Trends : LOVE STORIES: : THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY : ‘I Got You, Babe’

From true love to stabbed-in-the-back love, from quick love to love that just won’t die, View writers have chronicled looks at love in the ‘80s for Valentine’s Day eve. Some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the guilty, but all are true . . . even if love sometimes isn’t.

With the whole “neighborhood” watching, Darryl Brockman got down on one knee in front of the cardboard refrigerator box in which Kathie Charlene lived. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

That was Christmas night. A year before, the love of Brockman’s life had been rock cocaine.

At the peak of his career, Brockman was earning $65,000 a year as a programmer for the County of Los Angeles, he said. Then he “got divorced, got depressed, got into drugs.”

Gradually the rock he loved began making harsher and harsher demands.

“You have to have smoked it to know--cocaine talks to you,” the 40-year-old Brockman said. “It gets to the point where it’ll tell you, ‘You don’t need to go to work.’ It tells you, ‘You don’t need anyone but me.’ ”

Finally, he set up house with his habit in a cardboard box outside the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles Street.

One day last June, though, Brockman simply “got tired of being a bum.” He threw cocaine out of his life, and asked to be admitted to the mission. He worked for a while as a janitor there, and is now an assistant dormitory supervisor, earning $300 a month, he said.

Charlene, who grew up in Santa Monica, has been living in the cluster of “cardboard condos” on Los Angeles Street for several months. The 19-year-old was a lifeguard on Santa Monica’s City Beaches, but when her job ended last summer, “I ran out of rent money, so I stayed with friends for a while, and then I ran out of friends,” she said.

Now Charlene and Brockman are looking for jobs and planning a June wedding. As they sat on a fire hydrant, nuzzling and stroking each other’s hair, they said they haven’t really envisioned the perfect little slice of the American dream they hope for the way lovers sometimes do.

“But it’ll be the two of us living together and living happy,” Charlene said.

“That’s perfect enough,” Brockman said.