Caring for Others--and Himself : Lifestyle: Mandatory community service with handicapped children became more than a chore for a former car thief from Compton--in the process, he turned around his own life.

“P ut your finger on your knee, on your knee ,” a young, bulky man in jeans and a white T-shirt sang to children in a classroom. The youngsters, afflicted with mental or physical disorders, or both, looked bewildered. One screamed and threw herself crying to the floor. One tried to give a kiss to a classmate, and then, to the young man himself.

But Cory Cotton, 19, of Compton kept singing . . . “on your knee, on your knee “ . . . and finally a few of them got the idea.

“Sometimes they’re just in their own world,” Cotton said later at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Bellflower, where he brings, to a job that requires patience and caring, an abundance of both.

A product of a program that connects former juvenile offenders with handicapped children, Cotton is an instructional assistant in a special Los Angeles County class for the severely handicapped. Required to become involved in the program after being released from a detention camp, he grew to like it. And it changed his life.

A few years ago, as a gang member and high school dropout, he was confined in the Afflerbaugh Juvenile Camp in La Verne, having been dispatched there for auto theft. He

stole three or four expensive cars a day, mainly for the thrill of driving around in them.

“All I needed was a screwdriver,” he said.

Cotton, who is built like a football lineman, is admired by the students in the Jefferson class. He tries to get them to talk and understand. He helps them eat. He takes them to the playground during recess. He even changes the boys’ diapers.

“Cory Cotton is my friend; on my birthday he brought me a bunny rabbit,” said Robi Hall, 10, a frail boy who sat in a small red wheelchair. In addition to cerebral palsy, Robi has heart and lung disease.

“Yeah, Robi’s my buddy,” Cotton said. “He brought me a flower today.”

Robi and the other students in the brightly decorated classroom are identified by large-lettered name cards placed around a table: “Jolette” . . . “Eileen” . . . “David” . . . “Felix” . . . “Ray” . . . “Philip” . . . “Kim” . . . “Crystal” . . . “Robi.”

All are severely handicapped. Some are autistic.

Before he sang the finger-and-knee song, Cotton cut an owl out of orange paper. And he helped the children eat a snack.

“This is David,” he said, nodding toward a blond boy with a wistful expression. “They say he talked when he was 3, but I haven’t heard him say nothing in a year and a half.”

“Cory, Cory,” said Eileen McGonagill, 7, a dark-eyed, brown-haired girl who was eating pieces of cereal. “Delicious.”

“Yes, they are,” the young man said.

Eileen, who has difficulty walking, also has a special bond with Cotton. She called for him--while swinging at everyone else who tried to help--last year when she fell head-first off a bus. He rode with her in the ambulance and stood by in the emergency room until her mother arrived.

“I like helping people,” Cotton said. “It makes you proud to be whatever you are. It’s really a sight when you first see the kids. You think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get too close,’ but after a while, you see they’re regular people. They don’t have control over what’s happened to them. I just treat them like I would want someone to treat me, if I was in that situation.”

Cotton assists Judy Gunnette, a special-education teacher who has known him for three years, since he first trained under her at Pace School in Bellflower. “He was real quiet and kept to himself,” Gunnette said. “For about a year, I don’t think he ever even smiled. But he had a real calming effect on the kids. Something inner that I can’t really put my finger on. As time wore on, he was so good with them. Things that I had tried to accomplish, he was able to accomplish.”

“It’s hard to believe,” she went on, “that he had another life. He’s found something here that’s intrinsically motivating to him. I have to give him credit for even getting up in the morning, because these aren’t typical kids that are easy to motivate.”

Cotton’s own motivation was once limited to joy-riding in the cars he stole in Compton. “That was just being young, and wanting to drive,” he said, pouring milk into a bowl. “Just wanting to be seen behind (the wheel of) a nice car, something like that. It got kind of wild, you know, people wanting to buy parts, then just dropping off whole cars and saying, ‘You do whatever you want to do with it.’ ”

He said he became involved with a gang when he was 13. “It wasn’t, like, if you wanted to join a gang you had to do this or do that,” he said. “It was more like just being brought up where it’s going on and knowing everybody.”

He was caught stealing cars several times and was eventually sentenced to the juvenile camp, where he stayed six months.

“It wasn’t too bad there,” he said. “It was an open camp. It wasn’t like walls or big gates.”

When Cotton was released, he enrolled in the Southeast Community Day Center (now the Rosewood Community Day Center School), a secondary school in Bellflower for about 30 students who are on probation.

“Finishing high school was my goal after I went through that little problem,” he said.

At the day center, students who have been in jails or juvenile camps are required to perform community service by working with handicapped children in a county Office of Education program that was begun four years ago. Cotton was assigned to Pace School, where he helped Gunnette with a class of autistic children.

Cotton, who had left Dominguez High School in Compton when he was in the 10th grade, earned A’s and B’s at the Southeast Community Day Center, and graduated in June, 1991.

This June, after completing two years of working with handicapped youngsters, he became the first person from the program to be hired by the county as an instructional assistant.

“When I first saw him, he looked kind of tough, kind of rough,” said Cedric Anderson, who was Cotton’s teacher at the day center. “Now you see him work with the kids, and it’s like magic, the softness.”

Cotton watched as Jolette Ridenour, 8, who is autistic, ate her Lucky Charms one by one. He also kept an eye on Eileen, who was wandering in the classroom.

“I like what I’m doing,” Cotton said. “It’s not real, real hard work. “You’ve got to have a lot of patience. You might have to clean up some vomit, or poopy diapers all day, but I don’t have a problem with it.

“Shut that off, Eileen, you can’t play with the microwave.”

Last Friday morning, the Jefferson School class went to Burger King, on Artesia Boulevard, a few blocks away. They formed a procession--the students who can walk held on to the sides of their classmates’ wheelchairs. The chairs were pushed by Gunnette, her daughter and fellow teacher, Heidi Gunnette, and Cotton and two other assistants, Elena Mariscal and Darlene Brightwell.

At the restaurant, the children sat outdoors and ate French fries.

Jolette peeled open a packet of ketchup and said nothing, after having talked all the way over.

Judy Gunnette stood over Felix Serna’s wheelchair and rubbed his neck, making him smile. Robi said to Cotton, “You’re nice to me, aren’t you?”

“I try to be,” said Cotton, as Eileen squeezed in beside him on a concrete bench.

Cotton lives on Mayo Avenue in Compton with his mother and grandmother. In his free time, he said, “I just mainly stay out of trouble. I’m (usually) planning for the next day.”

After their meal, Jolette, Eileen and Ray Williams jumped on hundreds of balls in an enclosed play area the restaurant provides. When it was time to go, Cotton had to pull Eileen out.

On the way back to school, Judy Gunnette pushed Felix along the sidewalk and walked with Ray. An energetic 10-year-old with multiple handicaps, Ray kept repeating:

“Cory coming? Cory coming? Cory coming?”

Cory’s coming,” assured the teacher, looking back at her assistant as he pushed Eileen, whose wheelchair glinted in the sun.