Mad Mike, the homeless blogger who became a millionaire overnight

Missing the Austin ditch in which he’d slept most nights for the last two years, Mike Wille curled up on the front lawn of the large house his mother had just left him via her suicide note. Her death meant that Mike – known to fans of his street music and his homelessness blog, The Ground Score, as Mad Mike the Hippy Bum – would soon be a millionaire. Mad Mike worried that, given his love of drink and drugs, he could not survive such a lifestyle shift.

At birth, Mike’s left leg was shorter than his right by an inch, with no defined calf muscle and an under-formed foot sans big toe. When I visited his mother’s former home near New Orleans recently, he showed me a box of family papers he’d unearthed regarding the lengthening of his leg by the famous doctor Gavriil Ilizarov, who invented the procedure.

Still, the bum leg helped Mike nurture a negative outlook that, once he became teenager, fractured his relationship with his already volatile parents. “My mother was a fairly erratic person. Sometimes extremely benevolent and generous, other times scathingly cruel,” Mike told me. “When I was in the seventh grade, she tried to kill herself in front of me because I got a D in history and I said I didn’t care. Later we found her passed out in the garage with the car running and my dad freaked out, showing more emotion than I’d ever seen out of him.

“Things came to a head when I was 17 and had a fist fight with my dad, causing him to have me arrested. This was my first time in jail,” says Wille, who immediately moved out of his house. Mike has more recently written exquisitely about subsequent trips to jail (most for public intoxication) at The Ground Score:

Thanks to his blog, Mike received fan mail from Scotland, New Zealand, Latvia and the Ukraine. To a homeless bum, this meant everything.

Mike’s deceased mother’s house, a nicely appointed junior McMansion 45 minutes east of New Orleans, represents the first roof over Mike’s head in four years. Mad Mike spent the last 15 years blowing back and forth from Texas to his home state of Louisiana, surfing both couches and park benches.

I met him in New Orleans where he played music in the French Quarter – songs like I Love the Devil and Money For Drugs, which he’d specially designed to make shocked tourists pause. “But after I got them to stop I’d get them to listen to a more substantial song,” Mike clarifies, “usually getting them to tip more money or buy an album in the process.”

For detail study : http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/24/mad-mike-homeless-blogger-millionaire