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Waking to fog that has overnight descended on the Greensboro park where he lives, his eyes slowly focus on the rope hanging from the tree.

This is it, he decides.

It won't be one more ambiguous overdose, or half-hearted cry for help, like the time he flat-lined on the EMS helicopter, and they brought him back to life. If you can call this life.

One end of the rope is knotted around a high limb. He tests it, imagining himself at the other end. A kid's game of hangman. Only he's the man.

So who can say what makes Ralph "Joey" Waynick do what he does next? He picks up the small black satchel containing everything he owns, crosses the little pedestrian bridge to the jogging path into town, and knocks on one last door.

A blond woman answers, anxious, but kind: "Is there anything we can do to help?"

Joey struggles to lift his ice-blue gaze off the ground, and meet hers.

"I hope so."

* * *

This is the bright spot, the beam of light in the dense forest we've come to know as "mental health reform." But from the outside, it looks like just another address in a county office building — fluorescent lights, fake wood conference tables, burnt coffee.

And that's why Joey Waynick, 51, wasn't prepared for what he would find when he made this his last last-ditch stop Oct. 1., the end of four years on the streets, two decades of heroin addiction, a lifetime of battling depression and post-traumatic stress.

He's a son of Glenwood, but spent some of those years around Baltimore. There, heroin was $10 a whack, as easy as boosting an MP3, and there were so many homeless, the police stepped over them on the sidewalk. When Joey did come in, he would stay at a shelter with no beds.

"Junkies don't lay down and sleep," he said. "They sit in a chair."

With a trail of severed family ties, he was in and out of rehab, had 14 psychiatric hospital stays and four suicide attempts in his file. So when he knocked on the door at Recovery Innovations, a crisis alternative program on Edgeworth Street, was there anything he hadn't heard before?

Yes, it turned out, there was.

"They asked me, 'What are your hopes and dreams?' " he recalled, still stunned by the question.

"I don't think anybody ever asked me, 'What are your hopes and dreams?' I didn't want to be homeless. That was my answer."

They knew he was planning suicide — and not as a "maybe." They knew about the rope. As professionals, there was a decision to be made.

Should they send him to the hospital, at a cost of $750 a day to the system, to be stabilized and then released to the same situation?

Or could they talk this out, using this new model that the client is the best expert on his problems, and best knows his own needs?

Cheryl Erhardt, the peer specialist who answered the door that day and would later become Joey's recovery coach, needed consultation. The team watched Joey's body language change as the conversation went on.

Recovery educator Mike Weaver asked: "What if you had an apartment for two to four weeks, with a number you could call for help 24 hours a day? And then we worked on finding you your own place?"

* * *

Breakfast this morning was cornflakes. And to Joey's surprise, he could taste them.

The black satchel still rests on a chair of the one-bedroom apartment he shares with another recovering addict. Now, however, the bag holds not his worldly belongings, but his school books for the training program that may eventually afford him a paying job as peer counselor.

At his graduation two weeks ago from the Wellness Recovery program, Joey told the class: "I woke up this morning, and I was warm. I had running water. Y'all don't know what that means to me."

He sleeps now, and not with one eye open, and not sitting in a chair. But some mornings, when the sun first hits him on the air-mattress he bought at Wal-Mart, he looks up at the pine paneling of his room, stuck with a dozen sticky notes with names and numbers of people he can call for help, and it takes a long moment to focus.

"Sometimes I think, 'Where the hell am I at?' " Joey said. "Then I remember. 'Oh, yeah. This is my place.' "

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com