Tip-toeing through a middle-class house of cards

I can’t pretend to know what was going through Ervin Lupoe’s mind when he shot his wife and five young children to death, then committed suicide this week.

His rampage was horrifying; unfathomable to anyone thinking logically.

But his predicament -- deeply in debt, jolted by job loss, despondent over his family’s future -- is becoming a familiar story.

The family lost its middle-class footing in an unforgiving economy.

You don’t have to feel the noose tightening around your own neck to imagine the pain and fear that brings.

Almost one in 10 Californians -- 1.5 million people -- are looking for work right now. That’s the highest unemployment rate the state has posted in 15 years. Every day, another company is cutting jobs or closing doors. On Thursday, the number of workers filing unemployment claims across the country hit an all-time high.

The dismal news is taking an emotional toll on all of us. I paid a visit to an unemployment office in the San Fernando Valley to see how it plays out among job-seekers.

In the parking lot at the Canoga Park office, I could guess which visitors were middle class, likely new to joblessness:

The fellow driving the tricked-out Expedition with expensive rims and a dent in the door. The well-dressed woman carrying a Coach briefcase, walking resolutely toward a late-model Lexus. The cheery young man with paperwork bulging from a colorful Whole Foods bag, which he tossed in the back seat of his Prius.

And I could sense the weariness in the veterans:

The grim-faced man trailed by a silent woman and child, who walked with their heads down to an ancient Chevy. The young woman out of work since November, pacing and complaining into her cellphone that her husband was now in line beside her. “Can you believe it?” she said. “He got laid off!”

Inside, the office was airy and calm, with banks of computers, phones and fax machines, and shelves of books with titles such as “Careers in the New Economy” and “How to Bounce Back Quickly After Losing Your Job.” The intake clerk was counseling a newcomer: “Remember, patience and perseverance.” The trays were empty under the “Job Postings” sign.

It looked nothing like the grimy, crowded office I remember from 1981 -- the last “worst recession since the Great Depression” -- when my late husband, a social worker, was among 12 million Americans looking for jobs.

Over time, our disappointment turned to fear, then panic. I still remember our tense Sunday evening ritual, when I’d type out dozens of cover letters for him and we’d bicker over prospects and qualifications.

But looking back, we were lucky. We didn’t have children yet, and the newspaper business was healthy enough to offer me plenty of overtime shifts. It took a year, but he found a job -- a commission-only sales position -- and turned it into a new career.

The effects of that year lingered, though. It exhausted our savings, strained our relationship and stole our youthful optimism.

On Thursday, I saw the same haunted look in the eyes of job-seekers that I saw in my husband back then. Now, as then, middle-class families are taking it on the chin.

People like Claire Fabian, who has an MBA, lives in suburban Westlake Village and has worked steadily for 40 years. She landed in the job-seeking pool after recovering from foot surgeries that forced her to quit her job last summer. This was her first visit to the unemployment office.

She keeps the grim statistics at arm’s length. “I’m having hope,” she told me, hobbling to a pickup truck with an Obama sticker on the back. “I hear the stories. I personally don’t know anybody who’s hurting so bad, though I know they’re out there.”

Claire, meet Kevin.

He lost his job with a video firm in September when the company went under. That same month, he wound up with custody of his four children after their mother went into a rehab program.

“It’s a joke trying to find a job,” he told me. “Everybody’s apprehensive about spending money. Even the companies who need help would rather spread the extra work around to their employees rather than go out on a limb and hire somebody.”

His unemployment benefits will run out next month. “It’s hard not to be discouraged,” he said. “They say, ‘We’ll give you a call when things pick up.’ We already know they’re not picking up.”

So on Thursday, he spent two hours waiting to get the paperwork he needs to apply for more government help -- a housing subsidy, health services, child care programs.

“It’s really, really scary,” said Kevin, who is 45 and lives in Canoga Park, but did not want me to use his last name because he doesn’t want social workers to find out how precarious things are.

“I’m afraid they’ll look at me and say, ‘You have no means to keep your kids.’ And they’ll take my children away.”

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There is a sick sort of irony in the fact that the Lupoes’ life unraveled, in part, because the parents -- behind on a mortgage payment and taxes -- lied to try to cut their child care costs and were fired from well-paying jobs for forging signatures on the day care application.

Their story sends chills through me not just because what the father did was criminal and unforgivable, but because I know there are many families struggling economically, like the Lupoes were -- ruing that kitchen remodel, the new car, the family trip to Costa Rica.

There’s a brewing sense of desperation as we realize how precarious is our status. I feel it myself as a single mother with two children heading for college, my savings shrinking, credit cards maxed and home-equity line gone.

I’m holding on to the advice from the clerk at the unemployment office:

It’ll take patience and perseverance to weather this storm.

Still, it’s hard to keep the fear at bay when your middle-class life is revealed as a house of cards, and one bad move could threaten it all.

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sandy.banks@latimes.com