boundcreature

my two front teeth are fake.

about nine or ten years ago, i was riding my bike down luzerne avenue from my house to my gram's house. across the street from my karate school (on luzerne avenue), there is a hump in the sidewalk created by an exposed tree root, where i (and every other boy in the neighborhood) for reasons of genetic predisposition would jump our bikes off the highest point of the hump.

as fate would have it (and unbeknownst to me) one day earlier, my "friends" ian and rusty had snagged my bike while i was one street over at the barber shop and loosened the nuts on the front fork that held my tire on. so that, when on this particular occassion, i made the jump...

my front tire came off in mid-air...

and i (at the time, three inches shorter and weighing in at about 230 lbs) came crashing onto the sidewalk,

teeth first.

***

it sucked.

i was about fourteen or fifteen years old, too young and rambunctious, dentist #1 felt, for permanent crowns. so, he shaved the dead teeth down to stumps and inserted temporary crowns onto them.

these broke and fell out on a regular basis (as i was indeed a rambunctious kid) and they were indeed of poor, temporary quality.

the most notable story from this era (of the buckykatt666 teeth saga) is when, at the tender age of 17, i had a date with a girl named nicole.

on the day of the date, the left temporary crown split in half (front-to-back) leaving me looking like the picture above (although with a full head of hair) for the date. what did i do you ask?

well, like any GUY worth his weight in ball-bearings and x-acto knife blades, i plugged in my favorite tool and HOT-GLUED THAT MOTHERFUCKER BACK INTO MY MOUTH.

as you may have guessed, hot glue burns when it hits your gums ...

but, i made it through the date (for the record, nicole was not worth hot-gluing a temporary crown back into my mouth, in all honesty, she was not worth the drive across town).

***

after deciding at some point, that dentist #1 was an idiot. my family switched en masse to our landlord's son, dentist #2. i thought all was well, dentist #2 was one friendly dude and i was finally going to get permanent crowns. after weeks and months of casts and fittings, i had new teeth.

of course, they were two shades too bright. and were never properly fitted, so that dentist #2 had to shave down the tops of the teeth below them.

over the course of the next two years, my crowns would gradually fall off.

lovely.

to make matters even worse, during a (at that point) not-so-common scuffle with my younger brother (who had grown much bigger since our backyard days) he elbowed me in the face and knocked the crown (including the shaved stump it was attached too) right out of my gums.

i had to have both stumps removed and then have fiber posts embedded in my gums to hold the crowns.

in the next three years, my teeth fell out even more frequently. most notably, when having a huge family dinner i was eating an ear of corn, took a bite and then turned to the pants, who damn near fell off his chair in a bout of hysterial laughter, only for me to find that my crown was no longer in my mouth, but now, quite firmly affixed to the ear of corn.

time passes. i lose my health insurance. the goddamned crown falls off again, my dad recommends his dentist, dentist #3 and offers to help me pay for getting it fixed.

dentist #3 a similarly charming fellow (as was dentist #2, dentist #1 was a complete fucking asshole) seemed atypically competent (compared to his predecessors). he explained to me that the thin fiber posts applied by dentist #2 were not strong enough to hold teeth in my mouth and showed me that he would use a thicker, plastic post with threads (to better hold the cement).

seemed like a great idea to me.

he wanted to send me to a specialist to have the old posts removed, dentist #4.

dentist #4 grunted and moaned the whole time he worked on my mouth. i knew while he was fucking up that he was fucking up. my god did he fuck-up. the temporary cement he used to put my crowns on the new post would not come off one week later when dentist #3 was going to "finish the job." the "temporary" cement has lasted since then, two full years.

my tooth has been so loose that i could swear i could rip it out of my mouth for the last three months.

six months ago, at the sign shop, i had a client sit down with me to go over her signs. i was in a good mood that day and she was friendly as hell, so i did top-of-the-line work for her and really went beyond the call of duty in the customer service department (carried her sign out to her car for her, etc). she was a really sweet lady. that sexy/other-worldy/yet extremely warm and friendly vibe that (to my knowledge) only foreign women between the ages of 36 and 55 are capable of portraying.

she offered to take care of me when i could afford to get my teeth fixed properly.

last month, my mom sold her house, her only goal in the last five years was to have enough money to help me get my teeth fixed (its not even that much money, she and i are just always broke).

i made an appointment and dr. rosie (too nice to be saddled with the dentist #5 moniker) recognized me immediately and went out of her way to take care of me. she explained the whole process to me with a friendly smile while making eye contact (this was new), gave me a great discount, dropped almost all ancillary costs and even offered me a payment plan.

dr. rosie and her husband specialize in cosmetic dentistry, not the standard family practice, they are the specialists i should have seen nine years ago.

so, i'm pretty psyched about all that. i am (understandably) very distrustful and suspicious of dentists. but, dr. rosie has this strange-as-hell "mom" vibe about her. for example, before i left i had some questions for her about the process and how much it would cost and while she was answering my questions, she absent-mindedly reached up and pulled out the left drawstring on my hoody to make it even with the right one. it was a strangely intimate moment, not in a sexy boy/girl kinda way, but in the same weird-ass way as when i would absent-mindedly lick my thumb and smear food debris off of my little sisters' faces.

so, in two months, i should have whiter, brighter, less-likely-to-fall-out-of-my-fucking-mouth-teeth!

***

one whole entry about teeth, who the hell actually even finished this one?

***

right now i am listening to IGNITE's cover of "sunday bloody sunday." i love the song, but i hate U2, so its a fair compromise.

tomorrow, i will have dinner with the pants, our friend paul and the lovely whitesamurai after which, i will make it through the nights activities to have the opportunity i have been waiting for for the last three days: kissing my girlfriend until my lips go numb.

i've been to busy to dick-around on this site much, but i've been keeping tabs on all of you...