Miami Herald - Sunday, December 29, 2002
Nicholas Spangler, nspangler@herald.com

And there, in the dirt and paraphernalia, John Delgado spotted a brand new condom wrapper. It was empty.

"Success!" he said, and his smile was so big you had to wait until it cracked to catch the sarcasm.

Delgado is an ex-con who now works as an HIV/AIDS outreach worker for the Borinquen Health Care Center, a private outpatient clinic at 3601 Federal Hwy., Miami. He spends his days and nights on the job in places like this, on the streets outside the roach motels on Biscayne Boulevard, in the bathhouses on Coral Way. When he goes out, he carries condoms, HIV tests, safe-sex literature and a book that shows, in high-detail color photographs, the genitals of people suffering from various late-stage sexually transmitted diseases.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting a mountain," he said that day.

"I can see the pieces I'm taking, but the mountain is not coming down. I see some of the same people over and over again. Then I suddenly stop seeing somebody. Does that mean they're dead or they got off the streets?"

Almost 19,000 people live with HIV/AIDS in Miami-Dade, more than any other county in the state. Miami-Dade leads the state in new diagnoses of HIV/AIDS, as it does for most sexually transmitted diseases, with 1,360 new cases of HIV and 897 cases of full-blown AIDS diagnosed so far this year, according to the Florida Department of Health.

The neighborhoods Delgado frequents -- Liberty City, Overtown and Brownsville -- have the highest concentrations of HIV/AIDS in the county.

Those are the numbers that make up Delgado's mountain.

Delgado is 34. He stands five feet eight inches and is built like a bull. He laughs a lot and says goodbye with a hug even if you've known him for two days.

He is also conceivably one of the last men in Miami you would want to cross, a man who took five bullets to the torso and survived, an ex-boxer and gang leader who spent 13 years in prison after

convictions of grand theft, armed robbery and cocaine-trafficking.

FEAR OF HIV

In the mid-'90s, Delgado was working in a prison infirmary when he began to suspect he had contracted HIV.

"It's hard to explain how I was feeling then," he said. "I was terrified. I knew I'd been exposed before and here I was with all these people I knew were positive. Any time I got a cough I thought it was a symptom. The thought just got into my head and it stayed. I bought other people's HIV medication, took anything and everything."

Delgado began taking classes in health education, hoping, he says, to learn enough to diagnose his own symptoms. He worked up the courage to get himself tested -- the results were negative. But along the way he learned enough about HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases to become a peer counselor in a new inmate outreach program run by the state health department.

He did the job well enough that the program's contract manager, Mark Rubens, suggested that he pursue a career in counseling when he got out.

"I don't want to say he didn't belong in prison, because maybe at that time he did," Rubens said. "But it was just so obvious talking to him, watching him work, that he had a gift. And because of his background, he has connections to the gatekeepers of certain communities down here that most people never dream of."

Delgado has worked at Borinquen for a little over a year. His office is windowless and holds two desks, two phones and an enormous filing cabinet. On this day the air conditioner was stuck on some super-setting, and it was freezing inside. He uses this office to do counseling, and sometimes to give results of HIV tests.

GETTING OUT

But his real work is done in the man-made caves of Miami, where the addicts go to inject heroin into their veins.

It's the part of the job Delgado likes best: getting on the streets and talking to people. On this day he was working his way through Overtown's street corners and back lots. He wheedled people into taking HIV tests; he handed out fistfuls of condoms. He used the book full of repulsive photographs as, of all things, an icebreaker.

"Let me ask you, you ever been burned? You know what this is?" he asked a man, the book open to a late-stage gonorrhea spread. The man had not, which was beside the point; Delgado had his attention, and he used the opportunity to run through a checklist of very personal questions touching on burning, itching, bumps and discharge.

Underneath the interstate, on the street outside the shooting gallery, Delgado ran into Sharon Ray. 'Sharon! You lookin' jazzy, sophisticated, girl," he said, and greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. "How you feeling?"

Ray was feeling good. Her 40th birthday would be in a week. Her last test had come back negative and she'd been clean for over a month, not even a drink, she said. "You using the condoms, right? Let me give you a refill," Delgado said.

Delgado chatted and he seemed to be in a good mood until he climbed the embankment to inspect the shooting gallery at North Miami Avenue. Overhead on Interstate 395, passing automobiles created a draft that gave the hot space a natural air-conditioning. A sliver of light made its way through a gap between the road and a concrete barrier above, illuminating the baggies and the cans and the lighters.

"Look at this place," he said. "You're out here long enough, you got no money, what is there but drugs and sex? That's what you got left to enjoy in life, that's what keeps you going."

TESTING POSITIVE

Delgado said he meets close to 1,000 people a month. He tests about 150. Between five and eight of those results generally come back positive.

"You always hear that the first reaction with a positive result is denial," he said. "But a good portion of the people, I'd say maybe 80 percent, figured they were positive already. The other 20 percent, they're just shocked. They just freeze. That's probably the worst part about this job."

He holds the empty condom wrapper he found in the drug cave. Did the condom protect whoever used it? he wonders. Does that matter, if the needles slipping into that man's veins, or those of his partner, were already infected?

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