With Budget Still in Gridlock, Grumbling Swells to a Roar : Politics: As the state government remains stalled, it seems everyone in Sacramento is lining up to give it a few swift kicks.

SACRAMENTO —  Seven hundred years ago, as an indecisive conclave of cardinals hemmed and hawed, exasperated Catholics who wanted a new Pope cut off everything but food, water and wine to the princes of the church--and eventually removed the roof to get them to hurry it up in there.

Two weeks ago, Breathitt County, Ky., threw three of its fiscal officers into the slammer for four days of attitude adjustment, after they refused to levy a tax to balance the budget on time, as the law required.

Do not think that such drastic remedies have not crossed some minds up here, near the lofty Capitol dome, on the 44th day of California’s budget saga: cut off their air conditioning . . . cut off their salaries . . . even cut off their, uh, manhood, one woman suggested to rock radio news director Kat Maudru, whose station plays the ka-ching of a cash register every seven minutes to remind listeners of what this is costing them.

Inside the Capitol, state workers--who face another payday with state IOUs that most banks aren’t accepting--are tired and tense. State legislators--who, when this is over, will get paid in real checks that will include $100-a-day tax-free expense money--are tense, too. People are leaning on them. Fax machines have sputtered and broken down under the volume of pleas.

In the office of Sacramento Assemblyman Phil Isenberg, who co-sponsored a recent budget compromise, is the “not us” wall: desperate letters, three deep now, each insisting that it is the worthy exception to the knife: “. . .The town of Apple Valley is opposed. . . . urgent plea. . . . retain funding for the California Arts Council. . . . sincerely request that cities not be cut. . .” and the office favorite, from the Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers, saying that its $793,000 “compared to the projected $11-billion general fund deficit, is only budget dust.”

This is not Versailles; no one is storming the gilt and pistachio-green Assembly chamber with its Latin admonition, “The legislators’ duty is to pass just laws.” But if you listen you can hear:

* The elevator man grumbling, “Dumb clown . . . stupid Wilson.” What’s he done? a passenger asked. “Nothing--that’s the point.”

* The people who wear blue ribbons on their lapels and line up outside the unmarked double doors of Wilson’s office from noon to 12:15 every day, “to move the heart of the governor,” said Sister Sheila Walsh, one of the leaders, who is against cutting services to the young and the needy.

* The man in the summer-weight khaki suit, walking by the wilting impatiens in the Capitol flower beds, telling another man in a like suit, “She’s just trying to protect her city. . . . I know cities are being devastated. . . .”

* The visitors like Mary and Jim Luck of Glendale. They’ve been taking their college-bound daughter, Emily, on a tour of state universities, and everywhere they’ve gone--Davis, Santa Cruz--all they hear is budget cuts. And now here they are in the pulsing heart of them. “I have to deal with budget issues too,” says Jim Luck, president and CEO of Orthopedic Hospital. “They’ve just got to get it done.”

* The visitors like the Laws, of Pasadena--here to help their eldest boy, Keith, earn a Boy Scout merit badge--and their friends, the Coltons. “We just took the tour,” said Susan Colton, “and decided if they sold the fancy paintings and chandeliers. . . .”

“Have a big yard sale,” put in Sara Law.

“Like the statue of Isabella,” said Susan Colton--the Italian marble one in the rotunda, immortalizing Isabella of Castile pawning her jewels to pay for Columbus’ voyage. “Let ‘em pawn the jewels and get the budget!”

The overdue budget has spun its own convoluted logic.

Some 545 disabled Californians--many of them blind or deaf--have special dogs to help them get around. On July 31, each was supposed to get a monthly $50 check for the care and feeding of the dog. No budget agreement, no checks. And some well-intended quirk of the law does not allow them to be paid with IOUs.

So a country-Western station here staged “Dog Aid” this week to collect high-quality dog food for them. But privacy laws keep the state from revealing the names of the 47 disabled dog-owners in the area, according to station official Don Langford. So the radio station is putting letters in 47 unaddressed envelopes, and sticking 29-cent stamps on each, to hand them to the state, which will address them and send them off to let the 47 owners know they can get free dog food.

But--and here is where Langford gets all het up--the state’s legal services still haven’t decided whether the disabled people could get their benefits docked for receiving outside income (the free dog food). “Here’s the food, here’s people who need the food, but there’s no protocol for it,” fumed Langford. “If I dropped these things off at Pete Wilson’s office, they’d sit there for a year.”

There wouldn’t be room.

Reporters wait expectantly for a few hours each day in Wilson’s anteroom, lounging under a painting of April showers over Napa Valley as Wilson meets with the “big four” legislators. Suddenly a TV cameraman shouts, “Willie and Roberti in the hall--let’s go!”

They dash off to what one local reporter calls the Willie Walk--Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and Senate President David A. Roberti, moving to or from Wilson’s office. Newspeople huddle around the two with microphones and lenses, and scuttle in tiny steps down the marble checkerboard floors. Tourists gape; parents yank their little children out of the path of the many-legged monster. Brown discourses on Wilson’s latest proposal. “Nixon’s plan to end the Vietnam War,” mutters Jimmy Lewis, Brown’s press aide, squeezed to the back of the mob.

This budget impasse has created not one but two hunger strikers: Madera County Supervisor Rick Jensen, 38, on a water-and-juice fast until the budget is signed, and state employee Richard Rubacher, 56--actually a hunger artist, he says, not a hunger striker. “I’ve done it before but never for a cause--just for a blast, a lifestyle.”

For three days so far, he has stretched out beneath a deodar cedar on the west lawn with his protest signs and a gallon of distilled water and some light--very light--reading: “Fasting Can Save Your Life.”

Not far away is the yellow nylon tent of radio station KSEG, where for several hours each morning for a week, Maudru and program director Jeff McMurray use their 50,000 watts to twit folks inside about the budget.

Peeved state employees drop by with little inside tips, says McMurray, like the Vacaville correctional officer who said he’s getting IOUs while prisoners earn cash for their labor . . . or the helpful listener who gave them the etymology of “politics,” said McMurray--”poli,” as in many, and “tics,” as in bloodsucking parasites.

There is one happy person in these parts: Carolyn Negrete, for 11 years manager of the sixth-floor Capitol Cafe. “I have to admit I’m probably the one person who benefits by this,” she said. Every legislator brings maybe 30 more people in with him or her--employees, lobbyists, family--and they all have to eat. In other crises, “the consumption of bubble gum, all kinds of candies, the stress reducers--they go crazy. That hasn’t happened yet. I think near the end of the month they’ll do that.”

There is a belief in these parts that all this recrimination over not having a budget will pale next to the anger of having a budget--a stripped-down, thinned-out one. Mary Ann Moore is Assemblyman Thomas Hannigan’s chief of staff. She watches people working killer hours, hoping to cut with the least pain to the most in need.

And it makes her furious that “what doesn’t come out is that the people, most of the people here, are doing what they do out of conviction.”