Once Upon a Time in the East Village, When I Didn’t Have Health Insurance

Because nothing says “quality care” like a nurse telling you it’s “probably not AIDS.”

“East Village” by SzX

I found a journal entry from August 2005 that reminded me of a fantastic time in my life when I didn’t have health insurance, and I was dependent for my health care on a sliding scale clinic in the East Village.

This was, of course, back before the East Village became a fun place to transform the money your grandfather made building a hardware store empire into cocaine snowballs and $5k/month apartments.

I’m just saying, I don’t love my HMO right now. But I’m also grateful that my health care routine doesn’t involve waiting until payday, walking into a supermarket with a hundred-dollar bill next door to my doctor’s because the clinic wouldn’t make change, so I’d have to drop the bill into a bucket on a rope. And then the supermarket manager would haul it up to his loft office and then lower my change back down in the same bucket. Because the last guy who had his job had been shot.

Here’s what I wrote twenty years and one month ago:

I went to the clinic yesterday to ge…