Driving down the road in Ft Myers Beach, FL today, I saw a homeless man in soiled jeans and a long sleeve wool jacket lying on a bench baking in the Southwest Florida sun. Having just left an all-you-can-eat Sunday breakfast buffet (my weekly splurge for being on this suicidal Adkins diet), I stopped to make sure he wasn’t dead from heat stroke. As I approached him, he quickly sat up, and in an unusual twist of irony, said, “Can I help you?”

Surprised, I said, “Unless you have a comfortable sofa and a cabinet full of Prozac, I doubt it,” and I sat down beside him.

“I don’t got that,” he said, as he reached into his pocket. Thinking he was fiddling for a bottle of Mad Dog, he pulled out a crumpled box of Sun-Maid raisins. “But I do have these!” he exclaimed in a cheerful voice. “You want some?” he asked, his breath nearly rendering me unconscious.

“Sure,” I replied. But what do you say we eat them in my air-conditioned car?

“Oh no,” he said, with sweat balls trickling down his face, turning brown as they cascaded over years of baked on dirt only to settle into his nappy beard, “You don’t want me sittin’ in your car.”

“It doesn’t bother me none brother,” I told him, hoping to make him feel at ease by mirroring his lingo a bit since I couldn’t mirror his appearance. “Come on let’s get you out of this heat,” I said, as I popped the trunk and put his worldly possessions—all of two back pack sized canvas bags—inside it.

As we sat inside my 1998 Lincoln MK VIII munching on dried out gritty raisins, I turned the radio on and go figure, Marvin Gay’s—I Heard It Through the Grapevine—was playing. I started singing along and he even joined me for a minute or so before he looked at me and said, “Damn you got some soul in you brother.” Then we both busted out laughing and I said, ”Yeah, well don’t tell that to some of my Facebook friends or liberal foes, I got a hardcore conservative reputation to uphold.”

“Oh you wunna them politician people?”

“Are you kidding me?” I chuckled. “I’d be roadkill before I ever got on a ballot. What do you say we get you a good breakfast somewhere?”

Right at that moment, you would have thought I told him his mother died as the jovial mood quickly dissipated. ”I ain’t got no money for that” he said with his head pointed towards the floorboard. “Sides, they ain’t lettin’ no people like me in there.” Then he lifted his head and looked me straight in the eye and proudly proclaimed, “I used to be a millionaire. I used to have furniture stores. I sold peoples furniture for them, and I sold overstock that the big companies would sell me for cheap. That was back thirty years ago.”

“Oh yeah?” I replied, “I used to be a millionaire too. Are you working anywhere now?” I asked him.

“Oh no!” he quickly replied, “can’t get my stamps if I do that.”

“Do you wanna be a millionaire again?” I inquired.

“Man, I’m 68 years old. Been on Welfare since I went bust in the early eighties. Soon as I made some money, they took my stamps and I couldn’t see the doctor no more.”

“So you chose food stamps and medicaid over reaching for your new dreams?” I replied.

“I got used to them,” he said.

“Yeah, you got addicted to it, didn’t you? You became a product of the state.”

“What you mean?”

Once you got hooked on those food stamps and medicaid, the fear of losing that security blanket from the government became greater than your desire to become an entrepreneur again, didn’t it?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “that stuff’s bad on the brain. It screwed me up on the inside for a lot of years. I wanted to start another furniture business and make a lot of money again, but my mother and my friends kept saying, you ain’t gonna get your stamps and medicine no more if you keep making money. They was trying to help me, but they was wrong. It was too late by the time I realized it. Then I just said the hell with it. It ain’t nothin’ to be proud of, but at this age I just have to survive. The system is all fucked up, I mean all fucked up. It’s taken’ good people and screwing with their heads.”

“Forgive me for saying this,” I said, “but that’s when you got castrated, figuratively speaking.”

“Yeah, I got used to it and lots a years went by so fast, I ain’t got no choice no more,” he replied.

“Wow! You have no idea how badly I wish President Obama and the rest of the country could hear you say that. I mean no disrespect, but you are exactly who Barack Obama and the progressive socialists wanna turn Americans into—a socialist nanny state where people lose their desire, their edge, and their entrepreneurial spirit. They become completely dependent on the government.”

“So how did you go broke, brother?” he asked.

“A confluence of events,” I replied. “Lost a few million in the stock market, a few million more in the casinos, blew a few bucks on the wrong women, gave some money to the wrong people, got behind a few million in income taxes, my business bled for the last three years of operation, and the federal government was hell bent on putting my rags to riches butt out of business instead of settling my debt for a percentage of what I owed them.”

“Motha Fuckas!” he shouted in disgust. “You was a multi-millionaire! And now you ain’t got nothing?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I got this car, these clothes and a few more back at the shack; I got a hell of a woman, a hell of a son, two incredible dogs, and a hell of a loving God! But you know what I really have, brother?”

Puzzled, he said, “What’s that?”

“My edge. My hunger. My drive. And I refuse to let the federal government and medicaid take that away from me. I’m prone to addictive tendencies, and that’s one addiction I refuse to acquire. It’s all about freedom. If I gave into there enticing entitlements, I’d be handing them my balls in a box. It would be psychological suicide, the castration of my cojones, the neutering of my nuts, and that’s exactly what they’re banking on.”

“You gotta a unique way of explaining shit,” he said. “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

“So, are you a radio man or something?”

“Holy Cow!” Are you a psychic?”

“No man, your back window say Titan of Talk Radio.”

“Yeah, well, not yet, but I’m working on it. I always aim for the stars, that way if I hit the moon, I didn’t do half bad, but yes, I have a weekly internet radio show.”

“Well, how you ain’t got no money, then?”

“Right now, it’s just a labor of love to help keep the majority of Americans from falling into the same trap you fell into thirty years ago. Only now, it’s a lot more prevalent and a hell of a lot worse. I do offer advertising and sponsorship opportunities for companies and businesses, but there is one thing people love a lot more than family or God.”

“What’s that?”

“Their money!”

“I ain’t made no money in years,” he said with a defeatist attitude.

“So you broke and still refuse to get your stamps?”

“That’s right. I answered. “With the little bit of money I earn at the moment, I fall below the poverty level. I’m qualified to receive medicaid and every social welfare program federal and state governments have to offer.

“Why ain’t you takin’ at least something?”

“For the same reason Eve shouldn’t have eaten the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s like I said, I’m not handing them my balls in a box, at least not freely. I use the VA in case I get sick or need medical care, but that’s only because I’m a Marine Corps veteran. If I was to take stamps or anything else, it would be equivalent to hitting a crack pipe for the very first time. Chances are good I’d be addicted for life.”

“You ain’t lying,” he said. “The shit just fucks up your whole life. It’s like a damn drug. Guess it’s my alcohol since I don’t drink.”

“Exactly! Would you want me or anyone else that’s been laid off, gotten fired or filed bankruptcy to make the same decision you did thirty years ago?” He momentarily bowed his head in disgrace and again nodded, no.

“I appreciate your honesty partner, and you know what?”

“What?” he mumbled.

“It’s a new day and you got a new friend.”

“I don’t have no friends and I don’t want no friends.”

I knew that was a self-preserving response, probably from years of being disappointed or otherwise let down by various people, and I respected that.

“Fair enough,” I replied. “Can I buy you breakfast?”

“You can drop me off at 7-Eleven down the highway and buy me one of them cold sandwiches.”

“How about a real breakfast at a sit-in air conditioned restaurant?” I suggested.

“I can’t.”

“How come?”

“I’d get too sick. I have a sandwich once in while and eat my raisins. But if I eat a whole plate of food, I get too sick. Can’t chew nothin’ hard no how.”

“When was the last time you ate a whole plate of food?”

“Bout nine years. Air condition make me sick too. Being around a lotta other people makes me nervous. Can’t get sick. No sir, can’t get sick.” he repeated emphatically.

I drove him to the 7-Eleven. When we got there, I gave him a five dollar bill that he quickly stuffed into the side pocket of his grease smeared jacket. When I told him I had another five dollars worth of quarters in my console, he pulled out his coin sack—three or four worn out layered plastic sandwich baggies made into a piggy bank. Upon dropping the quarters in it, I watched in amazement, as he held it up like you would a goldfish at a carnival and just marveled at the sunlight illuminating his new gotten silver coins.

He then thanked me and walked around to the back of the car where I had popped the trunk to retrieve his life’s possessions. When he closed it, he hesitated for a second before coming around to the driver’s side door.

“CatchKevin.com, huh?”

“That’s me,” I replied.

“Glad, I caught Kevin today,” he said, before he briskly walked into the 7-Eleven.

“Godspeed, brother” I uttered at him . . .

“Godspeed!”

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