COLUMN ONE : Life in the Underbelly of L.A. : The city’s warehouse district is rife with transients who pillage businesses on eerie nighttime raids. Once touted as an artists’ haven, the concrete jungle spawns a bizarre subculture.

At night, thieves play hide-and-seek on the rooftops of Los Angeles’ warehouse district, a hidden corner of the city where disparate worlds collide and Darwinian laws prevail.

Ill-bred wraiths, the burglars clamber from one building to the next in search of air vents, attic doors, any place they can break in. There are petty bonanzas to reap: stereos, shoes, tomatoes and oranges by the crate--anything they can sell for crack cocaine.

When alarms go off, they scatter like wharf rats, shimmying down drainpipes and disappearing through trash-strewn streets--gone before the police can get there.

“I ain’t been caught yet,” boasted Jonathan Rollie, who takes to the rooftops whenever he is short on crack or clothing. He is one among a legion of outcasts who inhabit this realm of cinder block and sheet metal, a bleak landscape hard by the concrete shore of the Los Angeles River.

Day and night, within the warehouse district’s labyrinth of high walls and razor wire, rootless subcultures are thrown together, sometimes clashing, sometimes spinning off in strange and darkly symbiotic alliances.

Here, weary truckers from across the country disembark for a few hours before gearing up again--their rigs often plundered by transients who eke out a cave-like existence in the district’s empty warehouses. Here, intravenous drug users inject themselves in alleys while prostitutes troll for lonely drivers. Here, walled off from persistent thieves and intimidating beggars, a dwindling artists colony holds on in paint-stained lofts once heralded as the vanguard of the city’s artistic renaissance.

Not so long ago, the artists nearly succeeded in molding the district to their collective vision. But those dreams have gone the way of so many others here, withering away in a bleak nether world almost walking distance from the spires of downtown, yet so remote that it seems torn asunder from the rest of the city.

To enter this domain, to roam the streets of the warehouse district as it spins through its hyperkinetic 24-hour dance of trucks and human jetsam, is to undergo sensory bombardment--to be assaulted with the pungent odors of vegetables, urine, beer, sawdust and diesel fumes; to feel the shuddering gears of the city.

The asphalt trembles as hundreds of trucks prowl the streets hours before dawn. They bring in merchandise by the ton--toys, electronics, clothing and more, piling it to the ceilings of cavernous warehouses.

The warehouse district’s steel-shuttered produce and wholesale storerooms and loading docks are conduits for commerce exceeding $3 billion a year, making it one of the leading distribution centers in the United States. Yet amid the vitality, the area writhes in a perpetual state of crisis.

Though many transients congregate around the Skid Row missions nearer downtown, taking advantage of soup kitchens and lodging, a rougher element has spilled over into the warehouse district by the thousands. In ungated lots and along empty walls, encampments spring up as fast they are torn down.

The street people mount a ceaseless assault on the district’s bulging caches of produce and merchandise. Even steel shutters are not immune. Eventually, time and a crowbar find an opening. “A guy walking around has all night,” as one police officer put it, “to pick, pry, poke and peel to get in.”

Startling tales abound: The warehouse that lost $80,000 in goods in a single night . . . break-ins accomplished with blow torches, or by ramming stolen vehicles into loading dock doors . . . $20,000 rooftop air-conditioning systems laid waste for $200 in trade at nearby scrap-metal yards.

“If there’s an empty building . . . one guy gets in and within a week there’s nothing left,” said Howard Klein, a land owner who found one of his structures gutted by intruders.

The area is a curio-scope of the surreal: The rusted loading dock of an old onion warehouse becomes the backdrop for an outdoor church service for the homeless; in a dark alley at 2 a.m., Northern California trucker Bobby Griffin sells 5,000 live chickens, a noisy cargo dispensed in wire cages to buyers from Chinatown and Los Angeles’ Eastside.

Drab and gray as a charcoal rendering, the district has no official boundaries. Its borders can be divined only by those familiar with its demarcations--columns of trucks, mazes of warehouses and loading docks, yards stacked high with pallets. The area sprawls from San Pedro Street on the west to the Los Angeles River on the east. The Santa Monica Freeway forms the south flank and the northern edge is 1st Street, next to Little Tokyo.

The district’s formless architecture has always been wedded to commerce. Southern Pacific Railroad opened the first depot in Los Angeles here in the late 1800s, near the river and open fields. The train yards begat vast brick storehouses as the burgeoning city became a terminus for goods pouring into the West.

Cheap hotels offered rooms for a quarter a night to newly arrived shopkeepers, migratory rail workers and hobos, said John Armenta, a former produce market manager who came to the area in 1947. Since then, the district has been shaped by the arrival of trucks and freeways.

It became a magnet for the homeless as downtown construction forced street people east, first into Skid Row, and then into the warehouse zone. Low-rent cantinas and eateries now dot 7th and 8th streets, a nocturnal gathering spot for drinkers, addicts and prostitutes. On summer nights, police have counted as many as 50 prostitutes lining up in the shadows behind the bars.

“I’ve seen an entire city block filled with truck drivers and cars completely stopped in the middle of the street and (transvestites) at every vehicle,” said Los Angeles Police Department vice Sgt. Henry Quan. “I’m talking about a complete city block . . . like a freeway at the end of the day, just bumper to bumper.”

The prostitutes beckon from knots of street people who are equally determined and even more resourceful. Jonathan Rollie is typical of them--38 years old, an inveterate hustler who, until recently, lived under the high decks of the 7th Street bridge, his shelter a cramped plywood hooch. Rollie moved on after the City Council recently ordered the underside of the bridge cleaned out and sealed by a chain-link fence.

When not stealing, he collects recyclable scrap or roams the streets along routes as regular as a postal carrier’s, scavenging for food. He claims to know the hours when overripe fruit can be had free at Pacific Banana Co., the exact time to steal into the rear portals of a meat processing plant, where he combs a certain trash bin for chicken, ribs and steaks tossed into the trash.

Rollie’s nights are spent cooking on open grills and smoking crack, plotting warehouse raids or worrying about intruders. A religious man, he also has ample time to think about his soul. Before he moved from the bridge, he often bowed to pray with a lay minister who came to the bridge Tuesday evenings to lead the transients and crack addicts in Bible study.

“I believe in God,” Rollie said one day under the bridge. But he lives by his own set of commandments. Sitting in his hooch, Rollie explained how he reconciles his religious convictions with his damned life as a thief and addict.

“Thou shalt survive,” he said, his eyes flashing.

*

Midnight: L.J. Eley wheels a metal shopping cart down a dim side street, searching for pallets--the slatted wood objects used by forklift operators to move material. Seven pallets are balanced atop the buggy, and Eley would gladly have added a dozen more if only he could find them.

Pallets are essential to the prodigious ebb and flow of the warehouses, a prized currency in the district’s subsistence economy. Found or stolen, a good, sturdy pallet is worth $3 at yards where they stack up like shoddily erected skyscrapers.

They are also one of the links that bind the district’s subcultures. Truckers and warehouse workers use pallets to move goods. Street people steal and forage for them to survive. Laborers from Mexico are hired off the streets to reassemble broken pallets. Pallet profits enrich crack dealers and liquor stores.

Even the district’s business owners and the raffish street people can form uneasy alliances. Benny Joseph, 46, a reformed burglar, makes his home at a propane station, guarding it at night from other transients. At first, he performed odd jobs for the station’s owners. Then he learned to pump fuel. Now, he lives in a tiny camper shell alongside the propane pump. He saves a little; the rest goes to crack.

Then there are “lumpers,” human pilot fish who attach themselves to truck drivers, offering to unload cargo at $1 for every 1,000 pounds. Joe McDade, 60, a disheveled lumper with a broken tooth, sleeps “in trucks, trailers, things like that.”

The truckers who come and go by the hundreds each day are as nomadic as the district’s other denizens. Most are here only hours or days before resuming their zigzag routes across the country.

The Los Angeles they see here bears no resemblance to the Los Angeles postcard playland of beaches and limousines. They find one more swath of rutted streets, industrial buildings and loading docks--the dismal cast of cities everywhere, except larger and more populated by the bereft.

Driver Frank Christman, 42, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., marvels sadly at the size of the street population. “You see all these people, down on their luck . . . it reminds you, this could be you.” Christman then turned to speak to two lumpers who were hunched forward on an oil drum, waiting under the glaring sun for work.

Some truckers seek out favored lumpers, using them as navigators. They point the way to an electronics store in Santa Monica or a grocery market in North Hollywood. The truckers often return, sleeping in the warehouse district overnight in cheap rooms or curled up in their cabs. To dispel their boredom, some frequent the bars--Venus Bar, El Zarape and Campers Corner--along 7th Street, or circle the streets in their trucks, picking up prostitutes.

Oscar Wynn, 63, of St. Louis, who lost a marriage to the strains of 90,000 miles spent on the road each year, says he stopped fooling around with the district’s women more than a decade ago, when herpes became a scare. But he knows plenty of drivers still desperate for action.

“They just jump any kind of woman,” he said. “These people don’t give a shit about AIDS.”

Police here have cracked down on prostitution; so far this year, nearly 2,000 arrests have been made in the two divisions that divide the district. One notorious truck stop has closed, and police began an abatement action against a motel where Quan said the action is so heavy that jaded residents are known to extort a $5 surcharge to allow prostitutes to use their rooms for brief tumbles.

And yet, truckers still have no difficulty finding what they want on 7th Street. At 1 a.m. outside El Caribe, a bar cheaply festooned with winking bulbs and hanging tinsel, a transvestite in mesh stockings parades to his customary perch at the corner of 7th and Ceres Avenue.

On the Eastside, Alejandra cuts hair for a living and is taunted for being gay. But here, performing $20 tricks, the 25-year-old prostitute eagerly joins others--some men, some women--who find an exhilarating freedom away from moralists and bashers.

“I’m happy as hell,” Alejandra declares as headlights stream past. “I just hope God don’t take it away.”

The risks are ever on his mind. Using condoms against the threat of AIDS, Alejandra evaluates each prospective trick carefully for hints of aggression. He has been assaulted or shoved into the street several times by men furious at discovering his gender.

“(Now) I study them first--the way they look . . . study the eyes,” Alejandra said. “I’ve been hurt . . . beaten up, my hair pulled. It’s dangerous. You jump in the car with a maniac, he could kill you.”

After a few moments, a truck rig comes by. Alejandra hurries over, climbing onto the running board. This driver passes muster and seconds later, the prostitute ascends into the cab. The truck rumbles away, disappearing down the dark street.

*

Jess Markey took over a thriving printing company, Harold Markey & Son, from his father in 1965 and oversaw its expansion to three buildings on South Crocker Street. But as Markey, 51, now looks toward his own retirement, he is sure of one thing--his two sons will not carry on after him.

“Because of the neighborhood, (they) will not work here,” Markey said. “They just won’t come down.”

Markey doesn’t blame them. He has replaced his windows with steel. He has installed a $12,000 alarm system. Escorts accompany female employees for the few short steps between buildings. Markey, like his sons, fears the crime around him.

Business owners here operate in a siege mentality. Police and city officials explain--as they do everywhere else in the city--that they are hampered by staffing shortages.

“The major priority--it doesn’t matter who you talk to--is crime,” said City Councilman Richard Alatorre, who represents the area. Without more resources, he said, the district’s exodus of businesses will worsen.

Fish importers, produce handlers, and electronics firms routinely spend as much as $100,000 a year on security for guards, video cameras, iron fences, concertina wire--to little avail. Goods stolen from warehouses are often sold hours later just a few feet away on the same sidewalks, police say.

On a sidewalk outside the Greyhound Bus Station on 7th Street, a man sells bell peppers from a crate balanced atop a shopping cart. Another vendor dangles belts from a coat hanger. The man selling peppers offers a ready explanation to a passing police officer. They had been given to him for doing a favor, the man said--even though he cannot recall the name of his benefactor.

“There’s such an unbelievable amount of merchandise--just mind-boggling. . . . Nobody can keep track of it all,” said veteran LAPD Sgt. Gary Hines. “You find six cases of Pepsi--you say: ‘Where in the hell did that come from?’ A lot of (warehouses) are so big . . . they literally don’t know they’ve been broken into unless there are obvious signs of ransacking.”

Truck batteries, side-window mirrors, even freeway guardrails are the targets of scrappers, who ferry their plunder through the streets in shopping carts in endless supply here--despite the warehouse district’s utter absence of shopping centers. Presumably stolen, the carts are targeted by police in random buggy roundups. Yet they reappear as if by magic.

Trucks are just as easily plundered. An unlocked semi can be cleaned out in about an hour, Hines said.

Barbed wire is almost useless. “If they had an Olympic event for barbed-wire climbing, I’ve got some guys who could win,” said land owner Howard Klein. “Not only can they get over the fence . . . but they can get back over the fence with the batteries out of the trucks--and I don’t know how they do it.”

Then there are the crack addicts, pent up with aggression, who prey on each other.

Not long ago, Joel Beason, 54, was assaulted in the narrow alley he calls home. Some thugs jumped him, left him looking “like Floyd Patterson when Liston got through with him.” He smiled about it one night, kneeling over a fire in an alley. It was just after midnight, and Beason was frying eggs in a coffee can.

Nearby, a discarded freight box was laid out--his bed. With eyes jovial above a beard now half white, Beason spun stories about his days as a gambler, a husband, a father of three children. All these things were gone now.

He dreams that some day, a film company will make a movie about his hard life. Maybe, he’ll write a book. But he owns no typewriter, and there were no pens or pencils in sight as the fire flickered.

All he had to look forward to was the night alone in the alley, with his eggs and the crack pipe he carefully hides from police and thieves.

“I got a little habit,” Beason admitted, turning sad. “That’s the only thing I can find . . . to relax my mind, forget about my problems down through the years.”

*

Just when beauty seems all but nonexistent here, you step into a garden: Michael Tansey’s loft. Here, in a brick fortress, the orchids are in bloom--bright, 4-foot-tall orchids that Tansey has carved out of polystyrene. They hang on the walls, huge petals spring-mounted so they bob in the breeze.

Tansey, 48, was one of several founders who planted the seeds a decade ago for what promised to be an artists’ boom town. Painters and sculptors came eagerly in the early 1980s, setting up studios, living quarters and galleries in these lofts, mixing at night at Gorky’s, Al’s Bar and other beloved dives.

There is little left of that heady time. By some estimates, the artists now number about 1,000--roughly half their high watermark. They come and go furtively, living behind iron bars as they follow their aesthetic visions.

Some go to enormous lengths to avoid assault and theft. Steven Grody, 41, who teaches martial arts in a loft, always carries a knife. He also uses two cars--a new Honda, which he parks behind locked gates, and a dinged-up 1983 Dodge Colt, which he dares to park on the streets. The Colt has no radio or speakers. When he parks, Grody leaves the glove box open to show that it is empty.

With all of the district’s galleries now closed, the remaining artists talk wistfully about the days before lease rates skyrocketed, before the street people became so desperate.

“The homeless are getting tougher,” Grody said. “They say: ‘Why don’t you want to give me money?’ I say: ‘Because I’ve been giving money all f-----g day long and I don’t want to give any more.’ ”

*

The warehouse district spins on, a gyroscope whirring on its skewed axis. The fallen are everywhere--ghost men, phantom women, drifting through the district’s ravaged tableau as if time and memory mean nothing.

Sidney Lewis, 44, landed here six years ago after losing a job as a maintenance man. Seizures from a childhood head injury kept him from working steadily. He last saw his daughter seven years ago, when she was an infant, and he has lost touch with a brother and three sisters in New Orleans.

Now, “nobody knows where I am.”

Sporting a gold tooth and Cleveland Indians cap, Lewis sits outside the Greyhound bus depot, an unemployed “porter” toting bags for dollar tips. He grouses about the passengers who snub him. “They think you’ve got leprosy or something,” he sniffed, “because you’re homeless.”

Lewis does not have leprosy, but he does have HIV. His movements are slowed by his encroaching fate. This, he says, is the worst place he has ever lived.

Yet in this domain of outcasts, no one bothers him, either to help or to hinder.

He watches the departing buses roll out. He should board one of them, go somewhere. But he stays, anchored, as they all are, to the warehouse district.

“I think,” he says, “I’ll probably die here.”