Lives Lost in Darkness Find a Way With Preachers’ Light : Redemption: Five people tell how they turned themselves around with the help of storefront ministers.

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

--Romans 3:23

Hurtling along life’s jagged pathways, they reached wrong-way turns and followed them. Some were too weary or despondent to know better. Others chased too hard after forbidden pleasures or chimerical riches, always just beyond their fingertips.

Their roads led them to crime, alcoholism or drug addiction. Or the path fell away completely into chasms of suicidal depression.

They are five men and women--members of the troubled masses in Los Angeles--who got another chance. With flailing arms, they managed to grasp hold of a storefront preacher, one of the hundreds who labor without fanfare in the city’s impoverished inner core.

Though lacking funds and resources, the storefront clerics gave them more than heated sermons. The preachers took the time to offer food and hospitality, bits of wisdom, a place to stay, even love.

For these beneficiaries, the efforts made all the difference. The preachers put a floodlight on their darkness, set them on a new course, a path out of the pain and heartache.

Here are their stories:

*

“I’ve always had an alcohol problem. I have a heart condition. I’m a diabetic. I got some psychological problems and stuff. . . .”

--James Johnson, 50

California was nearly paradise--or so Johnson remembered from his years in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ‘70s.

So five years ago, when he divorced, Johnson came west from Shreveport, La., to make a new start. He brought $700 and experience as a truck driver. But his life had begun to unravel. Having lost his driver’s license for drunk driving, Johnson was forced to look for odd jobs. He was drinking so heavily and living so recklessly that he squandered his savings in scarcely a week.

Drifting Downtown, he joined the human jetsam on Skid Row. By day, he roamed the streets. By night, he sought lodging in the cardboard condominiums of crowded alleys, or found a bunk at a homeless shelter.

Humiliated, living under conditions he had never imagined, Johnson pictured himself “in a boxed canyon . . . with no way out,” until one night at the Union Rescue Mission, where he saw a notice of a prayer service.

The service was conducted by the Rev. E. L. Woods, pastor of the Ebony Missionary Baptist Church on South Figueroa Street. Impressed by Woods’ no-nonsense style, Johnson told the preacher of his struggles and asked about attending services.

Woods told him about “Opportunity House,” the church’s shelter for recovering addicts and alcoholics. The rent was minimal--$100 a month--but even that was too much for Johnson. “I had no money, but I could drive--I’d gotten my license back,” Johnson said. “And (Woods) needed a driver.”

An arrangement was made: Johnson joined the church staff in early 1990, receiving room and board in exchange for driving Ebony’s muddy-red van to pick up food or parishioners, and for helping around the storefront.

Johnson took the spiritual messages to heart. He sobered up. Gradually, his duties expanded.

“It’s been the difference between day and night . . . between making it and not making it,” Johnson, now a deacon, said of the way his life has changed because of the church. “It’s been a godsend and a lifesaver.”

As one of Woods’ top assistants, Johnson drives each week to the charity dock of the Los Angeles wholesale produce market, where he loads the van with boxes of cabbage, squash, tomatoes, onions and other food that is dispensed at the church each Wednesday morning. He also works in the church office and helps to police the halfway house.

“Stealing is a no-no,” he said, laying out its ground rules. “If you go into somebody else’s stuff, you’re gone. You drink, you’re gone. You do drugs, you’re gone. There’s no violence, no fighting.”

For a while, Johnson moved out of Opportunity House, taking an apartment with a roommate. But the roommate left, so he is back at the church shelter, living on $293 a month in welfare and grateful for simple blessings.

“You got your own bath, your own kitchen and everything,” he said. “You come here (from Skid Row) and get a good, hot shower, a shave--that’ll mean the world to you. And a restroom, right here! Man, I thought it was heaven.”

*

“I had old men that I was manipulating. (They were) willing to pay my rent and take care of me, and I was giving up my body to these old men. . . . The lies would just come off my tongue like butter.”

--Michelle Thompson, 26

Fortune never came quickly enough for the former Michelle Payne.

Weaned on the pulsating lights of Las Vegas, she grew up infatuated with glamour, wealth and fast living. A palm reader assured her that she would prosper, and the glib, attractive young Payne came to Los Angeles to find her future as a model and fashion designer.

Taking part-time work as a department store sales clerk, Payne seized an opportunity to make quick cash. She began selling $100 dresses for $50 to a wealthy customer and pocketing the cash without recording the sale.

In two years, Payne helped loot the store of $23,000 in women’s apparel, audits eventually revealed. During that time, she also developed a network of older suitors who were willing to pick up her living expenses, from outfits and rent to plane trips and pleasure cruises.

“If I wanted to go on a cruise, I’d say, ‘I need $2,000, plus I need new outfits, plus I need to take a friend with me,’ ” Payne remembered telling them. “I would tell them a girlfriend, but of course I would take another man. . . . At that point, my heart was hardened toward people, period. I didn’t care who got hurt.”

But her deceptions put her in fear. One night she dreamed about being handcuffed and taken to jail. The dream came true.

Facing grand theft charges for stealing apparel, Payne was out on bail pending trial when she began some deep soul-searching. “I had lost my dignity, I lost my self-respect, I lost my job,” Payne said.

By chance, she knew a preacher, the Rev. Phillip Washington. They had dated as teen-agers in Las Vegas, when Washington was a gang member who hung out with street hoods and smoked marijuana. But in the U.S. Navy he had accepted God. After being discharged he settled in Los Angeles and started preaching.

When Washington discovered that Payne was in town, he tracked her down, but she refused his entreaties to attend church--until her arrest. Then, her attitude changed. “God had my attention,” she said.

Finally, she showed up on Sunday at the church where Washington preaches, the Greater Upper Room Church of God in Christ Apostolic on South Hoover Street. Its founder, Elder Forest L. Person, kept her rapt with his sermon about how God could lift up the troubled.

A former thief as well as an ex-drug dealer, Person counseled her and accompanied her to court through a year of trial delays. When at last the judge pronounced her sentence--three years in prison--Person rose to speak in her defense, telling the court how much her life had changed.

Apparently moved, the judge reconvened the attorneys. Payne received a six-month sentence, serving only a month in jail. She met and married a warehouse packer, Steve Thompson, and they had a baby girl.

Her daughter, Stephanie, now 2, is in church every Sunday, sleeping on the pew while Thompson sings and raises her hands skyward for Jesus. Thompson is effusive in her praise of Person’s small congregation. “I had never experienced so much love from any group of people, ever.”

*

“Cocaine is not good to nobody. It kept me poor, broke, hungry, living in a house with rats and roaches, living in cars, living in abandoned houses , living in anything that I could.”

--Anthony Lightfoot, 27

Although his speech is slurred and his right eye droops, Lightfoot’s memory is clear--especially of his first experience with cocaine. It happened five years ago, soon after he moved out from Phoenix.

He met a woman.

She invited him to a motel.

As they stripped off their clothes, the woman produced some cocaine, marijuana and thin papers to roll into cigarettes. “She rolls it up and starts smoking it . . . and she asked me, ‘Do you want to try it?’ ”

Lightfoot had tried marijuana, but this high was different. It created a craving, an appetite more powerful than any sex drive. In only weeks, Lightfoot had graduated to the crack pipe, and from then on everything else in his life became secondary.

Trained and certified as a nurse’s aide, Lightfoot was unemployed, living on $300 a month in welfare. The check would arrive on the first, then he would hit the streets, looking to score his drug.

“It’s devastating. I can’t even put into words how bad it is,” Lightfoot said. “Sometimes, I would have to go to the store and steal to get some food. I’d steal packs of cigarettes and sell them. But a lot of times, when I’d sell them, I wouldn’t buy food--I’d buy more cocaine.”

He neglected his health, his bills, and his appearance. He often slept in an abandoned house near 103rd and Main streets. For four excruciating years, each passing month consisted of one day of bliss and 29 days of torture, with his pockets and his stomach empty, his mind consumed by the obsession with his drug.

When Lightfoot finally sought help, much of the inspiration came from a most unlikely source--Michael (Ice Mike) Rowles, a former drug dealer once known to police as “the godfather” of his Crips gang.

Rowles, a longtime friend of Lightfoot, had decided to break with his past and follow a new calling as a preacher. From informal prayer sessions on a street corner, Rowles had moved on to become a minister in training at a narrow storefront, the Holy Temple Four Square Community Church, on Crenshaw Boulevard.

“Mike has told me, ‘Man, you’re my homie, you’re a friend of mine,’ ” Lightfoot said. “He tells me . . . ‘I want you to stop doing (cocaine).’ ”

Lightfoot is trying.

Eight months ago, the lanky crack user entered a drug rehabilitation program, and he later took up residence at a Salvation Army shelter in Bell. Lightfoot has his meals there and attends weeknight Bible-study sessions.

On Sundays, he sometimes goes to church, either at Rowles’ storefront or any of several other sanctuaries.

The cravings still gnaw at him, the unspoken entreaties of Lucifer. But Lightfoot says he has been sober these last eight months.

“Oh, man, it is hard,” he conceded, noting how so many of his friends drink and use drugs. Rowles is the notable exception, the man he looks up to, the one guy who always has something positive to say.

“I spoke to him (last week),” Lightfoot said, “and he said that I am looking better, and he likes to see me that way, and to keep on doing what I’m doing. And I can reap all the benefits of the world.”

*

“I didn’t want to see nobody, didn’t want to go no place. My best friends were all gone. I just felt like, at 81 years old, what could I do? I didn’t see where I needed to be in the world.”

--Mary G. Rubin

All her life, she had taken center stage to lift the spirits of others. Her nonprofit organization, the Rays of Sunshine, was founded in 1952 to run musical variety shows for the disabled. The motto “Love in Action” still fits; even last week, the troupe--led by a blind stage coordinator and a one-footed Santa Claus--played to a fifth-floor ward at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

Not only did Mary Rubin create the Los Angeles-based group, but for decades she was its poet, songwriter and occasional singer. Her spiritual verse still appears now and then in the Sentinel newspaper, poems such as “The House in Which I Live”:

“God gave me a house in

which to live ,

A precious gift that

only God can give .

And I’m striving to keep

it clean of sin ,

So Christ my savior will dwell within. . . .”

But a year ago, Rubin’s ebullience and wit seemed to ebb. Her mother had died. So had her longtime secretary and many of her closest friends, including some of the women who featured her music at various schools, churches and hospitals.

Slowed by age and no longer able to drive a car, Rubin felt it time to join them. She withdrew into her memento-cluttered residence, the place her admirers call The House on the Side of the Road, and waited for that final exit.

But another act awaited her, a reawakening brought about by a chance meeting. Every week, a woman named Dorothy Washington, a writer for a Los Angeles religious newspaper, would stop at Rubin’s home to drop off the latest issue. Then, one week Washington could not get there, so she asked a storefront preacher--the Rev. Eddie Ray Thomas--to go in her place.

Thomas was 77 at the time. A large, avuncular man who spouts wit and philosophy in sound bites and metaphors, he was able to reach the despondent Rubin. He showed an interest in her poetry and listened to her feelings of loss and heartache.

He told her that God has promised each person only two things--a birth and a death--and that each would come at the time that God deemed.

“You didn’t have nothing to do with your coming here,” Thomas remembers saying to Rubin, “and it’s not for you to have anything to do with your leaving--except, ‘Be ye ready.’ So live to the hilt.”

Thomas did not stop there. He made Rubin an extension of his food program, sending her bags of carrots, potatoes, broccoli, apples and other goods each week to distribute to the hungry in her neighborhood. Giving away the food made her feel useful--as if people were depending upon her.

Rubin began to reach out. She began to write again. She began running a telephone prayer service for the homeless, circulating her name and taking calls from anyone who could find a phone. She began corresponding with prison inmates, receiving contacts from a minister in Albuquerque and sending letters across the globe.

About six months ago, Rubin fell, pinching a nerve in her neck. She has fallen several times since.

Because her doctor fears she may have a stroke, Rubin spends much of her time in bed, but she continues her work--an old soldier for God.

“I’m just happy that I didn’t give up,” she said. “I’m doing more from the bed than I ever thought I was able to do--mentally and physically and spiritually. Most of all, spiritually.”

*

“The devil had me messing with dope and drinking and carrying on. . . . Almighty God changed my whole life around. All I do now is praise him. That’s all. I don’t do nothing else but that.”

--Herman Brown, 64

Herman Brown does more than go to church each Sunday. He lives there, right in the sanctuary. At night, he sleeps on a rollout cot, one he keeps in the closet with his sparse wardrobe.

Tall and rawboned, but in a way that comes from not eating properly, Brown is an assistant deacon at Christians for Christ in a storefront on South Figueroa Street. His story has a distinctly Los Angeles flavor; Brown was one of the 2,000 people who were injured--58 others died--in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, which toppled an engine block onto his back.

Doctors had to insert a plastic disc into his spine, and Brown was left partially disabled--unable to lift or do heavy labor. Ten years later, when Brown and his wife separated, his life took a steeper descent.

Brown began drinking heavily and using cocaine. He lost his apartment, wound up in a series of homeless shelters and lived that way, unkempt and directionless, until yet another calamity--the riots of 1992.

With the burned-out city reeling, the Rev. Alfredo Noble raised a small tent behind his Christians for Christ storefront to house and feed transients. It became a shelter for five men. Three stayed for a while, then returned to the streets. One found a job. Brown found the Lord.

“God stepped in . . . turned me around,” Brown said, boasting that he sobered up without the aid of rehabilitation classes. “If God sees that you want to leave (these vices) alone, he’ll help you, and you don’t have no desire in your mind for them. That’s what he did for me. I didn’t have to go to no alcohol school or (drug) school.

“I went to God.”

Brown and Noble have worked out a rare sort of symbiosis. Brown receives lodging, food and spiritual guidance. In return, he mops, vacuums, trims the parkway grass, takes messages, paints over graffiti and serves coffee at Saturday morning breakfasts for the homeless. At night, he listens for would-be intruders.

“I just make a little noise, let them know I’m in here”--and usually they disappear, he said. “If I wasn’t here, they’d break in and steal something--anything they can get their hands on.”

Brown spends idle hours watching a portable TV. Sometimes, he talks at Sunday services or Wednesday night Bible meetings, telling others how his life has changed. “It makes me feel good,” he said, “to reach out to someone.”

Next year, he will be 65, with no retirement plan, no money saved for the years to come.

But he has faith. He is where he wants to be. It is just God and Brown, sharing the same roof, the same aging, white storefront in the big, mad, sinful, violent, drug-crazed metropolis--the City of Angels.

“As long as God lets me breathe this good air,” Brown said above the din of traffic on South Figueroa Street, “I’m going to be here, serving him.”