These women are crazy out here. No appreciation for a strong black man. I never thought my Double-Dumplings would go berserk like that; a good Christian woman from the peaceful town of Sandy Springs, Georgia. The Bible says turn the other cheek, not slash mine. I’m just lucky her brother stopped by her condo when he did.
These three weeks of rehabilitation and psychoanalytic healing at Grady Hospital in Atlanta have helped me to cope with the scares of an abusive relationship with Double-Dumplings. Now it’s just a matter of coping with that $7500 bill they said I needed to pay before I can go home.
Down here in Georgia, they don’t seem to realize the new Obama-care law inhibitates such outrageous charges against a person of my meager status. Here’s what I told that hair-lip woman from the billing office with that big clipboard and all those forms.
“I’m a forty-one year old highly intellectualized legal prodigy from St Louis, Missouri, the show-it-all, know-it-all state. I’m tall and handsome and spoken of in whispers. And yes, I still have a jheri-curl and one half-moon gold tooth in remembrance of our great civil rights struggles during the 60’ and 70’s. I’m a bonafide graduate of Meramec Community College night classes. And I know my rights. The 111th Congress House of Representatives Bill HR 3962 prohibits the willful gouging and degeneration of underprivileged patients such as myself. But in the spirit of cooperation, I won’t report you to the government if you don’t report me to the credit bureau.”
I was talking loud like Auntee Gussie use to do at the department store when she was trying to return an item that was two or three years old. It puts pressure on the reciprocal party and forces them to take action whether they want to or not. So far, the only action they’ve taken here at Grady Hospital is put me on an old Army cot they brought up from the basement, and cut my rationings down to one meal a day.
I mean, this is a semi-private room, alright. But SEMI don’t give them the right to make me spend my last day in a corner on a broken down Army cot.
I could understand if there were a bunch of patients coming in all at once and room space was tight ... like when my mother took us to visit Uncle Freeman in Mississippi, and somebody brought a pot of bad hog maws to the church picnic. Since there was no hospital, we all ended up being rush to the same little country clinic at the same time. Since the town doctor was also the veterinarian, we had to share a room with sick goats, dogs, and parakeets, not to mention a bunch of old people passing bad, Nazi-death-camp gas. But at least there was a reason for our constricted misery. What reason did Grady Hospital have for downgrading my hospitality and relegating me to an Army cot in the corner?
