Zombie, Illinois (10 page)

The story of how Leopold Mack became Pastor Mack?

Well, you're in luck. It's a tale I have practiced telling. It is also a tale strengthened by a few notable omissions.

I know by heart the version that makes my life sound ordered and even laudable. How I grew up on the rough south side, got excellent grades in school, served my country without hesitation when it called, and then returned because I wanted to change things for the better. I went to seminary, became a pastor, took over one of the community's most historied congregations, got married, had a beautiful daughter who is now full grown, and held myself together when the Lord called my dear wife away only two short years ago.

It may not be especially notable as pastor's biographies go, but it gets the job done. When people want my story, they get that. And they like it. Why did I become a pastor? I wanted to help my community by fighting the drugs and crime that beset our neighborhood.

What I don't tell them is that before I was part of the solution, I was part of the problem. In no small way.

The root cause was a simple one. You have likely heard it from others who were in my place. Who were called to be knee-deep in Southeast Asian jungles at the ripe old age of nineteen.

It started when I was exposed to drugs in Vietnam. And by “exposed,” I mean “addicted.”

Good old Leo Mack—the nice young man who went to Sunday school and had respectable friends, who never got in trouble with the police, and who didn't hesitate to serve his country when called—had never tried drugs. It was more than just that I hadn't; I was never
going
to try drugs. It was completely off my radar. You kind of block drugs off in your mind as a real possibility, you know, when you make that decision.You think, as long as I never go down to such-and-such street corner where the prostitutes and dealers hang out, then I'll be okay. Drugs are something I'll
never
have to worry about.
Never
have to deal with. I'll have problems, sure, but drugs won't
ever
be one of them.

But things have a way of getting in through the back door. They find a chink in your armor and slither through in the dark when you're not even looking. That's life.

See, there are things you won't ever try...and then there are things you won't try when you're pretty sure you're going to die in the next few days. And let me tell you, the first list is longer than the second.

Awake for seventy-two hours, half-starved, and ankle-deep in the freezing tributaries along the Mekong Delta; unthinkable things have a way of becoming thinkable. When the second l ieutenant in charge has been making bad decisions all month— and, to boot, is a white guy from Mississippi who sends the black guys in the platoon to do all the most dangerous shit—it begins to feel more and more likely that you won't be seeing home again. And you start to cross a few items off on that list of things you'll never do.

Then that fateful night happens when the guy awake with you on guard duty says he has some pills that can help you stay awake. Stronger than coffee. Better. So much better, they're t echnically illegal. And apparently, in addition to waking you up, they have the side effect of making you feel
amazing..
And you just sort of say okay, whatever man, gimme one.

And that's it. Boom. You like them. They work. You feel better. You feel up and optimistic. Getting through the night isn't so jackshit horrible.

You then ask about getting some more. Pretty soon you want your own personal supply. Then you learn that there are other pills, and others still. Things that make you go up, down, and sideways. Sure, there are some side effects—most of which you don't notice right away because you're young and strong—but overwhelmingly, they just contain different ways of making you feel amazing. And you sure aren't thinking about the side effects that'll hit years later, or how this could turn into an expensive habit that you sure-as-shit don't have the money to pay for. You're only thinking about how there are a million North Vietnamese coming down the river to kill you, and you don't expect to live out the month.

So . . . yes.

By the time I got back to Chicago, I was hooked on uppers and downers and smoking reefer to boot. Some guys had it worse, but that was bad enough for me.

The first thing I realized was that if I wanted to keep taking these drugs—which I did—I needed entirely new friends.

People back home said, “The war has changed him.” They didn't seem too surprised by how I was different, because hey, it's war. It'll do that. Everybody had an uncle from WWII or a grandpappy from the first one who'd come back a different dude.

So when I started running with a new crowd, became unable to hold a job, and got shifty when asked about my future, people just assumed it was the war.

And it wasn't. It was the drugs.

A year after Vietnam, I was an amphetamine and opiate addict.

Two years after Vietnam, I had added cocaine.

Four years after that, I was a stone cold criminal, doing jobs right and left to support my habit.

In the 1970s, Chicago's south side was changing. Or.. .wait... maybe the most accurate thing to say was that it had
stopped
changing.. .and that
that
was the change.

Once upon a time, Chicago's south side had been
the
destination for blacks leaving the Deep South hoping for a better life. Beginning in 1910, people started calling the Illinois Central Train Depot “Black Ellis Island,” because so many African Americans made it their entryway to the North. The Pullman Porters circulated Chicago's black newspapers like the
Defender
and the
Crusader
all throughout the South. A whole lot of people read those papers and thought they were reporting on a place that was better than where they were. Eventually, Cook County had more black people in it than any other county in the United States, which it still does. Most of those black people lived on Chicago's south side. It became its own city within a city. You never had to leave the south side if you didn't want to. Your job, church, doctor, dentist, insurance agent, grocery—they were all black and all on the south side.

And no one will say it was a perfect time—or even a good time—from, oh, about 1910 to 1970. There was racism, housing discrimination, and race riots. And when Martin Luther King came to town, they hit him in the face with a damn brick. But it had this feeling of impetus. Of momentum. Ours was a community that was growing, you know? New people were arriving every day to come be part of it. It was a thing.

But then, around 1970, it started to change. The immigration stopped. All of the blacks who had wanted to move north had pretty much done so. Maybe there was less racism and more opportunity in the South, or maybe the dew was just off the lily for Chicago. Whatever it was, people started to leave the south side. Couple that with a massive national recession and huge spikes in crime, and you began to see a new south side. The one—you
could
argue—that we still have today.

There started to be these things called “shopping centers” and then “malls” that were fun to shop at and cheap, and you could get to them on the El trains. So boom, suddenly there's no reason for all of these local businesses on every block. Most of the trusted family-owned stores die out. The businesses that replace them are usually terrible. Lousy restaurants. Second-hand wig shops. Fly-by-night places that do your taxes.

It was hard times. The first Daley was still mayor, and he took the south side for granted. Instead of the social programs and real investment that were needed, he trucked in free swimming pools in the summer and created scholarships to bad city colleges where a degree didn't help you much. It was putting a Band-Aid on a cancer, and everybody knew it.

This was the south side in which I found myself after the war. I was hooked on drugs, and I came back to a neighborhood that no longer was growing. Instead, it had a feeling of stasis. There would be no new people or stuff. Now it was just trying to hang on, and criminals were starting to fight over whatever was left.

When the world around you is changing for the worse—and everybody is filled with the same feeling of sickness and unease— turning to crime is not so hard for a young man to do. There were gangs—not quite like what we have today, but still technically gangs. (What we had in the 1970s was like the Cro-Magnon man of gangs. Evolving, but not there yet.)

I was never a major player. I carried a gat but never shot anybody. Mostly, I just did B and E's. A little stick-up work now and then. A whole lot of intimidation. And I'm basically high the whole time.

And then God saved me. There is no other way to say it.

God “accelerated” my life, is how I like to put it. I was “fast-forwarded” to rock bottom ahead of everybody else. He let me reach my lowest moment after just five years, when I was still salvageable. Still young. Most young men who choose drugs and crime can keep it up a lot longer—ten, fifteen, even twenty years before they want to get out—and by that time they're just dead husks that don't have long to live.

The walking dead indeed.

The Bible tells us that the wages of sin are death. Nothing in the entire book is more demonstrably true.

And I can remember the moment when I changed like it was yesterday. My best friend—or the man I
thought
was my best friend—had been shot to death the night before in a robbery. We'd been upping our intake of pills and blow to superhuman levels. We knew we couldn't maintain that lifestyle, but we were crazy. We did it anyway, because . . . well, I don't fully know why we did it. I still don't. We should've stopped. We should've known it could only be the road to ruin. Maybe we were blinded by the pleasure of it all, in love with the dark magic of our existence. Maybe we were just young, high, and stupid.

I remember looking at myself in the long, cracked mirror that we'd propped against the wall of the basement of the dingy two-flat in South Shore where we were living . . . and it was like God touched me. Like, he physically touched me. He said, “I'm going to take these bad things from you and make it right. It's going to happen right now.”

I flushed my pills and cocaine down the toilet—trying not to think about how much money they had cost—and left my apartment. I started walking with no destination in mind. I walked down to the decrepit shopping strip on Jeffery Boulevard, not knowing what was happening or what to do next. I was just walking.

Then God tested me.

I suddenly started thinking about how I would never take another pill in my life—never feel that warm rush that made everything okay, that let you relax about things, that made sex feel like the greatest thing ever (even if it was with some hoochie you didn't really care for). I started thinking about how I'd driven away my family and all my childhood friends. I had no real job or prospects. What would come next? What could?

A horrible panic seized me. My chest felt like it was going to explode. I had this strange tension running down of the backs of my legs, like a cramp that wouldn't go away. My heart was beating fast. (I had this new
awareness
of my heart, too. I was afraid it would wear out, and I had no idea how to make it slow down.)

Then I thought to myself: So . . . this is
probably
death. I've never died before, so I can't say for sure, but this feels about right.

I stopped right there on Jeffery Boulevard, clutching at my chest with everyone looking at me like I was crazy. I started looking around, turning in circles. I could have gone to a hospital. I could have called for a policeman or an ambulance. But then— looming above the other buildings—I saw the steeple of The Church of Heaven's God in Christ Lord Jesus.

Go there, my brain said to me.

So I stopped spinning, and I walked over to that church. It wasn't the biggest or best church in South Shore. It had a small congregation for its size. The pastor was nobody I had heard of, certainly nobody powerful in the community. The building was an old synagogue that had been converted to a Christian church in the 1940s when the last of the Jews in the neighborhood gave up and moved away. The addition of a cross and steeple left it looking not quite right, like a lizard that has scurried underneath a cast-off shell and insists it's now a turtle.

These shortcomings didn't matter at that moment. To me, it looked absolutely perfect.

When I reached the church, I was too scared to go inside. I didn't know a soul there. Also, I thought that if I stopped moving— like in a pew to pray—my heart would explode and kill me. Instead of going in, I walked circles around that church, peering up at the dark lead glass windows and the steeple that didn't match the roof. After a few minutes, I began to feel calmer. I still felt like I might die, but I felt like
if
I died, that it would be all right. It was up to God now, and not up to me.

And you know what? God let me live.