 | Gish's JournalI'm 27 years old and have lived on the streets since I was 6 years old. Three months ago I moved into Rebeccas Community 'Hospitality House.' This website chronicles my life journey through foster care, homelessness, drug addiction, prison and my new life off drugs and off the streets. |
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If I died who would mourn me? My life changed a lot when I lost Opium; he committed suicide by jumping on the over head wires at a train station after his girlfriend of three years Jannette left him for another guy. I never knew he was that in love with her, I don't think she did either because she committed suicide three months later at the same spot by overdose. I dealt with the loss by going out at night and doing crime till I dropped from exhaustion, the amount of times I was nearly caught because I was too tired to run or I fell asleep midway through a job was insane. Over the twenty years I have lived on the streets I have lost a lot of my friends to suicide or overdose, the list would be to long for me to write, some have been murdered and others were lost through accident. I have lost so many of my friends in fact that I have often wondered when my number would come up, a pretty morbid way to spend a day. I have met so many new streetie's that are so young and they all think that they are bullet proof or that they are to smart to get addicted to drugs I felt like slapping them in the head. The problem is they never listen to friendly advice, the universal problem with all kids is they all think they are smarter then the ones who have seen it before and know what the warning signs are. I never gave up on a lot of them though; I would always be there if and when they needed some advice or just a shoulder to cry on. The ones I gave up on were the ones who were going to take me along with them down the road to self destruction and I have to much respect for myself to allow that to happen. It still hurts though, watching someone you care about kill themselves day by day and knowing there isn't anything you can do to stop them. I was eventually caught as all criminals are and I must admit that it was my own stupid fault for giving the keys to a brand new Porsche, one of seven that I had stolen that night, to the girl I was staying with at the time so she could drive to work that day. She got pulled over by the police for driving a car with no registration and no number plate. Who do you think she told them had given her the car? It certainly wasn't Santa Clause! I was seventeen and I knew that I was going to prison when the judge said that the police knew that me and my brother were responsible for 80% of the car thefts in the inner city area only they couldn't prove it so as a message to other would be car thief's he sentenced me to three years jail and recommended that I serve at least two thirds before being eligible for parole. I didn't get my parole date. All up I served two years eight months and three days out of my three year sentence. Not bad for a first conviction. This really had an impact on how I viewed the system. I mean I had been getting fucked over by the system since before I could talk so why should it have made all that big a difference when it came to the law. I had always been pretty antisocial because of the kind of life I led but after being treated the way I was by the people who I thought were there to try and tell me how my life was wrong and what to do to fix myself instead of locking me up and giving me nothing in the way of help or assistance to start leading a normal life. I figured my opinion on people and society was justified, they didn't like me and I hated them even more. I was nineteen by the time I got out of prison and that's when I met Jestar for the first time. A person who would change my life more then I ever would have imagined. Jestar - where to begin? I first met him at B.Y.S. a youth service in Fortitude Valley, and I knew the moment I laid eyes on him that he was what I had been looking for.
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