COLUMN ONE : Ruthless Ruler of the Streets : Many homeless addicts are slaves to crack. For them, life has two simple goals--surviving the night and finding a way to buy, or steal, the next high.

I lost a beautiful lady to a bitch. . . . That bitch took my lady . . . to sell her body for smoke. . . . Stole her heart and body and soul . A once beautiful body looks like a bag of bones. . . . I pray she will break that chain. To get away and stay away from that bitch cocaine.

--Street poet Southern Comfort, on a wall on Skid Row.

*

Out in abandoned bungalows and broken-down cars, out under the cardboard lean-tos of the city’s homeless camps and in the clattering halls of drug-recovery houses, the addicts talk in metaphors. It is a bitch, a devil, a god, a Svengali. It is a lover, an only friend, a full-time job.

It is a curse unlike anything that came before.

“You’ve got to have it no matter what, and you’ll go to any lengths to get it,” said Sharon Hayes, who remembers times when for five straight days she smoked crack cocaine, times when she went without eating, times when she engaged in sex for the sole purpose of affording her next high.

Gordon Marble lost his job, his family, his home and everything he owned. He said he first fully understood the seductive power of the drug the second time he used it--in bed with a woman in a hotel room.

“Once I took a drag off the cocaine pipe, I didn’t want the sex,” Marble said. “I just wanted the cocaine.”

A lust for crack cocaine is a thread that unites untold thousands of the homeless in Los Angeles--from the garages and back alleys of Boyle Heights to the rooftops and beaches of Venice; from the parking lots of Long Beach to the wooded parks and railroad tracks of the San Fernando Valley.

Crack is everywhere, a fiercely dominating drug that has eroded much of the city’s beleaguered core while scattering “mini Skid Rows” throughout poorer outlying neighborhoods. Not only has crack substantially added to the number of people on the streets, it also has changed very dramatically the nature of those streets, making them far rougher, more desperate places.

For the sake of a hit, guns blaze, people die, apartments are ransacked, windows are smashed. Those who have gone so far as to neglect bills or mortgages, giving up beds and refrigerators and indoor plumbing, find it not so difficult to make further reckless choices: to prey upon fellow transients and the mentally ill, to break into garages and vending machines, to hijack cars and hold up liquor stores, to usurp parks and street corners to buy and sell and get high.

In the crass street ethic of the drug, all other rules and priorities submit to a single overriding aim: to obtain that next rock. The consequences do not always make headlines; far more often, crack merely chisels away, day in, day out, at the elaborate underlying framework of society.

Driven by their cravings, men steal from their families. Young mothers forsake baby food and diapers. Teen-agers drop out of school. Employees quit their jobs--or get fired for theft and absenteeism. Institutions such as marriage and religion, the axis on which so many moral values revolve, weaken and give way. There are husbands who disappear for days or weeks at a time--the intermittent homeless, some still spiraling downward. There are wives and girlfriends walking the streets as prostitutes or “strawberries”--women who trade sex for cocaine--one more route to what addicts call “the curb.”

“When you’re disadvantaged and you throw crack into that, you absolutely can’t make it,” said Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a family service agency on Skid Row. “Crack just crumbles you. It pins you to the ground.”

Tabulating crack’s impact on homelessness is, of course, difficult; the experts cannot even agree on how many people reside on the nation’s streets. Certainly, a substantial share of the homeless do not use crack, and crack smokers do not inevitably wind up poor, or commit crimes. The roots of poverty and lawlessness run deep; some connect, some reach back for decades, some are entirely unrelated to drugs.

Still, activists acknowledge that the relationship between the drug and homelessness is more closely entwined than many of them would have admitted a few years ago. In a vacuum of statistics and hard data, one fact stands out as if etched in neon: During crack’s 10-year siege, Los Angeles County’s estimated homeless population has doubled, reaching 75,000 on any given night.

What alcohol can do over 10 or 20 years, crack can do in a year, or less.

For anyone living paycheck to paycheck, it allows scant time to see the danger and regain equilibrium. For someone already homeless, turning to crack for escape, the drug becomes a Sisyphean burden. The rock does not permit escape, not easily. It is there day and night, on nearly any block, a crushing obstacle for those who might otherwise climb out of the depths.

Crack has thus wrought upon the city a soundless explosion: The shock waves were felt, the victims now lie in rows on the sidewalks, but no one really heard the bomb.

Few communities, if any, have escaped the damage. Homeless crack addicts are part of the reason that, in South-Central, 62-year-old Esquine Pettie has had to change the time of her Neighborhood Watch meetings to 5 p.m., before dark, because it has become so much scarier to go outside.

“They sleep in the daytime and rambles at night,” Pettie said of the transient rock smokers who congregate in parks and abandoned houses, moving every time the police flush them out. “They just go from one house to another house. The senior citizens say they can’t walk to the market, can’t go to the bus stop.”

Crack dealers have taken over entire apartment houses in Van Nuys. Dan Faller, president of an apartment owners group, remembers one landlord whose tenants fled as the dealers moved in, bringing with them the addicts and transients who helped to strip the fixtures and render the building uninhabitable.

“The owner had to walk away and leave it,” Faller said. “It’s hard. You’re dealing with somebody who can kill you.”

Of all the stages on which crack and homelessness have played as high drama, perhaps no town in the nation has offered more compelling theater than Santa Monica, a liberal, upscale beach city that once embraced the homeless by opening parks to overnight camping and initiating aid programs.

That was before crack addicts began taking the blame for worsening crime and turning public opinion against the homeless. In a city of 87,000 residents, about 1,000 people living on the streets now account for one-third of police calls and up to 45% of bookings in jail, said Police Chief James T. Butts Jr.

Car break-ins have escalated. Apartment tenants have complained of transients camping in carports, even setting fires. Despite a citizens’ campaign that led to the parks being closed again at night, the battle still rages, and many residents fear their town is forever changed.

“There was a time when--when your kids got to be about 10--you could let them walk to the park and play,” said Jean Sedillos, who joined a group called Save Our City to try to clean up the parks. “You can’t do that anymore. At some parks, they’ve taken the doors off the bathrooms because of drugs. You never know if a drug deal’s going on in the bathrooms.”

For a while, police ran sting operations directed at transient cocaine dealers in Palisades Park along the bluff-top between the beach and some of the city’s most opulent hotels. Even after $400,000 in police overtime, the problem persisted. Ultimately, City Councilman Kelly Olsen won approval for a six-month, $540,000 program establishing a full-time police patrol in the park.

Launched in June, the patrol has won praise, but the money is about to end. Many residents do not know what to do. Many feel intimidated.

“You’ll find that all of the seniors start going home at 4 o’clock,” said 90-year-old Florence Cardine, who considered Santa Monica one of the world’s beautiful places when she first moved to town 50 years ago. “It isn’t safe to be out on the streets anymore. I would never think of going out alone.”

Fear creates a variety of hardships. Jess Markey has been hurt financially. Outside his print shop in Downtown Los Angeles, Markey sees homeless crack smokers every day, all day long. They break into cars and steal briefcases, tapes, anything they can sell. They panhandle. They scavenge for the drug in the cracks of the sidewalk.

For two years, Markey said, he has been looking to hire new employees. No one seems willing to work on 7th Street. One woman a year ago never even got through the door, calling later to say she just didn’t feel safe.

“They just light up right in front of you,” Markey said of the users, mostly lean, restless men who have in common one horrific fact: They are among the drug’s most pitiable victims.

The suffering of the homeless addicts is a living hell. No one can know the depth of it, they will tell you, without tumbling down that same chasm. The addicts tell stories, and those stories take on an aspect of caricature--so filled with anguish and irrational acts that they would defy belief, except that they unfold time and again, along roughly similar plot lines.

Aloyisous Anderson, now 31, a former forklift operator from Norwalk, was a crack user. He owed $6,000 in payments on his Ford Escort when he sold it to the dope dealer for $200 in rocks.

“I just watched the guy drive off in my car and I didn’t really care,” he said, “because I had dope in my hand. I just went on in the house and I smoked. . . . I used to smoke in a walk-in closet. I had a reclining chair in there, and I wouldn’t come out. I stayed up in there all day.”

Charles Chavers was renting a home with his girlfriend and training to operate construction equipment when he first inhaled the vapors in a lot behind a pool hall in Bakersfield.

“I was hooked right then . . . that first hit,” Chavers, 42, said outside a Skid Row rehabilitation house. Within 24 hours he had spent $100. By the end of four months, the drug was a complete obsession, costing him $300 a day--even more if he had it.

Chavers quit school, sold everything--stereo, clothes, rings, lamps, telephone. He got $45 for a 19-inch color TV and faked a break-in to account for the loss. He parted with a ’76 Mercury that he figured was worth $700. The crack dealer got the pink slip for $150 in rocks.

“If he’d have told me $75,” Chavers said, “then he’d have got the car for $75.”

From there it got worse--a breakup with his girlfriend, a series of cheap apartments, living without lights, without gas, refusing to pay rent, cashing food stamps to buy crack, losing weight, committing burglaries and armed robberies.

Chavers ended up on Skid Row, then in prison, then back on Skid Row, where one day, just before he sought treatment, he tried to hang his girlfriend by her belt from the 12th story of the Frontier Hotel--because she took a few dollars, or stayed out too late, he doesn’t quite remember.

“The drug and alcohol, mixed together, just sent me off into a rage,” he said. “My life was unmanageable. You want it so much you’re willing to take a chance on losing your life to go out here and get it.”

Crack’s destructive punch, its power to send lives crashing to the sidewalk, reaches across all racial and economic lines. Joe Shulkin, a 43-year-old television writer from West Hollywood, lost a six-figure income and found himself living in a string of dilapidated motels. He and his wife, Cheryl, came to see the drug as a disembodied voice, guiding their steps, at once soothing and insatiable.

“The drug takes on a personality all its own,” Shulkin said. “It just gets to the point where, if you can afford it, you don’t even want to sleep.”

Yet not everyone hears its siren call. For complex social reasons, the drug has burned its greatest swath through low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods, where for only $5 or $10 it offers, in concentrated form, a high once available only to those who could afford costly powder cocaine.

In the minds of those who welcomed crack into their dens and bedrooms, the new drug held a certain cachet. It connoted sex, caviar, the ultimate in self-indulgence. Depressants such as alcohol or heroin might bring serenity; crack, it turned out, emboldened the smoker with energy, a colossal sense of power.

“You immediately feel like you can handle the world, no problem,” said Marble, 41, who now beds down in a Skid Row recovery house after living on the streets and in abandoned homes in Compton. “Let’s say I’m depressed and concerned about the job and the wife nagging me about the money that’s gone. One blast off the cocaine and I start to feel the sensation where my head gets light. I start to get kind of excitable. Where I was depressed and low, now I’m up and standing tall.

“Then my thoughts are saying, ‘I can manipulate my wife, I can manipulate my job, I can manipulate the Internal Revenue Service. . . .’ ”

To many smokers, there came to exist a wide gap between the euphoria of the high and the trials of life in communities marred by chronic unemployment, crime, despair, domestic strife, drug abuse and other social problems. The two opposite poles create an almost electrical force--”the magnetic pull of confusion,” addict Linwood Brown calls it--which seizes users and rapidly propels them downward.

Crack use on the streets varies by age group and by neighborhood. Though most statistics are rough guesses, at best, some experts put the percentage of the homeless who use cocaine at about 15%--or half of those believed to regularly use drugs. On Skid Row and in its lesser spin-offs--among them, dense encampments at MacArthur and Lafayette parks--the proportion is thought to be far higher. Former addict Mike Neely, who now runs an outreach program on Skid Row, estimates that at least half of the homeless population there uses crack, while some addicts insist the percentage is more like 70% or 80%, even counting those in missions and hotel rooms.

Skid Row is the bottom of the abyss. A nether world of Darwinian laws and grotesque horrors, it is crack’s kingdom, the one place in Los Angeles where every facet of life has been tainted. The changes in Skid Row over the past decade offer by far the clearest window onto crack’s domination of other drugs and the dark spell it casts over users: How it has grabbed hold, warping attitudes, turning what has always been a bleak, trouble-marred corner of the city into a pit even more grim and unforgiving.

“If you walk down through there, you’ll smell something, and most people will say it’s the stench of the street,” said Chavers. “And it ain’t. It’s death. A lot of people are simply dying, and either they don’t know they’re dying or they don’t care, because it takes away everything. It takes away the will to live. All you want to do is smoke.”

Hard-core addicts who become homeless tend to gravitate to Skid Row because of the proximity of welfare offices and a cornucopia of free-meal programs and clothing giveaways. They share the streets, shelters and hotels with alcoholics, heroin addicts, multi-drug users, the mentally ill and other transients, taking part in a brisk street economy in which crack is both currency and commodity.

Rocks even as small as a quarter of an aspirin sell on nearly any corner--$1 hits. The hustle to afford them goes on day and night. There are handouts to sell: A hamburger provided by a homeless mission might bring $1, or a worn shirt 50 cents. Stolen goods account for much of the trade: onions and grapes from the produce markets, toys, flowers, camping tents, shoes, electronic equipment.

Addicts make regular assaults at night on warehouses crowned in razor wire. Some deal drugs, smoking up their profits; some run errands or obtain crack for other users in exchange for hits, or trundle shopping carts of recyclable cans and bottles. The most deeply afflicted say they can spend a $212 welfare check on crack in 24 hours, and in the long intervening days they hustle from dawn till dark--going without food, showers, clean clothing or shelter, pausing when they can savor a $1 or $5 or $10 rock.

Many addicts seem resigned to bitter hardship. Outside a ramshackle lean-to on Ceres Avenue, a man known to his friends as Black scrapes up dope or cash by fixing bicycles. In September, he and his girlfriend, Theresa, became parents of a baby boy--5 pounds, 9 ounces, born in good health at County-USC Medical Center, but in foster care because Theresa was found to have cocaine in her blood.

The parents grieve for their baby; they are going to court to try to win him back. Yet at every crossroads they seem to turn toward crack.

For Theresa, 30, it is the third time she has been forced to give up a child. The second time, five years ago, she went eight months of her pregnancy without using, she said. She even saved a little money to buy Christmas toys for her daughter in Dallas. But before she mailed them, she said, her boyfriend at the time sold them for cocaine.

Theresa said she was so upset that she left their rented room and bought a rock on Crenshaw Boulevard. Soon they were broke, lost the room and ended up Downtown, where one night the boyfriend slammed her body to the pavement. Two days later, she went into labor.

“I had a pipe full of dope,” Theresa said, remembering how she tried to get someone to call the paramedics, but the only man near her insisted on first having a hit off the pipe. In a rage, she said, she shattered the glass tube in the street, screaming at him, “F--- the pipe, this baby is on the way!”

The man answered, “F--- the baby, I’m going to buy me a pipe.” Then he hurried off, leaving her to crawl to a pay phone.

This time the pregnancy was much easier, Theresa said. Black looked out for her and forbid her to smoke.

But she found ways to outwit him.

“I use,” she said, “any time I can get it.”

In the decade since crack arrived on Skid Row, the street population has become, by most accounts, larger, younger and more violent. Though murder rates are not as high Downtown as in some areas overrun by street gangs, the Skid Row homeless now regularly carry knives, lead pipes, even handguns.

The hard-core users have pushed some of the more docile addicts and alcoholics into East Los Angeles, into MacArthur and Lafayette parks, into Pasadena and elsewhere. Rip-offs and assaults motivated by crack are common. Skid Row loan sharks expect a $2 or $3 return on the dollar, and delinquent addicts sometimes are killed. Occasionally the overdue debtors stop in at Las Familias on Seventh Street in tears, said director Callaghan.

Some end up boarding a bus out of town.

More than 2,000 crack-related arrests were made last year on Skid Row, not counting assaults and burglaries in which no crack was confiscated. Despite running regular drug raids, police concede they are overwhelmed.

“Cocaine is a particularly difficult drug for us,” said Detective Ed Auerbach of the Los Angeles Police Department’s narcotics group Downtown. Partly because it is such a stimulant, it creates “the kind of emotional states that tend to produce erratic or violent behavior. It causes people to get very agitated and nervous and paranoid and defensive and to act out in a very aggressive manner.”

Chavers said he used to wait outside a check-cashing office and bludgeon people with an ax handle to get money to feed his cravings. Remorse was never part of the deal.

“If you laid there and bled to death, it wasn’t on me,” Chavers said. “I got what I wanted. (Cocaine) hardens you. It turns you into something that you’re not. . . . You’ve got your drugs; nine times out of 10 you’ve got a ‘strawberry.’ And you and her, you don’t care about that guy you left in that alley. If he makes it, he makes it. And if he don’t, he don’t.”

The promiscuity of many addicts has become a deadly new means of transmission of the virus that causes AIDS. Men with cash often celebrate by finding a woman, a hotel room and a supply of cocaine. The room being optional, cocaine is also traded for sex in alleys, cars and cardboard shacks.

In a study of the sex-for-crack phenomenon, UCLA researchers Kathleen Boyle and Douglas Anglin learned that the buyers’ market heavily favored men, who, having crack, had little difficulty finding partners. “Strawberries” were reluctant to insist on using condoms for fear of losing the chance to get high.

AIDS reaches ever deeper into Skid Row, spread by both intercourse and intravenous injection. The infection rate among those who get tested is about 20%, according to one clinical group that gives free exams.

The roll call of the sick includes Rochelle Davis, 37, a tiny woman with large, expressive eyes who has been hospitalized eight times since her first collapse early last year. She was introduced to cocaine in 1979; a man she dated showed her how to smoke it by free-basing--in which the drug is burned with a makeshift torch. Seeing it sizzle, she grew alarmed.

“I said, ‘Damn, what is that? I’m scared of that,’ ” Davis recalled. “He said, ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’ ”

But that same man later forced her into prostitution on South Figueroa Street to support their habits. Eventually, she said, he went to prison and she drifted Downtown, where for seven years she lived on the streets, weighing her craving for crack against her own fragile values.

Some women consented to sex for as little as $5; Davis felt she preserved a measure of pride by insisting on $20. “I said I wasn’t no cheap ‘strawberry.’ ”

Now, because of AIDS, she yearns to stay clean. This fall, social worker Callaghan found a $240-a-month room for Davis and her boyfriend at the Pershing Hotel. In the lobby there one afternoon, Davis boasted of being sober seven days, feeling just great. But the stress hangs on her.

“I’m dying slowly but surely, and I know it,” she said. “I think about the HIV, and I get scared. . . . And my old man, he gets to drinking his beer and he might say stuff, and I just get me some money and just break out of here and get high.”

And so it was, a few weeks later: Davis, alone among crowds on the trash-strewn sidewalks of 5th and Crocker streets, the city’s crack hub; back to a place where she could find a brand of solace.

The bitterness of AIDS abets its own lethal spread among addicts. On Seventh Street, where transvestite bars foster heavy prostitution among gays, Alan Jackson, 49, looked back on a life laid waste. Crack made him homeless. He was diagnosed with AIDS four years ago. He spoke through several missing teeth and a bloody sore on his lip about the brutality of life on the streets.

Still, there are times, Jackson said, when he gets his $671 Social Security check, buys a quarter ounce of crack for $150, and finds another man from the streets to join him in a hotel room. He uses condoms, Jackson said. That is as far as he goes in trying to ensure that he does not pass along the virus.

“That’s what the Lord’s going to punish me for,” he said. “I’m only concerned about me.”

In their study, which began in 1989, the UCLA researchers reported one surprise finding that had nothing to do with sex: How frequently the addicts attributed their homelessness to the drug.

“Many of our subjects, though heavy users of other drugs, had fairly stable lives before heavy crack use,” the scholars wrote. “For all, the quick escalation of their need for the drug seemed to catch them by surprise.”

It also caught much of America by surprise.

Crack hit the streets in the early 1980s. Homelessness became a national issue during the same period.

Yet the connection between the two went unnoticed by most so-called experts for many years. In 1984, when homelessness first made the cover of Newsweek magazine, drugs were not even mentioned in accounting for the crowds that were taking to the streets in Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis, Atlanta, Chicago.

At the time, advocates for the homeless were blaming Reagan-era cuts to housing, welfare and mental-health programs, coupled with a general breakdown in family bonds. New York attorney Robert M. Hayes, who was emerging as one of the nation’s leading activists on homelessness, told the media that the plight of the displaced could be summed up in three words: “Housing, housing, housing.”

There was much truth in all the outcry, but it told only part of the story. Activists considered it a given that a certain percentage of the homeless were substance abusers--mainly alcoholics. Tactically, there was no point in harping on drugs when it risked destroying political support for those who needed aid.

“There was an effort, in some ways, to homogenize the (homeless) population and make it look as mainstream as possible,” said USC professor Jennifer Wolch, co-author of a book about Los Angeles called “Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City.” “If you are arguing for programs and money . . . (drug addiction) is not particularly popular. A lot of people believe drug addicts got themselves into it, and why should we help them out?”

Then, too, there just wasn’t much data. No one was charting trends in crack consumption among the homeless and looking at the fallout. The first warnings were sounded far below the level of public debate, by voices from the streets.

Among the more eloquent were members of the Homeless Writers Coalition--street poets who began meeting in Los Angeles at a quirky Skid Row cultural center named Another Planet.

The Writers were like a teardrop from the eye of God; out of suffering, they emerged as a gift, eager to help the downtrodden, said co-founder Alexander Anderson, now 40. Anderson wrote with passion in the mid-1980s about the evils of crack, comparing the eyes of a coked-up user to the high beams of a car:

“He got his high beams on/ And it won’t be long/ Before he sells his Cadillac and his three big homes;/ He said he needed a hit,/ That led to 15 more;/ Now that sucker has to crawl around on his bedroom floor;/ Around and around and around . . . trying to find some more.”

His friend, Charles Walker, a.k.a., Southern Comfort, also wrote about the drug; eventually, he emblazoned some of the verse on what addicts call the “Berlin Wall” on Fifth Street.

For a time, the Writers achieved success--city funding, performances at schools and churches, their own compact disc. But they, too, were battered by crack. At one time, Comfort estimated, there were 20 members, a dozen of them smoking the drug. Eventually, he said, the group split, with one high-ranking member accused of embezzling and smoking up $12,000 in proceeds. Two members were later killed over cocaine--one, a performer known as Pops, in July of 1993, because of a $15 debt. By Comfort’s account, Pops repaid the money to a dealer’s girlfriend, who spent it on crack. In the end, the dealer took her word over his and shot Pops in the chest.

Tears and deaths out on the crowded streets of urban America were not enough to put a political spotlight on what was happening to the homeless because of crack cocaine. But, one by one, other voices were coming forth, people who had seen it, people directly familiar with the pain.

One was Neely, the founder of Los Angeles’ nonprofit Homeless Outreach Program, who had plumbed the depths of addiction by parting with about $90,000 over six years. He had lost an aerospace job, a home, a family and had done what many addicts do--slept in the rain, booked rooms only to check out when the money and crack were gone. The $5 deposit on a hotel key was good for a $5 rock.

At one point, living on an upper floor of a $90-a-week Downtown hotel, Neely grew so paranoid that he imagined there were thieves in the room above, lowering a string and chewing gum through the window to try to heist those precious nuggets.

“Cocaine cost me everything,” he said. “It cost me everything that I ever had, everything I was, everything I ever wanted to be.”

Neely turned the nightmare into activism, traveling in the late 1980s to homelessness conferences in Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco and elsewhere. He kept talking about crack, he said, and people kept rolling their eyes and turning the discussions back to housing and social services.

Similarly frustrated was Donald Burnes, who ran an emergency-assistance program for the poor in Washington, D.C.

Burnes and his wife, Alice Baum, an alcohol and drug counselor, began work in 1986 on a book they published this year, “A Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness.” In it, they argue that untreated drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness are more to blame than poverty and lack of housing. The tragedy, they say, is that by failing to acknowledge the root problems, America allowed homelessness to gain unintended momentum.

Time has brought a deeper understanding. Today, in Los Angeles, low-cost housing is more available than in decades. Through redevelopment, $206 million in public funds was spent to refurbish 40 of the 73 hotels on and around Skid Row. Every night, especially during summer months, many of those rooms sit empty. Vacancy rates in traditional bachelor and single apartments in central Los Angeles have climbed to 21%, according to a survey by the Apartment Owners Assn. of Southern California. Emptiest of all are apartments in the lower rent ranges, starting at $400 a month.

Part of the trouble is enduring poverty. And part of it is the continuing drain of crack cocaine.

“Crack is a problem that we, as a society, ignored for a long period of time,” Neely said. “We’re still in the infancy of addressing the issue.”

Addicts lament that there are too few places to turn. Treatment programs, by most accounts, are sorely underfunded; the wait for county-sponsored beds is 17 days at most facilities.

Addicts who have surrendered to the power of the drug rarely wait that long--not when, as they point out, the dope man is open 24 hours a day.

There are hints of better days ahead. In parts of town, the crack epidemic has shown signs of slowing, even receding. The quality of the drug on the street has dropped significantly in recent years--the result, apparently, of dealers trying to maximize profits. Teen-age drug users in Hollywood, Venice and outlying parts of the Valley have turned, instead, to marijuana and methamphetamine.

A certain number of crack addicts do get help, many through hospitals and recovery centers that stress 12-step programs modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. Chavers, Marble and Sharon Hayes are among them. Anderson, the street poet, is now clean and sharing a sober-living apartment. Southern Comfort lost one girlfriend to the drug--her whereabouts are unknown--but he rescued another woman from crack addiction. They have two children and an apartment in Palmdale.

And yet, success stories seem to be the exceptions.

Comfort’s best friend, Paul Johnson, still lives with his dog Punchie on Skid Row, cooking for other addicts, hustling and using. On a recent sun-filled morning, he lay nearly incoherent at Fifth and Crocker, his bare feet jutting from a crumpled box. He cradled fragments of rock while he sucked on his glass pipe.

Down every adjoining street were others like him, hanging out, scheming for money, going nowhere.

“Where would I like to be in the year 2000?” Edwin Broome, 51, mused on a stretch of Towne Avenue lined in steel gates and cinder block. “I’d like to be on my property, enjoying my grandkids and just kicking back. . . . I ask God all the time, ‘Why are you putting me through this misery?’ ”

But Slim, as they call him, has no answer. He rarely hears from his two grown children and three grandchildren. His days are devoted to shooting heroin, smoking crack and gossiping with other addicts.

Near the curb is a stunted tree, its limbs cut, naked of leaves. Slim has written on its trunk the names of many of his friends, those who share the time here. He calls it the Tree of Salvation.

It has been dead for years.

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About This Series

In this four-part series, The Times examines how Los Angeles County’s neighborhoods, institutions and morals have been ravaged by a decade of crack, the most addictive form of cocaine ever devised.

* Sunday: Crack drains funds from vital public agencies, imposing a hidden tax on everyone.

* Today: Crack creates a new wave of homelessness, bringing more crime and despair to the streets.

* Tuesday: Crack forges an underground economy, luring a generation with false promises.

* Wednesday: Crack takes down a neighborhood--but the spirit of its residents brings it back.

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Helping the Homeless

Scores of missions, shelters and social service providers offer assistance to the homeless, from short-term to transitional or permanent housing. Some examples:

* Southeast Council on Alcoholism and Drug Problems: Seven live-in rehabilitation centers in Los Angeles County, run by the Downey-based Southeast Council on Alcoholism and Drug Problems, provide free or low-cost help for people with alcohol or drug problems who do not have health insurance and cannot afford traditional treatment facilities. Call (310) 923-4545 or (310) 869-6385.

* Rio Hondo Temporary Home: A two-story, 18,000-square-foot shelter in Norwalk containing 27 bedrooms for families and three dormitories for single men and women on the grounds of Metropolitan State Hospital north of Imperial Highway. The homeless are allowed to stay at the shelter for 60 days. Working singles and those who receive welfare must pay $50 a week to defray costs, while families stay for free. Residents are required to perform some chores, such as cleaning the kitchen or vacuuming the hallways. About 30% of the residents have been alcoholics or drug addicts, or have a criminal background. Residence receive job counseling, some vocational training and placement programs. Call (213) 863-8805.

* Restore: Three renewal centers for transitionally homeless men and women who suffer from substance abuse, battery and mental illness. Call (213) 937-7672.

* Ryan Center: A living clean and sober shelter in North Hollywood where about 25 male ex-convicts voluntarily room and pay about $200 a month. They do chores, handle most of the cooking and adhere to a 9 p.m. curfew. In return, they get security, help finding work and counseling.

* Info Line is Los Angeles County’s largest information and referral service, handling more than 250,000 requests on how to get emergency food, shelter, day-care, hot lines, mental health resources, health services and legal resources. The nonprofit organization provides confidential information and referrals 24 hours a day, seven days a week at (800) 339-6993.

Compiled by Times researcher CECILIA RASMUSSEN