the inside of my front tooth sheered off. you can’t see it from the outside but it’s now half as thick as a normal tooth. I don’t know how. Probably on soup, considering I broke a molar on a tator tot.
dentist told me it could easily fracture and then…break. i told him, i need broadcast quality teeth and i cant do braces like you said i should because it hurts an i can’t. I did pay a visit to the braces doctor and she was just terrifyingly competent, a blond pain machine. she smiled and took some pleasure describing the minor though frequent adjustments that would be required throughout the year to straighten my white trash teeth. I left her office thinking, I pity the straight guy who falls for that sadist bitch’s short skirt, who just nods “ok” to whatever she says, never taking her eyes off her legs to notice the alarming gleam in her eye. I said to my dentist, can’t you just give me crowns anyway? So what if they are crooked? at least they’ll be new. he agreed. he said I could do four crowns, top front fangs.
so i went in yesterday and had the first round of construction.
nobody told me that when you have crowns they saw your teeth down to stumps and then place a one-piece plastic denture in your mouth. it’s the most horrifying thing i have ever been through and i did it to myself. those were FINE teeth, just FINE. except they were fractured and would someday break off.
so i have to walk around with this denture, which could fall out at any moment by the way, for ten days. then he somehow, in a way i don’t even want to contemplate, will attach each individual tooth to the calcium stump that remains.
the injection felt exactly like a rat, gnawing inside the mouth, just below the nose. it was HORRIBLE. not a typical shot. and he even warned me. normally, he just gives me a shot in the mouth and it’s no big deal. but he said, “Okay, this injection is a little DIFFERENT. that was the word he used. i instantly became alarmed. “It’s going to hurt but I will be as fast as possible.” which was not fast.
then he said, “are you ready? are you sure? there’s no going back.”
at this point, I still had no idea of the engineering required for the procedure so i was like, no going back to what? i don’t want to go back to anything. ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS!
then he grabbed the drill and i could feel exactly what he was doing.
even when your mouth has been chemically detached from your body you can feel pressure and this includes the grinding away of tooth materials. i could feel him saw away all sides of each tooth. Tooth dust filled the air in front of my face and I was gazing through this misty cloud at the ceiling lights, which seemed shrouded in a halo now. There was almost as much dust as if I had decided, on a whim, to open the kitchen up to the rest of the apartment.
then when he was done he left the room for five minutes. i’ll be right back, he said. so i was stuck there and i was literally saying to myself, DON’T rub the tongue against the teeth.
i snuck it forward and felt the teeth, very low, spaced very far apart. i could instantly picture them, vividly, in my mind. i knew exactly how i looked.
when he began on me again, i saw my reflection -tiny- in the chrome of the lamp and my imagination was confirmed. i looked like one of dolly parton’s childhood playmates, the one whose father is also his brother and his uncle.
so ten days now. ten days of constantly checking with my tongue to make sure my temporary dental appliance hasn’t fallen out, ten days of this horrible THING clamped on the front of my head, ten days of not thirty seconds passing without thoughts of the teeth, the mouth, the chewing rat, the dust.
i keep looking at pictures of teeth online, celebrity teeth, to remind myself of why i am doing this and how many others have done this before me.
my dentist is the very finest dentist god has put on this earth and he is not only crunchy’s dentist, but he was pigheads, which makes him, in effect, my dentist of 20 years.
$2,000.00 cash per tooth, no insurance, btw.
he told me, “no charge for the bottom filing.” what this meant was, he’s not charging me for filing down my bottom teeth without any anesthetic. that was my “treat.” they do look better. but i did notice that the line isn’t perfectly straight. i think i have just enough asperger’s syndrome to have some strange visual ability. when we were building the house our builder was constantly ASTOUNDED by my ability to walk up to a wall and say, it’s off a fraction, it’s just a tiny bit low on the left. he would say, no it’s not, its perfect. and i woudl say, i bet you 1,0000 it is not. he would measure and i would be right. how can you detect 1/100th of an inch, that isn’t possible? so dentist had to file my bottom teeth three times because he couldn’t get it straight. i kept seeing a very slight dip. so he’ll need to file once more. but if i keep going, i will file those bottom teeth down to little milk teeth. i almost wish i could take the file and do it myself because it’s a subtle adjustment and he is an older man.
working from the side. you can’t judge a straight line from the side.
you must be right in front. i could do it standing in front of my mirror with a power drill. i know i could.
Also, this dental work has greatly intruded upon my enjoyment of nicotine gum, the last bad thing I get to do. So maybe I should just quit that, too, and go totally sterile.
Both dogs have whiter teeth than I do, btw, and neither of them has ever brushed, not even once.
Cow just threw up on the bed. I typed the period above and, bleghablaglaaaaaaaaaaaa, right on the white duvet cover from Gracious Home.
50 bucks says I wake up with stage four prostate cancer.
