COLUMN ONE : Sex, Drugs and No Place to Go : Angel and her friends outgrew foster care and ended up on the streets of Hollywood. ‘I look forward to death,’ one teen says. ‘There has to be something better than this.’

Angel draws closer to the candle in the pitch dark, crouching on a floor infested with fleas, beneath kitchen counters crawling with maggots. As the 18-year-old passes around a bottle of Cisco, the half-dozen teens huddled in the flickering light plot strategies to get money, drugs and food.

Their home of the moment, an abandoned Hollywood house, has no water, so they use shower vouchers at the YMCA. Unable to get jobs without identification or an address, they pool money from panhandling, prostitution or muggings.

“We’re a family. We take care of each other,” says May as Angel strokes her friend’s silky long hair. Angel calms the panicked teen-ager, who just glimpsed a man she says tried to rape her.

Angel and most of the others are recent graduates of America’s foster care system. Taken from her family at age 11 to shield her from alleged sexual abuse, Angel “emancipated” from foster care in June after seven years, 13 homes, and a blur of quick stops in at least 10 schools.

Just before her 18th birthday, she was handed token bus fare and a Hefty garbage bag for her belongings, and was told the government’s obligation was over. With no high school diploma, job or home, Angel says, she descended into the Dickensian world of Los Angeles street life.

Each year, thousands like Angel outgrow foster care to join the ranks of the homeless. They are products of a system critics say plucks children from their parents for protection, but fails to prepare them for life. Although taxpayers last year spent more than $11 billion for foster care, most of the nearly 16,000 who emancipate each year leave unprepared to get a job or an apartment, or to survive on their own.

Government child welfare agencies, which provide homes until parents are deemed fit or adoptions can be arranged, acknowledge a large minority of children leave foster care for troubled lives. But they stress that the majority are self-sufficient. Los Angeles Department of Children’s Services Director Peter Digre emphasizes that most teens who emancipate do not become homeless, and that many excel after leaving loving foster homes.

Still, one-quarter or more nationwide end up on the streets. Nearly three of four leave foster care with no high school diploma. Many end up swelling welfare rolls. A third, studies show, survive by terrorizing others, through muggings and robberies. In California--a magnet for street youths--two-thirds of prison inmates were in foster care, one survey found.

Many homeless foster care graduates, suffering from low self-esteem and skeptical of shelters, often join Skid Row’s permanent homeless, or die young from overdoses, disease or suicide.

They flock to Hollywood, hoping to live the glamour they glimpsed on TV. Instead, they are thrust into a brutal world. A year ago, six youths raped a homeless teen-ager with a broomstick, and carved the satanic mark 666 into the flesh on her back. In recent months at a Salvation Army center, one of Angel’s friends was stabbed and two others had their heads bashed in. Each month, 10 youths in Hollywood--an area with at least 10 gangs--enter the Covenant House drop-in center with stab wounds.

Self-survival forces many former foster teens to cling together in fledgling street families. Angel’s group keeps two baseball bats in the entryway of their home. They use speed to stay up all night. Occasionally, they nurse cups of coffee at the Fame Cafe until dawn, when crack heads stop scurrying the streets in search of prey.

“Family life,” the teen-agers know, offers only temporary salvation. On one wall of their current home, someone has scrawled: “No one here gets out alive.”

LIFE ON THE RUN: ‘Let’s Dash and Dine!’ ‘Let’s Run the Boulevard!’

At noon, Angel and her group stir from soiled mattresses. They recently left another abandoned building, where the floors were covered with feces. Theft by crack and heroin addicts ran rampant. Here, the group banishes anyone with crabs or scabies or people so addicted they can’t step outside to shoot up.

Heather eases out of crusty blankets, but quickly pulls away from a window as a stranger--who she fears is the building’s owner--approaches. There is a mad scramble to grab boots and clothes, then the group escapes half-naked.

“Let’s dash and dine!” suggests 19-year-old Heather. That means ordering at the neighborhood Denny’s, then bolting rather than paying. Instead, they go to 7-Eleven, where a clerk, who fears that the teens are trying to shoplift, brandishes a bat to get them to leave. As they reach Hollywood Boulevard, Heather screams, “Let’s run the boulevard!”

Here, on the street, fear of rape grips Heather. “I’m going to take your drugs, and I’m gonna take you too,” growled a trucker recently. He clubbed her with a tire iron, she says, leaving her bloodied on the street. “You are always alone out here. You can’t trust anybody,” Heather says, spitting angrily on the boulevard’s pink-terrazzo stars.

As Angel’s friends trudge up and down the street, one teen-ager dives into dumpsters, fishing for food. Others begin panhandling, working in pairs for security. “Spare some change?” whines Heather, kneeling before tourists who are watching a movie shoot. She winces. A rash has begun developing below her belly, perhaps because she has not had a shower for a week.

When panhandling produces little, Heather says, many in the group resort to crime. In Hollywood, some sell crack, clean out people’s homes, or mug camcorder-touting tourists. Several in Angel’s group “jack people,” which means they demand up-front payments from prostitution customers, then sprint away.

Back on the street, Jerome motions toward the bus stop where he recently stalked one victim. “Spare a dollar to catch the bus?” Jerome had asked. He says he mangled the man’s face, while two friends grabbed his wallet and Walkman. “It’s just another way to survive,” says Jerome, 18, whipping off a leather neck collar with metal spikes he wears for protection. “It’s nothing personal.”

As dark descends, Jerome sits in an alleyway, guzzling a 40-oz. bottle of beer behind a dumpster where the group sometimes shoots up speed out of view of passing police.

Speed is common. Angel says she began using last summer when dealers offered her the drug free. Although Julian, Angel’s boyfriend, says he has quit speed, he until recently shot up anywhere he could track a vein, including under his fingernails. “I needed it to escape reality,” says Julian, as the group’s pet, a white rat named Socrates, crawls on his chest.

Jerome hurls the empty bottle to the ground. Perching his lanky body provocatively on the wall of a 7-Eleven parking lot, he watches customers cruise by. “They want me. You know they want me,” Jerome giggles, doing a sexy sashay. A middle-aged man in a gray Corsica idles and casts a lusty eye over Jerome. After snappy negotiations, Jerome and a friend scramble into the car, which rumbles away.

Each ride is a life-or-death crapshoot. “Click-click,” Jerome heard once, shortly after climbing into a car. The customer had pointed a .22-caliber gun at his chest. Jerome threw himself out of the moving car and sprinted away. Two other customers--who knew that street youths’ records make them reticent to go to police--pulled knives rather than pay. Nearly a third of homeless youth work the streets, a 1990 American Psychological Assn.-sponsored survey says, many for as little as a Happy Meal at McDonald’s or a place to sleep for the night.

“It’s the condom lady!” shriek half a dozen youths on a corner near Jerome, greeting Tracy Constable, a street outreach worker. A crowd of male prostitutes--who dress as women because the pay is better--chase her in their stiletto heels, sequined spandex mini-skirts pulled high up their thighs, and black pushup bras, snatching “kiss of mint” condoms from her palm.

Constable, looking around warily, says Crips gang members have taken to beating up street youths for the night’s proceeds. “It’s a death wish to be out here,” she says, adding that one of 11 youths is infected with HIV.

Except for a few states--such as New York, which allows homeless former foster youths to return to the system until they turn 21--Angel’s plight is all too common. Nationwide, more than a fifth of teens at homeless shelters arrive directly from foster care, while 38%--and 45% in California--say they have been in the system within the last year, a 1991 National Assn. of Social Workers survey found.

That year, a health department study tracked foster youths who emancipated in the previous four years; less than half had a job, four in 10 had been a financial burden to the government, a quarter had been homeless. “Our shelter is full of kids who have emancipated from the system,” says Kevin Casey of the homeless agency Covenant House.

Such youths’ troubles, says Digre of Children’s Services, often predate foster care. With a crush of cases, social workers often must make brutal choices, focusing their efforts on babies or younger youths, says Michael Olenick, Los Angeles regional coordinator for the California Community College Foundation, which runs classes to help teen-agers leave the system.

Ultimately, Digre says, it is unrealistic to assume that teens can thrive without someone to fall back on. “None of us can make it on our own at 18. Give me a break!” he says, noting the growing number of teen-agers who live with or rely on family support after high school.

Despite a 1980 federal mandate that welfare agencies move to reunify children with their families or initiate adoption within 18 months of having pulled them out of their homes, almost a third emancipate after nine years in foster care, the health department study found.

Before leaving, 58% endure three or more jarring moves, the study said, each one confounding efforts to finish school. Many moves result from poor matching of children with foster parents and inadequate training of foster parents to handle severe behavior problems--teen-agers who constantly test parents’ limits, setting things on fire and even threatening to kill them. Three percent are abused by their caretakers.

One 10-year-old boy who came to her had moved 21 times, says Lupe Ross, vice president of the Los Angeles Foster Parents Assn.

Teen-agers typically emancipate after 2.5 placements and four years, says Digre of Children’s Services. “They feel no one values them, that they aren’t worth keeping,” says Los Angeles Youth Network counselor Michelle Boduc. “They feel they are a commodity to be moved around.”

ABUSIVE CHILDHOODS: ‘This Is a Very Expensive Way to Fail’

Many foster care graduates in Hollywood were troubled long before they landed in government hands. Some had been whipped with electrical cords, beaten until they arrived at hospitals with crushed skulls, or raped by parents. But many pin their plight largely on foster care, where they were shuffled between a dizzying number of homes, then released with little preparation.

Many states’ confidentiality laws restrict access to foster care records. But social workers confirm some teens’ accounts and say others sounded typical.

Heather says she was dropped into Oklahoma’s foster care system after being abandoned by her mother when she was 4. Plump with a boisterous laugh, Heather passed through eight placements, then landed in Downtown Los Angeles where, she says, she sold crack and lived in a freeway underpass.

Julian, Angel’s boyfriend, emancipated from Nevada’s foster care to find his mother--a Las Vegas casino worker who had neglected him--dying of cancer. He came to California with her ashes.

On his 18th birthday, Jerome collected a few love letters, hugged friends at his group home in northeastern California, and shed his extra clothing, knowing he was headed for homelessness. After five years in group homes from Illinois to California, the government gave him $20 and an air ticket out of town. “I didn’t want to be homeless,” says the lanky teen-ager, nervously stroking his scraggly blond beard and red Mohawk.

Sitting on a Hollywood Boulevard bench, Angel says she was 11 when police officers pulled her from a fifth-grade class, telling her she was going into foster care. “I was scared. I didn’t understand,” says Angel, recalling the terror of being torn from her parents and friends and dropped into a stranger’s home.

Two years later, Angel was sent back to her mother. “They said she was suitable,” Angel scoffs, pulling the red hair from her face. As with a third of children who return to foster care, it didn’t last: Moments before a drug raid on one of many hotels they stayed in, Angel says, her mother vanished.

Angel desperately asked to be adopted, tired of impersonal homes and foster parents whose main motive seemed financial. But, she says, her social worker told her that, at 14, “you’re too old. People want little kids.”

Each time problems arose or Angel objected to a foster home, she was moved--in all, 13 times. Social workers familiar with her case say they tried to help her, but she always ran away from the homes in which she was placed. She became withdrawn and anti-social, and began drinking and using marijuana, then PCP. After realizing that harried group home staff focused their attention on the biggest troublemakers, Angel became increasingly violent.

“After a while, I didn’t care where they sent me. I wanted to have fun. I didn’t care about anything else,” says Angel, adding that she was consumed by loneliness, and once drank a bottle of ammonia in a despondent cry for help. “I just wanted someone to care, to have a heart-to-heart conversation. I felt abandoned by the world.”

Leaving foster care was a rude awakening. Group homes bred dependence: Others did Angel’s laundry, shopping, cooking and dishes. She got a monthly allowance. Everything was planned. As late as the eighth grade, she was never allowed out of the front yard of one home unaccompanied by an adult. At one home, which had its own school, she never left the grounds. Angel had a bank account but wasn’t allowed to manage it. Sixty-one percent of those who emancipate from foster care have no job experience, according to a UC Berkeley study. Angel had never even had an interview.

Although federal law requires agencies develop an emancipation plan for teens 16 and older, only 35% get independent-living training while in foster care, the UC Berkeley study found. Until recently, foster youth were not allowed to save more than $1,000, making an apartment deposit and first month’s rent difficult. Many leave without identification papers, such as a Social Security card. Former foster youths who straggle into the drop-in center run by the Los Angeles Youth Network outreach agency are illiterate and cannot fill out a job application.

Others lack minimum social skills needed to keep a job. Reading classified ads, proper telephone behavior and grooming are unfamiliar to them, says Robert Pfeifer of Covenant House, who often must tell women to wear undergarments and keep their legs closed during job interviews.

Social workers say many in Angel’s group have applied for fast-food and other jobs, but employers, flush with applications, are wary of hiring homeless teen-agers.

“Social workers do nothing for emancipation,” says Earlleen Lloyd, a foster mother of six in the San Fernando Valley. She adds that with caseloads of 50 or 60 children each, there isn’t time for such help. Some fail to refer her foster girls to the county’s independent-living program, a voluntary 30-hour course only half of those who emancipate attend. Lloyd says social workers never asked if the 70 girls she reared had a job or an apartment before emancipating them.

A 1993 UCLA study found that social workers in three of four cases do not discuss with teens where they will live after foster care. Twice in two years, Lloyd has had to fight in court to keep kids in foster care until they are 19 to let them finish high school, which California law allows. “The unspoken pressure is to get the kid off the rolls at age 18,” Lloyd says.

Some foster teen-agers seek desperate solutions: They get pregnant on prom night to qualify for welfare, says foster parent Lupe Ross. “If we force them to leave their parents’ home, then we have to do better for them.”

Maria R. Lowry, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Children’s Rights Project, says: “This is a very expensive way to fail.”

DEAD-END STREET: ‘I Want Out, but I Don’t Know How’

His prostitution business finished, Jerome spills out of a customer’s car and onto the curb. Back on Hollywood Boulevard, outside the Fame Cafe where her friends sit, Angel screams “Foot Patrol!,” warning of approaching security guards. The group heads home.

Angel talks fearfully of waiting for HIV test results after she stepped on a needle used by a drug user who has AIDS.

“I want out, but I don’t know how,” Heather moans; already, three street friends died of overdoses.

Jerome says some in the group are considering shooting up speed. His girlfriend begins slicing words into her arms with a razor blade.

Julian says he has applied for four jobs, but doesn’t expect a reply. “I look forward to death. There has to be something better than this,” he says, adjusting two earrings clamped to his nose and the heavy metal chain around his neck. He and Angel mull getting general relief to get off the streets.

“Sometimes I wish I had parents,” says chubby Mike, who was in foster care from birth, as he saunters down the boulevard. “I wish I had someone to turn to, but I don’t.”

Another of Angel’s friends grabs a cigarette laced with PCP, inhaling deeply. Minutes later, his eyes go dull.

Angel and Heather dance on the star-studded sidewalk as the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” blares from a shop.

Foster Care Surveyed

Critics of foster care say the system fails to prepare children for life, leaving too many homeless or unable to get a job or even survive. Government agencies contend the majority of children leave foster care self-sufficent. Here are some findings from a national study of youths who had been out of the system for 2 1/2 to 4 years.

Have been Never been in foster in foster care care Employed at time of interview* 49% 60% Median weekly salary* $205 $261 Receiving welfare 30% 5% Living with relative 39% 53% Completed high school 54% 78% Women who had a child 60% 26% Ever used illegal drugs 50% 51%

(*Note: Employment status and median weekly salary are for people ages 16 to 24; the remaining general population statistics are for those 18 to 24.)

USE OF SOCIAL SERVICES SINCE LEAVING FOSTER CARE Housing: 12% Food stamps: 37% General assistance: 21% AFDC: 34% Job placement: 23% Public shelter: 10% Mental Health treatment: 9% Alcohol treatment: 5% Drug treatment: 6% Food bank/soup kitchen: 12% Source: Department of Health and Human Services study by Westat Inc.