| Outreach worker uses painful past to help others June 12, 2005 NATALIA MUNOZ It's not until you hear her voice that Smiley seems friendly. First you see the toughness in the hard posture and wonder if there are any other tattoos you can't see. There are, and living up to her name, the Holyoke outreach worker shows them with a smile and with the pride of a good museum tour guide who shares little-known details of famous masterpieces. Smiley Arroyo was born in The Bronx, N.Y., 40 years ago to a mother who died early from alcoholism and a father who disappeared shortly thereafter. That was the wobbly foundation from which she fell into drug addiction. Raped at 5. Mother dead at 10. Drug dealing morphed into drug using at 17, and at 19 she was a prostitute. By 21, she was HIV-positive. Six years ago she finally disentangled herself from drugs. No more relapses. So far, so good. Even with your eyes closed you would feel the thick and bumpy serpentine scars that mark where she used to inject heroin and cocaine in a rush to fly away from judgment. But in seeking those highs she shared needles. "We were living like a family," she says. "We shared everything." Even jail time. So much flying landed her behind bars but it was there that she found herself and was liberated. She fell in love with another inmate and like schoolgirls would steal moments for themselves. It was a thrilling discovery of herself. "All my life I've been treated different," she says, beginning a list of reasons why she was the target of scorn. "I didn't have a daddy. I didn't have a mami. 'Cause I looked like a boy. . ." There was no saving grace to help her through the lost years. Even the church, whose teachings of love hold rapt its devotees through blinding storms, turned its back on her because she was gay. "They say you shouldn't judge, but they are the first to judge," she says, without resentment. "They say that everyone should be accepted but they haven't accepted me." She is spiritual and prays and works hard every day to reach out to those who have fallen into prostitution and drugs. On her dime she approaches users and gives them a bleach kit - nothing more than water, bleach and instructions on how to clean a needle. (Wash it three times in both liquids.) She talks to the teenage prostitutes, gives them her number and hope. "I can't call them, 'Those people' - I was one of them," she says, which is why she is effective in her work in all the ways a monolingual social worker raised in the suburbs is not. She is also putting together a Web page for lesbians who are HIV-positive. HIV, AIDS and women - especially lesbians - are not talked about much even though there are more than 4,000 women in Massachusetts who have the disease. It's not talked about, and the heartache of being rejected only hours after the first date is also muffled. But Smiley won't be silenced. She's an outreach worker with the Center of Education, Prevention and Action in Holyoke, where she helps run a support group for women and a writing group. I ask about the tattoos. She has five on her arms and back. They are small and blue. One's Garfield the cat, another the Playboy bunny icon. There are two names. There could be more but she realized early that might not be such a good idea. And there's the one of a knife through the heart. "If you show you're tough, people don't abuse you so much," she says. Natalia Munoz can be reached at [email protected] |