Struggling at Bottom of Welfare System

They cling to a lifeline of $212 a month, these 96,000 single men and women at the bottom of Los Angeles County’s welfare system.

Many are addicted to drugs, alcohol or both. Others are mentally ill. Some are chronically unemployed, ending up time and again on the wrong side of good intentions.

In March, citing budget problems, county supervisors reduced their monthly general relief check by $73--intensifying the debate over why taxpayers should help those who can’t--or won’t--help themselves.

People like Terry Akison--a tall, thin man with schizophrenia, who feasted on ice cream and chocolate raspberry cake then starved himself for four days so he could spend his last few dollars on soap.

Rita Barker, struggling with a crack addiction, who sold half her food stamps and a pile of donated clothes to get money for drugs.

And Don Ferrebee, an ex-con trying to rebuild his life, who got up at 3 a.m. day after day to earn enough handing out fliers to pay for what had become the center of his world--his telephone.

“You just don’t see no light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

In the first months since their checks were cut, Ferrebee, Akison and Barker tried to hang on to their spare existences, struggling to keep from falling further into destitution. This brought a frenzy of excess and deprivation. They made hard decisions by necessity and sometimes, blinded by temptation, unwise choices.

Welfare reformers say that by simply handing out money the government is failing to stop the vicious cycle of poverty.

“Let’s deal with the problems instead of just dealing out cash,” said Janice Ploeger Glaab, a state welfare official who is working with Gov. Pete Wilson on reforms. “It’s a sinful waste of taxpayer money. . . . We need to get (welfare recipients) back to work.”

But homeless advocates warn that as government support diminishes, the lives of the poor will only become more desperate.

“They need help, not condemnation,” said Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias de Pueblo, a skid row social service center. “General relief is truly little more than a safety net that benefits all of us.

“It doesn’t help any of us to have hundreds of thousands of people living on the sidewalks, begging and turning to crime.”

Akison, 36, refuses to panhandle because he’s afraid of rejection. He can’t work, he says, because he can’t get along with people.

“I’m mentally disturbed,” he says matter-of-factly. He rattles off his symptoms like a laundry list: “I hear voices. I suffer from delusions. Terrible thoughts come into my head. I’m afraid of dying. I see things. I have trouble with reality.”

Akison, whose schizophrenia was diagnosed two years ago, hopes to qualify for a federal disability program that could nearly triple his income. In the meantime, he lives on general relief and $119 a month in food stamps.

“I’m hoping someday I can get a job,” said Akison, who once worked as a limousine driver. “I just can’t do nothing right now.”

No Family Help

Akison lives in a Main Street hotel, paying $190 a month to rent a room. Because he’s indigent, he qualifies for a discounted rate on phone service, which ranges from $3 to $5 a month.

Like many on skid row, Akison gets no financial help from his family. He does call his sister in Georgia, but rarely speaks to his father--who he says disowned him--in Illinois.

He says he meets with a psychiatrist at a county-supported facility every two weeks but has stopped taking medication. None of the drugs he’s tried have helped him, he says.

After the March cut, Akison handed over $5 to get his check cashed, paid his bills and had $14 left over for 31 days.

He immediately splurged with his food stamps, stocking his half-sized refrigerator with cold cuts, ice cream and chocolate raspberry cake. One day, he ate six ham and cheese sandwiches, then spent 20 minutes jumping rope to work off the calories.

By mid-month, the food stamps were gone, and so was most of his cash.

Once the refrigerator was empty, Akison queued up at a soup kitchen. He used to go to the missions for food, but that meant sitting through a religious service--mind wandering, stomach growling--to get a free bologna sandwich and half a pint of milk. He said he would rather go hungry.

“You’d spend all day praying,” Akison said. “I felt like a priest.”

Although he lives a simple life and can manage with little cash, there is one item Akison cannot do without: soap.

Horrified by germs, he showers twice a day. He scrubs his clothes in the tiny sink in his room, using a double dose of Ajax detergent. He hangs the secondhand garments to dry in front of a fan.

Once, when he thought he was out of money, Akison found a few dollars in a jacket pocket and faced a choice: buy food or buy soap. He opted for the soap, riding a bus 15 miles to a discount store, where he bought six bars.

Akison then locked himself in his room, watching “Married With Children” reruns on his portable color TV.

After getting his second reduced check in April, he splurged again on deli food, and the food stamps were gone within two weeks. What little cash he had was used to buy toilet paper and laundry detergent.

Because of the cut, Akison couldn’t afford to buy deodorant or replace the batteries in his portable radio.

He figured he could get by without toothpaste, but carefully rationed what little dental floss he had left. By month’s end, that was also gone. Using a small sewing kit--a donation from a posh hotel--he patched up the holes in his worn-out socks and underwear. He wondered how he would ever be able to replace such items.

“There’s just no money for these things anymore,” he said.

Fighting Addiction

Barker’s descent into welfare and ultimately onto skid row started 10 years ago, with one drag from a pipe filled with crack.

A native of Santa Monica, she once played the flute in jazz bands, hoping to land a record deal. She had talent and a promising future; she could commit any tune to memory after hearing it once.

But she just couldn’t stay away from the drugs.

Over the years, she pawned several flutes to get cash to support her habit. She lived homeless in Venice for a while, sleeping during the day, then roaming the streets at night.

“I started out to be a rock star,” Barker said. She laughed. “Smoking rocks, I mean.”

These days, she’s renting a room in a downtown hotel for $190 a month.

On the surface, the hotel appears clean and orderly. But the smell of burning marijuana and crack hangs heavy at times in the hallway, betraying the addictions of those who have ended up there.

Barker, 39, vows daily to rid herself of her demons.

She goes to support meetings twice a week with former drug users, but she is no longer in rehab. After spending the past 10 years in one county program after another, she said she decided to go it alone.

“I’m on my way to completely quitting it all,” she said. It is a battle she continues to lose.

“Just when things are going good, I’ll sabotage it. I don’t want to be like this the rest of my life.”

The county expects able-bodied welfare recipients to try to better themselves. For the first eight weeks on general relief, recipients must show that they are actively searching for a job, providing the county with signatures of 24 prospective employers.

Also, those who are not disabled--about 60% of the group--must either work six days a month for the county, laboring at clerical and maintenance tasks, or be enrolled in school.

Barker has been going to trade school several days a week, studying to become a plumber’s apprentice. Someday, she says, she wants to design bathrooms.

The welfare cut--which left Barker with $17 after she paid her bills--sent her into a frantic quest for money, driven by worry that she would be unable to keep a roof over her head while struggling with her drug addiction.

“It just made me feel more desperate,” she said. “I started looking for ways to make money that I wouldn’t normally do.”

A street-wise woman who knows how to maneuver through skid row to get what she needs, Barker picked up donated bicycles, clothes, radios--anything of value--from the downtown rescue missions. She then sold the items on a street corner--raising about $30.

She also signed up to participate in a UCLA study of indigent women, earning about $34.

Barker’s mother, who cut her off years ago because of her drug use, heard about the welfare reduction and pledged to send her money to help cover her rent. Barker gladly took her up on the offer.

Figuring she’d eat most of her meals at the Union Rescue Mission, Barker sold half of the $100 in food stamps she gets, raising another $30.

“It’s what everyone is doing down here to pay the rent,” Barker said. “The problem is you just don’t have any extra money to buy your personal stuff. You’ve got to do something, you know what I’m saying?”

And, finally, she said she resorted to illegal activities--which she won’t discuss--to get quick cash.

“You could just say I had to do some things that were not positive to make ends meet,” she said.

“I don’t go out and beat people up, rob them or jack them. . . . I’m not a bad person; I’m just surviving.”

Even when they have money, many of the people on general relief spend it unwisely.

Barker used $25 to get her hair done and bought a large order of Chinese food for $5. She bought a color TV for her room. That cost about $100.

She said she spent $100 or so on crack and marijuana, locking herself up for days at the hotel to feed her addiction.

By April 3, three days before she got her next check, Barker had $1.50 in her pocket. She pledged anew to abandon her vices. Her words started to sound like a hollow litany.

“I just wish I was never introduced to the stuff,” she said, staring out the window of the hotel lobby.

She sighed, grabbed her flute, on loan from a downtown women’s center, and headed over to Pershing Square.

Barker figured she could play the flute in the square during lunch. Once, she earned $20 that way.

Not on this day. After playing half an hour, she had earned only 61 cents. Discouraged, Barker gave up and headed back to the hotel.

“I’m a survivor and I’ll make it,” she said. “But, oooh, I can feel the pressure.”

A few days later, she received good news: Her mother offered to give her enough money to pay her rent--possibly through this month.

Downward Spiral

Ferrebee--who was convicted of assault and robbery in the 1970s--was struggling to get his life together.

He spent years working odd jobs. He flipped burgers at Wendy’s, rang up tapes at Tower Records. For a time, he says, he worked at General Motors’ Van Nuys plant, assembling Camaros.

“I was making $180 a day at GM,” said Ferrebee, 41.

The plant closed in 1989, and Ferrebee and his girlfriend moved to Roswell, N.M. He worked at a restaurant, then got a job at a bus factory.

The business, however, relocated to Mexico last year, and Ferrebee--who broke up with his girlfriend--returned to Los Angeles.

Last summer, he moved in with his 62-year-old mother. After a few weeks, she asked him to leave. The house was just too small for the two of them, she told him.

So Ferrebee sought help from the county, signing up for welfare and food stamps--which enabled him to rent a room in a hotel off 6th Street. It was a dreary, lonely place, but it was cheap--$195 a month. He figured the shabby surroundings would be temporary; he’d move into a nice one-bedroom apartment as soon as he found a job.

“This is a steppingstone,” Ferrebee said.

He put in applications all over town, looking for any kind of work. “If they’d offer me a job shoveling elephant doo, I’d take it,” he said. There were no offers.

He could get by on the old relief check, but the $73 cut left him desperate for money. After paying his rent and a $5 check-cashing fee, he still had to figure out how to buy personal items and cover an $82 phone bill.

The phone has been both a necessity and a curse for Ferrebee. He needed it to talk to potential employers. But he also ran up his bill chatting with his father in Detroit and friends across town.

Doing without the phone, he said, meant losing his last slice of normalcy.

“You want to go out and socialize, but how are you going to go and talk to someone when you can’t even afford to buy them a soda pop,” he said. “And if you meet someone, you would be too embarrassed to tell them where you live. You just leave that alone.”

By mid-March, the phone company cut him off.

One of his neighbors at the hotel told him about a way he could make some quick cash handing out fliers advertising mom-and-pop businesses. To get the job, Ferrebee lined up at 3 a.m. to wait for the delivery vans, out scouting the area for cheap labor. They would pick him up along with several other men, and take them to suburban neighborhoods.

With his feet blistered, Ferrebee would spend the next eight hours delivering advertisements door to door. He walked five or six times a week, with the promise he would get $25 a day. But some days the drivers wouldn’t pay him, saying he’d just have to wait.

By the last week of the month, Ferrebee had managed to hang on to about $75.

But he gave in to temptation and bought a large breakfast while handing out fliers in the Valley. The cost: $6.

“I felt so good, I left the waitress a dollar tip,” he said. “And I could have used that dollar.”

Ferrebee scraped together the funds to pay the phone bill, but was told he needed another $60 to have the service restored.

“It’s demoralizing,” he said.

Friends and relatives said Ferrebee was trying to turn his life around.

“He knew he had to do it on his own,” said his mother, who asked not to be identified. “No one was going to carry him anymore. . . . He was doing OK for a while, then all of a sudden everything went wrong.”

On April 6, a friend took Ferrebee to breakfast in West Hollywood to lift his spirits. Instead, Ferrebee got into a fight with a drunken man who slapped him on the ear and used a racial slur, according to police reports.

Ferrebee, who acknowledges that he has a bad temper, beat the man so badly they both ended up in the hospital--the man with serious face and head wounds and Ferrebee with fractured hands.

His anger and frustration had been building.

“I was staying out of trouble,” Ferrebee said. “I was getting up every morning to hand out the papers. I was trying to make ends meet. . . . But you have all this stuff in the back of your mind. It just all came to the surface.”

He is in jail on $170,000 bail, awaiting trial on assault charges. If convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison. His arraignment has been set for today in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“Like the old saying goes, things could always be worse,” he said from jail. “Well, I found out it could get a lot worse.”

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General Relief Requirements

General relief has long been called the “safety net” for those at the bottom of the welfare system. It is limited to adults with few assets and no dependents. About 40% of the recipients are disabled, many suffering from mental illness. Almost half are drug addicts or alcoholics. To qualify for the $212 monthly payment, recipients must be ineligible for other types of government assistance, such as Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Those on general relief cannot earn more per month than the welfare payment, have a car worth more than $4,500, more than $50 cash or more than $500 in insurance. They also cannot own a home worth more than $34,000.

In addition to the general relief payment--which recipients can receive indefinitely if they meet the requirements--they also get up to $119 a month in food stamps.