Zombie, Illinois (2 page)

(This is where you say “Amen,” by the way.)

With the girls, teen pregnancy is unacceptably common. Almost no babies are planned. With the boys, a culture of violence pervades. There are shootings nearly every day. In the summer months, the fatalities over a long weekend can stretch into the double digits. Statistically, it is safer to be a soldier in the U.S. Army stationed in Afghanistan than it is to be a young black man on the south side of Chicago.

The billboards in my neighborhood are for cognac and AIDS medicine.

Something is wrong here.

And now, the darkest detail...

My neighborhood is not the worst.

My neighborhood is
nowhere near
the worst.

White folks from the north side of Chicago—who never bother to visit us—view “the south side” as one uniformly harrowing and dangerous place where they must remember never to go. They close it off in their minds. It becomes almost mythological—a world they only hear about on the nightly news. But if they ever scratched the surface, they'd see that “the south side of Chicago” is a dynamic mix of about thirty neighborhoods, each with a distinct personality and character.

South Shore, Chatham, Back of the Yards, Kenwood, Auburn-Gresham, South Chicago, East Chicago, Pullman, Grand Crossing—all these neighborhoods are slightly different. “Better” and “worse” in some ways, yes, but also distinctive and uniquely colorful. This one has a vibrant community of immigrants from Senegal. That one is renowned for its block safety clubs and high school football tradition. This one has been the epicenter of black newspaper publishing for eighty years. That one has the finest soul food in Chicago, if not the world.

And yet, to the outsider.we are all “the south side.”

Do we let that bother us? No, we don't. We cannot afford to. We—ladies and gentlemen—have more important things to do.

(“Amen” also goes there. Thank you.)

I'm taking a trip now, and I want you to come with me.

I said my congregation is beset on all sides.. Let's see for ourselves.I'm going to pull my Chrysler 300 (yes, a big ostentatious “preacher car”) out of the parking lot of The Church of Heaven's God in Christ Lord Jesus—a crumbling structure built in the 1920s that needs a new pipe organ and a new roof—and I'm going to head south, toward Indiana. We'll drive down roads called 12 and 41, parts of a lost highway named for General Grant.

As we drive, we will pass fish fry shacks, hot dog stands, dilapidated no-name hamburger joints, and Chinese restaurants that still advertise chop suey. What we
won't
pass are grocery stores. These neighborhoods are what sociologists call “food deserts.” There are almost no businesses selling fresh produce. There's
one
grocery store chain in South Shore. One brand-name grocery store for a neighborhood of almost 50,000 people. Think about that. I don't even know if the store is profitable. Leakage—people stealing stuff—has to be through the roof. I think the franchise just keeps the doors open as a PR move, so in their TV commercials they can say that they're “committed to
all
of Chicago's communities.”

So no, not many options for fruit and vegetables and whole grains. But fast-food that tastes motherfucking delicious (if you'll pardon my language)? Welcome to a fried grease wonderland!

Of course, this food isn't good for you (not to eat all the time, which is what most people do). It gives our communities the highest rates of diabetes and high blood pressure in the city. But it's affordable, and it tastes good. Most importantly, it provides—to quote the prostitute in the Book of Proverbs—solace.

For a lot of people around here, food is the most affordable kind of solace. It's what they've got when they want to feel better.

A close second—as the astute reader will have already guessed—is alcohol, the last great legal vice (until, that is, we cross the border into Indiana.but more about that in a moment).

Dave Chappelle has a comedy bit about driving in the ghetto and how the businesses go “liquor store, liquor store, gun store, liquor store.” But Chicago's strict handgun laws have arranged things such that the places where you can purchase a functioning firearm—and they are legion—can't exactly put up a sign. Consequently, on our ride, the businesses simply go “liquor store, liquor store, liquor store.”

At the end of nearly every block, a crumbling “packaged goods” establishment is making 90 percent of its money from liquor and beer sales. And liquor and beer—say it with me—are solace. They take away the pain. They are a short-term solution, but a solution nonetheless.

This is what I'm up against. This is what my congregation is up against.

(“Amen” goes there, too. Hallelujah.)

Moving on, we pass into a neighborhood called South Chicago. Here we find illegal bars, derelict houses—tax delinquent and/or victims of mortgage fraud—and abandoned apartment blocks filled with squatters. We also find places to buy drugs.

And, I hate to say it, but drugs are one of the few vices that are
not
an overriding problem for my congregation, as least, not directly. Nobody sitting in my pews is smoking crack or shooting horse, but most people have somebody in their family who is lost to drugs. Parents with kids who won't behave worry that drugs are in that child's future, and unfortunately, they're probably right. Most certainly, drugs fuel the gang violence that pervades our neighborhoods.

But the people who actually make it into the pews on Sunday are, themselves, not usually on drugs. This is good. This is, as I remind myself, a start. I take encouragement from it because I must take encouragement anywhere I can.

(“Amen” definitely goes there.)

As we draw nearer to the Indiana state line, we begin to pass large swaths of undeveloped land owned by the park district. These swaths extend eastward and eventually border Lake Michigan. They are full of nothing—bleak and littered with garbage. They are lonely places, giving off the feeling of having been forgotten. Developers don't want to build here, and the city's park system has a shrinking budget and more pressing issues. The politicians would like to see these swaths built up—probably because wealthy people can see them from their boats out on Lake Michigan and are depressed by the sight. (These politicians—for what it's worth—have not voiced much concern for the urban neighborhoods
adjacent to
these nautically visible swaths.) The city's latest bright idea has been to use them to stage a three-day rock music festival every summer, featuring bands tending to the tastes of white fraternity members. Will this project, in any sense of the word, “work?” I do not choose to dignify that question with a response. For now, we drive on past these lonely brownfields where, 362 days of the year, local kids go looking for trouble, drunks pass out, and drug deals go down.

Closer to Indiana, we encounter shipping canals. Boats— most of them ugly, flat affairs laden with unpleasant cargo like animal offal or crushed cars—use them to pass into Lake Michigan. The area around these canals is something most Chi-cagoans never see. It is functional but unsightly, like an orifice or sphincter. (One knows it is there, but would, all things being equal, elect to never actually see it up close.) We pause in a line of stalled traffic—my preacher car standing out starkly against the rusted Neons, Corollas, and Fiestas—and wait for a bridge to be raised and lowered as a long, slow barge carrying refinery waste passes underneath.

Then we leave the shipping canals and cross into the Hoosier State by driving underneath the Illinois/Indiana Toll Road (known officially as the “Chicago Skyway”). It looms above us, a massive structure, thrusting upwards into the air. Since it was built in 1958, the neighborhoods below it have literally existed in its shadow. This is fitting. These are shadow places.

The character of the neighborhood begins to change a few blocks in, the racial demographic shifting from lower-class black to working-class white and Latino.Yet, this does nothing to diminish the temptations awaiting my parishioners here, in this short drive from South Shore. If anything, the temptations are compounded.

The back alleys and side roads are havens for prostitution. At night, the truckers driving the Chicago Skyway know to pull off here to find “lot lizards,” prostitutes (usually grizzled and emaciated) who specialize in servicing truckers. They walk from rig to rig, climbing into each cab to do their lonely business. The interstate nature of a trucker's travel means my parishioners who seek solace from these same prostitutes can collect venereal disease from every corner of the lower forty-eight. For those seeking slightly tamer fare, the neighborhood is also riddled with topless joints. These are somewhat safer, yes, but still the last places the men in my flock should be spending their time and money.

Pressing deeper into Hoosier-land, we'll make a quick detour to a place called Whiting. At first glance, it's an All-American community sitting pristine and unnoticed on the lake just south of Chicago. The quaint downtown is practically picturesque, with cute restaurants and shops you could spend an entire Sunday exploring. There are well-kept residential streets and houses with white picket fences—but those picket fences have to be repainted annually because of the constant discharge from the massive BP oil refinery that sits right next door.

Since time immemorial—technically 1889—British Petroleum has owned this place: first literally, then only figuratively. Pollution lurks everywhere, always just below the surface. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has designated Whiting an “Area of Concern” whatever that means. The residents who choose to remain are the kind of people who can either accept a dark bargain, or who find the truth too unthinkable to credit. “Never mind the cancer-clusters and off-the-chart asthma rates,” these folks will respond. “BP sponsors a nice fireworks display every Fourth of July and makes donations to our civic programs. Why, the basketball team wouldn't have those new uniforms if it weren't for the refinery!”

I exaggerate a bit, but only a bit. I have heard residents of Whiting, when questioned about how they stand the refinery-odor that pervades their town, answer with no trace of irony: “It smells like money.” (I should add that the residents ofWhiting, per capita, have only slightly higher incomes than my parishioners, which means that they are very poor. Certainly, they are in no substantial way privy to the wealth being generated next to their town.)

And despite BP's enormous resources, there is no magic dome keeping the pollution generated in Whiting from seeping over the border into the south side of Chicago. My parishioners' asthma rates aren't as high as those of the people ofWhiting, but they're still too high. And we sure as Hell don't get a fireworks display.

(“Amen” sure does go there. Thank you kindly.)

But we have tarried long enough. Now let us grit our teeth and head for the belly of the beast. Into Calumet and outlying Gary, and the scourge that is the Indiana Riverboat Casino industry.

While there are no casinos in the City of Chicago proper— yet—”Chicagoland” has become the third largest gaming destination in the United States after Las Vegas and Atlantic City. If you count the casinos less than an hour's drive away in Michigan, Wisconsin, Western Illinois, and here in Indiana, then there are about fifteen casinos in Chicagoland. Their billboards are everywhere, as is their pull on those seeking solace.

And here's a secret: Casinos are racist.

And no, I don't mean “Do blacks get drink service as quickly as whites?” I'm talking about a quiet, sneaky, cultural racism that's virtually invisible but damnably damaging.

Here's the problem: The quicker a casino game is to learn, the worse the odds are for the player. I didn't grow up white—so this is next part is, granted, a guess—but whites (and also Asians and Middle Easterners, I think) grow up learning to play casino games. I don't know how this happens, but it does. Maybe the family trips involve gambling with cards in the back seat. Maybe the kids all play casino games at their expensive private summer camps. However it happens, they show up knowing how to play games like Texas Hold ‘Em, Blackjack, Pai Gow—stuff like that. Stuff with the better odds.

When all these new casinos opened in the late 1990s, my flock didn't know casino gambling from hot air ballooning. My flock hadn't been jetting off to Vegas for generations or spending summers on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. When my parishioners—curious and in search of a thrill—walked into the casinos for the first time, they were confronted by the newness and strangeness of the games. Naturally, they gravitated to the two you can learn the quickest: slots and roulette. Pull this lever, and you might win some money. Pick red or black, and you might win some money. Yet these are the two games with the
worst odds in the casino.
And they are no less addictive for it.

The players might care—might bother to learn the other games—if they were actually out to win money. But they're not. They only
think
they're out to win money.

Really, they're after the same thing they're always after.

Say it with me.

Solace.

(“Amen” goes there, indubitably.)

To say that casino gambling addiction is rife on the south side of Chicago is like saying that water is wet. It's rampant within my congregation (and those, remember, are the churchgoing folk in the neighborhood—the folk who have, at least on some level, decided to make an ongoing investment in self-i mprovement). Many of the young couples in my pews have fights over money that one or the other has lost across the border in Indiana. Many of the grandmothers while away their pensions and Social Security checks on “the boats”
Most
of the grandmothers, if I'm being honest. Grandmothers are the biggest concern. (With all their sexy advertising and waitresses in low-cut dresses, you'd think the casinos were designed for men aged 18 to 35, but the average Chicagoland casino patron is a woman over 60. The casinos aren't there to steal from the young brothers; they're there to steal from big mama.)