Transformed by romance

Homeless alcoholic falls in love with teacher, cleans up his act

RALEIGH -- Pony Cook no longer swallows mouthwash to get drunk. He doesn't disrupt church, panhandle the mothers of pre-schoolers in the car pool line, inject heroin, dig for his dinner in trash cans or sleep behind them. This is because of a woman, mostly.

On New Year's Eve, Cook wore a jacket and tie and stood with his fiancee, Barbara Abbey, in the church where they met. The couple held hands in front of more than 60 family members and friends. They faced each other and promised that, in sickness and in health, they would endure together.

Then they kissed, and everyone clapped. It was a congratulatory moment, but one of encouragement, too. The coming year will be unlike any either has faced.

All relationships are built on trust, but this one has required new levels of it. When she met him, Cook was a blank slate. He had no driver's license, no birth certificate, no baby pictures or connections to home.

Slowly, she let him into her life. Some of their first dates were nothing more than sitting in her car, chatting about their lives. Some of what he told her was difficult to hear. Trust began to build.

Of his first 20 years in Raleigh, Cook estimates he spent 17 of them on the streets, and those three sheltered years include time spent staying with friends or in the county lockup. He preferred drinking and sleeping in the woods to punching a clock.

While he bounced along society's margins, Abbey raised two girls and built a career as a teacher at Wakefield Middle School in Raleigh. She is a middle-class mom who loves the movies.

"I think what he needed more than alcohol was for someone to believe in him," said Molly Beck, a church member who helped Cook when he was homeless. "She saw his potential, beyond his outside trappings, to what is in his heart."

Beneath the alcohol, the layers of old dirty clothes, the rambling stories and the stints in jail, she first fell in love with his hands.

They were, she would say just days before the wedding, the only thing about him in the beginning that seemed normal.

The homeless life

The government calls him Harry Wallace, but the man answers to Pony. Cook is 54 and a wiry fast-talker, the kind of guy who greets visitors with a two-part, streetwise handshake. The people in his elaborate stories of homeless life have names like Bandanna Jim and Little Ron. When he talks about kicking dope for the first time, he speaks of "sweating my brain pan loose."

Originally from Florida, he hitched a ride to Raleigh in February 1987 looking for work. A plumber and pipe fitter, he worked intermittently during his first years here but still chose mostly to live on the street. He once received a good offer to work in Cary but didn't want to commit himself, preferring to drink instead.

He lived at small campsites that he and his friends would set up in North Raleigh, behind buildings or Dumpsters or in the woods. "I didn't have to answer to nobody except myself," he said.

In 2004 he was photographed for a News & Observer story about pedestrians who are killed by trains. Two men had died recently in Durham, and Cook was camping near some tracks off Atlantic Avenue in Raleigh. He said the tracks served as a convenient pathway, and he was pictured sprawled beside them after taking a spill while drunk on malt liquor and mouthwash. He had stopped the hard drugs before moving to Raleigh.

Cook has no recollection of the photographer's visit that day. Although he could barely function, he was able to give the photographer a fake name, Josh Le Randall, inspired by Steve McQueen's character in the old TV show "Wanted: Dead or Alive."