Prayer and Purpose

Soon, the day people will come to stake out spots on the lobby benches and wait for breakfast. Most will neither read nor talk, just sit and look at nothing in particular.

It is 7 a.m. at the Los Angeles Mission, and about 200 men are gathered in the domed chapel. They are residents--members of the Fresh Start program. The men have signed on for 12 months, hoping to kick drugs or go straight or both, hoping when they leave here to have a job and a purpose.

Fresh Starter Roy McCalebb steps forward to share his news: His cancer-stricken wife, who’s living in a downtown hotel, is in remission. He wants “to thank all the brothers and the sisters of the house” for their prayers.

Applause.

“We believe that God answers prayers,” says Chaplain Jim Lewis, although some who find their way to the mission at 5th and Wall streets grumble about all the “amen-ing” that comes before the free food. But this is a Christian mission.

Today’s message is about being born again. Her voice rising to a crescendo, Chaplain Luenetta Silas thunders, “You are not earthbound! You are glory bound!” A few men snooze. “Each man here is a treasure. If you can stand here, you can stand when you leave here.”

And that is the philosophy of the mission, now marking its 50th year--that with help, you can turn your life around.

Once, says President Eric Foley, the typical client was “a 58-year-old white male curling up on the street with a bottle,” usually port, and the mission was primarily a way station for those in crisis.

Today, the mission is neither a flophouse nor a refuge for winos and addicts. Fresh Start is its primary focus--a program that can accommodate 200 men and 27 women--who must commit to staying clean and sober. In return, they get a chance to start over, perhaps earn a high school diploma, learn a marketable skill and enter the mainstream. As Lewis put it, “Rehabilitation without preparation is like a bird with one wing.”

The nonprofit mission still serves hard-core street people, but, Foley says, the client base is shifting to “the new homeless” and those “right on the boundaries of becoming homeless.” The age range is predominantly 28 to 32, and the main problem is drugs--cocaine, usually, and heroin.

There are the residents, the day people--who come only for meals--and there are those who come for a warm bed for a few nights.

This day, Sheila Arma, 41, a single mother, is here with five of her eight children. They came by bus from Seattle to be near her troubled teenage son who is a ward of the county court. Now, “all the money for hotels run out.” Her welfare check was somewhere between Seattle and Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Mission has no beds for transient women or children--and Arma knows finding an apartment will be tough. “My credit history just went to the moon,” she says. The family’s last home: a $185-a-week hotel room with a king-size bed.

She and her kids are waiting when the clothing room opens at the mission’s Anne Douglas Women’s Center. They sift through the shoes and pants and tops, then stuff their finds into big plastic bags. The rules: No trying on; take no more than allowed. But, Chaplain Marlene Ross says, “when they’re new, we give them a little extra.”

Women Tell of Hard Times

Upstairs, in the home-like women’s residence, where Fresh Starters share pleasant two-, three- and four-bedroom units, residents take a break from cleaning chores to tell their stories--of domestic violence, drug addiction, petty crime, prostitution.

Lisa Glover, 42, who served time for drug possession and prostitution, grew up in a family of “educated alcoholics and educated addicts,” and was molested as a child. But her world didn’t crash, she says, until her husband walked out, taking their three sons. “It was very ugly.”

She regained custody, but lost the boys because of her drug use. A month into Fresh Start, she’s determined to stay clean and hone her job skills. “I’m going all the way.”

Linda James, 42, came here eight months ago, having “messed up pretty badly.” She had served two years for embezzlement and forgery. Beset with debt and “in a relationship with a lazy man,” she started drinking, segued to drugs. “Instead of racing to God, I raced to the liquor store. Once you mess up your life, everything that can happen does.”

But things are turning around for her. “My mother called me ‘Baby’ the other day. I got off the phone and cried. When I left home, that’s not what she was calling me. I’d stolen from her, lied to her. When you have an addiction, you have no borders.”

The women’s program is 14 months long, and after graduating, she’ll head for Utah and truck-driving school. But she’ll keep reminding herself: “Tomorrow can hold some hidden corner, and you walk around it and all hell breaks loose.”

“The number of women has just exploded,” says Foley, with welfare reform expected to exacerbate the problem. “We’re going to have to develop a whole new concept of mission”--a family-center concept. The prototype is Family First, a new, yearlong nonresidential education and job-training program for parents.

Rather than being the stereotypical cart-pushers, women clients tend to be recent inmates and victims of domestic abuse or abandonment. Foley says, “They come to us not off the street, but to stay out of the street” or out of prison.

In the planning stages is a residential program for families, to include a preschool and day care. Says mission Chief Executive Mike Edwards, “There is the part of us that says we don’t want kids down here [on Skid Row], and there is the reality--there are kids down here,” families living week to week in single-occupancy hotel rooms.

Men Share Common Bond of Addiction

At 11 a.m., the resident men start lining up for lunch. Rodney Shepard, a Fresh Starter for five months, looks around the dining room. “We’ve got people from corporate America to cardboard condominium dwellers,” all with a common bond: addiction.

“The new guys come in like Billy Bad Boy, but they soon learn you can leave that street mentality on the street.” To him, the mission is “a slice of heaven here on Earth. All your needs are met. And we get treated like decent human beings,” he says.

He brings out the Shepard Gazette, created on computer by his wife, Jennifer, to keep him in touch with her and their two daughters. Once, he had a good job as an auto mechanic--and an addiction to crack cocaine. “All the money was going to the drug men. . . . I went so far as to steal money from my wife’s purse, take money from my kids’ piggy banks.”

Last night, he and his wife had gone out--dinner and dancing. Heading for his work shift in the kitchen--every man and woman here has a job--he smiles and says, “God is good.”

By 12:15, the day people, about 150 men and women, are in chapel.

“Any believers in this room?” asks Chaplain Kevin Sharps. A host of hands shoots up.

They have digested the message. Now they too can eat.

Upstairs in his tidy room, Dolton Walker shows a photo taken of him about a year ago, just before his release from prison after serving 42 months for illegally transporting firearms. Chaplain Wayne Ross looks at it, smiles and says, “Not the kind of guy you’d want to meet at the ATM at 10 o’clock at night.”

Walker, 48, is a new Fresh Start graduate. Only a year earlier, he was one of the mission’s regular lobby sitters. “I didn’t think they’d accept me with my record. . . . In the last 30 years, I’ve done 24 in the pen.” He’s in an on-site transition program and learning to operate a tow truck. “I’m scared,” he says of the future, “but I’ll make it.”

In the dining room, Doris Haley, 38, wearing a floral print dress, balances her bright-eyed, 16-month-old son, Dell-Daniel, on her lap. Haley returns now and then to the mission because “this is where it all started.”

Continually frustrated in her attempts to regain custody of her four older children, Haley had become a street person. “I thought, ‘What do I have to live for?’ I could be down here [on Skid Row], not be responsible, use as many drugs as I chose to. I was trying to die. I used to sleep on Winston [Street]. I was pregnant and I was using.”

One night when she was “just so hungry,” three men from the mission sneaked food to her. She’s never forgotten.

She says she’s now drug-free and “I’ll be getting my kids back this year. God is so amazing.”

Juanita Martinez, 37, who lives nearby, has come to the mission’s free community clinic with a sore throat. Like most of the nonresident patients--whose ills range from tuberculosis to diabetes--she has no job, no health insurance.

Some come for HIV testing. In the last year, says HIV outreach coordinator Christine Garcia, 500 were tested and about 2% were positive. She prays with each client “before and after they get the test.” Residents who are positive are encouraged to stay in Fresh Start--off the street, away from drugs and alcohol.

It is early afternoon, and at the Anne Douglas Center, three women are working at computers, a skill the mission’s Work Start program considers essential for getting entry-level white-collar jobs. Martha Zirpolo, a former crack cocaine addict, is writing “Addiction: My Disease”:

“I had to have it. . . . I had to have it. . . . I find an alley, a safe place to smoke in the miserable company of other crack heads . . . paranoia sets in and I forget all about whatever it was that hurt me. . . . I found the cure for life’s daggers that came at me . . . it will take you as far as you will allow it to, sometimes all the way to the curb.”

In the adjacent men’s facility, Joe Rowe, 56, a recent Fresh Start graduate, practices filling out a job application as part of Work Start. He once earned $40,000 a year in sales, but “got divorced and met a lady. The two of us together got into something called crack cocaine. . . . I went through my savings, went through my 401K account, everything I had.”

He’d like to work in the mission field. Since coming here, “I’ve developed a heart for these people. Five or 10 years ago, I thought they ought to scoop all these guys up off the sidewalk, bulldoze them and take them to the dump.” With some college, he tutors the more than one-third of Fresh Starters who come in unable to read at third-grade level.

Work Start’s goal, emphasizes vocational services administrator Allen Ceravelo, is to train people who will “bring something to the table, not dark glasses and a tin cup.” Otherwise, he says, “we would be creating a society that would just return back to us.”

Barriers to overcome include job history gaps, inadequate language skills (about 30% of residents are Latinos in the Nuevo Comienzo program and ESL classes), bad attitude and unacceptable social manners. As mission President Foley says, “You don’t start with job training skills. You start with wearing underwear.”

Recruits Look Mission Over

The 35 men in the chapel at midafternoon are Jump Starters, in a 30-day orientation program during which they’ll look the mission over while it looks them over.

Six new arrivals get an encouraging round of applause, a hug or two and Bibles. “These are your brothers in Christ,” Chaplain Maurice Ennis tells them. “Welcome aboard.”

Bibles, some in Spanish, are opened to the book of James. Pacing the aisle, his big voice booming, Chaplain Sharps prays for the men’s victory over Satan. “There’s not a man in this room who has not failed. Failing means [you] get to stop trying. . . . It’s a lot easier to escape than it is to stand.” (The dropout rate in Fresh Start is 42%.)

At 5:30 p.m., the men in the mission’s “guest services” program (meals and / or short-term shelter) start coming through the revolving door. Many know the drill well.

They check their parcels, show their bed tickets. In the men’s bathroom, they drop their pants for bug check; those infested will get an antiseptic shower and bug-free clothing.

Ennis would like to get some of these men into Jump Start, but knows “guys who’ve been in the penitentiary don’t want to get back into a structured situation.” So they sleep here five nights, then elsewhere five nights, which makes them eligible to return here for five nights.

Government checks are late, and tonight there will be a full house--about 200 transients. Among them is Joaquin Roebuck, 71. A first-timer here, he says, “I knew they had places like this for people who screwed up their money trying to get rich quick.” In his case, playing the horses.

There will be spaghetti for dinner, but first comes chapel. Roebuck sits in the back and talks about his life as one of the first black stuntmen in Hollywood. “I was running in the jungle with Tarzan when the jungle was along the Hollywood Freeway.”

In from Las Vegas, he’s hoping to get a background gig in a movie being shot downtown; that would mean $100 for the horses. “I got a system,” he says. “but it really let me down this time.”

From the back row an elderly man who came snappily dressed and carrying a blinking electric rose keeps shouting “Hallelujah!” and clapping loudly. Undeterred, guest minister Oliver Lambert winds up on a high note:

“Faith is steppin’ out on nothin’ and landing on somethin’.”

Seven men stand, asking to be saved.

Dinner will be in five minutes.

Los Angeles Mission is unique on Skid Row, Foley says, in that it is not primarily a social-services provider, but a Christian program founded on the belief that “having a relationship with Jesus” transforms lives. Fresh Starters are required to attend church and chapel, but no one is required to convert.

The nondenominational mission has an annual budget of $20 million from private and corporate donations and from its vehicle-donation program, which brings in $1 million. This supports residential programs and “guest services,” which in 1998 included 120,000 meals served and 31,000 overnight beds provided.

New Facility Drew Criticism

In early 1992, the mission--which has been dubbed “mission to the stars” because of its celebrity volunteers--moved from a pre-1900 site on Los Angeles Street to a $31-million, 156,000-square-foot facility complete with basketball court and computer room. Some critics asked whether “those people” needed such posh digs. And, they wondered, would this bring more homeless to Los Angeles, with a county homeless population estimated at 80,000.

“When we built this,” Chief Executive Edwards says, “it brought in a lot of people who were out on the street.” And, he asks, “Why would you build an old, cruddy looking place?”

Foley says, “We want to emulate a five-star hotel. We want to treat them like they’ve never been treated before--’Please, sir’ and ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ ”

“Our job,” he adds, “is to help the city heal the city.”

Times staff writer Beverly Beyette can be reached by e-mail at Beverly .Beyette@latimes.com.