Preparing for his final departure

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - He finally got his own bathroom, a coup for anyone living in a group home. He finally got the big front room with the big picture window, too, after living in four other, smaller rooms.

Now he's in what used to be the living room in this reconfigured suburban house. He has a fireplace where he keeps some groovy houseplants, his books and stuff. The guy has settled in.

James "Baines" Allmon never wanted to become too attached to the house and the people in it but too late: "I am already."

Which does nothing to explain why he has decided to move to Florida.

Now, a lot of 64-year-old men move to Florida. But they don't have his baggage, which is to say, they don't have full-blown AIDS.

For the past eight years, Allmon has lived at Solomon House, a seven-bedroom group home in Lexington for residents in the final stages of the disease, and for whom round-the-clock medical assistance is available.

Early on, the ebb and flow of residents was, says Allmon, a function of the efficiency of the disease. Now, though, there might be an AIDS patient who needs a temporary home and 24-hour care before returning to a less-monitored environment, and Solomon House provides that temporary haven.

That Allmon is alive at all, much less leaving the "last-resort" sanctuary that took him in, is a testament, he says, to the quality of care he has received and the degree to which researchers have succeeded in managing HIV infection and improving the length and quality of life for people living with HIV.

Solomon House is pristine and, most times, quiet. Each resident lives on his or her own schedule. They all may rise when they wish and take walks as they please. Residents make their own breakfasts and lunches; dinners are provided. Each room is private. There is even Riley, a schnauzer, who tends to make himself at home in James Jackson's room a lot of the time, settling at the older man's knees and near his ever-kind hand, answering to "my buddy." Riley is, for the record, the official house dog.

Still, the life there tends to be "AIDS 24/7," Allmon says.

"It's not a real world. It's always talk about pills, your next doctor's appointment, taking your meds, not taking your meds. what's your count. You never forget you have it. Not that that's not understandable, but you never get away from it."

He's on the phone now with AARP, asking about supplemental health insurance, trying to figure out what the differential rates are for his new Florida ZIP code. On hold, sitting in a large easy chair covered with a blue sheet, he is rail thin and talking about his well-versed history of AIDS and AIDS treatment.

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Gay, he probably contracted the disease when he was living in San Francisco in the 1980s with his former longtime partner, Daniel. He was involved in serving the AIDS community there and has traipsed up and down six-floor walk-ups to deliver food and medicine to those dying of the disease.

"By any standard, I've not seen anything better than what I am living in now," he says. "In San Francisco, where you'd think it'd be better, the housing could be filthy."

The couple moved around some, living in New York and buying a 100-acre farm in Woodford County. Working with horses and as a landscaper, Allmon took to calling Kentucky home sometime in the '90s.

When he leaves the Bluegrass in October, he will move into the second house on a two-house lot with Daniel and Daniel's partner, Michael. They insisted he make the move to the Sunshine State, sure that they can take all care of one another. Daniel and Michael are HIV-positive.

Allmon has signed up for an experimental research project in Florida, ready to do as he has always done, "take care of myself, be proactive in my own care."

He has lived too long with too hideous a disease to make light of the magnitude of this move.

"I need to go to control my own death," he says. "The end won't be pretty, because it's not a very amusing way to go. I can die down there just as well as I can die here."

He will leave a lot behind when he goes. Doctors he adores. Friends he loves.

"Some are so afraid to go," he says. "There are just too many hoops you have to jump through. You've spent a lot of time lining up all this support, all your doctors, insurance, food, meds. Once it's lined up, any ripple can seem huge to fix. It's hard. So I see why people don't want to do it."

Allmon is not naive about his own luck with this fatal, incurable disease.

In 2006, the estimated number of AIDS deaths in the United States was 14,627. The incidence of new AIDS cases in this country continues to rise. In 2006, the most recent year from which data are available, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that 56,300 Americans were newly infected with HIV. Worldwide, the number of those suffering from the disease is estimated to be 33 million.

"Without Solomon House," Allmon says, "I'd never be in the circumstances and health I am to go."

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The largest room in the house becomes available next month. There is a waiting list to get in. The former resident is leaving behind the houseplants and his more than considerable karma.

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© 2008, Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.).