COLUMN ONE : Money for a 6-Pack on Welfare? : Gov. Wilson said his proposed cuts in aid would leave less for luxuries. But less than $700 a month to support a couple of children doesn’t stretch far.

It is 5:45 a.m. on Inglewood Avenue in Hawthorne and Christine is preparing for a grueling 12-hour day during which she will sort through trash, seeking to supplement a meager welfare check.

As the headlights of her battered Ford Escort pick up the shapes along the curbside, her practiced eye catches sight of an odd-sized bulge in a trash bag and she jams on the brakes. Dashing to the curb, she peers into the bag and reaches deep inside.

“I can get 75 cents for each of these,” she says, holding up six large flower pots, used but unbroken. By the end of the day, she’ll scavenge a window shade, dishes, a baby’s bathtub, two Pyrex coffeepots, several editions of the “Book of Knowledge” from the 1930s, a working lamp, a child’s toy--all contributions to a monthly garage sale that will net $50 or $75.

“I’d like to see Gov. (Pete) Wilson live on what I get for just one month. I’d like to see him try to make it stretch. I’m sure he wouldn’t eat some of the food I have to eat,” says Christine, who asked that her last name not be used so as not to “embarrass my son in school.”

The remark is a retort to Wilson, who last month reignited the old debate over welfare when he proposed cutting Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by 9% to help balance the state budget.

Wilson tried to deflect criticism by saying the welfare mothers would “have less for a six-pack of beer”--an off-the-cuff remark that played to the stereotype of lazy welfare recipients using their grants for non-essential goods. He said the program invites a generational dependency on government handouts.

No one has been able to document exactly how welfare recipients spend their grants. But four days with Christine and a dozen other AFDC recipients who frequent food banks and clothing distribution centers reveal a population that defies generalization.

Among the 2.1 million who receive AFDC payments in California, the typical family is a 30-year-old single mother with two children. About one in five, however, are two-parent families in which the primary wage earner is unemployed.

Recipients are racially diverse; 35.5% of AFDC families are white, 29.9% Latino, 24% black. Slightly more than half of the single AFDC parents are considered able to work, although far fewer are viewed as having the skills to land a job.

While the average stay on welfare is less than 17 months, 20% of those who receive AFDC payments are considered “long term,” meaning they will remain on the program more than three years. Of those who leave the rolls, 40% will return within a year.

Some welfare recipients are well educated. Increasingly, they come from the middle class. They are fiercely protective of their children. They can be exceptionally articulate, particularly about their hopes to get off the public dole and away from a system viewed as impersonal and degrading.

For now, they just struggle to make do, squeezed between the high cost of housing--particularly in urban California--and the basic needs of their children. The maximum grant of $694 per month plus food stamps for a mother and two children often falls far short. If Wilson’s proposal is approved, the stipend will be cut to $633.

On a Wednesday afternoon, Teresa Cervantes sits on the edge of a small single bed in an emergency shelter in South Los Angeles talking of the circumstances that thrust her family into homelessness and poverty. The 30-year-old with a degree in Spanish literature from Stanford University rocks a baby, 18 months old, on her lap as a 3-year-old and 5-year-old tug at her for attention. A few borrowed toys are scattered on the floor and a do-it-yourself divorce manual is open on the dresser.

Until three months ago no one in her family had ever been on welfare. “I feel I’ve aged another 30 years in the last couple of months,” she says.

Her story is typical. Women and children are driven onto the welfare roles when they lose the support of the man in the family.

Cervantes says her secure, comfortable existence fell apart when the husband of five years with whom she had hoped to “live out the American dream” suddenly became violent and abusive. Not knowing how she would survive financially without him, she endured beatings until the day he brought home a gun. “It was very scary.”

At a battered woman’s shelter she learned about AFDC, applied and received approval for $824 a month--the maximum allotted a mother and three children. Food stamps worth $130 rounded out her monthly income at $954.

Even with a degree, she says, finding a job seemed impossible. First, there is the question of what to do with three young children and the cost of child care. Then employers want work experience; married in her last year in college, she has never held a job. Besides, she adds, her degree prepared her primarily for college teaching, a pursuit that requires post-graduate study.

The reality of being on welfare, she says, struck home when she went to buy groceries. “We can’t remain anonymous. We use food stamps. We’re identified at the grocery store,” she said. “When somebody looks at me with the food stamps, I feel self-conscious. I wish they were sensitive to our situation. I don’t expect to be on aid for a long time and while I’m on it I would like some respect. But I guess they want to see you crawling on your knees.”

For the immediate future, Cervantes’ biggest problem is finding housing. Few were willing to rent to a single parent with three small children. The cheapest apartment she could find was $650 a month, leaving $174 to pay for food when the stamps ran out, utility bills and any other needs.

Coming up with the money isn’t enough for some landlords. “When they find out I’m on welfare they just won’t go for it,” she says.

So today, she sits in a shelter. The rules allow her to stay only two months. In that time she hopes her homeless status will help her win quick approval for federal subsidized housing.

If not? “I don’t know how I will make out,” she says.

The state’s welfare payments are the nation’s second-highest, topped only by Alaska’s. Yet for many urban families they do not supply the most basic of needs--food, clothing and, most of all, shelter.

The large migration of the 1980s that helped the state grow and prosper came during a decade when other economic conditions slowed all housing production. The federal government also cut back sharply on its subsidized housing programs. California now ranks 49th in the availability of publicly subsidized housing for the poor, only topping Utah. Fewer than one in 10 AFDC families in the state get a rent subsidy.

Steve Renahan, assisted housing director for the Los Angeles Housing Authority, says he received 82,000 applications the last time he had a few openings for federally subsidized housing.

Without subsidies, welfare recipients are forced to spend up to 80% of their income for shelter, says Tanya Tull, founder of Beyond Shelter, a program that provides help for homeless families.

“On 80% of your income you can maybe go for three months, but as soon as your kids get too hungry you’re going to put more money into groceries that month and then you get behind on your rent,” says Tull. “Pretty soon you’re homeless again.”

Once an AFDC family loses its housing it not only has to begin the difficult search for new shelter, it also has to come up with $1,500 to $2,000 to cover security deposits and first and last months’ rent. Wilson has recommended abolishing a state emergency housing program that helped pay these costs for homeless families, contending it does not adequately safeguard against fraud.

Maria Sanchez is the mother of four children ages 14, 12, 9 and 18 months.

To her, the one-bedroom, one-bath camper-trailer she rents for $520 a month is so precious that, pushed by her landlord, she plans this month to kick out her two older children rather than move. Better that the two oldest children be forced to fend for themselves, she reasons, than for the entire family to become homeless.

“You need a lot of money to move,” she says through an interpreter. “I can’t save that kind of money.”

At 38, Sanchez has been on welfare six years, ever since her truck-driver husband “found another lady” and left the family. For most of that time, the best shelter she could afford was a single room with a Pullman kitchen. Then last June she found a tiny trailer in Pacoima. With a $940 monthly AFDC payment plus $150 in food stamps and donations from a nearby food bank, she could just get by.

But then the gang visits started. Carloads of young men would tear through the trailer park, stopping to taunt her daughter and exhort her young son to join them. Eventually, both children dropped out of school.

“It’s very dangerous to live here with teen-agers,” says Sanchez, who refuses to reveal her real name for fear of reprisal. “They (gang members) come from other sections of the city and they want to fight with those who already live here.”

Last month, the landlord delivered an ultimatum. Because the older children were attracting gang visits, she would have to move out in February. Instead, Sanchez told the landlord she would tell the children to leave.

Where will they go? she is asked. “They should have thought of that before they decided not to go to school,” she says. “The younger ones aren’t guilty of anything; they shouldn’t be punished by losing their home.”

The older daughter listens to the conversation and stares vacantly into the distance. Asked where she will live, what she will do, she shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Forced by unemployment to live on an $820-a-month welfare check, Ronald and Lydia Ford couldn’t find affordable housing. So they resorted to what AFDC families call the “hotel circuit.”

“It’s a vicious cycle. Once a month I would have to check the family into a different Skid Row hotel,” says Ford.

For the couple and their two children, the cheapest hotel room was $175 a week, the most expensive $49 a day. The hotels took every penny of the Fords’ welfare check, leaving only $160 a month in food stamps. They would beg local businesses for temporary jobs washing windows.

Without kitchen facilities, Lydia Ford kept the food in a Styrofoam cooler and cooked each meal on a hot plate. “It required eating very carefully,” she says. “You ate potatoes, beans, rice and chicken.”

In a year, their 14-year-old daughter changed schools five times--so often that she never collected a report card, although miraculously she was promoted to the next grade.

“I have been working since I was 12 years old,” says Ronald Ford. “I’ve worked all my life and paid taxes and then I happened to fall into this misfortune. If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.”

Ford, 43, said his problems started a year ago when he gave up his Michigan hairdressing business to move to California so his wife could be near her ailing elderly mother. Unable to get a California cosmetology license and unskilled in any other trade, Ford soon joined the ranks of the unemployed.

Even with extra money from odd jobs, the family finally ran out of hotels and was forced onto the street. There a sympathetic stranger directed them to Gramercy Place, a homeless shelter near Wilshire Boulevard that took them in for two months. Ford has since enrolled in a job training program and the family has applied for federal housing assistance.

“I plan to be working again soon,” he says. “I hope to pay taxes again and I hope my money will go to welfare services so they will be there for someone else.”

Even within the welfare system there are haves and have-nots--poor and poorest.

Lucky ones have relatives or friends who will occasionally send them some money or a former spouse who will pay child support. The AFDC family can keep an extra $50 a month if the father makes support payments; the state gets the rest to help offset the AFDC allotments.

Those savvy enough about the complexities of the welfare system and knowledgeable enough about family budgeting have a leg up. Experts refer to them as people with “better coping skills.”

“You’ve got to go down to the welfare office and be very persistent,” an AFDC recipient advises a 16-year-old mother she has just met at a food bank. “You just have to act crazy sometimes but you can’t get too emotional or they will call security.”

The unfortunate are those with limited proficiency in English who don’t understand the system and have no close friends or relatives to help them out.

Pasquala Isais, who lives with her four children in a converted garage in Pacoima, is among this group.

The garage costs Isais $200 a month and is attached to a small three-bedroom, two-bath house that shelters 22 people--12 adults and 10 children. Isais, who immigrated from Juarez, Mexico, 12 years ago, and is in the process of becoming a citizen through the amnesty program, receives AFDC payments for three of her American-born children. But she is not entitled to aid herself. She has reported the birth of a new baby but so far has received no additional AFDC benefits.

“While she was preparing for amnesty, she was told it would be bad on her record if she asked the government for any money; so she is afraid to ask for any more help,” says Louise Hernandez, an outreach worker who brings food donations to the family.

“You have to use everything God gave you just to make it,” says Christine, the woman who spends her days scavenging the trash to supplement her welfare grants.

The 38-year-old former driving instructor traces her descent to welfare dependency to the disappearance of her son’s father and a tragic neighborhood accident that left her only child slightly brain damaged.

Of the father, she recalls: “I was nine months’ pregnant and I was standing in the rain and he turned and looked at me and said, ‘You know I’ve given this a lot of thought and I’ve decided I don’t want to be a parent.’ ” Her son was born 12 days later; his father departed a few weeks after that.

At first, her low-wage job provided enough support, although medical insurance was beyond her reach. Then one day when her son was 3, a neighborhood child picked up a discarded can of Mace, pushed it up to her son’s nose and pressed the trigger.

Her wages couldn’t cover the medical care and specialized baby-sitting that her son required as a result of his injuries.

Now a seven-year veteran of the welfare program, Christine acknowledges that she is better off than most. She has that most prized possession--a car. It is a gift from relatives who took up a collection to buy it.

With a car, she can shop for the best prices, collect recyclable cans and bottles for a few extra dollars and make her trash runs in the early morning hours.

Her home is a small, neat two-bedroom house near the freeway in Hawthorne. Although the rent is $1,000 a month, a housemate has agreed that Christine must pay only $430 as long as she does all the cleaning and yard work.

With utility bills of $100 a month, she is left with only about $30 in spending money from her $560 AFDC grant. Another $115 in food stamps, she says, will usually provide groceries for two or three weeks. For the rest of the month, she depends on the House of Yahweh, a food bank in Lawndale where the poor can get weekly handouts.

But on this day, Christine is planning a small celebration for her son’s 10th birthday and she will purchase a few luxuries--soft drinks and potato chips. To make the purchases, she maps out a strategy like a general preparing for battle.

Grocery advertisements are spread out across her living room with big red circles around certain items. On one sheet, Vons has advertised a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola for $1.19, but Christine has passed that by. Instead, she has circled the Top Value advertisement that offers the same item for 98 cents. With a 30-cent coupon that the store will double, she can buy the soft drink for 38 cents.

Potato chips are on sale at Price Food for 99 cents, but she opts for Ralphs, where the special is even better--49 cents.

“I won’t shop at any supermarket that doesn’t have double coupons,” she says. She gets them from newspapers she has pulled out of trash piles or picked up off the street.

But she hastens to explain, “I never take anything off anybody’s lawn.”