Some People. Some People can't ever open a can with a tin opener. Some People can't drive from one end of a city to another with developing some form of minor road rage, or at least a little bit of frothing at the mouth. Some People can't help but avoid the cracks in the pavement as they walk down the street, so as to avoid triggering some unforeseen, yet terrible event. Some People, like me, can't have a procedure with a dentist without something going horribly wrong.
In the wonderfully charming and pleasant world of "nude modelling" (cough) that I undertook whilst I was studying sound engineering, you got to meet some lovely people... Well, no you didn't actually, most of the photographers were ok, but the other models thought were all Mark Owen from Take That. I actually found it hard to tell what they looked like and it was amazing they could keep their heads up with the poundage of foundation and mascara they wore. I thought they were more Atomic Kitten than Boy Band, I kept my thoughts to myself - I didn't tell them I had teeth like a donkey - as one of them said to me. I wanted to scrape "BITCH" on the grouting, I mean foundation, on his forehead with a sharp stick.
Around this time I developed a nasty abscess, and as usual, I had absolutely no money, or should that read - absolutely no concept of money. Many Warner Bros Cartoon ideas went through my mind - should I pull out the nasty tooth with pliers, tie some string to the door and get a friend to punch me in the face? But no, it had to be a dentist.
I eventually found one on Derby Road. It looked like it had been lifted out of one of those "working museums", those places that are like time-warp towns, like Blists Hill in Shropshire, where all the shops are period Victorian, and they have chemists and bakers and stuff. This dentists was more like circa 1950. I think his last customer had been 1952.
I let myself in, expecting to find a kindly receptionist behind a desk, but there was just a hallway with some very dusty looking seats and small coffee table. I'm sure someone must have heard me come in, because I heard footsteps above my head. I sat down and picked up a copy of a woman's magazine. It was from the mid 1980's. I was beginning to feel very uneasy.
Then, from above came an a extremely tall, slightly stopped man with rimmed glasses running down the stairs. I jumped up out of my chair. He said he was pleased to meet me, in an icky kind of go away, kind of way. I thought dental treatment was free, but he explained that it wasn't. I was in so much pain and after a lot of bartering he agreed he would take out my tooth for £10 and that in exchange for my home address and telephone number I could give him the money when I got paid. By this point I wouldn't have cared if Tufty the Squirrel had pulled the bloody thing out... Until I saw his treatment room.
I'm sure at the beginning of the 50's the esteemed dentist's treatment room would have been the height of futuristic dentistry. His dentist's console looked like a cross between a spaceship and a Cadillac that had been left out in the rain for years. The big arm with the light had rust all over it, the bowl for washing your mouth out was rust-riddled, the floor was dirty, the leather reclining chair had a huge wear split from top to bottom. Worse still, some of his instruments weren't clean and some of them were rusty.
I thought the only way of combatting this was to think about when I was a kid and all the things I'd eaten. Like when my brother had promised me 5p for every tadpole I'd swallow, so I swallowed about 25 of them. And he promised a few French Francs if I bit the head off a caterpillar and I did. Suffice to say I never saw any money.
Things got even weirder through the extraction. Suddenly, he be-straddled me, basically sitting on my crotch as he tried to pull my tooth out. Just at that moment, a shabby looking man came in. Wheeling a pushbike, which he propped up against the units in the treatment room and began chatting to the dentist. The dentist periodically stopped yanking on my half disengaged tooth to yak to this guy, as tried groan at him to get on with it. Then, the man, leaving his pushbike where it was, left through the back of the treatment room never to be seen again.
When the dentist had finished, I noticed my face seemed number than usual but didn't pay much attention, I tried to say than you of sorts, but my mouth wouldn't open and close properly because of the anaesthetic, and I started to make my way home.
I was feeling so much better, simply because I couldn't feel my face, and as I passed the shops on Lenton Boulevard I took my time and looked in the shop windows. But then I noticed people were acting strangely. They had frightened expressions on their faces. A woman walked past with a small girl and she pulled the girl away from me. Someone else laughed. People sat in the hairdressers all turned and stared. I was completely nonplussed. Even as I walked up Church Lane, a couple crossed looked at me in horror and crossed the road.
I finally got back home, feeling a mixture of confusion and relief. I sat down on the sofa to take off my trainers and that's when I noticed blood - on my t-shirt. I went into the bathroom, and recoiled myself. I had two channels of blood running from each corner of my mouth, down the sides of neck, which had soaked a two inch thick strip of blood all the way around the front of the neckline of my t-shirt. I think they must have thought I'd been bloodsucking goats.
My next (bad) experience at the dentist was to be far, far worse in every possible respect to this one....
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