Ollie is a homeless man, a drug addicted homeless man, who lives in my neighbourhood. He is in his mid- forties and is physically extremely healthy. Ollie's vitality gives him the endurance, the requisite endurance to pursue his addictions. Ollie is childlike and has an innocence about him. There is a boyish innocence about him as though his development was arrested in the primary school years. His desires are a child's desires and so they seem innocent. Ollie himself is blameless. His desire for meth is as a child's desire for chocolate, the meth doing for him what the sugar used to. He is fashionable and you can see that how he presents himself, his grooming, is important to him. He dresses in a unique, idiosyncratic style. Finely cut trousers, Italian slip on leather shoes, stylish but incongruous shirts. I wonder where does he get those clothes? But Ollie is homeless so everything is horribly wrinkled and given his childishness and lack of practicality, given the absence of any domestic sensibility, as in the use of washing machines, of course Ollie always looks a little scattered, a little like he just got out of bed and is in need of help, in need of a grown up's help. I suspect that Ollie was raised in a house with a maid, with a nanny, I really do. Call it an intuition but that level of impracticality just doesn't make sense otherwise. Imagine Oliver Reed playing homeless, with complexity, gravitas, light, heavy, deep and innocent all at once, that's Ollie. I don’t know Ollie’s real name. I really like him.
Oliver Reed from Wiki Commons - minus the mo tho
Sometimes I see Ollie in the morning on my way to work at the bottom of our street. If given the opportunity he likes to talk, he likes to chat, excitedly, manically, about what is happening in his life, about his travails. I have learned from our short conversations that his mother is on the Australian Meth Council - is there really such a government body? Once he told me about how he was beaten up by some young thugs on drugs who stole something important to him, something that he was dearly missing if only he could remember. He showed me the bruises and was dismayed.
Ollie often carries a classical guitar, a cheap one, a sort of busking device, a busking prop. He doesn't play the guitar though, he just gently flicks his thumb at the strings not bothering with the fret board and is deeply entranced by the suggestive reverberations so produced. He whispers and chants along, a mumbled invented language, so earnest, so entranced. One time I saw him in one of these busking stupors, sitting on an orange milk crate quietly chanting and tapping the guitar strings and I stopped to give him a few coins. “There you go mate.” There was a glimmer of gold as I handed the coins over, gold evening twilight. Ollie looked up. “I'm wearing green cords” he says to which I respond “You look great!” This brings a boyish smile and he pepps up and guffaws and smiles, cheekily. He then goes on to tell me about his last busking attempt, about how he had told them all, all the kids, at some place before, near the supermarket, about Brett Whiteley and everything, about how he wasn't a heroin addict, about how he loved his guitar. “Let me busk!” he had pleaded with the authorities that had forced him to move on. You see how he just dropped in that reference to Brett Whiteley? What's with that? There is something remarkable about Ollie, something unexpected.
Anyway here is my little story about Ollie. I am walking home after work one evening, distracted by my own woes, no biggie but I was a tad down and not in my best form. I’m walking along with aching feet, it's a long walk, when I hear a gravelly warm voice singing one of my all time favourite songs. Nick Drake’s Northern Sky from his superb Bryter Layter album. The voice is full, the rendition first class, what an interpretation. Like Micah P Hinson’s The Times They Are A Changing, such pathos, or Bill Fay’s I Hear You Calling. I seek the performer, up a side alley generously decorated with graffiti, profanities and colour ablaze on grey alley walls. The player sits alone in the gutter singing and strumming, strumming and singing, to the deepening dusk. Ollie. Wow. It's Ollie! I sit down beside him in the gutter and close my eyes and lose myself in his heartfelt rendition. A tear wells in my eye and I'm no softie! When he finishes, he must have repeated the song a few times, when he finally finishes he puts his arm on my shoulder and says in his boyish, excited way “I’ve gotta go! I'll be late!” He gets up and disappears into the young night. Thanks Ollie! Who are you Ollie?
I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree…
I haven't seen Ollie for quite a while now. Six months or so. I hope he's okay.
Postscript
I just saw Ollie, less than a day after my post! No joke! He was looking great! Aaah life, amazing.