You will be gratified to read that sensation is returning to my tongue.
Obviously I don’t know why that news should affect you so, but that’s hardly my fault, is it? I can’t be held responsible for every drooling pervert who obtains their tiny, disgusting thrills wandering the internet in search of lurid reports on the status of my personal mouth parts, now can I? I only brought up the subject of my tongue as a perfectly innocent lead-in to a diverting story about dentistry, but now you’ve soiled it with your revolting animal urges I’ve half a mind to pack the whole thing in and run off to become yet another one of those damn Fairfax Bloggers for hire.
You sicken me. There, I’ve said it. No, wait: I love you. Let’s never argue again. Have a peanut.
I wonder what they make the stuff out of that goes in dental anaesthetic?
‘My name is Mat,’ I say. ‘I have a three o’clock appointment.’
‘Certainly,’ says the dental nurse. ‘Wait a second — didn’t I see you on Temptation last night on the TV?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got out of order with my blog posts, so you can’t have seen me last night until I write about it, which won’t be until the weekend. It's an internal continuity thing.’
‘Oh,’ she says uncertainly.
‘Sorry about this,’ I say, ‘the whole thing’s a right palaver, but I’m sure I’ll post about it on the weekend, so by Monday you will definitely have seen me on TV last night.’
She asks me to go into the waiting room. Fair enough, really.
While I wait, a short note on dentistry in the popular arts: a inordinate amount of Seinfeldian, observational, did-you-evah-notice-style stand-up comedy has been devoted to the dental and orthodontic experience since the nineteen eighties, and close study of the genre by learned scholars over this time has drawn two major conclusions on the subject, viz.:
- it is almost all a load of complete arse, and
- stop it.
As I am being seated, bibbed and unfashionably sunglassed, then, I choose not to subject you to the usual sad run-through of rinse-and-spit gags, but will instead allow you to accompany my mind as it wanders back to a simpler time when the sky is clear, herds of dentists roam the veldt unmolested by sports-jacketed punchliners and, almost magically, it has taken eight needles to persuade my twelve year-old cheek to fall asleep.
It is 1986, and I am walking out of a dentist’s rooms with one side of my face utterly flaccid, in the manner of one who has allowed his admiration for Sylvester Stallone to progress one critical step too far. I am barely out of view of the baffled dentist, who has just pumped half of his monthly supply of No-Tooth-Hurt-O-Stuff (how do I know what it's called? You're already on the internet — look it up yourself) into my mandible when it occurs to me that I have to take the bus home.
A bus ticket in those days costs sixty cents. Alone at the stop, I give it a try.
‘Schischty schentsch, plisch.’
It's about an hour's walk home, but I'm only four stops along, with my mood much improved by the thought that if I take the head off the rake at home I can pretend to be Monkey instead of Pigsy, when the bus catches up with me. However much I try to wave him away, he pulls over and opens the door.
‘Come on kid,’ he calls grumpily. ‘I haven't got all bloody day.’
I turn to face him.
‘Jesus!’ he cries.
‘Iss awwight,’ I say. ‘I’ww wawk.’
He’s leaping out of his seat. ‘Stay there, son!’ he says, very slowly and very loudly. ‘I’ll come help you on board!’
‘Whah?’
‘Come on, little matey, who was supposed to get you home?’ He walks me up the stairs into the bus. I don’t know what's going on, but I think my priest warned me about it. I decide to play it cool for now.
‘Schischty schentsch, plisch.’
I hope he hasn't noticed my speech impediment. He seems quite flustered.
‘Keep your hand in your pocket, you poor little bugger. I don’t know who would leave a spas— a ret— you know, a, a ... special kid like you out on the street to make his own way home.’
I pause. This is either what my priest told me about, or—
Oh no.
‘Waigh, no, I’m awwight, weawwy awwight!’ I protest.
‘’Course you are son, you’re very clever!’ he bawls. ‘I’m going to take you to Child Services!’
‘No, wischen to me, it’sch juscht - I’ww been to zhe dennisch!’
‘Dennis? Is that your name?’
‘No!’
‘God, the poor daft headcase doesn’t even know what his name is! You sit right behind me son, I’ll get you to safety!’
‘Oh, for fuxsch’s schake … ’
‘That’s right Dennis, when you get to the foster home you can have all the milkshakes you want.’
And so forth. I’d never experienced such a powerfully educative example of the terrible indignities people with disabilities are subjected to every day. Naturally, I grasped the opportunity to flee when the doors opened near my house to let on some spackers.
I’m wandering mentally from the bus into a mid-twenties experience in which a grumpy dentist informed me that if my tongue bumped his drill once more he was going to install the filling in my brain (this, like the bus, is a true story), when I am roused by my current dentist, who tells me I’m all done.
On the way out, the nurse warns me against accidentally biting my tongue, chewing or attempting online prose while the anaesthetic wears off.
‘Good luck with the TV show,’ she adds. ‘I will have hoped you did well.’
‘Scheerzh,’ I say with precisely half of a charming grin.
I have my car, which surely guarantees me a private, unpatronised trip home. Overjoyed by the sublime benefits of adulthood, I flip on the radio and launch into a passionate, semi-paralysed rendition of the wild middle bit from Bryan Ferry’s ‘Let’s Stick Together’. As I pull away from the curb, I am haunted only briefly the conviction that I had heard one passing pedestrian say to another, ‘I didn’t know they let them drive cars.’
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