Stories From the Edge : For Many of L.A.’s Hungry, Adversity Visits Suddenly

They come in battered Pintos with bald tires and missing fenders.

They get off buses, transfers in hand.

They walk in off the street pushing expropriated shopping carts.

Or they drive up in shiny new vans with chrome roof racks and stereo speakers fore and aft.

But no matter how they arrive at the county’s 475 food pantries, the stories they tell have a common theme--for whatever reason, they live their lives so close to the economic edge that anything from a flat tire to an extra-large utility bill is enough to put them in the one place they never expected to find themselves: standing in line for free food.

For Ruth Alexander, the thing that pushed her over the edge was problems with men.

“I was doing great,” wrapping meat in a Sacramento supermarket for $12 an hour, she says. She had her own car, $300 in savings and a rented room.

Then, she says, “my boyfriend got out of jail.”

Alexander is a husky, forthright, trusting woman with her hair piled up in a bun and a big purple bruise on her left arm. “My boyfriend did that,” she says. “He popped my finger, too. I said, ‘Hey, I need that to work.’ ”

He was in culture shock, she says. He didn’t know he didn’t have to act tough anymore. “I felt sorry for him. I took him out to dinner. I spent all my money.”

Because her boyfriend had grown up in Los Angeles and thought on that account he’d have a better chance of finding work here, Alexander sold a diamond ring to finance the trip.

When they arrived in Los Angeles, Alexander immediately found work wrapping meat in a San Fernando Valley supermarket. It was only later that she discovered the pay was just $5.70 an hour.

“This is crude,” she says. “I was making $12 an hour by myself and doing great. Now I’m supporting both of us on $5.70 and sleeping in my car.”

A malfunctioning air conditioner led to Keith Perau’s standing in the free food line. He had a job as a maintenance man to an African consulate in Beverly Hills and was living with his wife and their three kids in a house trailer on a little side street in the San Fernando Valley.

During a heat spell, Perau complained to the manager that the air conditioner didn’t work, he says. Then, three men armed with two-by-fours showed up to evict him: “They beat me up and threw me out on the street.”

Meantime, Perau lost his job and couldn’t find another.

“I’m dyslexic,” he says. “I can’t fill out the application. I can’t find work. I can’t find nothing.”

As a result, Perau says his family now gets $500 a month welfare while living in a motel that costs $560 a month. It’s an awful place, full of prostitutes and crack addicts. “You got people knocking on doors all night.” Whenever he has to leave for anything, his wife, he says, waits in the locked room with a .357 magnum.

On top of everything else, Perau says he has a kind of colon cancer that has left him drained and dispirited.

But he’s afraid to have an operation because that would mean leaving his wife and kids alone in the motel while he recuperates.

“If dad is on his back, he can’t provide,” Perau says.

It was a red light in Van Nuys that did in Danny, the carpenter. He’s 29, blond and broad-chested with curly hair and a polite low-key manner. He’s originally from Ontario in San Bernardino County. He doesn’t want to give his last name, he says, because he never paid his ticket.

Last Nov. 22, while lost in Van Nuys, a police officer stopped him for going through a traffic light. Because he didn’t have his license on him, Danny says, the police impounded his car and left him and his wife standing in the street. “I had a ’71 Cougar, good condition, registered and everything,” he says.

Danny didn’t know what to do. He’d never been on the street before. He and his wife spent that first night sitting up in an all-night coffee shop.

He never did get his car back. Every day the impound yard added another $9 in storage fees, which Danny couldn’t pay. After 45 days, they auctioned off his car to the highest bidder. And he’s been stuck in the San Fernando Valley ever since, living in a motel room and when necessary collecting free food.

There is no end to the reasons why people go hungry in Los Angeles: a new baby, unemployment, the need to come up with first, last and a security deposit when renting a new apartment. Sometimes people simply don’t know where to get food. Other times they have no way of getting there.

Or, like Jean Hastings, who until recently had been making $7 an hour running a machine in a plastic bag plant, they haven’t been out of work long enough to quality for welfare.

At the Seedling food pantry in South-Central Los Angeles, director Rita Russo has served Central American immigrants who have applied for amnesty, and are, therefore, ineligible for Aid for Families With Dependent Children (amnesty applicants are required to be self-sufficient).

At the San Pedro Harbor Interfaith Shelter, Sister Marilyn Rudy once had a man come in for free food because he had injured himself on the job and his lawyer wouldn’t let him work until he settled his lawsuit.

Even people getting public assistance need free food, because sometimes the checks are late or never come at all, says Cheri Miller, a welfare advocate at the Harbor Interfaith Shelter who testified at a hunger hearing held by City Councilman Robert Farrell in March. Other times, the benefits are arbitrarily reduced. “Most people only get a fraction of what they are entitled to,” Miller says. But when the clients complain, she says, “the welfare office hangs up on them.”

Nor is it only the poor who need free food.

Construction workers and gardeners sometimes need help during rainy spells. Homeowners have been forced to the wall by the recent rises in their variable interest rates.

Screenwriters came by the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry during the writers’ strike, says Jerry Rabinowitz, captain of the Friday food giveaway. “Afterward, they sent us checks for $100 or $150.” One woman who used to come in for free food married a farmer. “Now,” Rabinowitz says, “she brings us a crate of lettuce every week.”

Still the most common complaint by people who need free food is the high cost of rent--which in many cases consumes 75%-80% of the family income.

Karen Cleveland, 39, a single mother with three children at home, gets $760 a month in welfare and food stamps. But she immediately pays out $600 of that sum for rent. As a result, Cleveland says, “I usually run out of food the middle of every month.”

There are, of course, food stamps. But rarely are they enough.

“I figured it out,” says Jimmy, an unemployed person with heart and lung problems who gets $24 a month in food stamps. “That’s only 80 cents a day. Dogs and cats get better.”

As he leaves the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry, Rick Rofman has a stroke of luck--he finds five pennies on the asphalt parking lot.

“That’s a five-cent peanut butter cup at the 7-Eleven,” he says, happily. “I pick up pennies wherever I find them. I never used to think this way--I just used my MasterCard.”

Rofman is bright, articulate and opinionated. He lives in a spectacularly unruly apartment littered with large piles of newspapers, magazines and assorted articles of clothes and decorated with hundreds of magazine photographs taped to the walls.

He says he has two master’s degrees from Syracuse University and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania--though when he discovered that he went to school with Donald Trump, “I wanted to commit suicide.”

On this morning, Rofman, who is 46, walked six miles for his bag of groceries but he’s quite light-hearted about it all: “When you have diabetes and high blood pressure, walking is the best thing in the world. The thing about this (economic) depression is that it will strengthen people like me.”

Until recently, Rofman taught English composition and vocabulary at local community colleges.

Now he lives on $100-a-week unemployment, which after paying for the 50 magazines to which he subscribes leaves him with so little discretionary income that he recently asked the phone company to disconnect his telephone.

Two years before, the bank repossessed his car, but it didn’t bother Rofman--”I couldn’t afford to put gas in it anyway.”

In order to survive, Rofman has devised all sorts of mini-strategies to save money. Recently he went through all his old letters and peeled off any uncanceled stamps to re-use. “I found a 6-cent Eisenhower,” he says.

Whenever he has a hamburger at McDonald’s, he pockets little bags of condiments.

“Many times,” he says, “my lunch has been four bags of ketchup.” Because the food pantries don’t always have toilet paper, he takes extra sheets from public rest rooms.

At the moment, he says, his total assets are $3 or $4 in the bank and two shares of Disney stock.

When panhandlers stop and ask for money he gives them 50 cents, even though, he says, he may only have $1.50 in his pocket.

If they ask “Is that all?” Rofman replies that Jesus only required people to give 10%: “I just gave you 30%.”

People who work in free food distribution agree that hunger is getting worse in Los Angeles.

Emergency food requests in the city are up 10% over the previous year, according to a January, 1989, report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, while the amount of food available from such large groups as the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is down 21% for the same period.

The first three months of 1989 were so bad, executive director Doris Bloch says, it made her “blood run cold. I remain hopeful. I have to be. But we are really hanging on by our fingernails.”

One reason for the problem is that distributions of government surplus flour, honey, butter, cornmeal, cheese, rice and nonfat dry milk have dropped dramatically in recent years.

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which distributes food to 425 charitable groups in Los Angeles County serving an estimated 175,000 people a week, received 65% less government surplus food in 1988 than it did the year before.

At the same time, there has been a significant drop in some kinds of private contributions from the large food companies and supermarket chains.

“Because of debt service for (their) leveraged buyouts,” Doris Bloch says, “the big companies are selling their outdated, surplus and damaged goods to the secondary market” instead of donating the goods to food banks. As a result, she says, some charitable groups have even quit coming to the food bank. “They don’t get enough food.”

The people hardest hit are mothers with infants and young children.

During the flush government surplus years, many mothers fed their children nonfat dry milk. Now with the surplus depleted, many mothers, says Cheri Miller of the Harbor Interfaith Shelter, have had to resort to filling their babies’ bottles with watered-down Kool Aid or iced tea.

At the Failure to Thrive clinic at the Harbor-UCLA medical center in Torrance, UCLA pediatrician Carol Berkowitz says she sees 10 to 15 babies a week.

Because at least a third of the children simply don’t get enough to eat, she says, they are small and dwarfed with smaller heads and smaller brains. Their ribs show, their flesh hangs loose, there’s no swell to their buttocks. The size of newborns is smaller too--5-6 pounds, as opposed to a more normal 7-8 pounds.

There are several reasons for such malnutrition, Berkowitz says. Mothers who are taking drugs often either lose their appetite and neglect to feed their kids or just assume that, like themselves, they’re not hungry. Some mothers don’t know about free food programs or because of their illegal immigration status are afraid to take advantage of them.

For some mothers, it requires a trip on four different buses just to get to a food pantry.

But for the most part, the real problem isn’t so much a shortage of food as a shortage of nutritious food.

“Peanut butter is like gold,” Rabinowitz says. “We need more soups. And I would like to be able to give out more than one can of tuna fish to a family of eight.”

Although most people who get free food are deeply appreciative for the help, not everyone standing in line for free food is a charming model citizen temporarily down on his luck.

“Some come in real demanding,” says Oleeta Crow, a full-time volunteer at the Seedling food pantry on South Broadway. They think they are in a supermarket--”I want two butters. Do you have any toilet paper?”

The North Hollywood Interfaith Pantry had to hire a guard to placate neighbors who complained that its clients were littering the street with food wrappers, and, on one occasion, defecating on the lawn.

Some people need food because they don’t use good judgment when it comes to spending their money.

“I’m amazed,” Berkowitz says, “how many people have TV sets but don’t have enough food.”

Nor are all the people who show up really hungry. Some recipients only want to sell the food for drugs and alcohol. When Rita Russo, a former Catholic nun, first opened the Seedling six years ago, she often got burned, she says, by single men coming in and saying they had six kids to feed: “I started asking for proof that the kids existed. And they quit coming in after that.”

Rabinowitz estimates that perhaps 20% of the people who come into his operation for food are running some little scam.

Even so, he says, it’s not worth it to try to separate the needy from the greedy--”We give food to anyone who asks.” Besides, he says, if 20% of the food requests are scams, that means “80% really need it.”

“I do a lot of praying that I will get out of here,” says Oleeta Crow, a single mother of four sitting at the kitchen table of her small battered house near Gage Avenue and South Broadway in South-Central Los Angeles.

There are police drug busts up and down the street, knife fights at the nearby liquor store and drive-by shootings at the apartment house next door.

Her kitchen sink leaks so badly the floor sags. When it rains, a stream of water drips directly into the bathroom toilet bowl. Because the drain has been disconnected, the suds from her washing machine run across the utility shed floor and out into the side yard, turning the grass gray and making the lawn look like a toxic dump.

Despite all this, Crow, 32, is candid, usually cheerful and quite industrious, volunteering up to 45 hours a week at the Seedling food pantry next door.

Then, last winter, she got a part-time job at $7 an hour distributing food vouchers for food and shelter to homeless people during cold weather. “I was making good money,” she says, “$500 a month.”

Applying for Unemployment

When the warm weather returned and her job ended, she tried to go back on welfare. But welfare workers told her to apply for unemployment instead. At the unemployment office, they told her she hadn’t worked long enough to qualify.

Then, when Crow tried to get Social Security benefits for her daughters (their father recently had died in a car crash in Mexico), “the lady asked me if I was crazy,” Crow says. “She said he didn’t work long enough.” And besides, the caseworker said, he had been working under a phony number.

In the end, welfare agreed to take her back--but only after 45 days.

Meantime, she was 100% dependent on free food from the Seedling to feed her family. And recently, Crow says, a woman from the Department of Water and Power showed up with a cut-off notice resulting from an unpaid electric bill of $115.70.

For the kids’ sake, Crow tries not to be depressed in front of them. When she feels bad, she waits until everyone is asleep. Then, she says, “I just lie there and cry.”