During the years Michael Davis spent panhandling in Palo Alto, Calif., his nickname was “3850.”
Every day before he bought so much as a soda, he would try and find the $38.50 it took to pay the nightly rent at the Palo Alto Hotel so his wife, Detta, would not have to sleep on the street.
“My thing was keeping her indoors,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing until I got that $38.50 first.”
In May, one month before their 30th anniversary, the Davises moved into their first apartment since Dec. 23, 1988, when they moved to the Bay Area.
A glass dish of Jolly Ranchers rested on top of the IKEA coffee table Michael had assembled, and Detta re-arranged the red and white throw pillows on their sofa.
The couple giddily listed all the perks of living in their own apartment.
They don’t have to hold a blanket over the window to change. They don’t need to dress to walk to the communal bathroom. They have a mailbox.
“I got a refrigerator. I can cook any time of the day I want,” Michael said. At the hotel, the kitchen closed at 9 p.m. “I can come in the house and take my shoes off.”
Detta was looking forward to the temperature dropping.
“When it was cold at the hotel, they got to decide when to turn the heat on,” she said. “Now when it’s cold, we get to do it.”
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The couple met 33 years ago in Southern California at a barbecue Michael organized as a resident director for the California Youth Authority. He had recently gotten out of state prison and was battling an addiction to heroin and crack that started in his teens.
Detta, 18 at the time, came with a community organization to the picnic.
“He pitched me a baseball,” she said. “When I saw him, I fell in love.”
Detta’s family objected because Michael was eight years older, but they got married in 1978, on her 21st birthday.
“It’s the present that keeps on giving,” Detta said, patting Michael’s arm.
Early in their marriage, the couple did yard and home work — laying linoleum floors, maintaining lawns, installing carpet.
Their “claim to fame,” Detta said, was painting the interior of an apartment whose balcony appeared in the opening credits of the television show “Baywatch.”
But in the late 1980s, Michael’s grandmother got sick and the couple moved to the San Francisco area to help his father. After his grandmother died, Michael found out his father had leukemia.
Michael was still doing drugs, and Detta had started drinking. Arrested for a series of drug-related crimes, Michael spent time at Folsom and San Quentin State Prisons and was imprisoned at the California Rehabilitation Center four times.
Then in 1992, Detta was bicycling across Willow Road while intoxicated and she was hit by a motorist exiting Highway 101. She broke her neck and doctors told her she would never walk again.
But Michael became her physical therapist, forcing her to do her rehabilitation exercises every day.
“I called him [Michael] my M.D.,” said Detta, who has scars on her arm but walks comfortably.
In the 1990s, the couple spent most of their time bouncing between motels, hotels and sleeping on the street. Sometimes they rode the bus all night.
Seven years ago, Michael kicked drugs.
“I just stopped,” he said.
In November, Michael started working for Palo Alto’s Downtown Streets Team, a non-profit that employs the homeless to clean city streets and facilities, as well as several other local shelters.
“At first I didn’t really like it. I just saw it as a means to an end,” he said.
But he saw people leaving the program with jobs and started getting to his cleaning shifts early. After 2 1/2 months, he was promoted, then made a manager.
In May, Detta joined the streets team, too. She cleans the doctor’s office and children’s center at the Opportunity Center.
The couple found their apartment through InnVision, a housing non-profit.