When I was a kid I went to a pediatric dentist who was a million years old, had a big square head, and a crazy hunchback. If you painted him green and added spark plugs to his neck he’d be the spitting image of Frankenstein and he had a temperament to match! This isn’t to mention that one day when I was having my braces tweaked he had a college student in there asking questions about his career and get this, dentistry wasn’t his first career choice. Before ripping at the teeth of small children he was a goddamn mortician.

This guy was rough, Old School, and if I have to guess a pretty big quack, but my mother was poor, didn’t have insurance, and he was local. Eventually he’d be sued out of a job – something about assaulting several children – but not before he messed about with my chompers!

This dentist wouldn’t allow the parents of the children to come into the room when they were having their teeth done. Parents have a pesky irritating way of stopping him from manually holding their children down, you know? But this isn’t a story about being forced into proper oral hygiene, it’s a story of sweet youthful stupidity.

My neighbor’s kids went to the same dentist. She had a red-headed hell raiser of a boy with too much energy and some issues with making rash decisions. One of these instances involved our dentist who he summarily bit with all his tiny eight year old might. BLESS. If I knew I could have bitten him I totally would have tried to nab myself a finger or two!! This unlikely child is in some ways my hero.

But anyway, this isn’t about him. It’s about my youthful stupidity and my epic struggle against the needle. No, I wasn’t a tween heroin addict, I was just playing a dangerous game with laughing gas and Novocaine. You see this dentist often felt the children were easier to handle if they were fucking stoned off their gourds so he routinely gassed them with strawberry scented nitrous oxide. There had been many an afternoon where I saw my peers teeter out of that office slurring, “I thound like the drunkth on the Simpthons!” I mean as funny as that was I hated the feeling of my limbs floating off into different directions. Unfortunately for me I had been slated to have five permanent fully healthy molars ripped out of my head because my mouth was supposed to be too small to hold them in a row. I’d already went through the gas and knew it was followed by a needle poke of Novocain to the roof of the mouth and several to the gums and cheek. I couldn’t get out of the Novocain (which I also loathed with only the malcontent a tween can summon) but I could weasel my way out of the laughing gas without anyone noticing. I had noticed the mask was not flush to my face and I could suck fresh air from under it so I did. Of course that left me completely not numbed for the Novocaine needle.

In a moment of absolute stoicism I sat deathly still as the needle made it’s way for the bone in the roof of my mouth. I did not flinch as the most intense pain I had ever felt seared through me. Of course he didn’t get it right at first and had to use way too much force but it did eventually go through the bone before finding it’s way to my gums which felt like a nasty pinch but was not nearly as traumatic. I SAID NOTHING. I didn’t move. A single tear fell down my cheek and went unnoticed. And then he took pliers and ripped out my permanent molars with a loud sickening crack that echoed through my head and sounded like bone crunching under pressure.

I walked out there sober as fuck – with a new air of confidence in my step. My own right of passage? Maybe. And I lived.

**All photos were taken by me of calming nature scenes to offset the horror of this story. Cheers!