A milk­shake for Dennis

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.:

1. it is almost all a load of com­plete arse, and
2. 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.’