by Matt Hanson

originally published in Flak Magazine

            You're cold. Shivering. Your legs pump back and forth, trying in vain to generate heat. Your feet are cracked and aching, fingers turning to steel. You can feel your breath leave your body as you wait, exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke without actually smoking though in all likelihood you've already gone through a few already and it's only 6 p.m. Two hours past, three more to go. You're standing at a stranger's door, having just rung the doorbell twice. You jiggle your clipboard in anticipation. You are wearing an official T-shirt in an odd color with a large logo affixed. You feel vaguely ridiculous and very much alone. There's a small tinge of hope mixed in, however. You've seen whole nights of labor redeemed in a minute and a half. You've also gone home hungry and resentful, beggin' cup empty, to take the long subway ride back to the office feeling more than a little like Mr. Willy Loman. You've got $65 in checks and small bills in your pocket, quota is a hundred and twenty. You were behind quota yesterday, and the day before, but three days ago you raised two hundred dollars — a great night, a splendid night, a "hot night!" You need to be on quota for the week. You really need to be on quota for the week. 

            He's got a nice house, large and stately, though not overly ostentatious. Someone raises a family here. Through the window you can see the warm lamplight humming over the bookcase and stereo. It looks promising, luminous. You hear dinner sounds. You've come to know the small roar and crackle of highway cars echoing in the distance. You feel a little bit like an actor auditioning for the same role in the same play for the thirteenth time in a row. It's a nice neighborhood. Three or four streets will be your turf for the night. You've never been here before and you will most likely never return, but this block will become a microcosm of the world until quitting time. The location is decided from a general aggregate of voter data. There is, contrary to public suspicion, little interest in targeting specific persons. Not everyone is friendly, not everyone is on-board with the cause. Not very many people are actually glad to see you... 

            You have an interesting job. You meet more people in a day (even superficially) than most do in a month. You shake hands, you goof with children, you look strangers in the eye and talk directly into them. You catch glimpses of fascinating (utterly fictitious) backstory in a sideways glance or a casual gesture. You catch glimpses of a real person's life: family, spouse, income, livelihood, opinions, politics. And this is what happens with the dozen or so faces you greet every night. You have met all manner of fellow citizenry, all races, colors and creeds: middle aged Portuguese men who live with their mother, angry black urban youths, octogenarian Jewish grandmas, ancient Irish union men, embarrassingly friendly Albanian couples, Latino housewives, Russian twenty-somethings who followed their boyfriends from Moscow to the States. Self- described relatives of Lord Byron and Winston Churchill. You meet upstart yuppies with popped collars and spiked hair, hippies, churchies, fuckups, fat men, rednecks, soldiers, students, carpenters, cops, millionaires, doctors, lawyers, bartenders and some of the most undeniably gorgeous fellow citizens you have ever laid your eyes on. You flirt. You fall in love at least once a day. 

            The work is physical. You clamber down icy stairways, through the mazes of steeply winding streets, up twenty foot porches, hills, walking everywhere all the time. You sweat, you lose weight, you're profoundly glad to sit down at the end of the day. Your boss has been known to wrap her feet in plastic bags, under the shoe, during snowstorms (and yes, you do canvas in snowstorms). You exhaust yourself. You have the distinct sensation of having really earned your paycheck, savored it, since what it essentially amounts to is a pile of shekels in your beggin' cup. This is enhanced by the fact that the amount of said shekels fluctuates without mercy. You do, after all, walk alone at night for hours, convincing people to give you money. 

            It can suck. It can suck unbelievably, and in ways you could never have imagined and that only fellow canvassers can really understand. People, quite simply, are assholes. You know this from consistent experience. You will never forget it. You have been lied to directly (Your wife was home! I saw her in the hallway!), patronized ("I just think it's WONDERFUL that you're out here! I love seeing idealistic young people getting out there and DOING SOMETHING! Ooooh, no, sorry... I don't have any money."), condescended to ("I am not sure you realize, young man, how the Edwards campaign has utilized the polyglot dynamics of the contemporary socio-political hegemonic realm...") and demonized ("Off my lawn, faggot"!). You have literally had hundred of doors slammed in your face. You have been told — exasperatingly — simply to get a better job. Incidentally, the last parenthetical was an actual quote, recounted by a comrade who came back to the office one night pale as a ghost on account of its being uttered by a man in a rage who was indeed gesturing with a knife. Local cops make up stories and kick you out of their neighborhood for spite. This is particularly true in the more upscale neighborhoods. You are yelled at; you are scolded. Some people snottily demand identification, as if the neon shirt and nametag and clipboard weren't proof enough. You get the police called on you at least once a month. You are not welcome here. 

            The main suck is this: The people who'd love to give, want to give, are in fact just dying to give, but who won't give to you. This is the ache, the fly in the ointment, the perennial pain in the ass. If you're given to introspection or insecurity, it will drive you mad. The beast can take many forms. You have heard every excuse in the book and do not believe a word of any of them: we have no money, we have no checkbook, we have no pen, we aren't citizens, we don't get involved in this stuff, we don't do door to door, we'd rather do it online (roast in hell for that one!) we don't do it by phone, we don't do it in the mail, we would not could not with a box, we would not could not with an ox. At these moments, you swear on all that is holy that when the inevitable canvasser comes to the door in the future you will not only invite them in but feed them, smoke them up and immediately give them everything you have. 

            Your scorn is focused on one very special assertion: "We're eating dinner." This is the unkindest cut of all. God forbid you interrupt a dinnertime! You hate it because it is so transparently hollow. You are dying to scream at the top of your lungs. You want to say: I know what time it is. I know you've worked hard all day. I respect that. I get it. Believe it or not, I'm working too. It's not shabbas and it ain't Christmas. It's a Tuesday. This is the time when everyone's home. You're most likely munching take out and distractedly watching SportsCenter. This isn't Rwanda. You will eat again, I promise. We are not as much of an intrusion (honestly we're not) as you would like to make yourself believe. (Everyone loves to be annoyed these days. It's a sign of sophistication). I am not a solicitor, by the way. I have no vacuum cleaner. The transaction will take three to five minutes, tops. It's not that complicated. You'll be glad you did it. You said, after all, that you liked what we do. 

            This is the rub. This is why dinner hurts. It reeks of apathy and the armchair radical. It's redolent of the kind of flippantly cynical, solipsistic, desultory approach to the outside world that is so readily applied to the current rising generation (not without warrant, of course) when there is more than enough shallowness and cynicism and cheap sarcasm to go around. People love to have opinions about politics. They just don't like to think about politics all that much. You find yourself in a position where you are called on to justify positions you yourself don't like, on account of the situation. Idealism gets sidelined to pragmatics. You find yourself thinking "Yes, sweetie, I know the Democrats haven't been as vigilant as they should have been in doing X or not doing X but you know what? Politics is the art of the compromise (don't I know it!) Give up now, go back to dinner and the whole game is lost. The bullshit has got to stop. Write the check. Sign the petition. It's about numbers. And the good guys are always outnumbered. We need to win the next election, pure and simple. We need good drinking water. We need these things. If we don't get ourselves out of the dining room the possibility of real change shrinks ever smaller and there's less and less of a chance for something even remotely close to the America we dream of to actually happen." 

            Nobody gives it to you. You have to earn it. Turn away in disgust and the enemy votes twice. And besides, isn't there someone always complaining about how the corporate behemoth fat cats who rule this planet are buying up elections and politicians by the handful? Guess who dictates policy then? And doesn't that make you mad? Don't you think it ought to stop? Why won't someone do something about it? If only there were a better way! Here, take a look at my clipboard. 

            It's not that not everyone donates (no one would ever expect that) but that there are people who don't donate because they feel that it's somehow beneath them. It's an unglamorous, ungainly, inelegant way to fuel the democratic process. Wearing top hats and sitting next to the celebrity of your choice is so much more chic. Canvassers get treated like they do because they are living reminders of the nagging possibility of actual change. How else, pray tell, do Barack Obama or Ron Paul get their instant karma in the media and get to rock the collective electoral vote for at least a little while? It's the grassroots, stupid! We are, each of us, the scrappy little reminders of the Silent Majority that there is more to life than quietly eating one's dinner and grousing about The Way Things Oughta Be. 

            Sometimes, though, you get dinner. The gig is not without its perks. It is very rewarding. You have been fed sumptuous free meals by good people who want nothing more than to sit down and get to talking about what's really going on in the world today. They give you water. They give you gloves. They give you books. They let you in to warm up and have a rest. You aren't supposed to drink on the job but damn it, I'll have it if you are. You have sat for an hour with a jovial family on summer vacation in the Vineyard and been poured 18-year-old scotch in tiny glasses. You've had money and sparkling repartee tossed your way amid a porch full of Christmas lights and people genuinely enjoying the presence of a new friend. On a warm summer night you drank obscure Jamaican rum that tasted like sugar cane and melted bananas, free cigar in hand, looking out over the city lights and ruminating with your host. You've been given bars of Swiss chocolate by a wonderful old lesbian couple whose children recruited you to play dragon wizard. You've met people who gave you money they themselves signified as being "hard earned" without a trace of attitude or self-importance. You look at their hands and you know they mean it. You've seen cleaning ladies give you all the money in their pockets. Once, a gaggle of junior high school girls went peeking through the doorway on the afternoon of the junior prom and handed you lilies, giggling and running away. You've sat and spilled your guts (usually after a breakup) to obliging strangers who, after having taken in your tale of woe, decided to write you out a check after all — and get their spouses in on it, too. Cheer up, kid. You can do better. 

            You've got stories worth telling. Moments that you cannot describe. There's no feeling like asking for a large amount of money from a stranger and actually getting it. Nailing it. You can feel yourself saying the words but it's like this rhythm is going through you, the way a great speaker will connect with you in sound, expression and gesture (it's very musical) and as you deliver for the umpteenth time you somehow achieve this strange balance of absolute confidence with absolute calm. You watch people automatically open their wallets, walk off to get their checkbook, nod a bit and sign the paperwork almost in a daze. After all, you asked them too. Some people have this sort of power just pouring out of them, some people never really have it. But in time you learn to cultivate it, like any skill, and you too can make a living asking strangers for money. And if you can do this, what else could you do? 

            The clunking sound of footsteps breaks your reverie. You snap awake. You lean back, square your shoulders, shake your pen, ready your clipboard. You run your hand through your hair. Oddly enough, the feeling is very much what its like to ask someone for a date. You get butterflies! You are at this moment about to do your job. You are not (usually) a volunteer. You are by design part gypsy, part salesman and part politician. You are an idealistic young person who's gotten off the proverbial couch and actually "done something" about "it." You are a gnat, buzzing in the ears of the hoi polloi. You are a part of something bigger than yourself. You are tired, humble, broke, energetic and improvisational. You are, if nothing else, and in the face of everything else, an activist.