Disaster Dentata, and why I am not really Red Symons

Last Sunday morning, Wilcox gathered his kit and drove Geordie, in the car Geordie came in, to the house Geordie lives in. In Canberra. Which is the same house Wilcox grew up in. Geordie was going home forever. Wilcox was coming home on Thursday. Which was yesterday.

With me so far?

"Ouchy toof," I grumbled to myself on Sunday afternoon, after they'd left. I felt for the tooth but it was the tooth that wasn't there. I have a missing tooth. (I already knew that. It's been missing for some time. I didn't just go to rub my tooth and discover it was missing.) I rubbed my gums instead. I missed Geordie.

"Really, really ouchy toof," I wailed on Sunday night. And tried to rub my gums, but they were too tender to rub. And took some painkillers. This is not always a good move for me.

"shoot me, grandmammy. my leg is broke. be strong for me now, boy. old smithy can have the house! just shoot me, just kill me. wait! wait! dig two foot down under the old apple tree, just two foot mind. alrighty, now do it," I whispered, sliding in and out of delirium at about 3am Monday morning. I think it was the worst pain I've experienced in my life thus far. It wasn't so much that it was so incredibly excruciating, it was more that it was so diabolically unrelenting. You know how doctors want you to put it on a scale from one to ten? Well, it was only about a seven, really. But a lot of people have pain that's a ten for five minutes, then they slide back down to a five for a minute or two, which is a release for them. I had no release. This was just consistently, persistently seven. Or maybe even eight.

So I took some more painkillers. This is sometimes bad for me.

After that I got some sleep, and did try to pull myself together on Monday. I was just in pain a lot. But, hell, I thought, this isn't the first time I've had tooth pain or fillings falling out or indeed teeth falling out since I last went dentist six years ago! Jeez, oversensitive. Gimme anovver one doze nurofenz plus. And that was all out loud but to myself because Wilcox is gone to Canberra, remember.

Memories of Monday night and Tuesday and Tuesday night are a bit hazy jumbled together. At one point I vaguely remember being pleased that I hadn't eaten anything except alcohol and nurofen for twenty-four hours so was bound to have lost some weight, and actually it wasn't that bad, I wasn't even hungry, so maybe I could just keep it up for a month and be size ten again. The pain was completely consuming — I could think of nothing else but the side of my head. Wilcox was gone and while I could talk to him on the phone, I couldn't ring anyone else or move much or do much except think about the pain or take nurofen or sleep. At one point, crashed out in front of the telly, I realised the vision in my left eye was blurry. Either that, or... Is that my cheek I can see?

I went to the bathroom mirror. The whole side of my face was puffed up like a cat fish. I though I had a black eye, until I realised it was just the shadow that this great pus-filled ball was casting on my face. And yes, I could see my cheek out of the corner of my eye.

I felt a bit faint.

I went back to bed.

I thought, I should probably ring a dentist. I wonder if it is morning or night.

I don't even have a dentist in Melbourne. Stupid dentists. I used to have perfect teeth until I was twenty-five. All pearly white and no cavities or nothing. Then everything went downhill, quite rapidly — a filling, then another, then a couple more, then it was straight on to the root canal. I noticed in my early thirties that smoking had taken its toll — as Rob Brydon says in A Cock and Bull Story, they're not so much white anymore as Barley Meadow or Tuscan Sunset*. Consequently, I became, at that late age, at over thirty, afraid of dentists. Though to be honest, I am more afraid of the pain of them draining my wallet then the pain of them draining my gums, though I'm afraid of the pain too.

The upshot was that I ended up avoiding dentistry for a couple of years. Then, in my late twenties, I lived overseas for several years, and rationalised that I couldn't go at all, because I was overseas, and all the overseas dentists were bound to be foreigners. Then one of my molars actually fell out, which was a shock. It didn't fall out all at once, it fell out bit by bit, but the shock was the day I realised it really just wasn't there any more, in tooth form. It had become a stump.

So I got back to Sydney, where I lived back then, and went to the dentist my flatmate recommended. He worked round the corner from us, in Darlinghurst and was (and I'm sure still is) an excellent dentist, highly prissy and poofy and precise. My flatmate would sometimes bump into him at some big faggy party when they were both on Eing off their nuts, and yet the dentist could still make Tezza feel somewhat guilty about not having seen him professionally for seven-coming-up-to-eight months. He want to smile, but end up sliding his hand over his mouth. And Tezza has really attractive teeth.

My mouth was a mess, but he was kind and fixed it up for me in exchange for my first born child. (Sucked in him — turns out I'm infertile!) Unfortunately, I accidently forgot to ever see him again. And then I accidently forgot to get a dentist when I got to Melbourne. So I don't have a dentist. But I knew Wilcox has a good friend who has a dentist near us, so I texted him to ask her. Eventually, I managed to speak to the dentist's receptionist.

"I need to see the dentist. Quite urgently really. I'm in some pain."

"That's fine," she said. "The dentist will be able to see you or one of your ancestors in 3017."

On Wednesday I went to the doctor. Dr Head Girl was busy so I had to see another doctor, so as you can imagine I was immediately on the defensive. However, she was great, she gave me a script for what she said were the strongest antibiotics she could think of and said, "Get it filled out now and take right one now. If it gets any worse, go to the dental hospital. No, no! Don't do that! Go straight to casualty!" I was well pleased with her drama and the depth of the wrinkles in her concerned forehead. Doctor Head Girl is too contained to be dramatic.

My head, by this time, was the the size of a pumpkin, but even just as I got home and before I took my new pill, my mouth filled with green pus. Sorry, but it did. The thing had bust, just by itself. So I took my anti-biotic and spat green pus out on to tissues and I did immediately feel better. I've been getting better ever since. I'm not totally better — my gums are still pretty cushiony on that side of my mouth, but I'm nearly better. Wilcox came home and that made me a lot better. But I still miss Geordie.

Anyway, as my Swedish cousin would say, "And so it was." That signals the end of a story.

Meanwhile, Red Symons is not Miss Schlegel — I made that up to fool youse all. I'm feeling especially proud of not being Red Symons because I caught him being a dickwad the other night, after I saw the doctor. I went to the bottle-o, which, yes I know, I shouldn't have done on antibiotics — because what does it provide but fuel for my sorrow and tooth pain and my general despondency I was right in the thick of at the time? Oh, and make the antibiotics work less well. And the antidepressants. (It does turn the heat up on the Aunties though!) Anyway, there was a chick in there getting served and I just stood next to her and stared up at the rows of reds, like big vials of blood behind the counter, trying not to cry. Then I heard the door creak and felt a large man behind me. The girl beside me turned round and obviously started, then he said, "Don't worry, it's only me." She laughed and said hi. I assumed they vaguely knew each other.

Meanwhile, she paid for her booze. I didn't look at anyone cause I was still trying not to cry, and was aware this might have made me look grumpy which I wasn't, just sad. The guy behind the bottle-o bar (which is attached to the real pub bar) was the oldest guy they have, a very sweet old bloke who's probably worked there since the war, and probably came with the place when the latest owners bought it. I got ready to tell him what I wanted because it was my turn. But the big guy behind me just threw a fifty buck note down on the counter and pushed his bulk in front of me. The old guy looked at me, and suddenly I was really grumpy, very grumpy at people and their lazy and overdeveloped feelings of entitlement and their pushy-in-ness. I said, "Please," and let him get on with it.

Anyway, that was Red Symons.

After he left, the lovely old bloke behind the bar reached over and squeezed my arm and said, "Sorry love, you were next, I know." He found my cab sav for me. "You know that bloke, that's Red Symons, from the telly. He's a rude man. The other day he came in here and wanted money from the EFTPOS and we didn't have it yet. We don't carry money specially for EFTPOS, we have to make it first." I agreed that I knew this because I had been caught out with the same problem, although of course I was perfectly charming about it because I have good manners. "Anyway, he got stuck right into me. Totally pissed off. Well it's isn't my fault. It's not the way we do it round here."

Tosser.

Manners. I was going to post once about manners, but I've gone on too much so I'll save it for another time. Instead I'll leave you with one of my favourite bits of an interview ever. It is from an interview with Stephen Fry in The Times, during publicity of The Ode Not Travelled, which I own and have read, although, shamefully, I never finished all the exercises.

... the chief cause of bad verse, says Fry, is laziness.

“You cannot work too hard at poetry,” he says, tapping his saucer for extra emphasis. “People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don’t have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It’s not as if you’re ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted.”

He puffs contemplatively on a full-strength Marlboro, and pours more tea.

“It’s so easy to say, ‘That’ll do.’ Everyone’s in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy …”

Morally lazy?

“All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don’t stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it’s not good enough.”

The solution? Poetry, thinks Fry. “At its best poetry engages with the realities of existence. That’s why it’s so grown up. It’s the absolute opposite of this Disney idea that if you dream hard enough you can get anything - that’s so manifestly not true. Good art has a skull showing. We just need to knuckle down and produce it.”

* To remember the exact shades of Rob Brydon's teeth in A Cock and Bull Story I googled it and arrived at one of those "memorable quotes" pages, where I cacked my pant over the following exchange. Dr Slop, you'll remember, was played by Dylan Moran in a pitch-perfect, I'm-just-in-my-living-room-aren't-I-?-What-are-all-you-people-doing-? performance. This dialogue may not be funny if you haven't seen the movie. If you haven't seen the movie, STOP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING and get to a video shop.

Dr. Slop: I can't extrude the baby's head before the mother has a chance to mash its head to dough. Captain Shandy, make a baby's head of your hands. You're to imagine these sleeves are Mrs. Shandy's... funnel.
Rob Brydon: Funnel?
Susannah: Meat curtains.
Rob Brydon: Meat curtains? Brother?
Steve Coogan: My brother knows nothing of women.