ORPHANS OF ADDICTION (pt. 2 of 2)

Several times, he faked falling down the stairs to interrupt her drug
sessions. "I was really scared for her," Brian says. "I'd do anything to
get her out of there."

The anxiety is amped up even higher when a child not only has to worry
about a parent but has to be one, tooa burden so great that drug
counselors say it has turned gradeschoolers into junkies. Guillermo
"Willy" Parra, 7, is the man of the apartment. While his mother shoots
speed, he plays father to his 5yearold brother and 7monthold sister,
making sure they are fed and safe. "I'd rather play," Willy says. "I do it
because I have to."

Willy says his most terrifying moments are in the middle of the night when
he awakens to find that his mother is gone and that he is alone with his
brother and baby sister. "I'm scared somebody could steal us," he says.
"Someone could kill us."

In very young children, such as Tamika, the psychological devastation of
living in substanceabusing families is not overtly evident. For the most
part, they still see the world as a playground, the hard truth cushioned by
their innocence.

But as these children grow older, the cumulative abuse and neglect begin to
soak in, saturating their psyches. They begin to seethe with anger that
manifests in inappropriate and destructive behavior. Lying, cheating and
stealing become more common. Some simply withdraw into an impenetrable
depression.

Tenyearold Ashley and her brother Kevin, 8, are an example of how steep
the slide can beand its implications for the future.

Learning Violence, Anger at an Early Age

Ashley and Kevin are opposites.

He is aggressive, belligerent, always in trouble. She is sullen, a
peacemaker pushed to tears when the yelling inevitably starts. In their own
ways, they are coping with the same problem: Calvin, their father, a raging
speed addict and alcoholic.

Ashley and Kevin live in a onebedroom apartment on Long Beach's lower
westside with their dad, his girlfriend, Rita Green, and an everchanging
crew of addicts. Rita, whose 4yearold son was placed in foster care last
year, says she does not have a drug problem, but she frequently snorts
speed.

The apartment's bathroom walls are peppered with black mold. The toilet
leaks, leaving the floor awash in slime. The tub brims with dirty clothes
alive with fleasone reason Kevin and Ashley go weeks without bathing.

The visiting addicts"the bad people," Kevin calls themsleep on the
kitchen floor, which has become more spacious since the stove and
refrigerator were sold for drug money.

By midJune, Ashley and Kevin have missed the last four months of school.
Calvin pulled them out when he was thinking about moving from Long Beach.
Reenrolling them, he worried, might bring too much attention to themand
to himfrom campus officials.

Sometimes, Ashley walks to a nearby elementary school so she can watch the
children spill out onto the playground. "I just want to go to learn," says
the wouldbe fifthgrader. "What's 3 times 3? I don't know." Students with
whom she used to attend school already have mastered long division. "I wish
I were them," she says. "I'm so behind."

So is her brother.

"OK, what's 2 plus 2?" one of Calvin's friends quizzes the boy one night.
Kevin, staring hard at the ground, responds in a voice marred by a speech
impediment, "I don't know how to do that." The friend then holds up one
finger on each hand. "What's one plus one?" Kevin grabs his head. "A
hundred!" he blurts out.

Spell "cat"? Kevin's face clouds with frustration.

Calvin describes his young son as violent and angrya description that
suits him just as well. In kindergarten, Kevin poked a girl in the eye with
his pencil. Later that year, he was suspended twice for biting his teacher
on the ankle. Kevin says he likes being unsupervised. "I can hurt people,"
he explains.

Calvin usually responds to his son's destructive high jinks by yelling:
"Boy! You're on your way to prison!" No one disagrees when he says it.
Calvin also calls his son "bag of bones" or just "retard." Other times, the
father hauls back and lets his hand fly. Kevin, pointing to his head, says
his dad "beats me all the time. He don't give me no toys."

"I don't want to be like him. He's nasty. He'd be nice if he didn't use
drugs." Asked if he loves his father, Kevin hesitates, then says, "A little
bit."

Kevin's soft spot is his sister. One day, he overhears Ashley pine for
some new clothes; she has been wearing the same dirty pants for a week.
Kevin runs outside into the alley, crawls into a metal dumpster and madly
tears open bags of rotting food. Flies swarm around him. Finally, he fishes
out a pair of canvas tennis shoes. Proudly, he presents them to his sister
but they are too small. A familiar look of disappointment crosses her face.

Once, years ago, there was money in the family, before drugs stole it all.
For 18 years, Calvin worked as a welder, even had his own shop.

His second wife introduced him to speed, which, Calvin says, she started
using to lose weight. Calvin says he started dropping some into his morning
coffee. Over time, it became an $800aweek habit, costing him a lucrative
welding job, his home, the Cutlass, the boat. After his wife left him,
Calvin says, he consoled himself with heroin. Kevin became his emotional
punching bag.

At 10 a.m. one day, Calvin rises from his platform bed, reprimanding Kevin
for hitting a neighbor's boy. "Get over here, you asshole!" Calvin screams.
"Let's see how you screw up today." Later, when Kevin disobeys an order to
keep a speed addict out of the apartment, Calvin whacks the boy.

"You're mean to me! I want my mom!" Kevin sobs. Calvin yells back: "Your
mom's a tramp! I'm all you got. You're my worst nightmare. You don't think
I'd get rid of you if I could?" Kevin covers his head with a filthy sofa
pillow, cups his hands over his ears and bawls.

Violence and abuse are not the only traits Calvin has imparted to his young
son.

One day, the two hop on a Metro Blue Line train without paying and head for
the mall in downtown Long Beach. After buying Kevin a cheap pair of shoes,
they go to Carl's Jr. for a hamburgerand a lesson in larceny.

As father and son make their way to a table, Calvin swings by the salad
bar, for which he has not paid, and swipes some hot peppers. He goes back
for some cantaloupe.

"Daddy, should I take that?" Kevin asks, looking for his father's approval.
"Quickly!" his dad instructs.

With that, Kevin darts to the salad bar and dips his grubby fingers into
the crouton jar. Calvin, beaming at his son's prowess, instructs him to get
some cantaloupe. Before long, Kevin has made more than a halfdozen brazen
trips, finally catching the eye of a Carl's Jr. worker. "Now we have to
throw the whole thing out!" she yells at the boy with dirty hands, who
slinks back to his seat. "Shut up, bitch," Calvin mutters to her. Then, in
the lecturing tone of a father sharing pearls of wisdom, Calvin tells
Kevin: "It's all right to steal, son, just don't get busted!" When Calvin,
who spent four years in prison for burglary, gets up to leave, he takes the
salt and pepper shakers with him.

It's no wonder Kevin turns to outsiderssuch as Pastor Bill Thomas of the
nearby Long Beach Rescue Missionfor comfort. Thomas offered food to
Kevin after noticing the skinny boy scavenging in the mission's dumpsters
earlier this year. "Will you take me home?" Kevin began asking. "Will you
make me your son? They don't feed me."

Pastor Thomas, who says Kevin is "a child crying out for love and
attention" through aggression, worries about the boy wandering the streets
alone because pedophiles sometimes hang around the mission.

"It's a matter of time," Thomas predicts, "until something will happen."

At 5 p.m. one night, while Calvin drinks beer on the apartment sofa, the
children complain of hunger. "It's a neverending problem of being a
parent," Calvin grouses. "Food." He tells Kevin to go to the mission.

Ashley, wearing a "D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Off Drugs" Tshirt, is not allowed
to go with him because of the danger of sexual predators. She will go to
bed hungry.

Calvin, for his part, doesn't miss a sip. "Ha! I'm getting a buzz. Feeling
better!" he says, kicking back.

But four hours later, an irritating crimp ruins his high: One of Calvin's
friends realizes that the boy has not returned from the mission. It is the
same week a 7yearold girl, left unattended in a Nevada casino, was found
raped and dead in a toilet stall. "Shit, where could he be?" Calvin says,
clearly annoyed.

Prodded by his friend, Calvin heads outside, finding his son blocks away.
The time is 9:40 p.m. "Kevin, get your butt over here!" his father screams.
"Where are you going, stupid!"

Ashley, unlike her brother, is more depressed than hostile. Quiet and
wellbehaved, she fantasizes about a stomach filled with candy or taking a
trip to Target to buy a Bugs Bunny Tshirt. Asked about her father's drug
habit, the girl with willowy limbs wrinkles her nose. "He goes crazy," she
says. "He gets mad, even when we don't do nothing."

To survive her stormy life, Ashley has glommed onto her father's girlfriend
as an anchor. Rita's shrill, loud, berating voice is a test of anyone's
patience, but to Ashley it is music.

"I loooooove Rita," Ashley says several times a day, practically swooning.
"She's a good mom. She makes sure there is dinner for us. Sometimes, my dad
don't remember to do that," says Ashley, whose real mother hardly ever
visits. "She just took off," Ashley says harshly.

Fearful that Rita will do the same, Ashley becomes nearfrantic when her
father and his girlfriend fight about drugs or money, which is constantly.

"Hey bitch!" Calvin yells as Rita arrives at 6:30 one evening. He is peeved
that she has spent some of her welfare check on speed, food for herself and
on a motel room to shower. "Get the hell out of here!" demands Calvin, who
earlier that day had grabbed her by the neck and slammed her against the
apartment wall.

Ashley breaks into tears, trailing Rita out the door. Calvin threatens to
beat his daughter with a belt when she returns. The next day, the squall
has passed and Rita is back, cooking over a hot plate on the floor. Ashley,
squatting alongside her, whispers into Rita's ear. "If he keeps drinking,
you'll take me away, huh?" Rita smiles, enjoying the power that comes with
knowing that Calvin's own daughter would rather be with her.

All Ashley knows is that Rita seems to care.

The youngster opens a small cardboard box and removes a hospital bracelet,
a treasured keepsake, reminding her of the day she was rescued by Rita.

Although she was vomiting and could barely walk earlier this year, she says
her father wouldn't take her to the emergency room. He recently had gone
there with Kevin to find out why his neck sometimes twitches from side to
side. Social workers questioned Calvin after noticing bruises and scratches
on the boy. They later visited the house at least three times, neighbors
and others say, but allowed the children to remain.

Although Calvin did not want to risk a repeat, Rita insisted on taking
Ashley to the emergency room. "If Rita wasn't there," Ashley says, "I'd be
dead already."

The five days Ashley spent in the hospital with pneumonia, she says, were
the best of her life.

"I had my own bedroom, an IV in my arm. My own bed. A TV. I could play.
Put my clothes in a bathroom."

When it was time to leave, Ashley cried. "I wanted to go back," the girl
says. "It was my home."

And now she and her brother must adjust to yet another one. Calvin and
Rita, facing eviction after paying no rent for half a year, have decided to
leave for Bakersfield, 140 miles away. There, Rita says, she will take
parenting classes to get her son back from foster care.

She and Calvin say they will leave behind their problems with drug
addiction. "We need to change our environment. No one knows you. No
lowlife friends. It's so easy," Calvin says, waving his hand. In
Alcoholics Anonymous, this type of denial is so common it has a name:
"doing a geographic."

After shooting up speed in the bathroom, Calvin packs the family's few
remaining possessions for the bus ride they will all take that night.

Ashley, cynical beyond her 10 years, is resigned to more disappointment.

"He says we'll leave and he'll stop doing drugs," she says, sitting on her
apartment stoop. "But I don't believe him."

In School, a Brief Taste of Normal Life Given the choice, many
schoolchildren would prefer watching TV or playing with a prized toy
at home. But for the vast majority of youngsters whose parents are
fullblown alcoholics or addicts, classrooms are their refugetheir
only connection to a normal life, a sense of blending in, getting at least
one meal a day. They try their best, as if their lives depended
on it, to show up. In the process, however, they pose special challenges
and problemsfor teachers and classmates alike. These children, despite
their earnestness, too often are warming the seat more than learning.
The extra attention they require robs other students of learning time.

At Washington Middle School in Long Beachwhere a purple banner proclaims
"Be Drug Free"seventhgrade health teacher Ann Rector estimates that
nearly a third of her 185 students live in substanceabusing families.
"They are so behind the other kids," Rector says. "They get frustrated
and angry because they feel stupid." Some come to class with their jackets
reeking of crack. Others talk about how they put to bed passedout
parents and about fathers who get drunk and mean.

Without alarm clocks or anyone to wake them up, the children often wander
into class late. Once there, many drift off. Rector remembers the time
two girls from the same home fell asleep because they had been up until
5 a.m. taking care of a baby sibling while their mother, Rector believes,
was on a drug binge.

When the mother arrived to retrieve her girlsafter being summoned by the
schoolshe promptly pummeled them to the sidewalk with her fists. Such
experiences understandably make children distrustful of adults, including
teachers, further complicating the educational mission.

Ritchie Eriksen, program facilitator for safe and drugfree schools for
the Long Beach Unified School District, remembers a picture one
5yearold girl drew of her father. "This is my dad and he likes to drink
beer and smoke pot," she wrote on the top. One hot morning, Eriksen
noticed the girl was wearing a blue turtleneck. Eriksen pulled up the
girl's sleeves and found a bruise in the shape of a belt buckle. Further
inspection revealed that she was black and blue from her waist to her
knees.

Eriksen says she called the police, who summoned child welfare
authorities. Counseling was ordered for the father, Eriksen says, but the
girl was allowed to remain in the home. A more subtle sign that youngsters
may be living in substanceabusing homes is their attendance record.

Recovering addict Valerie Gipson, a counselor at Long Beach's Woman to
Woman Recovery Center, says her two schoolaged children missed half of
every week for an entire year. If the school called, she would claim
the children were sick.

She coached her children to stick with the same story, threatening that
if the truth got out, "we'd all be in trouble." Since 1991, in an effort
to prevent a similar fate for other children, the Los Angeles County
district attorney's office has joined forces with a number of schools
to put a scare into parents. The district attorney notifies them by
letter to attend a meeting at the school auditorium. There, a deputy
district attorney lays down the law: Parents with chronically truant
youngsters can be fined $2,500 and spend up to one year in jail.

If things do not improve, then parents are summoned to a private meeting
with school and district attorney officials. They are warned that the next
step is prosecution. Still, while school is crucial, it takes a special
kind of determination for these neglected children to overcome their
circumstances. Amazingly, many do. "The shame drives them to be perfect,"
says Van Nuys substance abuse counselor Hillary Treadwell. "They
have to prove to themselves and to the rest of the world that they are
OK."

That's what Tina Moraga is doing. Her past and present offer hope for
little girls like Tamika. Tina, 27, is sitting on a velour couch in her
Long Beach apartment. Alongside her is her mother, Rosario Moraga, the
woman who two decades ago had turned her daughter into an orphan of
addiction.

Tina remembers being left alone for long stretches, or with a relative who
regularly forced her to give him oral sex. Tina says her mother's drug
friends used to feel her up. Often, in fights during drug crazes, Tina
says, her mother would call her "rape baby." Tina says she called herself
"the shield" because her mother often used her as a buffer against drug
dealers bent on beating her up. When Tina was 7 and Rosario was turning
tricks, the youngster accompanied her mother and a customer into the
HoHum Motel. There, Rosario lay Tina down next to her on the bed and
covered her daughter's eyes with one hand.

Through the cracks between her mother's fingers, Tina watched the encounter
in a ceiling mirror. As Tina recounts the story of her formative years, her
mother mostly remains quiet, sometimes shrugging her shoulders and offering
a few words about how she was oblivious to much of the damage she was
causing. Today, at 46, Rosario says she no longer sniffs paint, and she
stopped shooting heroin when the veins in her fingers and toes collapsed
from overuse. She is on methadone and still smokes crack, but only outside
the apartmentunder orders from her daughter, now head of a household with
strict rules and everyday routines.

Tina managed to veer from her mother's twisted path, finding her way to
higher ground, with a simple but sure vow as a child: to never use drugs or
alcohol. Although her journey into maturity has been bumpyher four
daughters have three dadsTina has remained resolute. Each morning, she
rises at 4 a.m. to drive a big yellow school bus. Smiling pictures of her
daughters, immaculately dressed and coiffed, line the apartment walls,
along with track medals won mostly by her oldest, Brandi, 10, who has
qualified to race in national competitions. Tina attributes her resiliency
to the power of her memories.

"I always remember that drugs tore my family apart," she says. Although her
children are young, Tina is planning and saving money for each of her four
girls' Sweet 16 birthday parties. "I'm trying to make their life like I
wish my life would have been."

About This Series Times urban affairs writer Sonia Nazario and staff
photographer Clarence Williams spent five months chronicling the tortured
lives of children living with drug addicts and alcoholics. Nazario and
Williams spent day and night with many of these families during the summer
monthsa snapshot in time intended to show the kind of existence such
youngsters confront throughout their formative years. While today's story
focuses on the personal tragedies and obstacles faced by substanceabusing
families, Monday's piece offers an inspiring look at a treatment program
that has given families a fresh start.

On the Web The complete series, including additional photos and a
discussion area, will be available on The Times' Web site Monday.

Go to http://www.latimes.com/orphans/

Copyright Los Angeles Times