Hanging On : Their demon is drugs. Their struggle is to get free and stay free. In the balance is a fragile love relationship.

Abel and Shantell are in love. It’s one of those small flowers clinging to life in stony soil, in this case the crack houses and sidewalk drug merchants of the eastern San Fernando Valley.

The two teen-agers have been drawn to each other by a mutual struggle to get clean and sober after an adolescence of violence and drug abuse. Together they hope to leave behind the neighborhood for a house with a picket fence, but they are finding that it takes more than a fence to keep out temptation.

A slender, gloomy youth of 18, Abel Maldonado sat nervously drinking coffee near the end of a difficult summer at his grandmother’s house on one of Pacoima’s graffiti-splattered streets. He was packed to leave on the bus the next morning for the city of Madera in central California.

A Christian family there had agreed to take him in so he could try to stop using drugs. It would be his ninth drug program.

Shantell sat beside him. A confident-looking young black woman of 17 with flamboyant red nails and mocha skin, she said she would wait for him. After all, he is the first boyfriend who hadn’t abused her. One beat her so badly that her face was paralyzed for four months. She is in hiding from another who wants to kill her, which is why she asked that her family name not be used.

“He already asked me to marry him, and I said ‘yes,’ ” Shantell said. But she had seen him fail several times before and was determined that if he didn’t stay clean this time, it would be over. She was not prepared to sacrifice nearly two years sobriety, not even for Abel.

Abel and Shantell are the walking wounded of the drug war. Like many others in their generation, they began getting high as youngsters and now are veterans, though she is still too young to vote.

They aren’t alone in their efforts to be free. Despite fears that drug use among young people is rampant and growing, recent surveys by the National Institute on Drug Abuse show declines among a critical group of youthful users of both marijuana and cocaine. In 1988, the number of known drug users between 18 and 25 years old who had used cocaine in the previous 30 days was about 5%, down from a high in 1979 of nearly 10%. Usage also is declining among 12- to 17-year-olds.

“It may just be that kids are leading the way to sobriety,” said Jim Hall, director of Up Front Drug Information in Miami.

But the journey to recovery can be long and torturous.

For one thing, crack cocaine is cheap, easy to obtain and at least as addictive as drugs that have been around longer.

Most treatment programs are geared to adult users. There are months-long waiting lists for admission into treatment centers for young people in Los Angeles.

Deciding to get clean and finding a program that can help is only a part of the battle. After graduating, the young users often return to the environments that corrupted them in the first place. Working at menial jobs as waitresses and clerks, they can’t afford to go anyplace else.

“Sometimes I wonder, is this all life has to offer?” Abel asked.

Jerry Larson, the director of a San Fernando Valley live-in center for adolescent users, said that after a year in his Pride House, many addicts become good students. But as their graduation date approaches, they worry about returning to the old neighborhoods. “They know that if they don’t maintain the tough-guy image, they’ll get slaughtered,” Larson said. “They’re all scared.”

With so much to surmount, Abel and Shantell have been drawn together in an alternately turbulent and gentle cross-cultural love affair. While others their age look forward to the prom or to renting a limo on homecoming night, Abel and Shantell relish stealing a few minutes’ conversation at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

“I’ve had girlfriends that I thought I was going to be in love with until the hubcaps fell off,” Abel said. Those relationships, born in the poisonous atmosphere of drugs and street life, shriveled and died.

A former gang member and product of its warrior code, Abel can be wary to the point of numbness. But Shantell’s brashness shatters the walls he erects against the world. “I love her for the fact that she never gave up on me,” he said, turning away uncomfortably. “She’s always stuck by my side. I’ve put her through a whole lot. She helps me stay that one more day clean when things are going hard.”

For Shantell, Abel’s introspective toughness is an anchor against turmoil. She sees him as a man honestly grappling with his demons, so different from other men she has known who loosed their demons on her. “I know he would never hit me,” she said.

It’s characteristic of her to define love in terms of pain. After leaving her violent boyfriends, she rejected one man who was too gentlemanly: It gave her the creeps. Abel is no gusher, but he has learned to show her how he feels. She was delighted when he had her name tattooed on his chest.

“It took a while to get used to, but I like being treated this way. It trips me out, because in past relationships, I’ve been materialistic. All the other guys had nice cars, gold chains around their necks, and they would get my hair done every week. Right now Abel doesn’t have a lot to offer me as far as material things.”

Despite all this, each may be a danger to the other. “They’ve got two chances, slim and none,” Marcellus Robinson, a drug counselor in Los Angeles, said on being told about the couple. Robinson says that even if Abel stays clean, coming home with a few dollars less than usual some week will always arouse the old suspicions. “If I was the young lady, I would terminate the relationship.”

Shantell is loathe to break off with Abel. She remembers how much it hurt when her mother abandoned her.

Her natural mother, a white woman who once set the family home afire with Shantell and her sisters inside, decided upon taking up with a new man that her keenly intelligent 5-year-old daughter needed to be with a black family. One day she introduced her to a stranger who she said was going to take her out for ice cream.

Instead, he took her to a foster home, and, from there, to her adoptive parents, who lived in Los Angeles. She was afraid at first, she said, “because I had never been around black people.”

Clever and rebellious, Shantell started smoking pot at 13. Her favorite highs were on crack and PCP. By the time she was a sophomore in high school, she had entered the first of half a dozen treatment programs, a Care Unit in Los Angeles. She left in 30 days, beating up a ward matron to escape.

During the next year she made a rapid descent, abusing drugs and being abused in turn by her boyfriends. She developed an enlarged liver and an ulcer. She also became suicidal, once slashing her wrists with sharpened bobby pins when she was hospitalized and couldn’t get a razor blade.

She became so violent at one point in her early high school years that attendants at a Van Nuys psychiatric hospital immobilized her in a five-point restraint. Above her was a mirror.

“It was the worst feeling I ever had. All I could do was look in the mirror,” she said.

As a last-ditch effort short of permanent institutionalization in a mental hospital, she was sent with her mother’s permission to a treatment facility in San Diego. She has been clean for 21 months.

She met Abel a little more than a year ago at a “sober dance” sponsored by a treatment program. Despite his tough exterior, she began to see a genuineness in him she had not known in others. They enjoyed dancing and going to dinner and quickly developed a bond.

Yet she recognizes the destructive side of the relationship. Her trouble, she knows, is an addiction to pain, both physical and mental. “My relationship with Abel is up and down. I need that. I need some drama.”

Ellen Morehouse, a clinical social worker who treats adolescent drug abusers in Westchester County, N.Y., was not ready to predict doom for such a couple.

“The worst thing for kids trying to get clean is boredom and loneliness,” she said. In a world of rigid treatment programs run by adults, two teen-agers can be colleagues in their recovery, she said.

Abel’s father, Augie Maldonado, today is a well-regarded anti-drug crusader in the eastern San Fernando Valley. But when Abel was young, his father was a heroin addict. When he would use drugs, his wife would scream and he would break up the place.

Abel saw it all. “He always wanted to be like his dad,” Augie Maldonado said sorrowfully. Eventually he succeeded, starting with marijuana at age 12.

“Gradually I went up in the world,” Abel said. There was PCP, then crack cocaine and finally heroin. His parents finally kicked him out of the house, so he slept in abandoned cars and in “shooting galleries,” spots where dope users congregate to get high.

Staying off drugs has not been easy. After his latest program before the one in Madera, Abel stayed clean for a month. Then the needle got the best of him, and he was flying for days. When he came down, he landed hard. He was so disgusted with himself that he pulled out a gun and looked heavenward.

“I started to yell out to God, ‘Show me what to do not to live this unhappy,’ ” he said. “All those years of trying to get clean, and I failed every time.” Then Shantell called and talked him to sleep.

Would he have used the gun? “Fifty-fifty,” Shantell said. “If I had not called, he probably would have used it.”

Within a few days of his departure for Madera, Shantell got a letter. “He told me he was sitting under a tree, tripping off the birds singing. When he’s clean, he’s a different person,” she said happily in a conversation after work one day.

But Abel was back before the leaves fell from that tree. He was kicked out of the program when the director accused him and other residents of using drugs. Shantell picked him up at the bus station in Pacoima. He had a smile of reconciliation on his face and started to explain. Shantell cut him off.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” she said angrily.

Shantell checked his arms, his neck, his feet, places where he would shoot up. Finding no tracks, she finally believed him.

At his father’s insistence, Abel entered yet another treatment program the next morning. It is called the Live Again Ministry and is on a small ranch in Sunland. In the midst of a fall heat wave a short time later, Abel emerged from his room and, pulling a T-shirt over his tattooed body, said he was doing fine.

But he was jumpy. He had attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting the day before in his old neighborhood in Pacoima, where he saw some of his old friends on the street.

“What’s happening, Abel?” one of them asked. Abel pointed to his Bible, and they sneered. “They told me, ‘You big sissy.’ They were going to their connection. Temptation came on me. I felt like walking out.”

He asked his counselor not to take him there anymore.

Two weeks later, the itchiness hadn’t left him. The counselors were worried, as was his father. “He’s feeling they’re trying to talk too much Bible,” Augie said. Religion is an important part of the therapy, and Abel believes in God. But sometimes, his impulses get the best of him.

“I gave myself a six-month commitment, but I’m tired of these places,” Abel said, slumping into the sofa at the Live Again center. “I want to get out there and get on with my life. I want to get with Shantell.”

When she has time to dream about the future, Shantell thinks of the same things as girls who live simpler lives. “My dream is to have a house and family,” she said. “I’m getting a better education so I can be comfortable and not have to struggle like I have been.”

Abel is not sure the future is as promising as it once seemed. He still believes he can get clean but admits he is weary from all the failures. His dreams aren’t dramatic. “A little more peace of mind, a nice place to move to away from the neighborhood, a white picket fence.”

Shantell and Abel didn’t see much of each other when he was at the Live Again Ministry. They would talk on the phone and huddle at Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

Augie thought even that was too much. He wanted a 90-day moratorium on their meetings to keep his son’s mind on getting straight. “They’re very disruptive for each other,” he said. But he was sympathetic too. “Both of them are starving for affection.”

Things were easier in his day, Augie said. Addicts went to jail and cleaned up because the authorities made them. Now the juvenile jails are so crowded that young addicts are back on the street too fast. And crack is so easy to get. “It’s a different set of rules,” Augie said.

Waiting for Abel, Shantell was having her own trouble.

She’d lied about her age to get a job as assistant manager at her store. It paid $5.25 an hour, enough to cover her share of the rent on a one-bedroom apartment where she sleeps in the living room. But honesty is a big thing with Narcotics Anonymous, so Shantell confessed and was rewarded with a demotion to a job paying $4.50.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said over dinner in a pancake house. “I can’t afford to live on $4.50,” much less save for an apartment she hoped to rent for herself and Abel when he was finally free.

With her hair tied back smartly, Shantell looked glum but professional. And rather than call up some old friends to get high, she settled in behind a plate of strawberry pancakes and groaned, “I’m really blowing my diet.”

It didn’t take her long to get a second job, equally low-paying.

A month after Abel held the gun to his head, his roller-coaster life hit another unexpected dip. One day during a Bible study, he walked away from the Live Again center. Asked about his father’s reaction, he declared bluntly, “I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”

He took a room at his mother’s house a few blocks from his father’s and began looking for a job. He and Shantell were happy, except that he had no money to take her out. He and his mother were fighting, which always makes him think about getting high.

He said he resisted the impulse, but admitted, “It’s real tough for me. An addict alone is bad company.”

He was only on the streets for a few cool fall evenings before he disappeared. Shantell said he started hanging out with his old friends, then vanished.

“He’s talking about all these things he wants for us, but he ain’t doing no footwork,” she added. She wasn’t sure she would take him back. “I think this is the icing on the cake,” she said angrily.

A groggy Abel picked up the telephone at his mother’s house late in the morning a few days after their fight and said it was no big deal. “We had a little argument.” He denied that he was using drugs, but his father doesn’t believe him, saying he thinks that his son was hanging around the neighborhood crack house.

“This is the life of a dope fiend,” he said.

In one hospital, the therapists used to ask Shantell to evaluate herself. “What percentage wants to live, and what percentage wants to die?” they asked. Today, she says, most of her wants to live. She recently received a piece of good news when her boss said that when she turned 18, she would be promoted to her old job.

But she sometimes thinks Abel needs to go through more pain--to reach a new bottom, as they put it in recovery--before he can climb out for good.

When asked about his son’s struggle, Abel’s father said: “Just put, ‘To be continued.’ ”