Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he was not afraid of too many things (other than flesh-eating zombies, vampires, burglars at the window, rattlesnakes and scorpions and a plethora of black widow spiders), but one thing probably more than any other caused the Little Papa to lose his proverbial cool, and that was visiting the dentist. His first, and worst, memory of the dentist was when he was five years old, probably just after the family had moved to Lancaster from Huntington Beach. This odd bump had appeared up high in his gums, very painful, tender, and accompanied by a fever. Too much candy produced a cavity, which produced an abscess, which hurt about as much as a stick in the eye (Dougie had received several sticks in one or the other eye by the time he was six years old, so he knew his pain very well, thank you very much please).
Mama got Dougie psyched up about the dentist. It was going to be fun. And he was excited, well maybe just a little, but there was this underlying hum in the nature of reality, a certain hidden truth that whispered in his ear that this was not in fact a fun and exciting visit he would soon experience. Doom whispered in his ear.Everyone was nice at the dentist's office, and Mama was allowed to sit near him, holding his hand. And Dougie behaved himself. The dentist said so, several times: "You are doing great, what a good boy!" But Dougie knew better. Because something was building, a literal trembling, a quaking, from the inside to the outside. Mama sensed the approaching Vesuvius, and she tensed, and kept repeating: "You're okay, calm down, it's okay." The dentist didn't know why Mama was getting so tense, because the boy certainly wasn't showing any fear. Not yet.Dougie was like that, always able to maintain a semblance of normalcy while the monstrous force of terror bubble toward the top, the hot lava gushing, the ground shaking almost imperceptibly at first, then with more force.Bubble bubble toil and trouble.The dentist experienced the brilliant brainstorm of pulling the tooth with the cavity which had set off the abscess. It was the tipping point, the dentist's bad breath, the clammy hands, the fake smile, and now the condescending: "It won't hurt, not even a little bit!"Blammo. Dougie began kicking and screaming and soon there were two other dentists, two hygienists as well as the receptionist and the janitor from the building next door, all of them surrounding Dougie, all of them attempting to hold down a leg or an elbow, applying the weight of their bodies to Dougie's head, his dancing knees. There seemed to be an awful lot of people in the room, and the amazing thing was that Mama kept laughing hysterically, as all the dentists wrestled with her five-year-old son.One young dentist was there, a very good looking guy fresh out of dental school, who Dougie would not meet until many years later, under less humiliating circumstances, a Dr. Church, a handsome and hilarious guy with a great sense of humor, who would be the first person Dougie would ever know that up and died, in the flower of youth. Dr. Chruch was a wonderful man seriously loved by everyone that knew him, and he had a beautiful young wife, and he fought the cancer, and hard, but still died within about a year of the initial diagnosis. But here on this day he was one of the guys trying to joke with Dougie, calling him "Tiger!" (which he was never called ever again, probably even if he lives to be over 100), but after about five minutes of the wrestling match, poor Dr. Church snapped: "You little brat! You need a good spanking!" It was a common consensus in the room that Dougie probably wasn't spanked, not nearly enough, and every adult in the room barely denied themselves, to their credit, the pleasing cathartic relief of administering Dougie the whacking of his life.The massive shot -- delivered via a metal syringe with a giant metal plunger with a big metal loop at its end for the dentist's thumb (who in the world would design a SHOT to look like that? nowadays they are pink and plastic and covered with flowers, but back in the 1960s the "shot" looked more like a torture device) -- was finally delivered, and Dougie calmed down somewhat, and all the various wrestlers departed the room, most of them grumbling, cracking their knuckles, suggestively slamming their fists into their hands, while Mama hugged Dougie and kept saying, giggling: "Boy! I can't believe you behaved that way!"Somehow, Dougie survived. Just barely.Succeeding visits were better contained, and rarely involved screaming and wrestling with several sweaty dentists. But for years afterward, Dougie would sit in dental chairs, orthodontic chairs, and manfully will himself not to scream, not dash gibbering from the room, not to drop-kick the dentist. Often dentist and hygienists would be completely fooled by his calm exterior, but if they chanced to touch his arm they'd exclaim: "Youch! You are tense! Calm down. Sheesh."Big baby. All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
