A panhandler stood on the March Lane median amid eight lanes of traffic, holding a sign and (!) balancing a half-gallon bottle of chocolate milk on his head.

Maybe you’ve seen Jack Walcott. The 29-year-old homeless man often stands along busy Stockton streets balancing things on his head. Not just small things. Everything, from a bicycle to a pit bull.

“The last four years I’ve just been walking around Stockton with something on my head,” Walcott said when I joined him in the median. Traffic roared by on either side.

It’s no trick, Walcott said. To prove it, he removed the milk and bent over so I could inspect his skull. “I’m not faking it,” Walcott said. “I don’t have a flat head or anything.”

Walcott habitually perches small things up there, whatever he happens to be carrying. “Sodas. Coffee. Nachos. A hot dog. A dog.”

Other times he goes big. To the astonishment of passing motorists, he’s balanced a 55-gallon drum on his head. And outsized boxes full of his stuff.

Once, he salvaged a discarded 70-inch plasma-screen TV. Big as it was, you know where that TV ended up.

“It makes people smile,” Walcott said.

As we spoke, Walcott effortlessly hopped down from the median onto the street and hustled to rolled-down car windows to accept donations from drivers stopped at the red light. The milk bottle atop his head never wavered.

“It’s my Zen,” Walcott said. “It’s just kind of how I keep even when I’m in the middle of it all.”

Walcott said he honed his balance while jailed in Humboldt County at age 13. He served three years. Cell-bound, bored, he learned to stand on his head to pass the time.

Fine-tuning his balance changed his life — if not for the better, for the more colorful. One day after his release, he went to light a cigarette, though he had something in his hand. Without thinking, he placed the object atop his head, lit the cigarette and sauntered off. Only a few moments later did he remember the object still sat on his head.

A shtick was born.

Now Walcott is the city’s showiest panhandler. On the Stockton WTF Facebook page people post Walcott sightings. Walcott’s relatives chime in to say he’s a drug-addicted bum.

Walcott keeps his poise, literally. “When you’re in balance, in your zone, you can actually slow the world down. And you are the boss of something.”

Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/fitzgeraldblog and on Twitter @Stocktonopolis.