Medicaid on Broad Street
I just got home from a proctologist’s office. The condition he diagnosed, in German “Marisken,” is neither appetizing on its face nor otherwise suitable for permanent enshrinement in association with my international online reputation as a journalist of quality, so I will spare my readers the details. Even in German, the word is obscure, of a piece with “bergamot” and “salvia.” When I first heard it, the image that presented itself to my mind’s eye was certainly not that of a raw and malformed anus, but of a bouquet of flowers. The medical profession has something in common with politics: Giving an ugly reality a nice name is the first step on the road to healing. Shingles, for example. It could be a benign condition in which coin-sized, lizardlike scales painlessly obscure the skin. Its German name, “Gürtelrose,” makes it sound like a girdle made of rose petals, or so I tell myself.
On arriving at the office of the respected professor of medicine at an elite university research hospital whom I considered uniquely qualified to study my problem more closely, I was asked to state my home address. Addresses, too, apparently suggest images pregnant with meaning. I personally would have no objection to living on Lakeshore Boulevard, Park Avenue, or even Elm Tree Lane. You are where you live, after all.
“Broad Street,” I said. Accordingly, the doctor’s secretary checked the box for financially troubled clients dependent on public assistance. “No no no,” I said, “I do have fancy private insurance! I just happen to LIVE on Broad Street.” Broad Street is the Charade of addresses. Just as you drive a Charade only because you can’t even afford a Punto, you live on Broad Street because the rents on Main Street are too high. As I had seen rose petals encircling the waists of elderly sufferers from herpes zoster, the receptionist, in typing my address, had a sudden vision of boarded-up storefronts and shivering day laborers dodging bundles of newspapers at five a.m.
In most German cities, one is advised to call for a blindfold before venturing on to such a street. The political party that demands “Wealth for All!” could just as well demand “Elm Tree Lane for All!” Its founder comes from the city – Saarbrücken – whose train station lies on the ugliest Broad Street in, by my reckoning, the entire world. But in the last analysis, they are all the same, and like them all, mine has two sides: front and back. Out front is the wide, busy street. Behind us is the railroad. During the day, the roar of passing trucks masks the roar of passing trains. By night, vice versa – but only until 1:30, when the last local from Stuttgart screeches around its last curve. By day we open the front windows, by night the back. The village where I live may be a picturesque residential and farming community, but acoustically speaking, it might as well be the Holland Tunnel entrance in Jersey. Once I woke up because the train was late. Unconsciously, I knew something was terribly wrong, and I was unable to calm down until I once again heard its brakes dragging and my windowpanes buzzing in their frames.
Location, location, location: The railways can shut down for all of me. Then they might rename my street “Old Broad Street,” which sounds almost as nice as “Lakeshore Boulevard,” seems to me. I could hold my head up high, and doctors’ secretaries would apologize for the delay before seating me in the waiting room with clean cushions on the chairs.