Caroline Graham
a university student living in Australia.
They say that if you draw a map of everywhere you have ever been, what you actually draw is your own face. If that is true, Jesse Houston has probably seen it all.
A careless tangle of dreadlocks falls over his weathered face. He is only 38 but time has already left its mark; the cracks on his lips, the contours etched into his cheeks, the creases in the corners of his black eyes.
I find him in the shadows of Surfers’ Paradises, amidst the hedonistic swell of Friday night pleasure-seekers. The blues his guitar is singing strikes a discord with the lurid nightclub music. It has been a slow night and there cannot be more than five dollars in the guitar case. I decide to try and strike a deal; I offer the rest of my change in return for his story. He looks at me for a while and I am afraid he is going to say no. Then his face loosens into a smile. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “It’s freezing cold and I’m dirt tired. If you can bring me a sweet, hot coffee, you can have as many stories as you care to listen to.” It’s a deal.
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Jesse is what most Australians would call ‘homeless.’ “I travel almost non-stop. I don’t have anywhere I call home, but I never feel like I don’t belong in a place,” he says. According to him, the trouble with words like ‘homeless’ is the stigma attached to them by society. “What does the word ‘homeless’ mean anyway? I always have a place to stay. I’m at home on the beach or in the parks. Sometimes I meet people who offer me a place to stay until I move on; I’m at home there, too. For me, there’s no such thing as homeless.”
Jesse left ‘home’ at 17 and has been moving ever since. He has been to more countries than I have fingers to count and has more stories than I have paper to write them on. As a teenager in a small Australian town, he was tired of watching the world through his suburban, middle-class windows. So, with nothing more than his guitar, a few changes of clothes and three crumpled photos he set off to discover a world outside those windows.
“One day I woke up and decided that I couldn’t stay any more,” he said. “I was sick of having to follow these rules all the time. People spend their whole lives walking in straight lines, accepting convention. It didn’t seem like much of a life to me.” Tired of the drab routine of high school and burning with a desire to see the world, Jesse was restless. “I wanted to do something for myself. Not for my parents or my school or my future, but for me. So I left.”
He made his way down the East coast of Australia until he reached Sydney, living off the money he had saved working in a corner store before he left. The city he found was quite unlike the glossy photographs in tourist brochures. “It was the most horrible reality,” says Jesse. “To be surrounded by people and to be completely alone. If you want to forget that life can be beautiful, spend it alone in a foreign city, with nowhere to go and nobody to go there with.”
But through the kindness of strangers, his belief in beauty was reaffirmed. A youth worker found him a place in a hostel and an elderly couple gave him casual work in their bakery. Jesse says: “I’ve always been grateful that they trusted a scared-looking street kid enough to give him a job. They were really good people.”
It took nearly two years, but he finally saved enough to buy a one-way ticket to London. Taking whatever work he could find and sleeping wherever it was warm and dry, Jesse made his way around Europe. It was an extraordinary journey through 17 counties and it would take him fifteen years to find his way back home.
Jesse doesn’t pretend that it was easy. Sometimes he was cold. Sometimes wet. At other times he was tired and hungry and desperate. There are few things he hasn’t seen; alcoholism, loneliness, fear, illness, crime and death. “I saw a guy stabbed for the bottle in his hand and five pounds in his pocket. You walk away from a sight like that a different person,” he says. “Five pounds. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Despite everything, Jesse is convinced he made the right choice. Why? “I lived,” he says. “I took life and wrung everything I wanted form it. I met so many extraordinary people, they taught me far more than a textbook or a television ever could have.”
People. Like the 40 year old lawyer he met sleeping at a train station, who gave up an annual $200 000 salary because of his contempt for society.
Or the Russian prostitute with hard eyes and bitter words, and hands whose violin playing could make the most hardened cynic cry.
And the Czech clown who hid sad eyes behind his painted face and who made hundreds of people laugh every day but never smiled himself.
There were nights that were filled with Gypsy music and philosophies shared over cheap wine. Jesse says that the homeless always have a story to tell because there is always a reason behind the way they live. Some are the unfortunate victims of circumstance; others choose to reject society’s values. Contrary to the stereotypes associated with homeless people, they are political, intelligent and a have realistic view of society. Jesse says: “The homeless see society as it is, because they have no vested interests, no attachments to it. Maybe that clarity comes from existing outside of society. Or maybe it is because they see society for what it is that they choose to exist outside it.”
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It would be easy to not to notice Jesse, strumming his guitar in the shadows, against the garish lights of Surfers’ Paradise. We are invisible.
“This is not paradise,” Jesse says, glancing at the night clubs and skyscrapers. “I’ve been looking for it all over the world and I’m telling you, you won’t find it here.” I ask him where it is and he raises one eyebrow. “If I knew, princess, I wouldn’t be sitting here in the middle of winter playing the blues to apathetic by-passers.”
For the majority of society, there is nothing remarkable about Jesse Houston. Dozens of people pass him by without a second glance. He does not exist within the confines of the reality we have built ourselves and is therefore denied a voice within that self-censoring reality. But I will never forget his story.
I stand to join the drunken throng, simultaneously intoxicated by the magic of Jesse’s stories and sobered by their truths. And as I walk away, I can’t help wondering how many people exist in the shadows of society. How many stories go untold simply because their narrators exist outside our perceptions of ‘normality’?
a university student living in Australia.
Caroline Graham
U S Legacies October 2003
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