You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!™
Going to a ghetto dentist to get your teeth fixed.
I know it sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what I did.
Going Ghetto is totally a third world manuever that you orchestrate only because you have to. You go Ghetto only when you are buying crack with food stamps or trying to survive on top Ramen Noodles.
Going to a ghetto dentist is ok if you’re Rodney King or Vice Lord of the Latin Kings. But when you are a kid going to a college nicknamed the University of Spoiled Children, going to a ghetto dental clinic, well that is “off the hook” crazy.
Most of us go to a nice suburban dentist whose personell wear pastel colored smocks and greet you with sparkling manners and shining teeth. There are diplomas on the wall and Motor Trend Magazines in the rack. There are machines that exray and machines that drill and machines that treat the air to make it smell like citrus. There are monitors on the ceiling and cute posters of cats urging you to “hang in there”. This is the dental experience we take for granted. Now let me tell you about the dental experience that truly was a one of a kind.
DATELINE: LOS ANGLES
It’s 1985. As my web site promotes; I’m young, dumb and full of crazy!
It was my senior year in college. Sitting on the roof with a keg was boring. Throwing aluminum cans to homeless dudes with shopping carts was growing old. How many times can you burn your pool table on the front lawn?
With boredom in the air, the only real answer is: ROAD TRIP.
A bunch of us loaded up in the back of a pick up truck and headed into the hills of Pasedena. It’s amazing what you can do with a few frat brothers, a couple cases of beer and a lot of time on your hands.
We decided to forgo Mexico and the Beach and Vegas. Instead we wanted to hug some trees. Luckilly the state park is a short jaunt up the 110 freeway. Almost as soon as you get north of downtown, the stench of L.A. diminishes.
If USC is ground zero, home to Felix the Cat used cars, crack denizens and three alert smog, the Pasedena Mountains are like a Coors commercial bathed in golden sunlight. The air there is cooler and the pace slower. The air less chunky. The sky is blue not bronze. The trees are green, not the monotonous tone of grime that seems to signify the inner city.
People in Pasadena can actually speak. There is sentence structure and gramatical compatability. Please pass the Grey Poupon actually happens there. Back at Felix the Cat, sentences like: “Hey homey you gonna git wit dat?” constitute English. Honestly, I don’t even know what the hell that means.
Frat boys are inherently stupid and that wasn’t going to change just because the sky was bluer 20 miles away. Along with our fatuousness, we brought sleeping bags and beers and frozen burgers. I remember laughing and belching and hiking and throwing footballs. There was farting and crapping in the woods like educated farm animals.
My roomate Gilmore loved to publicly defecate. I remember him pulling off his pants, taking a pose and leaving behind a momento for all other hikers to come across. To commemorate the moment, and make sure no one thought it was bear “guano” the fellas used ketchup and mustard to write Gilmore’s name by his excrement. I believe there is a picture of this moment hanging proudly in the Delta Chi kitchen. YUM.
The trip would have been uneventful if not for the “oral incident”. I just remember it happening so fast and so violently that it was scary.
It is on a simple hike that my front tooth snaps like a two by four under the weight of a bull dozer. You take for granted how smooth the inside of your teeth are until suddenly they’re not. In a split second I went from Farah Fawcett, Ultra Bright pin up smile to a hand grenade chewing crack head whose front teeth looked like a car wreck.
The moment is frozen into my memory. We were pushing deep into the woods. For what reason, I don’t know. There were no strip clubs or bars down this path, yet here we were, out of breath frat boys, laboriously trudging through the woods.
I was looking down, making sure of my footing. We were in a single file line, ducking branches and skirting briar bushes. I’m sure i was hung over and the air was thick with the stench of too many bodies and too much franks and beans.
All of a sudden, I hear the compression of air and wizzing of of branches moving rapidly.
I looked up just in time to get my clock cleaned by a ferocious right hook of bark and sap.
WHIZZZZZ. WHAPPPPP.
The branch that hit me square in the teeth was traveling at a 100 miles an hour. It was wound tighter than a rubber band mounted to an engine block.
I was on the ground, stars floating above my head. Pain was searing through my jaw. It felt like my neurons were exposed to a flame. My lip was bloated like a Wall Street wallet. I felt blood spewing down my chin.
Though my tongue was swollen, like Donald Trump’s ego, I moved it forward on a reconasance mission to assess the damage inside my mouth.
“There’s a problem with the lower dental area,” the tongue screamed to the brain. “There’s a huge hole in here. It’s shattered like the dreams of a prom queen in Tijuana.”
As the story is now told, the guy in front of me pushed a branch forward so he could get by. Instead of easily letting go of the branch, and saying something civil like “Hey watch that branch.” He simply let go of the branch. Like a time bomb it exploded into my face. It was a young sappling, elastic like a Russian cheerleader. All i remember was WHIZZZZZ, then WHAPPPP!
It was like Mike Tyson hitting me in the mouth with a lead broom handle. It was a pretty severe injury, but I didn’t want to act like a wuss, so I got up quickly and tried to shake it off.
“You gotta fat lip,” someone stupidly said not noticing the front of my shirt covered in blood.
With tears swelling in my eyes, I touched my lip. It was obnoxiously huge, like a breast implant dangling from my lip. My gums were numb, but I could tell from the broken glass feel on my lower front teeth that I would be slurping my food through a straw for a while.
“You OK Cordan?”
“Yeah I’m F-in OK, you F-in Moron.”
I split out a glob of blood.
“Hey boys!”
And like that my injury was yesterdays news.
3 bikini clad girls appeared on the trail.
I could have had a hatchet in my skull and nobody would have cared.
The rest of the day was spent carousing and drinking beer. My wound actually was a fascination to one of the girls who either had a mothering complex or was into grotesqueness.
She asked me what happened and I said we got into it with a bunch of Hare Krishnas. Who knows if she bought it, but she laughed. And as you all know laughter is the key to planting your flag on a woman’s island.
If this had happened to one of my children, I’d take them immediately to an oral surgeon. That’s how serious this injury was. As a father, I doubt I would have recommned a prescription of franks and beans and wiskey by the campfire. My how times have changed.
By the light of the fire I’m sure I looked like Godzilla with a hunk of uncooked bacon dangling under my nose. But if a chick is into the Frankenstein monster you go with what’s working.
My frat brothers couldn’t have cared less. They laughed and reminded me how gruesome I looked. My head was pounding and I could feel the blood rushing through my jaw. I knew I was hurt, but there was no cell phones back then. There was no ranger stations nearby. And by this time, the guys I was with were too inebriated to drive anywhere.
So if you can’t beat em, you join em. I decided to anesthesize my anguish with Wild Turkey 101.
The liquor felt like acid on my lip. The wound was pulsing in conjunction with my heart beat. There were no mirrors, but I was told that I looked hideous like something from Phantom of the Opera. All I know is it was difficult to breathe.
But over time, the Wild Turkey eased the pain and allowed me to see the hilarity in my deformity.
Tomorrow, in Dr. Wiggins II; we head into South Central for some much needed dental work.