts the stable and serene surroundings necessary for them to change their lives.

Once a person has been clean and sober for 90 days and successfully completed a drug or alcohol recovery program, they can apply for a $500 a month room in one of the homes. All of the current roommates get to sit in on an interview session to judge the applicants seriousness to stay clean. The candidate must also agree to random urinalysis tests if there is any suspicion of drug use.

Once a new house is filled, Johnny then looks to add on more rooms to accommodate still more recovering addicts that are either still in prison, on the streets, or crashed on couches while they linger on a waiting list. One woman in prison recently wrote her second letter asking for a room in a Serenity Home upon her release. And this has all been through word of mouth, and built on Johnny's back.

It's been a long time since John Apodaca graced the pages of the Napa Valley Register. Strung out on a 16-day meth binge, Johnny had gone too far, physically threatening his wife. Meth-induced hallucinations and a power screwdriver were no match for the SWAT team, who pulled him out of his house amid a cloud of tear gas and tossed him into a squad car. It was a sobering moment for Johnny, one that still leaves a mark on him, and Napa .

Since that day, Johnny has not used drugs again and has helped more than 300 people over the past 10 years get clean and sober and put their lives back together, or together for the first time ever.

"You gotta have a passion. You gotta want it more than anything else in your life," Johnny said of teaching others to love and help themselves.

Johnny has eight homes now filled with recovering addicts, and looks to double that number in the next five years.

By completing the paperwork to become a nonprofit organization and begin accepting corporate and private donations, he hopes Serenity Homes will continue to grow and be self-sufficient.

He has filed for his 501c and articles of incorporation with the state and obtained an employer ID number. Now he is waiting for the IRS to approve his 1023 form. And it comes not a moment too soon. After suffering three anaphylactic seizures last year, Johnny was told by his doctor and lawyer that he couldn't continue operating the way he had or it would kill him. "I almost died three times for what my passion is," Johnny said, "helping these people."

He says that Serenity Homes was growing at such a fast rate that he was internalizing the pressure that comes with being financially, spiritually and physically responsible for providing a safe place for 50 adults to lay their heads down at night.

It was almost to much to bear, and sometimes still is. He's learned to take trips out of town now, so he can have a break from the daily damage that addiction doles out blindly and bluntly. He knows that many of his residents would probably still be out on the streets using drugs and committing crimes if it were not for a clean and respectful living space.

Serenity Homes manages to barely cover its $18,000 in monthly bills and mortgages as long as everyone in the homes stays clean. If a resident relapses, the person is made to move out immediately and the loss of that month's rent can make Johnny dip into the red.

"A business should fuel itself," Johnny said. "There's no profit in the business that I do. I've got a job like nobody else has." Johnny noted that he has never received a paycheck for the 10 years of work he has done.

The two women's homes are a new venture for Johnny, but were born out of necessity, he said. He was on his Serenity Homes property in Maui when he received the fateful phone call from Napa County sheriff's chaplain Lee Shaw. A register article ran with a picture of a women hanging out the second story window of a recovery home in Fairfield .

Johnny says the problem was obvious, the owner lived in Mexico and everyone in the house including the house manager was using drugs. So he answered the call again, starting an all-female program, headed by his girlfriend of more than two years, Kimberly. She says she helped him get organized and put his ideas for growth onto paper. She credits his success to his plan, which includes a 12-step program and promoting house managers from within. "There's no sell here," Johnny said, "you either want it or you don't."

"Women have different needs," Kimberly said. No men are allowed on the property, but a resident is allowed to stay out one night a week after 90 days in a home. Women with children are allowed to have the children stay with them in the house one night a week.

"It's a program of attraction, rather than promotion," said Kelly, a house manager whose fast-paced days of big business and partying in San Francisco are a long way from the small-town pace of Napa .

The only ad needed to sell Johnny's program is his quick laugh and radiant smile that seems to rise and set with the sun. But after hours the toll of building his "empire of recovery" single-handily begins to show.

"From 9 to 10 p.m. it's Johnny time," he said. That's when he retreats to his master suite and dims the lights and relaxes with a soft drink and his ever-present canine sidekick, Homey. Yet all of the strain from the pressure of his daily work is still no match for his will to stay clean and help others.

"I have beat it," Johnny says of the scourge of addiction. "I wish I had five lifetimes to do what I'm doing," he said. He's found the formula to beat addiction, and loves nothing more than to give it away to anyone he meets.

"That's how I stay clean," he says, "in order to keep it you have to give it away."