He laid on my couch, face up, staring at the ceiling—a posture I had never seen in a spotlight interview. When I asked him why, he told me he wanted it to feel like a “Freudian session.” I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t try and diagnosis that, but here are the facts: David is like no one I have ever met before, and his humor is only outmatched by his heart. You’ll see what I mean.
To understand David, we must go back to the sixteenth century and a man named Owen Ragsdale. Owen looked around at the poor and the elderly of Rothwell, England, and decided to do something about it. He founded Jesus Hospital—an almshouse, housing for those who had nowhere else to go. He dedicated his estate and his life to the care of people the world had largely stopped thinking about. The disenfranchised, the lost, the poor, the elderly. The hospital still stands today, still houses people, still carries out its original mission. More than four hundred years later, his descendant, David, has followed in his footsteps as the Discharge Planner at Beit T’Shuvah—finding safe housing for those who need it the most.
David grew up in Miracle Mile, youngest of three boys in a family that had been putting down roots in Los Angeles since 1902. His father was a lawyer, a Division I basketball player in the 1960s, and by all accounts a genuinely good man. His two older brothers were great athletes. The expectation, while never stated, was clear. And so when nine-year-old David got hit by a pitch at Pan Pacific Gardner Park, he did what any reasonable child would. He ran across the park, down the block, and to the library. To what he really loved. When his parents came and found him, they dropped all expectations of David’s illustrious baseball career and accepted their son for who he was.
He tried fencing next—his idea, not theirs. Foil. Full uniform. A school called Sal Gascon in what used to be the Helms Bakery building. His father drove him twice a week and bought all the equipment. David silently hated it. He hated it for a year and a half, dutifully, before his mother clocked his disgust in the rearview mirror on a drive down Venice and said, “You don’t like fencing, do you?” He said, “No.” She replied, “Why are we doing this?” And that, too, was over. What he understood then was that he didn’t have to do any of it—not sports, not fencing, not the things that everyone in his family had always done. What he didn’t understand yet, but was beginning to learn, was how to quietly undermine what the world expected of him. The lines were no longer for coloring in, and rules were meant to be bent. “I just needed to do things my own way.” The crazy part: it worked.
At Loyola High School, where all the men in his family had gone, he spent four years feeling gently misaligned. Not unhappy, not rebellious—just not quite right. The kind of place that worked perfectly well for everyone except him. He would write essays on the back of his chemistry tests because he preferred it that way. The teachers didn’t know what to do with him. David was a brilliant student—maybe too smart for his own good—so they knew they couldn’t fail him. So, despite turning in the David version of every assignment, he passed his classes with flying colors.
For college, David went to Claremont McKenna, where his nonconformity was praised. He gave a speech in Latin at graduation, had lunch with Ray Bradbury, and won the Thomas Watson Fellowship—a prestigious, competitive grant for seniors at small liberal arts colleges to design and carry out a year-long independent project outside the United States. His project: pilgrimages. The Camino de Santiago. Knock and Walsingham in England. Lourdes. Sacred roads in Tunisia. He was surprised he got it. He was even more surprised by what happened next.
He was in London on September 11th, 2001. Two weeks later, when flights resumed, he came home. The only issue: the one rule for the fellowship was to not return to America for a year. He came back anyway, stayed a month, went back to Europe, and continued the fellowship “sort of, but not really.” A classmate who had applied for the Watson and not gotten it told the foundation out of spite and jealousy. The investigation took ten months. The punishment: no student from Claremont McKenna could apply for the Watson Fellowship for a decade. The dean sent an email to all alumni, all current students, referencing vaguely “a past recipient” who had violated the terms. David had already graduated. He got his flowers. The foundation penalized the entire school for something he did…but the true punishment came in the form of David’s long-standing guilt.
Next up on the adventures of David, he went to Taipei, where his oldest brother had an English-language school. He wrote for a small newspaper. He made good money and discovered, in the way that one does in a city full of young expats with disposable income and nothing to do on weeknights, that he liked cocaine. By early 2004, he recognized a problem. His solution was to fly to a beach in Thailand and get off cocaine by spending a month doing mushrooms and drinking alcohol. “I’m going to go there for a month and get off drugs. When I say get off drugs, I’m like, ‘Okay, I won’t be doing cocaine.’” He never made it to the beach.
Instead, he met an exorbitantly rich man in Bangkok the night before he was supposed to leave, and ended up in Singapore. When he became David’s boyfriend, that short trip to Singapore turned into living there for six years. He went to graduate school and got high-paying jobs where he found himself drinking like others drank—a lot. Before he knew it, he was in the rooms of AA in Singapore and then Paris, and then flying back to LA—crying on the plane when he saw the skyline. The tears were a mix of “how ugly the city is” and “this is my home.” A duality that lives within every native Los Angeleno.
David was in and out of the rooms. Sober here. High there. That’s when he discovered meth. “I was just hooking up with a guy, and then he was using meth, and I was like, ‘sure.’” Sometimes, it’s just that simple. Just that fast. The first hit happens in an instant, but the fall happens faster. Within nine months, everything had collapsed. An old sponsor from Singapore, who happened to be on the board of a treatment center, got him a scholarship to rehab in Antigua. He went. He got six months. He relapsed.
Miraculously, David got a job at Live Nation through a guy he’d met at that rehab—running a new festival division with no background in the music industry. They tried every possible way to fail at creating a new festival and succeeded at all of them. “It was so much fun,” and he means it. Unfortunately, he got fired. Disgruntled with any and everything, he went to Atlanta with a plan to build his own festival, found investors, found a venue, and found Georgian meth. When the festival collapsed, he ended up homeless in Atlanta, though he didn’t know it until the man he was staying with told him he had to leave. With a mix of fear and ingenuity, he managed to avoid sleeping on the streets. Thankfully, he eventually asked for help and, yet again, checked himself into rehab. He got two and a half years sober, during which he was, by his own account, profoundly miserable. He was sober but not working the steps. Crying all the time. Not quite alive in any meaningful sense.
Then David’s father died. Before he knew how to process it, COVID hit. He had inheritance money…and then he didn’t. During the pandemic, his mother had a stroke, and his oldest brother called to tell him that he needed to come home. David drove back to Los Angeles, moved in, took care of his mother, and spent the next several years cycling through ninety-day stretches of sobriety and short, devastating relapses. After being told that his brothers were putting his mom in a home and he had to move out, David was even more lost than before. Then came his final run. A run that culminated in a Catholic boy calling Jewish rehab, entirely unsure what to expect. David called Beit T’Shuvah. Two weeks and one good word put in by his family priest, he walked through our doors.
David was, to say the least, genuinely confused about what kind of place he was in. The staff looked like residents. The residents seemed to be running things. Nobody acted like they worked at the jail like rehabs he had been to before. “I thought it was like a Kibbutz. Some communal thing where like, ‘Here, you’re the clinical director this week!’” He had a counselor from Wales, and his first Shabbat was on the beach. He thought to himself, “I can dig this!”
…and he’s been digging it for ten months. After landing on his feet, he got an internship working with Mia in the Susan and Leonard Nimoy Career Center. Here, he began tapping into the skills of service that have been deep within his bloodline for generations. Now, he’s the newest BTS hire—building a bigger and better discharge navigation program. He’s expanding the network of sober livings. He is on Step 12. What he brings to the table isn’t just knowledge—it’s care and love. Finding a place to stay is one thing. Ensuring a client knows that it’s going to be safe is another. The calm of a person who has been homeless and figured it out, who knows the fear of having nowhere to go and knows, from experience, that the fear is survivable, is indescribable. “I have faith that things will work out for people. That there’s a bed for every person.” He doesn’t think homelessness is required for recovery. He doesn’t think it’s inevitable. “Homelessness out of Beit T’Shuvah doesn’t need to exist.” That’s true, only because David makes it possible. In every way he knows how, with every resource he has, he finds stability for those who need it the most. He guides them to safety in sobriety. And yes, David still doesn’t always color within the lines. But, he doesn’t have to. Because David was never meant to be a sheep. He’s the shepherd.
