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:

Immediately upon entering, one of the prisoners, a skinny guy about my age, walked up to me, looked me in the eyes, extended his hand, and in a welcoming voice said, “Hi. My name is “John.” Now I knew I was in luck. Not only had I stumbled upon a harmonious pod, but also one which contained at least one smart inmate. If you ever go to jail, I recommend doing just what he did, and greet any unfamiliar inmate coming into your living space in exactly this way (almost any). You can learn a lot from a guy by presenting him with the option of civility. I gave this gentlemen amongst the despondent a firm handshake and said, “Hey man. I’m Mike.” Over the next two nights I ate, slept, watched TV, read a book about Marlon Brando, and talked to John. A decent conversation is hard to find in jail, and I could tell he hadn’t had one in a while. As for me, it had probably been even longer. In this town, the only class of people less worthy of respect than prisoners, are the homeless.

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

Wille, now 36, lived rough on the streets of Austin. Photograph: Jonathan Traviesa

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.”

Wille, now 36, first played music on the street in Austin at the age of 19, and he ended up spending his last two years in a ditch there because it does not snow and the attitude is fairly liberal. That, and there are drugs on the ground, everywhere. “The main reason Austin is such an ideal place for ground scoring is that it’s a college town with a heavy drinking culture. Drunk young people love to buy drugs, but they aren’t always the best at holding on to them,” Mike explains. “So not a day went by that I didn’t find a few nugs and a pack of cigarettes.”

Highly intelligent, Mike could probably hold a job despite his handicap. He was not, however, what they call in New Orleans a “fauxbeaux”— one of those grungy traveler kids who begs for change even though they have a safety net.

Mad Mike chose homelessness, feeling cast out from normal society. Since it was technically his choice, Mike held onto a strict rule against ever bothering anyone, even for a cigarette. “As a homeless person I always tried to be self-sufficient and not reliant on others,” he says. “Partly because I’d found in the past that others are not always all that reliable. Also, I don’t like it when strangers come up and ask me for things, and can only assume other people feel the same way.”

As a result, Mad Mike became a highly skilled scavenger. During an early trip to Houston, he found $700 atop a toilet paper dispenser in the bus stop bathroom. Another time he found what he estimated to be $500 worth of crack cocaine, which he intended to sell but instead smoked with his musical partner Ray Bong in a single evening. Soon after, he sniffed out a bottle of Dom Pérignon 2005 from behind a restaurant’s dumpster.

His mother gave him his first laptop. They’d reconciled somewhat in the years since Mike’s 48-year-old oilman father died of cancer in 2001, leaving his mom a rich widow. She and Mike occasionally bonded by getting drunk together, but most of these hang sessions devolved into brutal, raging arguments. She gifted him the computer, unaware that any drug Mike found, whether or not he recognized the plant or powder, Mike would ingest and write about on his blog.

Mike daily sat outside on the back steps of an Austin coffeeshop with Wi-Fi, blasting out touching and hilarious stories; as such, he possibly was the world’s first homeless blogger. His direct, pathos-driven diary entries smirked along with what most would consider an extremely rough life. Mad Mike’s economy of words and life of hardship even reminded some of Bukowski.

With his writing, he was able to provoke in readers an empathy for homelessness that most Americans do not regularly feel. And to accomplish that, he gave deeply of himself. “I mean, what did I have to lose by telling everybody everything about my life?” Mike asked me as he sat on the throne behind his brand new DW drum-kit, and lit a cigarette in what was once his mother’s living room.

Mad Mike: ‘Facebook and my blog were forums where I wasn’t judged by my financial situation.’ Photograph: Jonathan Traviesa

Mad Mike still has not told the thousands of readers who keep up with The Ground Score that he is now a multi-millionaire; he fears they will judge him differently.

“People talk so much about how Facebook is garbage, and just some cheeseball thing you shouldn’t take seriously, but … Facebook and my blog were forums where I wasn’t judged by my financial situation,” says Mike. “In Austin, people were cold to me, people didn’t look me in the eye. Women didn’t look me in the eye for years. Police would put me in jail every chance they’d get. The internet was the perfect escape.”

His first computer was quickly stolen, along with his guitar during one of his blackouts on Austin’s world-famous 6th Street. He managed to continue writing within the two hours allotted by the public library’s computers. “I’d post something in one hour, then go back later in day to see how it was received. When I wanted to get more done in a day, I’d write it all out in longhand first.”

It is tough to corroborate the stories of a homeless loner. But I’ve shared just a few degrees of separation from Mike in real life for enough years to believe his Ground Score tales. “In real life, I was a heavy drinker who rubbed people the wrong way,” said Mike. “But I always thought that if everyone could understand what I was thinking they might understand me and like me better. So hitting it big on the internet validated my feelings on that.” Fans out of nowhere also helped him live: “I’m obviously some kind of big shot artist to these guys – but then I’d look away from the screen and remember that I’m a pariah. It helped me to survive under those conditions. I made light of it in my writing,” he says, “but life in the ditch was fucking rough.”

Mike finally went against his own rule and asked his internet followers if anyone had an extra laptop he could have. His next two computers and a smartphone came from readers. “It was an amazing thing, the moment I realized I would always have a computer, just so long as I kept writing …”

A university press even reached out and offered Mike a one-book contract – which I advised him not to take because I thought his writing could touch more people than a university press could reach. Having published a couple books with universities myself, I knew that route wouldn’t lift him out of the ditch. “Hold out,” I advised him. “You could make real money with your writing.”

Soon though, money wouldn’t be a problem for Mad Mike.

Mike replaced his mom’s furniture with thousands of dollars worth of brand new musical equipment. Photograph: Jonathan Traviesa

“Three out of five of our siblings have committed suicide. Mike’s mother is the third,” says Danny Branighan, the arbiter of his sister’s will, though they’d been estranged since 2001. Danny has a turbulent relationship with his brother as well, and another sister who was so horrified to read Mike’s blog that she cut him off, and demanded he never write about her in even the most veiled of ways.

Danny’s most recently deceased sister had argued with her boyfriend, told him to leave the house, then went to sleep in the garage with the car running. “She had a will drawn up before that, but the one that she wrote that day was considered more valid, and it held up in Louisiana district court,” says Danny, who ever since has been giving Mad Mike rides and amateur legal advice. He confirms Mike will inherit $1.8m in investment money, plus his mother’s big house. “I’d have been upset if it all hadn’t gone to Mike,” he claims.

After the loss of his mother, Mike wasn’t heard from for weeks. When he resurfaced a month later, he told me that he was “very happy about the money, but I don’t like the way I got it. I wish she would have given me 10% of it and had a deeper relationship with me.”

Though still smoking weed and dabbling in other drugs – and worst of all, ripping the filters off his Pall Mall cigarettes – Mike is attempting to quit drinking. “I simply can’t afford to fuck this up, and if I’m drinking, I certainly would. Either I would waste all the money or kill myself,” he believes, pointing to his last drinking binge this past New Year’s Eve, when Danny ended up driving alcohol poisoned Mike to Tulane Hospital. “Abject poverty had kept my drinking reasonably contained,” says Mike, “but with a full bank account I tend to drink until I get sick.”

Instead, he’s indulging in music. Mad Mike immediately moved his mom’s sofa, love seat and ottoman out of the living room and replaced it with thousands of dollars worth of brand new, gorgeous musical equipment: a cherry wood Les Paul guitar and a Fender Deluxe Reverb amp; a giant, black Korg keyboard and a huge multi-channel Roland amp; a sleek, black Fender Jazz Bass; several microphones and the six-piece drum kit. As we sit around jamming, he tells me: “This morning off of eBay I ordered a $2,500 Martin acoustic guitar, a standup bass, a Deering maple Banjo, and an Irish Bouzouki Mandola.” I had to look that last one up.

He promises that now, after he buys his first car as an adult, and then helps Danny’s family pay off tens of thousands worth of debt, Mike will keep the rest of the money invested. “This looks like rash consumerism,” he recognizes, moving into the kitchen, which now serves as his recording studio’s control room. “But I am just acquiring the specific tools for my needs. I intend to spend the rest of my life writing, producing artwork, and recording music. I suppose I might even consider starting a family now that I have the resources to take care of one.”

Wanting me to try the weed he stashed out in the guesthouse, we must first cross his vast, verdant yard. The guesthouse is tiny but, with a bathroom, bed and TV, inheriting it alone would have wildly changed Mike’s life. Now, it is just another place Mike keeps weed.



I ask him if he’s worried people will treat him differently. “Oh yes, it happened immediately,” he says. “Now people invite me into their parlors, their guestrooms, they offer to let me sleep on their couch. Though this also has to do with the fact that I’m not drinking…”

Despite that he’s currently embroiled in something even more interesting than finding drugs on the ground, Mike hasn’t posted on The Ground Score since he moved in here. He did tell his followers that he’d inherited a nice house and is no longer homeless. But he fears the word “millionaire,” will alienate his fans. “They like an underdog,” he understands. “So I’m kind of nervous as to how they will react.”

He admits that the house is too distracting for blogging. “But more importantly, my family is now all really paying attention to my posts,” he says, blowing smoke in the breeze’s face. “And what I have to write about lately is stuff that would ... not offend them necessarily, but … they’re from a different lifestyle than me. To be honest I haven’t been writing because I finally care what someone thinks.”