dentaire a trois

dentaire a trois

I needed to write this Pre-Script to the story below. The story about my last visit to the dentist in 2019. Reader- please let me blame Covid19 and a general wariness of medical waiting rooms filled with ill or pained fellow citizens for this delay of four or five years!

I really shouldn’t be driving this fangled pen. They suggest I didn’t operate the car. I walked over to the giant op in the nearby shopping area shop after the journey around my head and came home with some furniture and other items I don’t really need.

I liked the story below because I tapped into or was able to access and reveal some primal drives of mine. I mentioned my mother, Philomena and my father, Noel. I usually feel such a range of emotions about them. How much of a bad son I was and how I could have behaved better at so many times and places. I also feel kind of protective about them. I put them in my songs sometimes.

“we look up at the blue sky in winter time

one of those sharp days

brilliant sun – blue sky - cold air

sweatin’ inside your coat

you look up and say your mothers name

she’s in the ground far away

she had a life – she had a spell

she holds you still

we get life” – we get life

But I thank them from here in that they let me run so loosely. Even though I screamed the dentist to hell and kicked the barber in the shins. As a child.

Yes, I went back to the dentist. My dentist. Again, my mind was blown.
The music this time began with Air Supply and Love And Other Bruises.
I mentioned why I was there, to get a general check up and clean. Oh and that also an x ray as I had a wisdom tooth causing some inflammation and last time she had said it was not to be concerned with. But I was also a bit concerned as one of my older brothers and my younger brother were both dealing with surgery and chemotherapy for oral cancers at this time. I was sensitive to being spooked to be thinking in these mortal directions. So could she…?

She asked if I had usually had gas and I said, “yes please!”.

I was regretting having worn a favourite white, woollen jumper into the situation as I began to imagine a cloud of misty blood and refined tooth material being splattered over this fine piece of clothing.

Soon the x rays were done and fillings proscribed and needles being waved about so I closed my eyes behind the futuristic shades they had provided and went with the flow.

So many thoughts raced through my mind. For the first time I realized that Noel had probably only been to the dentist once in his life! When he enlisted to serve in the Australian Air Force at 17 and they took all of his teeth out before sending him to Borneo. The explanation being that there would be no dentists where he was going. So he had his dentures from that time on.

I was breathing in the gas hard. I thought that drugs and regular use of them would be quite good, actually. As long as you didn’t have to score them from criminals or use needles or hang around with junkies, that is. Those were all deal breakers. Otherwise, it would be sweet.

Peaches And Herb came onto the stereo with their hit Reunited and I realized I was laying on my on the chair with my back arched and my jaw stretched open as if in a silent ecstatic cry. An orgasmic moment. I tried to release all the tension in my body but still hold my head open for the dentist. She kept asking if I was alright. Her assistant today was very attentive. She seemed to be more involved in the proceedings than the usual ninja. She had knowledge and confidence. She also didn’t do the little sweeping and air sucking things so easily, her skills and attention being elsewhere. I thought that it was as if I was involved in a threesome. I realized that my legs were totally tensed up to the ends of my toes and tried to relax that part of me. It seemed that I was tensing up in waves and not being aware of it at all.

There is only one other woman with whom I have such an intimate relationship. Well, to this one I am just another workplace or building site.

But I put myself in her gloved hands.

She had talked to me of my wisdom tooth. How it was not really pushing any other tooth and could be removed. Or not. It was provoking more primal, mortal thoughts. This wisdom tooth could outlive me! It would keep growing when I was done. I would be all toenails and tooth, but a wise tooth.
I got up from the chair and felt dizzy and groggy as she talked of a further visit to finish the job and to talk more. She had allayed my fears as well as completing a tidy rehabilitation of my vintage molars.

I am still catching myself all tensed up.

DENTAL NOTES - 2019

I wrote this in a dentists chair, on my mind. Through my mind.

Its about five days later, I hope I got it down right. I meant to write - I hope I get it down right. I suppose it’s a kind of a translation.

I wrote several songs too. But I keep forgetting to catch them.

One of those things, if you’re a songwriter – or any kind of writer, when you have no pen or paper around, ideas are guaranteed to come to you. I read that Thomas Hardy once wrote with a burnt stick on some dry leaves as he was compelled to get something off his mind and onto a page.

The dentist is in outer South Eastern Melbourne. I used to go to one in the inner city, recommended by a friend but that was when I lived in Zone One. I’ve been living in what was once Zone Three for two decades. This dentist  was recommended by friends from across the other side of the highway, music related people too. They said this practitioner looked like a member of Charlies Angels, the modern version. We laughed, though I only knew of Drew Barrymore from that series, she has the most classic nose of all recent Hollywood women. Classic as in Ancient Grecian. They meant to liken this person an actor of more Asian ethnicity.

So I’ve been going to this dentist for a while. I wouldn’t say “frequenting” as that is not a good description of my relativity to her business.

As a kid I hated the dentist so much. The pain was unbearable, but it may have been the noise, the smell and the sight of the needles that added extra energy to the whole evil sensation. It was operatic. Grand guignol. I remember making a scene at the barbers in Mt Gambier when I was a kid too, I kicked the poor barber, Vic Gentile in the shins and yelled us out of the place. My dad was shocked and apologetic to the barber. It must have been the chair, so similar to the dental swivelling high seat.

So here I was, in one of the few moments a modern man can get totally cut off from the webs and intrigues of life and its cyber ghostings. I was laying back in the chair and the assistant had her two hands near my mouth and the Dentist had her fancy little binoculars on and tools in both hands. I had some gel which came before the needle and also continuous gas.

There was a tv screen above me with subtitles and also music playing. The last time I was here it was a unified broadcast of audio and video, Air Supply Live. This time she had me watching The Block and listening to a playlist of MOR 80s hits.

I had breakfasted that morning on porridge and tea with an orange and some textual roughage  by Jonathan Swift from 1703. I had finished Gullivers Travels and was on to The Tale Of A Tub. His writing had really enlivened my mind, my inner monologue.  The Tale Of A Tub begins with a roundabout dedication and then an even longer runup to a preface where he begins to talk of “critics” and other writers. His tone is high and playful. He nails everybody and everything.

I lay back there with my mouth open and the gas flowing free and the lights and four hands about my mouth. The song playing was Paul Youngs version of “Wherever I lay My Hat”. It was peak sludge. Over produced over teched 80s UK beige soul. Every sound in isolation, all together. Music made for nodding, imperial radio programming straw men. No drummers, perfect machined rhythms set to an exact code. It was a period when I lived in the UK and that whole sheened era  seemed to go far longer than it actually did. No escape from it. No wonder the Smiths and Dinosaur Junior and House music hit so hard.

The Block was on above me on the screen. Some drama had been confected about tradies and budgets and materials and a deadline for someone’s renovation. I thought of the hotel in St Kilda where the show had last been and how all the poor tenants had been kicked out and they still sleep on the street directly across the road from their former home rooms.

The politics of it was horrible and blatant. Now I was watching them blow up some other situation. The leading blockhead is a fat everyman who has been recently hired by the actual government to head some sort of policy team in regard to skills training. The television personality hired by the former advertising and marketing man who is now PM. How shallow our country had become? The music changed to Go West “The King Of Wishful Thinking”.

The intimacy of dental work! People inside your mouth for an hour or so. She was very good.

Did I mention I also wrote several songs as well as this text I am relaying here. Still getting a feint signal. Worrying me that I missed a beat. “Is it happening? The long fade?”

I had heard that morning about Kanye West and his gospel album. I wondered if he had ever been any good. I had heard one track I had liked, about being with his family. He’s been elevated to a level of celebrity from which there’s no coming back. There’s no possible reverberation for his sounds. Everything distorted and crushed, as if its come from deep at the bottom of the ocean. With added Kenny G! Hey, he’s no Tupac anyway. No Bob Marley. No Nas or Lil Wayne. They come with a charge. Of specific locale and accent. Cadence. Kanye might even be good but it all comes through this filtering and serious compression from deep inside the wheels of synthesized meat.

Yes, this chair and being held down here by these technicians climbing on me; waving mirrors and pliers was giving me some time to think on things. Is that how you have to do it nowadays? Get kidnapped and strung up and your mouth painted in gels and lit by stage lights so you can get some time alone?

After two hours I got up out of the chair, went and paid and drove off to a rehearsal with the NDE. My wallet was glowing red in my pocket as if it held some piece of enriched plutonium.

Later, I tried to get back into that mouthwashed, laidback, anaesthetized flow. To catch these free flowing thoughts. I had to battle the interference all around. Dental notes.

A week after that  I was back in the chair. Only an hour in the betoothed zone this time. It’s quite addictive. Gas, gel, needle. “You okay David?”

“’yeah…”.

It didn’t take long to get back into the flow. The zone. Into the tooth of it all.

How many times have I been to the dentist in my life? A dozen?

The experience as a child and as a young man and now as a vintage gent.

I wanted to be brave, I didn’t want to hurt my mother. I didn’t want her to see me cry.

The experience is so primal.

Primal.

I use words like I know what they mean.

“Mean”, what does that “mean?” Have I looked it up in a dictionary? Have I memorized it?

Who am I to be wielding these words so loosely?

She is really digging in. An attendant on the other side with a suction tube and passing instruments and materials. They speak in English and Chinese. Cantonese? Mandarin?

She asks me how I’m going.

I’m being brave.

She is about to put a crown on a back tooth. She puts a mirror in my hand so I can look at the crown itself. She says she has tried to match it with my front teeth. I was meaning to get them cleaned and whitened.

I wave my hand in dismissal as if to say “it’s cool, just fix it…”

I worry that I have upset her. Was she up all night at the fireplace fashioning this crown with a nailfile and some sort of buffing material? Matching the colour?

Seriously, who is ever going to look inside my mouth to see a back molar? Except for her, or another dentist?

The Block is on again. These disgusting people are selling their renovated apartments in Grey street St Kilda to some other disgusting types. Each goes for well over three million dollars. They all act as if they’d won a lottery. The place is in the part of St Kilda that still has some streetwalking sex workers and is otherwise a haven for backpackers.

I gaze through my fogged eyes at the screen as the music plays some 70s soft rock, normally my favourite. Today it was Don McLean singing Starry Starry Eyes. He is no David Gates. Lets leave it at that. Those who know- know.

The disgusting buyers. I wonder if they will eventually extend the depth field of the show to make it all about the buyers with all the predictable drama of the couples renovating the properties way in the background (everybody has been there and seen that shit- so they have a gay couple and some non anglos- they’re all still disgusting) and make the show about the people wanting into these hideous nouveau, tricked up dumps. Some could be filthy rich, some just reps for overseas investers (send a crew over “there” to get intel on them) , some going through forensic interviews with bank managers (send a crew to background them as well). It would then telescope in at the end to an orderly scrum at the auctions.

I mostly still hate Scott Cam the overweight everyman tradie who hosts the show and is now employed by the government. He is a tradie to our country.

I rise from my chair and drift to the counter where I see so many zeros float in front of my eyes I realize why she wanted me to at least take a look at the crown she’d made. By the fireplace the night before.

It was quite valuable.