COLUMN ONE : Growing Up With AIDS Virus : Channon Phipps was born a hemophiliac and tested positive at 11. At 17, he is a typical teen with a girlfriend and a love of skateboarding. He is engaged to be married.

LAGUNA HILLS —  Cruising by the high school in his beat-up tan Isuzu, drumming the steering wheel with his index fingers, Channon Phipps turns up Queensryche until the speakers hiss. Out the corner of his eye he checks for wincing in the passenger seat, a pleased grin revealing retainers.

At 17, he is standard-issue teen-ager: raging hormones and boredom with a heavy metal soundtrack.

“Nah, I don’t miss school,” he says, faintly surprised at the question. “I’ve always had really good friends who care about me, so I see them. All the time. And, you know, we kick back and stuff. And like I’ve got a girlfriend, right? Not much to miss.”

This from a sweetly polite kid who had to fight his way back into the fifth grade because he was HIV-positive.

But the world of AIDS has changed rapidly since 1985, when the gap-toothed 11-year-old squinted into the limelight at Orange County Superior Court, about to emerge as a recurring news event.

Ryan White has died. Earvin (Magic) Johnson has HIV. And Channon Phipps has grown up.

A hemophiliac who contracted the human immunodeficiency virus through tainted blood products, Channon is approaching a decade living with HIV. It has not kept him from working, partying and falling in love.

“I try to live my life for each day,” said Channon, whose approach to coping is offered only when pressed.

“I don’t think about it all the time. I figure they’re either going to find a cure or I’m going to a better place.”

He is not religious about it. He is not even earnest. He is just answering a question.

“He’s right at that 10-year point, and it’s at the back of my mind, so I’m sure he thinks about it,” said Deborha Phipps Franckewitz, 35, the aunt and guardian who has raised him since infancy. “He handles it well though. He’s remarkable. I don’t know how he does it.”

Channon is the lesser known among America’s most famous children with AIDS. There are the Ray brothers from Florida, whose family home was torched after they insisted on going to a public school. An Atascadero youth, Ryan Thomas, faced similar torment before he died Thanksgiving Day.

The best known was Indiana’s Ryan White, who crusaded for national AIDS research and education before he died two years ago. They never met, but Channon, who was the first Californian to fight the schools, has always been grateful to Ryan for making his battle easier.

“I followed his case pretty close,” Channon said quietly. He broke down when reporters called for comment after Ryan died.

Like Ryan, Channon has grown up in a group harder hit by AIDS than any other in America.

Of reported U.S. AIDS patients, only 1% are hemophiliacs, said Dr. Jonathan C. Goldsmith, director of the Hemophilia Comprehensive Care Center at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles and head of the hospital’s Childrens AIDS Center.

But “the hemophilia population has the greatest percentage of people with HIV,” said Chuck Fallis, spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC estimates that up to 79% of the country’s 20,000 hemophiliacs are carrying the life-threatening virus. For the 12,000 severe hemophiliacs, the infection rate may be as high as 90%, said National Hemophilia Foundation Director Alan Brownstein.

Those with hemophilia, a disorder inherited almost exclusively by males, lack the protein that clots their blood and prevents uncontrolled bleeding.

Until the clotting factor--culled from blood donors--was developed 25 years ago, hemophiliacs often risked bleeding to death. From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, the donor pool was contaminated with the virus that causes AIDS, for which there is no cure.

Born with the disease, Channon’s roughhousing childhood meant weekly injections of the blood products he would learn, at age 11, gave him HIV.

“There are lots of Channons, and the reason is that children who are infected with HIV tend to fight it off better,” said Brownstein.

At Childrens Hospital’s AIDS Center, the largest pediatric program on the West Coast, Goldsmith has seen 200 individuals, from 12 weeks to early 20s, with HIV. About 40% of those patients have hemophilia, he said, and others say that is about the national average.

Many families hide their child’s ailment, fearful about discrimination at school and even among relatives. But those, such as Channon, who are open about the AIDS virus “tend to be very aggressive about their health care,” said Goldsmith.

They are different from other children with AIDS--the vast majority of whom have been infected by their mothers in the womb or through breast-feedings. Many infected hemophiliacs come from intact families. They are middle-class and suburban. And they have already dealt with one chronic disease.

“It’s like the little engine that could,” Goldsmith said, “but they get to the top and find that they have another mountain to climb.”

He occasionally busts curfew. His grandfather had to bribe him by paying his car insurance before he would cut his elbow-length hair. For awhile, he stopped taking his AZT doses.

Tutored now at home, Channon spends more time making out with his girlfriend than studying. He reluctantly agreed to be in a nationally shown HIV education video for teen-agers--”but only because they offered me $50.”

The AIDS poster boy he is not.

“Hey, I get up in the morning like everyone else,” he said one day in the newspaper cafeteria, powering down potato chips as he talked.

Though not particularly devoted to schoolwork, Channon hopes to graduate from high school in the next year or two. Then maybe he will go to the community college and maybe learn graphic arts. Lately, he has been going to work at a print shop with his aunt’s husband, Jim.

His desires are the basic stuff: sex, love and happiness.

For now, what he really likes are stolen hours past midnight behind low-slung industrial offices in the neighborhood, where he and a pack of friends skateboard unbothered.

They are good friends, he said, friends who look out for him. If he has a couple beers at a party, “they won’t let me skateboard home. They care about me.”

But like any teen-ager, he struggles for independence. And how does one tell a kid who may die young that he cannot live on the edge?

“If I had my choice, Channon would live in a bubble,” said Franckewitz, whom Channon calls mom as often as Debbie. “But he tells me: ‘Mom, you have to let me live my life.’ ”

Born hemophiliac to teen-agers struggling with drug addictions, Channon was a year old when he became the ward of Franckewitz, then an 18-year-old single woman. His father is Franckewitz’s brother, his mother her best friend. The parents divorced, kicked their bad habits and built close relationships with their son.

But years of neglecting her diabetes led to his mother’s death in August, 1990, a heavy blow to Channon. He remains close to his father, an Anaheim businessman whom he sees every few days and speaks to daily.

“Aside from the hemophilia, he was a fun child to be around,” Franckewitz said. “He wasn’t content sitting on the couch coloring or drawing, he wanted to get out and go and run. . . . He was a real happy child, and health-wise, we were probably in and out of the hospital three times a week with him.”

Although he stoically handled his hemophilia, insisting on giving his own injections by grade school, he constructed his own emotional life raft. By age 3, Channon had two imaginary friends, Little Freddy and Big Freddy. Whenever he made a mess, Franckewitz said, he would blame the phantom pals. During one frightening hospital visit, as Channon was rolled away on a stretcher, he insisted that his aunt give his friends a boost onto the gurney.

“Anything yucky he made good of it,” Franckewitz said. “He used his used syringes as squirt guns, made tops out of medicine caps.”

In 1983, Channon developed persistent rashes, diarrhea and lung congestion and began missing substantial periods of school. This is the year his family believes he was exposed to HIV. His school district in El Toro assigned a home tutor.

By August, 1985, Ryan’s school battles were making the news, so Franckewitz decided to have Channon tested for the deadly virus. Only a Long Beach health clinic catering to homosexuals would do the lab work. Because of his hemophilia, Franckewitz had to draw Channon’s blood herself. The test proved positive.

Fueled by uncertainty and the paranoia of the time, school officials barred him from classes. Before a judge ruled the next February that Channon posed no risk to others and ordered the school district to return him to the classroom, Channon was relegated to home tutoring.

“I remember when the school district ladies brought my computer to the house for me to do my schoolwork,” he said in the 1987 AIDS education video, his raspy voice and comments almost painfully spare, “and they wore plastic gloves. It made me feel really terrible.”

Once he returned to school, things went smoothly for awhile. He blended in with a classroom whose students were handpicked for their maturity and sensitivity. He was never short for pals and girlfriends, whose parents were quickly informed that Channon carried the AIDS virus.

Grade school was one thing; he’d grown up with these classmates. Junior high, filled with new students from seven or eight schools, proved daunting. He had to suffer the incessant school-ground taunts of ignorant bullies calling him names such as faggot.

He was also starting to get sick a lot. His aunt and doctor concluded that he was likely exposed to far more germs in class. They also figured that his immunity might be eroding under stress caused by enduring the barbs that reminded him, daily, that he was different.

At the mall one day, “some friend (of a friend) we met up with was bashing gays, blaming them for AIDS,” Channon said. “I blew my lid and smashed him in the face. That’s why I stopped going to school. In seventh grade I was getting a lot of upper lip from kids about it, and I came home one day and said: ‘Mom, I’m not going back.’ ”

In Channon’s crowded Laguna Hills rental home, four boys (his best friend just moved in), two adults, a dog, cat, birds and four hamsters vie for space. Franckewitz is the kind of mom who hauls Channon’s buddies to the beach in the family’s old motor home.

When Channon broke his collarbone at age 15: “I had to take not just him but all five of his friends to the emergency room. They wouldn’t let me leave without them. He is a very loved kid.”

Yes, he worries her sick when he surfs at the beach knowing he risks triggering the torturous joint bleeding common among hemophiliacs. Still, she said, gazing at his grade school picture above the fireplace, “he was the perfect kid. As perfect as any kid can be, that is.”

Once, “he got to the point where he wasn’t taking some of his medicine, and I said: ‘You’re going to die Channon if you don’t take this. You’ll kill your self .’ And that was the first time in this ordeal that death has been mentioned.”

Although his health improved after leaving school in 1987 and he has been free of the serious illnesses that typify AIDS, Channon this winter has been nagged by chronic coughing and fevers, part of a respiratory infection that persisted for two months.

Weeks went by in which Channon could do little more than listlessly watch television. Franckewitz spent sleepless nights watching him breathe fitfully on the living room couch.

“I’m tired of feeling bad,” he said one morning in January. He had just emerged from the bathroom after coughing nonstop for 10 minutes. It had been months since he was able to breathe completely through his nose, which he was blowing with special lotion-treated tissue. It was a rare complaint, but Channon was buckling under the monotony of feeling miserable.

“I think it really scared him to be sick so long,” said Tod Derring, 19, Channon’s best friend. “I know it got to him. He was like giving up. Not taking his medicine. We had to go over and kick his butt.”

Franckewitz toughed out the sick spell and fell apart when he was better. Lying on a couch beside his, she watched him in the living room all night. Only when he finally nodded off could she break down in tears, wondering, is this the beginning of the end?

“You really have to work at times not to let your imagination run wild,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of patients suffering, and it’s not a pretty sight.

“I think for the last five years we’ve been getting ready for this,” she added.

Pneumonia was feared, but that was not the case. However, blood tests revealed that Channon has only about 2% of his immune system left.

The family has not ruled out moving him during the flu season to Maui, which they consider a more healthful, cleaner environment with a major AIDS treatment center on neighboring Oahu.

“I’d sell everything I own to buy him more time,” his aunt said.

His health returned, however, in the following weeks.

“He’s holding his own quite well,” his doctor, Marilyn Myers, said. “I used to think he had this great attitude because he was in denial, but I think he just handles it.”

Last Christmas Eve, Channon proposed to his girlfriend, Lisa Shultis, 15, a sophomore at Laguna Hills High, with a diamond ring for which he had saved. She ran to her front yard, he recalls now with a pleased look, and screamed with delight.

They met after his family moved around the corner from her 17 months ago. For her, it was love at first sight.

Standing in the middle of a cul-de-sac, her sister and a clutch of high school girlfriends on a nearby curb, Lisa cheerily recalls when her dream guy moved onto the block. The fact that he has AIDS never comes up.

“I thought all his friends were cute, but Channon, oh!” She clasps her hands to her chest and swings her long brown hair behind a shoulder. Her friends know this story well, and listen with what appears to be envy for her happiness.

“I can’t believe I’m gonna be marrying the guy I fell in love with!”

When it became clear that Channon and Lisa had grown serious about each other, both were confronted candidly about sex. “I told them both, if you’re going to have sex, please come talk to me first. And they were very adult. They did,” Franckewitz said.

Accompanied by her mother and his aunt, the teen-agers met with Myers. The doctor talked with the foursome, and then the couple alone. All adults involved admitted uneasiness about the idea, and worried that providing the prescription latex condoms and spermicide would suggest that they tacitly approved.

“I worried about her more than him,” Channon’s aunt said with a deep sigh. “But if they want to have sex, they’re going to figure out a way. I’m not so old I don’t remember what it’s like to be their age.”

“The doctor talked to us about using rubbers and what kind and stuff,” said Channon. “She told us if we do (have sex), to use the rubbers she prescribed. . . . She said it’s both your own risk.”

Such an intimate topic is not the stuff of chitchat, and accommodating as he usually is, Channon leaves vague the subject of whether they have used the special condoms.

“They know how far they can go,” said Gabriele Gallagher, Lisa’s divorced mother. “They don’t want to hurt each other. I mean, Channon’s the last person who wants to hurt Lisa. He’s very respectful. If he didn’t care, yes, I’d step in and that would be that.”

She said she is happy about her daughter’s engagement, although the wedding will likely not happen until Lisa is out of school.

“They have a very healthy relationship, they’re very close,” said Gallagher, who stays in close touch with Channon’s aunt. “Nothing is hidden. I wish I could have a relationship like they have. . . . I like that Channon brings a certain charisma to Lisa’s personality. Lisa needed to do some growing and he helped her.”

What of her daughter giving her heart to someone who may not be around when she is 20?

Gallagher hesitates, and the silence hangs heavy. “I’ve laid awake at night over that one, thinking what’s this going to do to Lisa, because they are very attached. Not to upset her, but I’ve asked her if she’s thought about it. (Lisa said) ‘Yeah, mom, I realize that can happen, but nobody is around forever. I just want to enjoy what time I have with him. I’m very lucky.’ ”

Gallagher cleared her throat.

“You are supposed to live for now.”

These days, life has included Catalina Island weekends and concerts. Last month, he met Metallica before their show at the Forum, then sat in the front row for the concert.

Once a year, he works to educate fellow teen-agers about AIDS through the California Assn. of School Health Educators. He has made videos and surprise classroom appearances.

“He has been a real inspiration,” said the associations’s executive director, Ric Loya, a Huntington Park city councilman and teacher who teaches AIDS education for the CDC to instructors abroad. “He for our people has put a face on HIV-AIDS.”

Of dying, Channon avoids thinking about it. “If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. I don’t let it get to me. I look at it like a deck of cards. You got a couple of crummy ones. Have to play your hand though. Donchya.”