What I have settled on now is mostly insurance by name alone. For around $350, I have a shitty HMO that doesn’t give me much in the way of options of doctors; the visits cost far more than they should, the deductible is too high, and the drugs that used to be cheap for me are no longer covered. God forbid I get cancer, but if that were to happen—it’s surely happened to enough people in my age group at this point—I would basically take that garbage insurance and use it to access doctors in the Texas Medical Center, where you would want to be if the worst should happen. I will turn to GoFundMe to cover the rest—like so many others. I am not being facetious. It’s the best I can do for right now until I meet the requirements to join a union that would provide insurance. Or marry someone—preferably in the military. I’d say a rapper, but a lot of them don’t have health insurance at all.
When I’ve tried to explain my situation in the past, many have barked back something about the subsidies associated with Obamacare. Yeah, about that: If you make even 3 cents over the median U.S. income, ya ain’t getting naan subsidy. Guess who makes way more than the subsidies but doesn’t make nearly enough to afford these ridiculous private health insurance plans plus my private student loans, credit card debt, rent, cable, internet, and free condoms they hand out every Pride?
A public option would have at least provided an opportunity for better for less. Joe Lieberman isn’t dead yet, but I hope someone taps me to write his obituary. I’ll praise his speaking voice for its “White Barry White” teases, but his vindictiveness and poor judgment will catch these words.
Like any aging person, my body has turned on me.
My stomach truly antagonizes the everlasting hell out of me. Do I have IBS? Or is it the copious amounts of caffeine I drink all day, every day, in order to work obsessively to cover my ass (barely) and not turn into a blob of a man? I made the mistake of going to WebMD to see what my symptoms suggested. At last count, I believe I died four years ago. Everyone can appreciate a strong digestive system, but not one that acts like it’s on speed. I don’t even like hearing about gas much less bowel movements, but this shit can derail my day and I want to scream for a solution.
Not often but sometimes, there is a pain. Whenever it gets too unbearable, I go to urgent care. That’s pretty much my health care now: When something gets too unbearable for my high threshold of pain, I go to urgent care, and complain about the bill months later because it wasn’t so expensive only a few years ago.
The last time I went to urgent care, the doctor tried to diagnosis me with syphilis. I don’t know if there was a language barrier—perhaps my country twang was too much for this Black woman who spoke like Gabrielle Union doing an impersonation of Lindsay Lohan’s weird British accent—but I told her that no, a dick had not been inside me recently. I didn’t want to get into sexual politics, just for her to tell me what the lick reads on this pain.
For the life of me, I will never get why some doctors want me to have syphilis so much. This had already happened several years before in Los Angeles. Now, in Harlem, Dr. Girl, I Hate You is trying to once again give me this diagnosis, despite me explaining to her that I have not been in anything lately and nothing has been in me. She prescribed some medicine that my latest terrible insurance plan didn’t cover, but the state had some discount program for one of the drugs in particular—it was expensive with the discount, but much worse without. I should call the medical board. I still don’t know the root of my gastrointestinal problems, but I know if I die like Elvis Presley, I will return as a ghost and haunt a lot of pawns of the health insurance industry. I hope loperamide abuse isn’t a major health concern.
And oh bitch, do I have arthritis already? These long-ass arms have been folded up like a Tyrannosaurus rex’s for a decade in my work for the content factory, and they are finding new and interesting ways of pushing me toward greater consideration of writing by way of voice notes and dictation.
In the midst of all of this, I try to lead what I consider to be a holistic approach in the wake of my health insurance woes.
I try to eat healthy or healthy-enough most of the time. I repeat the following prayer as I season my food: “Please don’t get hypertension! Please don’t get hypertension!” I can’t be getting strokes and heart attacks. I can’t be getting the sugar either, so I try to drink my alcohol straight.
Meanwhile, I don’t get as low when I dance as I used to. My friend Maiya once said, “It will be a sad day when Mike doesn’t get low anymore, because that’ll mean we’re getting old.” I tell people that I no longer dance like a stripper trying to cover rent for three people, because I am a classy author now. That’s true to an extent, but I also saw what happened when Janet Jackson and Britney Spears both hurt their knees. Janet has managed to recuperate over the years, but even she knows when to fall back and let the younger dancers carry her legendary weight. I can still get low, but I haven’t done yoga enough to really drop it with confidence. As much as I aspire to be able to dance like Jennifer Lopez in the second half of life, one false pop and drop and I could end up with a walker. It’s not worth the risk right now.
I no longer let my friends back home take me anywhere that might end in me running from gunshots. Thankfully, I do enough cardio to be able to run from gunshots, but better safe than sorry. You can get shot anywhere in America, though, so I may have to stop going outside altogether soon.
I am not the only one taking precautions to prevent as much peril as possible.
A writer friend of mine told me she employs a similar strategy. “I ask God to protect my arm every time I cook mac and cheese,” she said. But she is dealing with far more serious consequences with her health. “My mama still asking what meds I’m taking to manage lupus and I laugh and tell her to get Twinkie and Dorinda Clark every time.”
She once asked if I play “Pray You Catch Me” whenever I season my chicken with Tony Chachere’s. I like Tony Chachere’s, but I can feel my heart wobbling to Big Freedia whenever I use it, so we’ve had to have a conscious uncoupling. I have not broken it off completely with Popeyes. Spicy chicken strips are my sanctuary, but I gotta go, I gotta leave. It’s not them. It’s me.
This is all as hilarious as it is pitiful. We do our best.
I remember one of the last doctors I saw regularly, Dr. Choi, warning me that my stress and depression often sounded like they were the root of many of my problems. She suggested therapy. I told her I would do that when I could afford it and asked for my generic prescription of Celexa in the meanwhile. As much as I would love to address past trauma with a medical professional, my goal in the interim is to stay relatively healthy and, more than anything, functional.
I am fully aware that therapy would benefit me, but I tried to get therapy way back when I was nineteen or twenty. I asked my mom if she could help me find a person to talk to about some of my problems. The person I met was a white guy that was dismissive. I wasn’t sure if it was because I didn’t explain myself well enough or what. In hindsight, his dismissal of me and the concerns I had about myself—the depression, the highs and lows, etc.—could be attributed to him presumably not knowing what to do with some lanky Black kid trying to explain that he wrestles with the occasional uncontrollable and uncontainable sadness even when he has a smile on his face—like the day he met him.
I do wonder what might have happened had he listened to me. I think the same about Dr. Choi. I didn’t know a lot about PrEP, but I was curious about a drug that might be able to protect me from HIV infection. As someone who grew up fearing AIDS, of course I felt it a good idea to ask about it. She asked me a few questions and ruled that based on my responses, I wasn’t an ideal candidate. I guess I wasn’t fucking enough at the time. But as someone Black and interested in men sexually, aren’t I “high risk” by default?
I bet my insurance didn’t cover it anyway, and the drug remains far too expensive to be accessible. The average cost of PrEP is $1,989.57 per month. It’s cheaper to die, no? During his second State of th
e Union Address, Donald Trump announced his plan to end the HIV epidemic by 2030—making PrEP part of that strategy. Yet it costs too much, and on top of that, Republicans continue to make it their goal to undermine if not flat-out dismantle the already imperfect Affordable Care Act, with no real alternative or plan to replace it with.
So the same way I pray over my food as I season it, I say a silent prayer before I . . . enjoy an edible arrangement. And protection. But prayer on top of protection.
Dr. Choi was the last decent doctor I had. My insurance changed and she only took certain kinds—which I increasingly had less ability to pay for. She was the beginning of my reckoning with the reality that even as my insurance becomes much more expensive, the coverage will grow poorer.
Twice I’ve lost my health insurance over simply not being able to pay for it. I’ve had to make the choice to default on my loans or be late for the second month of my insurance, which would effectively lead to its cancellation.
The second time was the same week I became a New York Times bestselling author. In the next enrollment year, I got another shitty health insurance plan in name only. Maybe that bestselling author part will help generate publicity for the GoFundMe campaign should I need it. I am confident it may not go that way for me, but you never know. I worry about the others in similar situations or worse anyway.
I stopped going regularly to the doctor around thirty. It’s literally just the urgent care if need be and back to Houston if God forbid. I truly did not want to become like all those Black men who just drop dead at forty or fifty or sixty over something even semiregular checkups could have prevented. But I am now that cliché.
Blame Joe Lieberman. Blame the Democrats. Blame the Republicans. Blame the health insurance companies. Blame the lobbyists. Blame the media ghouls who serve propaganda on their behalf. Blame them all. I do, especially whenever I feel permanently attached to a toilet.
In short: Consider all of this an endorsement of universal health care—namely Medicare for All.
SHRINKAGE
I try to remember that no matter what, I am a bad bitch, but every so often I can be worn down to the point where I momentarily conclude otherwise. A tragedy, a parody, but such is life when burdened by not having access to a tech CEO bro’s pin number. I am usually able to shake the doubt off fairly fast, but the older I was getting, the more frequently I questioned my place in life and how my future might be shaping up. I was less certain than I had been in years past.
So I don’t think it was in my best interest to be sitting in front of someone who I saw as a reflection of everything I was not. It was not his fault he was so amazing and I felt less than stellar. Being up close to him was giving my insecurities an adrenaline rush, but I didn’t want to look away and never turned down the invitation to meet up. No matter how he was making me feel on the inside, he was so nice to look at and speak with.
First, Chance, not the rapper, triggered my body dysmorphia. Based on the way his clothes fit his body, he looked as if he had been built in a CrossFit studio before being passed to nonstop SoulCycle classes until he finally got a break to allow Whole30 to further tailor his physique. That immediately let me know how disciplined he was and how undisciplined I was. I go to the gym a lot, but my dieting is mixed. I know how to diet like an Instagram model, but I also sometimes fall into the habits of all those southern Black folks actively courting eventual disaster. You could tell he was not an emotional eater. I bet he only ate turkey burgers and lettuce throughout the week, as opposed to convincing himself that it was okay to have another cookie because they were marked as protein cookies.
His lack of physical flaws did not bother me as much as it might have in the past. Sure, if I ever took my clothes off in front of him, I would have made certain to have done five thousand push-ups prior to showing up, while regretting every carbohydrate I had ever consumed the very second I saw him shirtless, but was I going to turn down the invitation to be in that setting? I was not that stupid. He was too fine to be caught up in the rapture of my physical hang-ups. Besides, it’d go the same way it had with the other hurly-burly men I’d met along the way: We’d finish.
One day I’ll get the shackles of my back fat removed so I can dance (shirtless). I can already feel Satan’s grip tightening around my neck for that sentence, though. Ah, well.
I thought he was a lot smarter than I was, too. He didn’t agree with me when I declared such, or if nothing else, wouldn’t allow me to actually highlight that tidbit out loud, but all of us can be idiots sometimes. I gathered it was a modesty thing for him. He was very big on presenting modesty. I think it was the southerner in him. I love all men, but there is something special about southern boys to other southern boys. No matter the reason, he was smarter than I was and I didn’t mind it at all. I could learn from him. That’s not to say I was suddenly the Tomi Lahren to his Rachel Maddow, but he was well read and well educated and thoughtful in ways I hadn’t come across in most men—none that looked like him, that’s for sure. (For reference’s sake, if I were an MSNBC prime-time anchor, I would be Lawrence O’Donnell, who is me if I were an older white man from Boston.)
He liked to debate. A whole lot. I wasn’t certain on that conclusion initially—maybe both of us were just too vocal about our differences of opinion? But no, he liked to go back and forth. I don’t mind disagreeing with someone and hearing them out, so I suppose debates are fine, although I’d much rather not. He was more into mental jousting than I ever was. People assume that given my line of work, I must love dialogue and debate. I wish people wouldn’t assume that. I consume too many thoughts as it is, being on the internet so much as my work dictates. I can go on with life just fine without people wanting to have a hot take off with me at happy hour for sport.
Chance riled me up whenever there was a difference between us, but I enjoyed being challenged by him. He was never provocative for the sake of—always careful with his words. I don’t think he necessarily ever needed to be right; he was adamant about a person proving their point, if anything. Whether or not too adamant can remain up for debate, but he was ultimately cerebral in the way my friends always said I needed. He kept me on my toes. I’d like to believe I only offer informed opinions, but there is a tendency for me to be instantaneous in my responses. He forced me to give myself a seven-second delay at times.
He was a lil’ classy nigga, to boot. Classy in the way my not at all refined self could benefit from. But he had plenty of lowbrow moments in him; he was not pretentious in nature. I need someone who may no longer be invested in Basketball Wives, but isn’t someone that would shame me for watching that and opting out of The Handmaid’s Tale after a while—everything about it is so well done, but it can make for such gruesome viewing.
If none of his other positive attributes was convincing enough, I was able to confirm he was it when he ordered a tequila with soda and chicken wings. That is me in an order. If a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy were ever modeled after us, this revelation would be the point in the film where it was clear that one of us needed to let Keanu Reeves go so true love could be enjoyed—blasphemous as that sounds.
He was pretty much my ideal guy. He was handsome; he was brilliant; he was southern; he was thicc; he was Black; his sex was amazing; he was funny albeit in his corny way. He made me want to improve. He was the first person I had met in a long time that I wanted to like me. I think he was into the idea of liking me. This should have gone better than it did in real time.
At this point in my life, I wasn’t the paranoid formerly in denial gay trying to figure out if I wanted to step out and be the person I was rather than chasing the one others preferred me to be. I’d figured it out. It was okay to revel in pleasure. God didn’t hate me. My mom would not be joining me at the Pride parade for reasons besides the fact that neither of us is big on crowds, but we were talking regularly. I was at as much peace with all of that as I could be. I wanted to move on. To the next stages of life. I wanted a fuller life. I’ve said
this so many times. I needed action.
So here was someone I liked. What do you do when you like someone? You tell them. You make an effort. You do so with the hope they’ll like you back. I’m not always the best at this, but I’ve learned to be fairly efficient at it.
Yet I choked every single time in front of this dude. Not once, not twice, every single time. I bet he’d say otherwise, but he’s nice that way. I needed to be Ariana Grande and I was Ashanti. Ashanti is cool—she has hits—and she hits her notes (but should never do so while scooting across the stage by her ass cheeks as seen on the second daytime series hosted by Queen Latifah), but I’m supposed to be shooting for the Mariah Carey–like high note, not the sweet whispers of “Foolish,” having people shout “Oh, this used to be my shit” at a thirty-somethings crab boil.
It’s not like we weren’t enjoying each other’s company. He said he was enjoying his time with me. I’m a good time. But I would freeze with him too many times. And when I did speak, he was engaged, though I could sometimes feel myself shrinking.
I liked him, but he was increasingly triggering.
I was grappling with how my life was and the way I preferred it to be. As the saying goes, you mess up and sacrifice in your twenties and everything works out perfectly in your thirties. That’s not the exact phrasing. I’m even messing that up. Point is, you should be better put together by a certain age—so I’ve heard.
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