(Editor's Note: This is the fourth installment of a story told in seven chapters about a man battling addiction in Albany. It is based on several months of interviews with Samuel 'Poppy' Baez, a 59-year-old chronic alcoholic and crack addict who is also homeless and struggles with mental illness.) ALBANY, N.Y. -- 'Hello, is this Jane Baez?' Poppy told me he hadn't heard from his wife in many years. 'I don't think she cares if I'm alive or not,' he said once, his voice wounded and weepy from alcohol. The last he knew, she worked at the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles. That's where I found her. I asked if she was the wife of Samuel Baez, nicknamed Poppy. Yes, she said. I explained I was writing a story about Poppy's life. Would she be willing to speak with me about him? There was a long silence. She sighed heavily. Her exhalation held a bluesy note, tinged with pain and memory. She was curious about what I could tell her about her husband, too, since legally they're still married. They met in 1984. He was serving a six-month sentence in Arizona's Maricopa County Jail. He had stolen a car when he was drunk. She worked as a jail guard. He was a trusty and a supervisor of the inmate cleaning crew. He had keys to the cells. 'Everyone loved him, officers and inmates,' she recalled. 'Everyone who met Sam instantly took a liking to him.' Jane oversaw the jail's trusty unit and fell under the spell of Poppy's considerable charms. After he was released, they became romantically involved and were married in 1986. She was four years older than he was, and had four children from two previous marriages. Her youngest two were in diapers when Poppy came to live under their roof. He landed a good job, with benefits, on the maintenance crew at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. They lived nearby. Poppy reveled in the role of a stepfather. He coached their Little League and football teams. He took them fishing and taught boxing and karate at a neighborhood youth center. Her boys idolized Poppy. 'He was a very good dad,' Jane recalled. 'Life was pretty sweet at first.' Addiction's wreckage accumulated gradually. He was adept at hiding his problem. The drinking started with a six-pack after work and grew to double that each night, and then more. Jane smelled the sourness of beer on his breath at all hours and nagged him about his drinking. She found out that he was doing drugs, too, including crack, but never caught him using. He switched from beer to vodka. The odor was easier to mask. She'd find empty vodka bottles in her kids' cereal boxes. He started missing work and was let go from the university. 'He always managed to get new jobs, but he couldn't keep them for long,' Jane said. He worked as a carpenter, painter, janitor, cook, dishwasher and handyman. Poppy began going on benders, disappearing for days or even weeks at a time. She later learned he had binge buddies on a nearby Navajo Indian reservation. Even when he was drinking and drugging, he paid his share of household bills and did not mistreat her kids. He and Jane never had children of their own. 'He never laid a hand on any of us, but there was verbal abuse and he'd threaten me,' Jane said. Scared and worn down, she demanded that he get into treatment or she would leave him. He managed to get clean and sober, at least five times. Once, she and her sons completed rehab with him in a family program. He'd been an alcoholic since age 9, a drug addict from his teen years, she learned in counseling. Jane contacted his brother and sister and filled in gaps of his upbringing. Poppy was born in Gary, Ind., and grew up in a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. He was the 12th child, hyperactive and a handful. His parents couldn't raise him and farmed their son out to his grandmother, who sent him on to a group home when he was 6. He ran away. Police tried to return him to his parents, but they insisted the cops take him back to the group home. During adolescence, Poppy was counseled for emotional and psychological problems that suggested bipolar disorder. He was a habitual runaway from the group home until he broke free for good. Poppy found refuge in the streets, taking up with the Latin Kings in Chicago. Just before he would have been sent to Vietnam, he was dishonorably discharged from the Army for punching a drill sergeant. He was married briefly to a Mexican woman. They had a son, but Poppy lost contact after their marriage broke up following a fight with his wife's brother. Poppy beat the man so savagely he was charged with attempted murder and served most of a 10-year state prison sentence. Addiction addled his mind and symptoms of permanent brain damage began to appear. In detox, doctors shot him up with massive doses of B vitamins, thiamin and supplements until his memory was gradually restored. As the years piled up, treatment was less effective, he resisted detox and any hope that Poppy might beat his addiction faded. 'Sam's story is a story of addiction,' Jane said. 'He tried really hard over and over again, but he couldn't get the monkey off his back.' She lost regular contact with him in 1998. A binge led him to North Carolina, where he lived for a year in the woods in a shack he built beside a cemetery. He worked odd jobs and eventually met a drifter with ties to the upstate New York. The dark side of Poppy's legacy is still felt by his wife. His erratic payment of taxes caused her to lose a house. She now lives in Chandler, Ariz. Her second-oldest son is a cop in that city, a detective who heads an anti-gang unit. 'Sam's a part of my life I'd just as soon no longer think about or discuss,' he said. Her two younger sons are alcoholics. Their biological father and maternal grandfather are alcoholics, too. She doesn't blame Poppy for her children's addiction. But his erratic behavior didn't help. 'As my boys got older and needed guidance, Sam was going off the deep end,' Jane said. 'When they needed him to be a dad, he let them down. And me, too.' She was into memory's deepest muck now, the dark and ugly residue of addiction. Curiously, she chose to remember the bright and shiny parts. She reminisced about what a beautiful dancer he was, with such rhythm and grace that he always drew a crowd who stopped to watch as he glided about the dance floor. Mr. Bojangles, she liked to call him. Jane has a photo album that preserved the happy moments, of Poppy's camping and fishing trips with her boys and the seasons he coached Little League. There is forgiveness in her voice. 'I've let go of my anger and animosity against him,' she said. 'The sad part is he had so much potential. He was a good human being when he wasn't drinking and drugging. I pray for him and hope he finds a little peace in his life. But addiction has always had him by the throat. He can't get away from it.' Do you still love him? I asked. There was a pause. Then she heaved a long sigh, the hint of a blues note again. 'I do,' she said softly. 