WacoWas AnAccident
Ex-Bluelighter
I was homeless for 4 months. It’s not something I’d like to do again. But it’s the kind of thing I recommend everyone go out and do. I didn’t do it out of choice. I was hard up for cash and got evicted. There was nobody to fall back on. That is the consequence of dicking over all the people you once knew. So I hit the streets. If you don’t mind being dirty, it’s not so bad. When the wind dies down you can catch a few hours of sleep on a bench or in a doorway with a red neon light shining on your sun-burned face and making you dream about Hell.
Homeless people are perhaps the most misunderstood human beings on Earth. It is believed that homeless people end up homeless through some intrinsic character fault. They aren’t willing to work. They are drunks. They are addicts.
This is, in fact, largely true.
But it doesn’t make them bad people. It just means they don’t have any skills to offer the modern world. Only a very small percentage of them are actually dangerous. Many of them are committed to slowly killing themselves via exposure to the elements and the kind of daily drinking binges that would stagger a normal man of about 180 pounds. It’s all very romantic in a way.
It is also exciting, in its way. It is oddly exhilarating to live day to day, with no real security net. There is no guarantee someone won’t kill or beat you up. No guarantee you won’t contract pneumonia and die in a filthy street or in the shadow of a concrete embankment. You live for the moment. You sleep when you’re tired or, failing that, whenever you happen to collapse in a heap of drunken flesh. You eat when the whims of charity allow it. You’ll talk to anybody, even if they don’t want to talk to you. It doesn’t matter. What do you care if they are disgusted? You might be dead or in jail tomorrow. Surely it doesn’t matter what some stranger thinks.
And since you probably don’t know many homeless people, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that taking a shit in an alley is one of the most freeing experiences that mortal man can avail himself of.
It is important to note that seemingly violent and erratic behavior does not necessarily translate into actual violence. A lot of homeless people are schizophrenics. These are the ones that sit next to college kids on buses and jerk their legs in violent spasms. They say things like, “Stay out of the system. Stay out of the system.” You have to understand that from their perspective, this is helpful advice. The college student might be a little put off by the notebook full of cryptic circular scrawls which the homeless schizophrenic periodically glances at or writes in. This kind of person can be frightening to the uninitiated. But they are generally able to carry on a semblance of a conversation, and are actually pretty nice people. More than anything they are concerned about you, because you don’t have the same pervasive insight that some bit of faulty wiring in the brain has yielded for them. They don’t want you to get rolled up by an unfeeling, mechanical System. At the heart of it, he is being no more or less irritating than the old lady in the supermarket who offers her unsolicited opinion on the best brand of frozen peas.
A large part of the homeless population is made up of veterans. They tend to congregate around VA hospitals or veteran’s clubs. They are a unique breed because they get medical treatment and food and various other perks at the government’s expense, but they often end up sleeping in their wheelchairs. Virtually every veteran will tell you, most without being prompted, that entering the service was the worst thing that ever happened to them. The really perplexing part of this equation is that once you talk to them a little more you realize they didn’t have much of a choice. They are typically not very educated. With a choice between a life of hard nosed blue-collar laboring or a stint with the Army, it’s easy to see why things played out the way they did.
Vietnam veterans are perhaps the most noteworthy. At least veterans of most other major American conflicts can fall back on the commonly held belief that their wars were necessary and justified in the court of public opinion. Vietnam vets always have an inescapable stigma that weighs them down. They won’t admit that, of course, but in my travels I have noticed an edge, an extra acerbic bite that is unique to the Vietnam veteran. You can talk to a guy who fought in Korea, and he might not have any legs and maybe a thick scar on his face where he caught some shrapnel, but in the depths of his eyes there is a certain tranquility that is singularly absent in the eyes of Willie D, whose stories about Da Nang and the delta tremble with the palsied undertones of resentment.
Homeless people are perhaps the most misunderstood human beings on Earth. It is believed that homeless people end up homeless through some intrinsic character fault. They aren’t willing to work. They are drunks. They are addicts.
This is, in fact, largely true.
But it doesn’t make them bad people. It just means they don’t have any skills to offer the modern world. Only a very small percentage of them are actually dangerous. Many of them are committed to slowly killing themselves via exposure to the elements and the kind of daily drinking binges that would stagger a normal man of about 180 pounds. It’s all very romantic in a way.
It is also exciting, in its way. It is oddly exhilarating to live day to day, with no real security net. There is no guarantee someone won’t kill or beat you up. No guarantee you won’t contract pneumonia and die in a filthy street or in the shadow of a concrete embankment. You live for the moment. You sleep when you’re tired or, failing that, whenever you happen to collapse in a heap of drunken flesh. You eat when the whims of charity allow it. You’ll talk to anybody, even if they don’t want to talk to you. It doesn’t matter. What do you care if they are disgusted? You might be dead or in jail tomorrow. Surely it doesn’t matter what some stranger thinks.
And since you probably don’t know many homeless people, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that taking a shit in an alley is one of the most freeing experiences that mortal man can avail himself of.
It is important to note that seemingly violent and erratic behavior does not necessarily translate into actual violence. A lot of homeless people are schizophrenics. These are the ones that sit next to college kids on buses and jerk their legs in violent spasms. They say things like, “Stay out of the system. Stay out of the system.” You have to understand that from their perspective, this is helpful advice. The college student might be a little put off by the notebook full of cryptic circular scrawls which the homeless schizophrenic periodically glances at or writes in. This kind of person can be frightening to the uninitiated. But they are generally able to carry on a semblance of a conversation, and are actually pretty nice people. More than anything they are concerned about you, because you don’t have the same pervasive insight that some bit of faulty wiring in the brain has yielded for them. They don’t want you to get rolled up by an unfeeling, mechanical System. At the heart of it, he is being no more or less irritating than the old lady in the supermarket who offers her unsolicited opinion on the best brand of frozen peas.
A large part of the homeless population is made up of veterans. They tend to congregate around VA hospitals or veteran’s clubs. They are a unique breed because they get medical treatment and food and various other perks at the government’s expense, but they often end up sleeping in their wheelchairs. Virtually every veteran will tell you, most without being prompted, that entering the service was the worst thing that ever happened to them. The really perplexing part of this equation is that once you talk to them a little more you realize they didn’t have much of a choice. They are typically not very educated. With a choice between a life of hard nosed blue-collar laboring or a stint with the Army, it’s easy to see why things played out the way they did.
Vietnam veterans are perhaps the most noteworthy. At least veterans of most other major American conflicts can fall back on the commonly held belief that their wars were necessary and justified in the court of public opinion. Vietnam vets always have an inescapable stigma that weighs them down. They won’t admit that, of course, but in my travels I have noticed an edge, an extra acerbic bite that is unique to the Vietnam veteran. You can talk to a guy who fought in Korea, and he might not have any legs and maybe a thick scar on his face where he caught some shrapnel, but in the depths of his eyes there is a certain tranquility that is singularly absent in the eyes of Willie D, whose stories about Da Nang and the delta tremble with the palsied undertones of resentment.
