Yesterday, on Halloween, the House voted to formalize
the Peach Inquiry. Stephen Colbert makes it sound
true and funny even when I mishear him. But right
now I’d much rather be watching the Nickelodeon
channel than The Late Show on my Chromebook. I
wonder aloud if I can stream it. Nickelodeon. But I
quickly move forward from that thought because I can-
not turn off Stephen Colbert. (My best friend often asks,
punningly, Why don’t you marry him? To which
I give him a glare, tell him he’s married, and remind
him that he’s a Sunday School teacher, to boot.) Then
begins a riff in the monologue about when Rudy Giuliani
butt-dialed an NBC journalist. The problem is we need
some money, coming in loud and clear. Then, We need
a few hundred thousand. And I think, Corruption be
damned, so do I. Only, realistically, I need only one thou-
sand. If I’m being really realistic, I need about two; just
two of those thousands. But Stephen Colbert seems to
want to stall my efforts, or so YouTube keeps telling me
(using Colbert’s voice, of course). Then I remember
how different (and similar?) this is to when I’d actually
panhandle online when I was homeless. I was homeless.
This still hits me like an exclamation point. The ramifi-
cations of that fact seem to never end. Homelessness.
Online. Panhandling. Online homeless panhandling
seems infinite to me. I am in the moment, so it might as
well seem endless. What can be eternally noted, I believe
is that two of those words kept the other from what I can
only assume would have been something this weak soul
could not have endured. Not to get to this lovely little room
in which I now exist (watching The Late Show), on what I
lovingly call the seediest couple of blocks in town...well...
this San Francisco story might be completely different.
And probably unnoted, unnoticed, not even a footnote
would be left of all of — what my pink heart-shaped tin
full of pennies says: MY DREAM HAS JUST BARELY
STARTED — of me and my dream. Dreams, more acc-
urately. But tonight I am only thinking of one dream,
which is a combination of several dreams when it comes
down to it. The dollars I need now are for a burgeoning
business, and not a bed indoors somewhere. Note to
self. I had strategy. I always had that. But back-up
plans? They have always been a bit too rare. Sure,
I had a job I loved. But it only lasted a month, due
apparently to no fault of my own. I was but a pawn.
Business. Where are my bargaining chips this time?
Do I have any left? I think too hard that I do not. I
am generally quiet now about my homeless past,
but if a question occurs in conversation that needs
it brought up, I am quite open; not so quiet. I walk
around town as if everyone knows. I type a cover
letter as if everyone already knows. I write this
poem as if everyone knows. And if you do not,
you do now, right? All I know at the moment is
I must come up with a few dollars or I lose my
new business, which wasn’t always mine, not
until I lost all of my money on a romantic getaway;
until I gambled away my future, or at least several
years of it (hopefully, not my final several years!).
And this time my actions make me only one of the
losers. I try to be excited about the future. I usually
am. I was, even during most of the worst of the past
five years or so. Yet I must take this tiny org chart
of mine into the next month, and the next year,
and so on. I am so ready to five-year plan the
hell out of it that it hurts. Because I need over
a thousand dollars in cash. I used to raise more
than this quite swiftly when I was homeless. And
boy was it comfort. It was survival, too. But there
was always this dirty feeling I had just for asking.
So much so that I would almost always ask a bit too
late for it to help as much as it could have. These
days, I walk past (and over) my old colleagues at
the shelter, familiar sidewalk figures. They need
a thousand dollars much more than I do. I could
say the same of the majority of the world’s popul-
ation, I presume. This is a way to bridge the gap,
I think, and wonder exactly what I mean by what
I just said out loud. Making good on doing some-
thing after managing my way through that. It
makes it hard to find the gusto to do anything
that is not giving a thousand dollars to anyone
I see who I think needs it. But I need the money.
And I mean it. And, not one to feel guilty for much
of anything in this life — for any extended duration
of time, anyway — my stomach is now twisted into
knots and I cannot bring myself to begin. Panhandling.
Well, this pen says without my uttering one single word,
let’s put down our pity and put out a plan of action!
To which Stephen Colbert responds, What else is there to do?
