SOBER SCHOLAR SHOWS THERE CAN BE LIFE AFTER DEATH.

Byline: Arthur R. Vinsel

ONCE upon a time, I wouldn't be caught dead without a tequila or whiskey in hand at a seaside terrace party amid cheery company and mariachi music, but there was no booze at a send-off for a Big Wave Dave.

All of us in the crowd are recovering alcoholic/addicts.

This is the story of Big Wave Dave: how one man who still seems a kid at 34 turned his life around, a needed reminder that we alcoholics have a disease, treatable and reversible.

David ``Big Wave Dave'' Hawes has seen an alcoholic die. The victim was a man with ragged pants around his ankles, sprawled in a dusty alley glittering with broken glass and bottle caps.

``He was just another of us homeless bums. We called him Gator,'' said Hawes, who owned little more in 1993 than a powerful thirst, a squeegee bottle for washing windshields in strip mall lots and a sizable chip on his shoulder. Hawes also panhandled on the street.

You might have seen him there. More recently, you might have seen his name in the paper - unaware of the odds against it - when he received the President's Distinguished Honor Award and a $500 scholarship at L.A. Harbor College, where he graduated with a grade-point average of 3.85.

``I guess, all told, I had spent four years on the streets,'' he said ruefully. ``I was 28 years old when I had my moment of clarity. I didn't have a key that fit anything, not a home, not a car, not a suitcase. I was just a loser.''

Hawes at first glance strongly resembles kid star-turned-movie director Ron Howard, with his multitudinous freckles and strawberry-blond hair bleached by sun and surf.

Big Wave Dave, who has become a devoted surfer in sobriety, is settled in at Humboldt State University in Arcata. He is majoring in marine biology, hoping one day to work in the ecology and environmental field. How did this happen?

Maybe it was God's will. Maybe he just saw his own future through the vacant, dead eyes of an alcoholic in a San Pedro alley. Dying like that seems more than final. Dave does not even know who Gator really was - just someone he'd hung out with. Gator got supplemental security income, a federal disability pension that no longer is granted for disability related to alcoholism or drug abuse.

``He was on SSI because of alcoholism, and he was always saying he'd get some help, soon as he got his next check,'' Hawes said. ``Who was he? Well, he was white. He was about 30. He had brown hair, blue eyes. He resembled - well, . . . he looked just like you or me.''

Big Wave Dave talked about who is susceptible to alcoholism and the continuing tendency of many to perceive it as a weakness and failure of will or morality, even a sin.

How does such a turnaround come about?

The process is not easy. Help is there, although the lack of detoxification beds - there are fewer than 100 - for roughly 85,000 who are homeless and indigent in Los Angeles County is shameful. It has been estimated that 80 percent of the homeless adults are substance abusers.

Weeks after his pal's squalid death, Hawes was lounging in a park on the waterfront near Beacon House, a men's recovery home where he would eventually spend nearly five years.

``I wasn't even really drinking that day. But I just suddenly felt, physically, like I was dying. I felt my spirit leaving my body. I could almost hear the beating of the angels' wings,'' he said, ``or maybe it was cloven hoof beats.''

Somebody took him to a soup kitchen for the homeless. A volunteer there, who knew alcoholic withdrawal can be fatal, got Hawes into the Weingart Center's detox unit on Skid Row. He went on to the county's 90-day Acton Rehabilitation Center, then to Beacon House.

Fortunately, at this social-model recovery program - in a more homelike, nonhospital setting - residents are allowed time to get their lives together after a tough, six-month primary phase.

But the process is hard work, and it isn't free.

The 120 residents volunteer for four or more hours a week of unpaid community service and have helped run Beacon House, in addition to participating in school, work, 12-Step meetings and self-government.

Dave's surfing led to his marine biology major, a tough course of study in a field where Humboldt State dominates. Some 30 of us toasted him with iced tea and diet cola at Acapulco Mexican Restaurant down by L.A. Harbor the night before he left for the university. A few diners may have wondered how we could be sober and as boisterous as Iowa Rotarians at a Las Vegas convention.

It was because, in a way, we share Dave's triumph over his beginnings. He's showing the world on behalf of all of us.

Big Wave Dave may not save the oceans as a marine biologist, but he is proof that, by working together, many of us who are alcoholics can be winners. We'll always have the Gators, lost men remembered only by nicknames, just as victims of other diseases will die.

And we alcoholics fortunate enough to be in recovery will continue to take a place in society. We can earn our modest way. We can contribute to our world. We can flourish as humans.

And that is something to celebrate.