The Drool Fool

This is the beautiful smile I have after a few hundred dollars worth of dental work. You too, can look like a proud recipient of an ass-whoopin’!

I had to have an old 80’s filling replaced in my mouth. My filling was a leg-warmers wearing, parachute pants lovin’, Duran-Duran listening filling. I had to get it updated to a street cred having, Starbuck’s drinking, iPhone carrying filling.

I realized that there’s a reason for medical and dental jargon… because you don’t want to know what’s going on. Really, you don’t. You want to hear things like “hand me the handpiece” instead of “hand me the giant, loud drill.” Trust me, when you're at the dentist, you don't want to hear, "hand me the super-glue, hair-dryer and a quarter inch of duct tape." You want to hear medi-words you don’t know, you want to be ignorant, because ignorance is truly blissful when you have a jackhammer in your mouth.

But here’s the problem, my Dentist’s assistant didn’t know all the lingo. She was “in training.” When my dentist told me this, I thought “Oh, that’s just freakin’ great!” But I couldn’t say that, because at that point, it was halfway through, and I was only able to communicate through grunting and slurping noises.

So I knew what was coming. I knew when they were about to go in with the mini hair-dryer, with the vacuum hose, with the nail glue, and sadly with the giant squeaky drills.

Then the assistant lays equipment they aren’t using on my chest. The dentist asked if that’s okay. I grunted yes because I thought, “Well, they don’t refer to them as a rack for nothin’. Sure, see what the girls can hold!”

After the dental work is done, he tells me that if I can’t close my mouth properly, “just come back and I’ll make a few adjustments.” Yeah. Because that’s really what I want to do – go through all this again!

And I think after you have dental work, they should give you some sort of “Just Left the Dentist” sticker, so people know. Like the “I just VOTED” stickers they used to give out at the voting booths. So when people see you afterwards, they don’t look at you with confused sympathetic eyes, trying to figure out what caused your disfigurement.

If I lived anywhere besides NYC, I’d be able to walk out of the dentist office, get in my car and drive home anonymously with my dignity in tact. But instead, I walk past dozens of people on my way to the train, while drooling and laughing. I looked like the kind of person that if you have small children, you’d cover their eyes and cross to the other side of the street to avoid.

You lose all rights after having dental work done. Like for instance, on the train, I wanted to ask the kid next to me to stop picking his nose, but I knew he’d just snap me back in my place with something like, “Dude, you’re drooling!"

So that’s what I was reduced to yesterday, the cock-eyed lady on the train, drooling, giggling and sitting next to a nose-picker.