Life’s Dramas Play Out Very Publicly at Shelters : Quake: Refugees adapt to the forced intimacy amid the bickering and camaraderie, misery and joy.

They have smelled the feet of strangers and sometimes heard them in the throes of furtive sex. They have staked out their own little neighborhoods and made new friends and enemies. They have comforted babies whose names they do not know, squabbled over whether to watch TV shows in Spanish or English and yearned like tortured prisoners for a night of peaceful sleep.

For a couple thousand earthquake refugees still living in 25 shelters, this is the end of Week 3 on the gym floor--where privacy exists only in your head and silence is a fantasy. The displaced have adapted with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm, bringing with them the tensions and compassions of the outside world. There is interracial bickering, toy-sharing and camaraderie. The forced intimacy has bred contempt and understanding, misery and joy.

And every bit of it is played out in public.

“It’s amazing what you see here,” 15-year-old Jessica Serrano said with a mix of wonder and amusement as she spoke late last week of her home under the basketball hoops, the women’s gym at Los Angeles City College.

For some, the shelter life is almost too much to bear. “It’s somewhere between hell and the twilight zone,” groaned one of Jessica’s gym mates, Virginia Johnson, 41. “I keep waking up every morning and realizing it’s real--it’s not a nightmare.”

For others it is a friendly haven, in some ways more hospitable than their prior environs.

“It’s like a colonia (neighborhood) without walls,” said Marin Rivas, 55, who lived alone in an unheated garage before the quake drove him to the Red Cross shelter at the San Fernando Recreation Center. “We talk, we play cards. The only problem is all the kids.”

Perhaps more than anything, shelter life resembles a slumber party with reluctant adult guests: Only the children seem to be in a truly celebratory mood, giddy with new playmates.

They careen across the wood floors, sliding on pieces of cardboard, wildly pushing toddlers in walkers and tossing balls within centimeters of heads. They rush en masse into a bathroom to tease the occupant. And they never, never seem to rest.

The shrieking and crying are unceasing. Every little footfall is amplified in the gyms’ cavernous spaces.

“They run all night, and if they don’t run, they cry,” sighed Johnson, a writer from Oakland who had been in Los Angeles for only a short while when the Jan. 17 Northridge quake struck, damaging the friend’s apartment she was staying in.

“I used to like children, but I never want to hear another baby cry,” she added, shaking her head.

In the city college gym, the floor was still crowded with cots last week--although they were emptying as the shelter population declined from a high of 320.

Absent tenants leave small signs on their beds, claiming their tiny patches of real estate beneath the grimy blue walls.

“Gone to service center. I be here today. Mario,” read one on a recent day. Mario also wanted to leave no doubts about which pink acrylic blanket was his. “Mario. Don’t Toch,” he had scrawled in heavy blue ink.

Some cots bore the touches of home: A comforter decorated with big, smiling Dalmatians, a small, stuffed gorilla toy standing sentinel over another bed. The favored storage method was black plastic trash bags, always bulging.

Jessica Serrano sat on her folding cot, dispensing shelter tales like the village grande dame. Around her sprawled several younger girls, playing and coloring books distributed by shelter management: “I Love Not Smoking.” Across the gym a Bugs Bunny cartoon blared from one of two televisions in the room.

“Oh, the TVs, the TVs are a problem,” the teen-ager acknowledged with a roll of her eyes. “People want to see (shows) in English and we want to see them in Spanish. And they wind up off.”

Not that television is the only source of skirmishes.

“The little girls are always fighting over their boyfriends,” said Jessica, who arrived at the shelter a week after the quake with her mother and older brother--having spent a few days with friends, as well as in their car.

Then there are the mothers. “The mothers get in fights because they don’t want other kids taking their kids’ toys,” Jessica explained. The police were summoned to quiet one tussle between moms. “They started fighting like little boys, pulling hair and punching each other.”

Ever observant of the social dynamics of shelter life, Jessica and her friends have dubbed one single mom “Sexy.”

“We named her Sexy. She’s not sexy, but she thinks she is,” Jessica said knowingly. “She doesn’t talk to the ladies. She talks to the men, the married men.”

Jessica also keeps an eye on her belongings. “If you move from your bed, things go away from your bed like that, “ she said with a wave of her hand. Since $500 worth of food stamps were stolen from one woman, Jessica’s 20-year-old brother sleeps with their meager cash (“the $18 we’ve had since the earthquake”) and even takes it to the shower--wrapped in a plastic bag.

Some disagreements are more charged than tiffs over toys and soap operas. Racial friction has flared between Latinos--who made up about 90% of the city college shelter’s residents--and blacks, who express frustration with Red Cross management.

“It was like a segregated gym,” said Benny Gibbs, 39, who accuses management of favoring Latinos and whites. “The blacks became very standoffish, stayed to ourselves. . . . When you’re living in close quarters like this it causes a lot of tension. People were really getting hot.”

Shelter officials say that given the circumstances and the mix of people, there have been amazingly few disruptions. “But sometimes, no matter what you say or do, it’s not going to change problems that existed before this disaster,” said Ce Anderson, the city college shelter manager, who usually works in her father’s boat business in San Pedro. “I think we have a very select group that are unhappy.”

At the San Fernando Recreation Center shelter, the lone African American, Willie Moore, 43, of Sun Valley, also feels isolated. His wife died of lung cancer three days before the quake and he says he is glad his apartment was condemned because he could not bear to live there without her. Grief-stricken and dispirited, he is able to summon up only anger for his fellow shelter residents.

“There are a lot of prejudiced people here,” Moore said. “This drunk guy came up to me and said all these things he was going to do to me. I told the Red Cross and I can’t believe they didn’t do anything about it.”

Most of the shelter’s occupants are Latinos from poor neighborhoods in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where they shared crowded apartments with relatives or other families. The gym deprived them of what little privacy they had previously enjoyed.

“There’s too many men,” declared Esther Morillo, 27, whose one-bedroom Pacoima apartment was condemned, leaving her and nine others--including her four children--homeless.

Like most of her shelter mates, Morillo sleeps in her clothes and changes in a bathroom stall.

The group showers--set up in a blue tent in the surrounding park--do not offer much more escape from scrutiny. Even sex and illness have an audience.

“You see that short, fat lady over by the TV? She’s the one we heard in bed last night having a real good time,” said security guard Hugo Macias, adding that the sounds prompted a certain amount of tittering.

Sometimes the laughter is cruel.

“There was this old man watching TV and he started shaking and spilling his coffee, and the kids were laughing and pointing,” recounted Josefina Morillon, 29, a San Fernando resident who arrived at the shelter with her six children shortly after the quake. “It turned out he was having a heart attack.” She said he survived.

Still, as Luis Antonio, 24, well knows, the shelters are at least less public than the streets, where he had been living before the quake, picking up day labor jobs. “I’m going to be straight with you,” Antonio said. “I’m very comfortable here.”

Others, such as Arnold Garcia, 66, resent the routine. He said the lights pop on at 6 a.m., and switch off at 10 p.m., regardless of whether residents like it or not.

“I thought we were going to be here only a couple of days and then they place you,” lamented Garcia, who said he is having difficulty finding an apartment for himself and his 10-year-old grandson because his income is only $1,050 a month. “I didn’t realize it was going to be forever and forever.”

Morillon, who reported the heart attack, takes her mind off the discomforts by volunteering in the shelter kitchen. A religious woman, she has also found herself acting as a volunteer cop of sorts.

“I saw this lady shooting drugs in the bathroom and reported her because of the kids,” Morillon said. “I’m still waiting for my sheriff’s badge,” she joked. “But, really, we are in this together, and we have to take care of one another like a family.”

Indeed, Robert Gatewood, 24, says that at its best the Hollywood High School shelter has been like one big happy family, with people helping one another. A tad less impressed with all the togetherness, his wife, Annie Tucker, 21, said: “It’s a good shelter; they supply you with everything you need. It’s just the people in the shelter.”

But then she concedes that she has made some friends.

“I decided I have to live here with these people so I might as well get along with them,” she said, holding one of the couple’s twin infants. “I found a group of people and we’re real close.”

Brian Laird, 23, who used to sell cleaning agents, even enjoys all the youthful high jinks. “You can have a depressing day and come here . . . and kick back on your cot and watch the kids and realize it’s just not that serious.”

One thing he would like to know, though. “Why do all these shelters smell like feet?”