Buddy System : Aid: Mentor program pairs professionals with the homeless in an effort to help them get off Skid Row.

Joe Zapalac and Mark Williams are buddies.

They get together often for dinner or to catch a movie. They share a passion for Green Bay Packers football and karaoke music. They enjoy meeting for coffee and talking politics and shaking their heads over the latest bureaucratic foul-up in Sacramento or Washington.

They don’t seem at all like the odd couple.

At least not until Zapalac mentions his home in Long Beach and his work as chief chemical engineer for a large industrial firm. And Williams starts talking about the old days of living in a cardboard box in Downtown Los Angeles and scrounging food in homeless shelters jammed with the hungry.

The pair are pioneers in an unusual effort to match successful business professionals with former street people who are desperate to escape Skid Row.

The pairings have been devised by operators of the Weingart Center, a Downtown rehabilitation organization. They call it their mentor program.

Williams, 36, calls it a lifesaver.

“Until now I haven’t had anybody here to call up and talk to if I had a problem,” he said the other day as he surveyed passersby on a crowded San Pedro Street sidewalk near the heart of Skid Row.

“You want to have somebody to talk to--there are times you really need to get things off your chest. But people on the street all have their own problems. They don’t want to hear yours.”

As Williams’ mentor, Zapalac is there to listen. And more.

Since helping launch the buddy program six months ago, the 33-year-old bachelor has become part cheerleader, teacher, role model and confidant to a man who freely admits he sunk so low on Skid Row that he had nowhere to go but up.

Williams’ problems began five years ago when the insurance company where he worked reduced its staff in reaction to Proposition 103, the insurance rate rollback initiative.

Other companies were not hiring, and when his meager savings ran out, Williams remembers heading “for the place everybody said you could get food”--Skid Row. Soon, he was spending nights in a box behind an office building near 1st Street and days in chow lines at nearby homeless missions.

Outside one of the missions, police making a routine sidewalk cleanup sweep tossed away a bundle of Williams’ possessions--including his address book with friends and relatives’ phone numbers. Inside the mission’s crowded dining hall, he soon learned he was rubbing elbows with tuberculosis- infected guests.

Williams discovered he had contracted TB when he found himself unable to walk. Doctors at County-USC Medical Center found that the disease had spread from his lungs to his spinal cord. Three operations later, the TB had been arrested--but Williams’ legs were paralyzed.

Earlier this year, Weingart Center counselors helped Williams find a Mid-Wilshire apartment and sign up for classes starting next month at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College. He has enrolled in computer programming courses--”something that won’t be affected next time another proposition gets passed,” as he puts it.

Mentor program leader Rebecca Dennison said Williams and the seven other former homeless people who have been paired with volunteer buddies were chosen because of such motivation. Each has completed short-term residency at the center, moved into their own apartments and either found jobs or enrolled as students.

Dennison’s other mentors include a real estate agent, a free-lance writer, an apartment house owner and a minister. She hopes to recruit an additional 20 or so by the end of the year.

Mentors are not expected to be counselors--”just someone with an open ear, a sounding board, a friend,” Dennison said.

Mentors are advised not to loan clients money, bail them out of jail or take them to dinner where alcohol is served, she said. But they are encouraged to share useful life experiences, offer tips on things such as budgeting and time management and share information about such resources as job opportunities.

Weingart Center Assn. President James Cheney said the mentoring--part of an expanding assistance effort for the homeless--is the first of its kind in the nation. It is being funded by a $500,000 grant from a family living in southeastern Los Angeles County.

Although Zapalac is not required to do so, he has given Williams his home and work phone numbers. He has encouraged him to call whenever he has questions about school or is frustrated by things such as MTA buses that won’t stop to pick up him and his wheelchair.

“I was nervous about teaming up with a stranger at first,” Williams said. “But I’d tried it alone and it didn’t work. You have to have somebody in your life who’s successful. Joe’s done it. If he can, maybe so can I.”

Zapalac said he expects to remain friends with Williams long after the one-year mentor commitment is over. “I knew we’d get along the first time I saw him wearing a Packers hat,” he said with a laugh.

Williams said: “I’m not going to let Joe down. I’m not going to let myself down, either.”