A Gift That Sustains the Body as Well as the Soul

At 9 a.m. today, the big new kitchen will come to life: Chefs will scurry around in white jackets directing a dozen volunteers who will peel and chop and stir and ladle.

By 11:30 a.m., the first meals will be packed up and ready to go: ham, marshmallow yams, peas with pearl onions in cream sauce, wild rice with currants, cabbage and braised apples, greens with cherry tomatoes, broccoli florets and trifle.

By 1 p.m., the food will have been dispensed to volunteers who will take it--in their own cars, trucks and vans--to South Central, West Hollywood, Granada Hills, East L.A. They will tote the meals up rickety flights of stairs into smoke-stained apartments, up fancy elevators to designerly townhouses, down little walkways into neatly kept bungalows, and along blacktopped driveways to red brick duplexes. Sometimes the food will be delivered into the arms of a grateful person, other times it will be left on a counter for someone too sick to leave bed.

Back at the kitchen, there will be a lull after this, as volunteers and staffers break for coffee and a snack.

And by late afternoon, Project Angel Food will be busy again, as preparations begin for Monday’s meals.

It is a remarkably simple concept, and as it turns out, a remarkably successful one. The idea was to feed homebound people with AIDS. Beginning five years ago in a Methodist church with a handful of clients, Project Angel Food has grown like a weed. Nowadays, 17 staffers and 900 volunteers feed almost 700 men and women out of a new building on Sunset Boulevard near Fairfax.

The agency has overcome management conflicts, growing pains and bad press to become one of the city’s most visible AIDS charities. Its budget has blossomed from nearly nothing to $2 million a year.

Did someone say compassion fatigue? On Christmas Day, at least 100 more volunteers than usual will help. Many others will be turned away. (“Come back next week,” they’ve been told in the past. “That’s when we’ll really need you.”)

The agency has a few simple rules for volunteers, addressing mostly routine issues such as scheduling and hygiene. But some are unique to the work: To protect client confidentiality, volunteers are asked not to wear PAF T-shirts while delivering food. They are asked to identify themselves as “a friend” of the client if neighbors ask and to destroy the detailed route sheets issued with each run.

You could call Project Angel Food a fashionable charity--its benefactors are some of the biggest names in Hollywood--but so what? Glitzy generosity and desperate need make perfect companions. Everybody gets something; the trade-off is a fine one.

And how can you argue with the work?

It’s true that the occasional church has refused to help “people like that,” said Executive Director John Gile, “but not very many people turn us down.”

Even with all the good vibes, though, the downside of the operation is pretty harsh.

“It can be very sad,” said Gile, “We lose clients every week.”

*

That’s the part that hurts, the part that really gets to Jeanette Bird, a 69-year-old former dental office employee.

Bird and her husband, Jerry, 70, have been delivering food for Project Angel Food every Tuesday for a couple of years. Jerry drives; Jeanette delivers. The arrangement suits their temperaments.

Last week, they packed their plush Dodge van with eight meals and eight poinsettias.

Jeanette recalled one client, who was, she said, “the loneliest person I ever heard of. He had friends, but they were so afraid of AIDS that he just dropped them. He really had nobody. I used to spend time with him until I nearly choked to death because he was such a chain smoker. He lived in one little room, no kitchen, just a little fridge and microwave. And we lost him last week.”

She said this sadly, but matter-of-factly. The Birds have lost at least six of their clients since they began delivering meals. Death is a fact of life with this gig.

Jeanette maneuvered a labyrinth of hallways in one of those big West Hollywood garden apartments. She is greeted at the door by a client, who waits in his elegantly furnished apartment, a huge spray of flowers behind him in the entry. He invites her in, they exchange pleasantries, then hug goodby.

“Hope you get what you want for Christmas,” she said.

He smiles and shakes his head.

“All I want is my health.”

At the last apartment, at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, a handsome middle-aged man peeked around his door as Jeanette handed him lunch.

I have never heard so heartfelt a thank-you.

The gratitude in his voice was as palpable as the hot meal in his hands.

And just as filling.