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Fallen Angels

By Chris Arendt

It is easy for a veteran to go homeless. All it takes is a few questionable decisions, or worse, mistakes. Suddenly one can find oneself very free of the normal economic bracket. I didn't find it hard at all. The hard part comes when you fall out of the habit of paying rent, having a job and bills and organizing your life to suit the modern world's demands and you still find yourself trapped... in a much more strenuous and uncomfortable system.

In this way the rebellion of the homeless vet becomes allegorically intertwined with the story of Lucifer and his Fallen Angels who were thrown from the graces of God through a hole in the floor of heaven into a substrata of existence, Hell. After the rebellion the demons, under the leadership of Lucifer, found themselves again entangled in God's all encompassing plan. Like a demon, the homeless vet soon finds that they are every bit as bound up in the economic plan as they ever were, but now at the high cost of damnation. Homeless Hell is a mile long line outside of the Salvation Army in the early fall sleet with a hand rolled cigarette dangling out of your mouth while you smoke and think about how you've got nowhere else to go and nobody left to care about you when you get there.

Worst, in this twisted metaphor, is that the homeless vet is left to prostrate themselves while still in the presence of the system that they left with all of its fancy expensive food and cups of coffee that take five minutes to order. It is as if Hell and Heaven all happened in the same place, yet the demons and the angels of this world barely even see each other, as if some unconquerable divide separated them.

I don't want to be homeless any more. I don't want to rebel against the plan. I want to go back to the plan. I want a job and a house of my own. I want to be able to buy fancy food and smoke manufactured cigarettes fresh out of the pack, but once you go through that hole in the floor there is no turning back.

It's always some problem. Where you going to get the money? First month and security deposit. One thousand dollars. You need a job but you've got no dress clothes for the interview, you smell like stale smoke, dirty feet and infrequently washed clothing that has spent some time in some filthy places. There is dirt on you you can't clean off. If you get the job you will still have that swagger, that attitude, because after all of that time being your own person out there where nobody cares about you probably changed into a much meaner, much more survival oriented version of your former self. And where in the Hell are you going to live while you work? What will you eat?

There are programs, which you will have figured out. Food stamps, rent assistance, things like that. The food stamps are easy to get but hard to spend because you don't have a kitchen to cook your food in but at least you can eat. You got to dance for the rent money, though. They want you to have a job, but they also want to see you in their office once a week so that you can fill out a stack of papers. If you're homeless chances are you were never very good with papers to begin with. Then you have to find a land lord that also wants to fill out a bundle of papers and then wait for the VA to finally send them some money. I dropped out of the HUD/VASH program after all the ride requests destroyed my relationship with the woman who was letting me stay with her.

Long story short, it is an impossibly long road back from the streets and nobody from the MGMT is going to help you out. The independent will that forced you through the hole in Heaven's floor in the first place continues to gnaw at your soul, making you angry and the constant need is making you crazy and that makes the chances of getting a job ever slimmer.

Everything is looking in my favor. I've got part of an education. I'm smart and young and my muscles still work. I am not addicted to any serious drugs or alcohol. I have a good record. No trouble with the law. Honorable Discharge. I'm not even all that dirty. I still have my friends and they don't let me sleep on the street. They say that it takes eight years to burn our all of your bridges and I've only been at it for two so the fires have only barely begun. But I still can't seem to figure it out.

I thought that it would be fun and that I would be free and that when I wanted to come back it would be easy. I thought it would just happen like magic and that I could be the person that I was before the Fall. I would tell all the other Fallen Angels who were riding on the many Greyhounds that carried us between our failures past and our failures to be that I was going to be a writer some day and they would tell me their pipe dreams but there was always this feeling in my stomach and presumably theirs that we will never make it out of this condition alive because we bear the mark of the malcontent.

No freedom here! Everything has been accounted for in "the Plan." Behind every alluring glimpse of autonomy is the crushing reality of heteronomy. Our fundamental lack of responsibility to the whole leaves us to occupy the many layers of hell whose boundaries are marked only by paperwork and the refuse of our vices. We stare in rheumy eyed disbelief that the Makers of this Plan could have built us to rebel with such a bitter punishment as a "reward" for doing what we were made to do.

Chris Arendt is a member of IVAW.