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Sparkles: A Journey Through Madness
| Article
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16182 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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6 / 1989 |
2,146 Words |
| Author
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Robin Parker
Robin Parker, Life editor of THE WORLD & I, was formerly a
health-care professional. |
"As man thinketh is his heart, so is he."
--Proverbs 23:7
Drug users were cool: They were classy dressers and had lots of cash. But after his imprisonment for armed robbery, Juan Powell saw the other side of addicts--desperate, dirty individuals, trapped in their own state of hell. So Juan preferred to shoot up alone.
"You use heroin to kill your misery, to numb yourself to the experience of life," says Powell, age fifty-three. But drugs only ushered more agony into his existence. The majority of his adult years were spent either hustling and committing armed robberies for the money to buy the drugs he needed, or in prison.
It's a far cry from that to the Powell of today: one to whom happy youngsters respond in littered dining rooms of homeless shelters and in city parades. He is Sparkles the clown, complete with rainbow-colored wig and chipper makeup. A far cry too from the man in tweed jacket and dark wool pants who offers ex-criminals in halfway houses what he terms "redevelopment" seminars on the ABCs of grateful living. Powell uses a self-created cartoon character, the Fourth Monkey, to illustrate his motto: speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and think no evil. In yet another setting, recovering addicts talk to him in one-to-one counseling sessions--at RAP, an eighteen-month, residential program for substance abusers. Juan graduated from the Washington, D.C.-area program in 1986.
"Those young people have a lot of confidence in him," says Yetta Galiber, who just hired Powell as a patient advocate in the community mental health unit of General Hospital located in Washington, D.C. "I was impressed at how he influenced the young people to think positively and [to believe] that they can control their future."
Powell used to think of himself as an isolated individual. But how he says sharing with people gives him an excitement he never found in committing crimes. "I use the character, Sparkles, that I created. I communicate with people as Sparkles would. I saw two older ladies, and I spoke to them in the energized, happy, outgoing way that Sparkles would have, and they just bubbled."
Getting his point across was always Juan's asset. As an eighteen-year-old, he successfully persuaded the older junkies in his Washington, D.C.,
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