I woke up this morning, surprised. Excited little squirming body licking my face but mostly licking my sore cheek. Gilbert , the cockapoo, had scaled the clothing pile to get on the bed. He immediately signalled the cat George,”He’s alive.”
George was already heading for his wet food dish , his sole concern, that he’d be fed. Gilbert was really happy his buddy had survived the night.
Doug had drilled a huge hole to China in my mandible where a molar had previously given up the ghost when it had the stuffing knocked out of it by the grind of life.
“I did a spinal block at C2. “ he joked, “You shouldn’t feel any pain,”
He knows people like me who have courageously faced pain half anesthetised in our other consciousnesses are now mewling whimps who characterize ourselves as ‘sensitive’. Doug’s lovely ,impossibly young assistant, had stuffed my face with local anesthetic so I didn’t even feel Doug using the tiniest needle known to man. It’s a molecular divider that moves between atoms to deliver the initial xylocaine in quantum drops. He then moves up to larger needles and more gallons of xylocaine freezer fluid till he’s got a fireman’s hose soaking my face from the inside out.
I looked like the Michelin man when he finally picked up his scalpal. The scalpal’s also from the future. Laser thin. Rapier. Wilkinson sword especially made for the whiners and complainers. Doug’s always at the ‘cutting edge’ of the research.
He showed me these tiny truly delicate space age apparatus that he would implant in my jaw. I would forever be traceable. Wink, wink, nod, nod. Dentists can’t survive on their incomes in Vancouver. Only corrupt government officials who live off the avails of drug and arms deals and money laundering can survive here. A million dollars gets you a phone booth and cot in the wrong side of town.
‘Will it send and receive Chinese, Russian and English?” I asked.
“All three.” He smiled. “They used to only receive but now others can even hear your thoughts.”
My schizophrenic patients have been convinced and convinced me that all the fillings they have had were listening devices for Homeland Security..
I’ve always reassured them , “you don’t have to worry. It’s the Ottawa ones you’d have to worry about they only understand French Canadian patois.”
The truth is Obama is listening to everyone through zippers, clothing buttons, cellphones and computers. He sells the information to the highest bidder. Russia pays more than Trump. Canada, bankrupted by Trudeau, has to buy it second hand from the Pakistan allies. We finally learned that the Kennedy shooting was an inside job. Information is the principal commodity today. It degrades with time. Is Justin Beiber really a Christian or just a celebrity church goer? “The public has a right to know.”
All the while this was going on when I told Doug I’d just been to the greatest concert I’ve ever seen, Paul McCartney. Doug told me he enjoying seeing Paul McCartney 2 years before me. The young are always ahead of the old now. I remember my days of youth and trend setting. At least Doug knows the Beatles. I met a young girl who asked me ‘who are they?’ The glow of Strawberry Fields still surrounds Doug. I know I can trust him. He’s taking his son to the Who. Normally he’s trying to kill the kid kite skiing. I see pictures of them on Facebook. He always has his physician friend Dr. Kumar with him ‘just in case’. So with a dentist and a doctor the poor kid has been subject to men’s idea of insane fun. His daughter probably rolls her eyes at them. After a weekend of kite sailing Doug’s got the steadiest hands in town. The only dentist with as steady hands takes his daughter parachuting.
Dentists are all mad. I was forced to do dental surgery up north. Worse than mining. Working in a tiny space with teeth all the while ready to bite your fingers off if you made a mistake. Never did my appreciation of dentists grow greater than when I had to enter that oral hell not knowing where it had been or what it had been used for. No wonder I became a psychiatrist. Better to enter another’s mind that get inside their dirty mouths. You can see the cockroach size bacteria that occupy other people’s mouth under surgical lights. Only worse job is the proctologist. Methane farts blowing them up when they’re looking for lost vibrators.
Doug puts an S&M restraint on my mouth. They sell them on Amazon now. Repurposed dental equipment.
“He’s not so bad. It’s easier when the patient has a big mouth.” Doug says to his assistant not being offensive but teaching as he always does.
I’m restrained and can’t talk back. I appreciate what he’s saying. Only place a big mouth is applauded. I’d hate to have to work on my friend Laura’s tiny mouth. Little people little mouths. It amazes me that Doug ,whose also a cosmetic surgeon, actually works on women and children. I’d restrict my practice to the Schwazeneggars . I’d call my practice “big mouth dentisty’.
“There’s blood.’ Doug said.
Last thing I remember.
“You nodded off” he said. They were taking the scaffolding, back hoes and cranes out of the construction site my mouth became. ‘Nodded off’ is polite dentist talk for ‘passed out’. I have no problem cutting and drilling in other’s blood but when it’s my own I’m heebee geebies.
Doug pointed at the picture on the tv screen. Looked like NASA probe on an asteroid.
This Straumann Implant looked like a Lilliputian capsule that had been rocketed into my jaw. It had a cap that screwed off. The conversation moved to diamonds in teeth. Diamonds in the tooth with Lucy. My South Vietnamese refugee patients from the boat person era had come across with all that remained of their life possessions in various orifices. The communists and then the coyotes had stripped them and probed them and taken everything before they got on overloaded boats that didn’t float to escape ‘yet another Communist Worker’s Paradise”. Now I’m looking at a cache inside a titanium radioactive listening gps device that could store all my secrets, so few remaining.
I felt no pain. . Doug thanked me for not pitbulling his hand. Talk about the ‘jaws of death’. My big mouth. Intrepid guy.
The blood had stopped. In an age when body parts are going this mensch of a dentist had given me a new part, an indestructible one at that had been , tested to withstand nuclear attack. A million of years in the future when my skeleton has been found preserved in government bullshit, a future Criminal Minds coroner will see the implant serial number and know my corpse came from the golden age of music. It will still play, “Let it Be’ , the song Doug had programmed it to play in ‘times of trouble’. Opthalmogists taking out cataracts are replacing the losses with tiny Netflix.
The most beautiful and sympathetic receptionists take my credit card.
It’s worth it. To bite and chew and not drool. Canadians pay for the Senate and the bad actors in Parliament and a fool for Prime Minister. I’ve just got a Lilliputian spaceship implanted in my jaw for a pittance. I could even carry Lucy’s diamonds inside it. It’s a small price to pay in the great game of life. I’m thankful to be alive.
It’s also all about vanity. I’ve lost that great gaping empty hillbilly gap in my shit eating grin look. I am back to looking like Robert Redford (the teeth anyway).
My Harley was parked outside. Like Clint Eastwood, (maybe a younger Clint Eastwood) I strode out of the dentist’s office, smiling, like diamonds. Like Mel Gibson I mounted my Harley smiling. Big teeth. Cyborg man, I roared off into the sunset. Thank you Doug!
All night long the implant channeled Sophie complaining to Trudeau about his Erectile Dysfunction.
I hardly slept for laughing.I’ll ask Doug to wave the channel changer over my jaw when I get the stitches out. That’s all they have to do these days to change the speed on pacemakers. In the meantime nothing could be funnier than the Trudeau Bedroom.
“I need more nannies. We can’t afford more viagra. What do you expect me to do, make my own clothes like Ivanka Trump”. I laughed myself to sleep.
Doug Lovely is the greatest dentist in the world.
I’m alive.
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