DR WIGGINS III
You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Dead man walking to a dentist chair in the middle of a ghetto apartment.
That’s the crazy scene I find myself in as Dr. Wiggins’ old man eyes bore a hole through my soul. He is standing there smiling, his blue eyes hypnotizing me as I try to turn and run. He is holding a tooth brush or a water pic or some instrument that glistens in the sunlight beaming through every open window.
As my brain races out the door, my body trudges forward. I feel the harsh stare of his Jamaican receptionist burning a hole in my back.
“Hey boxer, you here for a mouthpiece?” Her words are haunting and echo from the rafters.
I want to run or scream or dial 911 so they can start a missing person’s report. I know I am going to die. I know dogs will find my bloody body parts in the dumpster. Police will come and wonder how the boxer died.
Every sane fiber in my being says run for it. For some reason, the hypnotic blue eyes of Dr. Wiggins draw me closer to the center of this train about to go off the tracks.
Only a few feet away now. I feel my tongue wash over the bloody snaggle tooth dangling from my lower lip. I continue trudging toward doom.
“Run!” My brain tells my feet.”Run”
But my tooth takes control of my feet and shouts above the noise of confusion that is blasting my brain like a Pittsburgh blast furnace.
“We’re broken and hurt,” my teeth cry. “We need help. Take the chance. Walk on.”
It’s as if a spot light is illuminating my entrance into the octogon of death. The meniacal ghetto dentist stands at the ready, his water pic raised, waiting to slaughter the lamb at the alter of dentine.
But this is not a movie. There is no Chuck Norris to save me. This is my life taking a U turn into the twilight zone.
I’m in a dentist office that doubles as a crack house and a boxing gym. The 2nd floor is one big square Like a dance hall. There are no walls, no partitions, no where to hide. I cannot avoid the receptionist’s glare, or the harsh stare of God himself.
Every window is thick with security bars and I can’t help wondering if the bars are to keep the crazy’s out or the patients in. I’d give anything right about now to see a sign reminding me to floss. Instead, the walls are lined with pictures of fighters from years gone by.
The insanity of this scenario is thick like used cat litter. I am scared and amazed that it has come to this. I fight every instinct to run away like a frightened school girl. I move forward, pulled by a magnetic force of intrigue and necessity.
I move into, what I can only classify as the dental “zone” and acknowledge the central figure in this misguided abortion.
Dr. Wiggins is in his late sixties and his balding black head is accentuated with a fluff of white cotton. His face is friendly and his eyes burning a crystal blue like the arctic fox. I imagine this portly man working voo doo in a back alley in Haiti.
I quickly scan the “zone” for a dead chicken. I only see a tray full of what appears to be real life dental tools that my real life dentist back in suburbia actually uses.
“Take a seat,” he says, his voice full of gravel and phlem.
I notice “WIGGINS DDS” embroirded on his white lab coat.
That’s somewhat reassuring I think to myself. It’s not like you can get that at a garage sale. Or can you?
I climb in the lime green dental chair and look around nervously. The seat looks like it was repossed from a 1968 VW van. The only things missing are the love beads and the peace signs.
Dr. Wiggins stands over me and asks; “You here for a mouth piece fitting?”
What’s with the boxing questions I think to myself, fighting the urge to jump out of the chair.
I look past the antiquated light attached to the ceiling. It is heinously bright and it is pouring into my pupils, burning a hole in my cerebellum. I squint, noticing a long line of discoloration around the bolts in the ceiling. I imagine that there has been a year long water leak in the ceiling tile and at any moment this rusty metallic dinosaur could just give way and crush me where I sit.
I imagine the police pulling my lifeless body from beneath the heavy light that looks like one of those observation devices you pay a quarter to look through at the top of the Empire State building.
“Yeah Sgt,” the young uniformed cop is over heard saying. “He was killed instantly. Apparently he was an up and coming boxer here for a mouth piece fitting.”
“Another dental related tragedy,” his supervisor retorts taking a sip from his 48 ounce Big Gulp.
I push the visage out of my head and focus back on the voo doo doctor now hovering over my face.
I can feel his breath and I can see inside his flared nostrils, so cavernous, I half way expect to see spilunkers climbing through the mucuous.
“I’m a college student at USC,” I tell him. “I got in a fight with some Hare Krishnas.” I figure the lie has a semblence of fighting in it. Perhaps that will satiate everyone’s need for me to be a pugilist.
He leans his head back and laughs so forcefully it’s as if he is summoning demons to the alter. I almost expect bats to fly out of his pulsing nostrils and lightning to fill the room.
“let me have a look see,” he says opening my mouth gently with his wrinkly fingers.
“Yes. I see. Ah hah.,” Like a mechanic working under the hood a car, he begins inspecting my mouth and talking to himself.
“Yes, the crack is in the central incisor. The enamel has sheered away, but the dentine seems in tact. The pulp, yes. fine.. But there does not appear to be root damage.”
I feel my ass cheeks unpucker with every dental type thing he says. I realize that I have been letting external stimuli affect me and this ghetto dentist might actually know what the hell he’s talking about.
“Yes we can fix this. No, problem,” he says pulling a table of instruments closer to him. “Had a young boxer in here last week. Oh my. Oh my. 3 front teeth all gone. Major damage. Now that was a job. Oh me oh my.”
Dr. Wiggins suddenly feels like the avuncular 70 year old black friend that every 20 year old white frat boy is hoping to meet when seeking expert dental work.
Suddenly, Dr. Wiggins hands me a large dressing mirror.
“My assistant is out today,” he says.
The situation is so unusual, all I can do is grab hold of the mirror. I hold it up with my left hand so I can see my horribly disfigured face.
What an image. My Frankenstein monster head is surrounded by lime green plastic chair and a 70 year old black man’s hands inside my mouth.
The crazy isn’t over yet as Dr. Wiggins hands me that suction device thing that the dental assistant usually touches.
“OK, no problems. When you feel like spitting. Just spit.”
Suddenly I’m assisting in my own dental procedure. My left hand has the mirror. My right hand is now holding the heavy metal thing that sucks spit. I feel like throwing up in my own mouth.
How much am I getting paid for this I muse to myself.
The rest of the hour is filled with Dr. Wiggins talking about his own boxing career. He was a golden gloves boxer who didn’t get to finish his career because he joined the Army. Despite racism and obstacles too numerous to mention, he got a dental degree and now serves the community where he grew up.
As he spoke, I began to realize that this wasn’t a bad experience, this was a one in a lifetime experience that nobody in the world is getting to experience except for me.
Dr. Wiggins and I began rebuilding my tooth with some sort of pasty tasting dental material. His two hands shaped the little tooth from a Frankenstein Monster into a cute little incisor that might actually be able to chew through a steak again.
What was so great about this? My two hands were right in the thick of this craziness, assisting in the dental rebirth like some kind of four handed Michaelangelo. Someone should have hung a men at work sign on my forehead because this dental zone was on fire.
Toward the end of the procedure, I was gagging on chunks of something hard that wouldn’t suck through the tube. Like a good cut man in my corner, Dr. Wiggins stuck his latex finger into my mouth and scooped the chunks away.
In this dental zone, “no harm, no foul” was the mantra.
Meanwhile, my other hand, as if equipped with a diploma from the Watts School of Dental Hygiene, is now holding a purple light that Doctor Wiggins tells me helps harden the bonding material.
Drills and purple lights and the powerful sucking of spit. It’s an hour that would actually make a good reality tv show. Then as strangely as it all began, it’s over.
Like my mother, Wiggins dabs the corners of my mouth with a bounty paper towel that he has laid around my neck during the procedure.
“There you go, son. good as new.”
My mouth doesn’t hurt, but my arms are exhausted from holding mirrors and spit suckers and purple light things.
“That’ll be 50-dollars,” Dr. Wiggins says, suddenly taking off his dentist hat and putting on his pay roll hat.
I pay him in cash like the weird drug deal it is.
“Thanks Dr. Wiggins,” I say.
“Good luck at school son,” he says like the black grandpa I never had.
As I leave, the receptionist lowers her copy of Ebony.
“Good luck in your next fight.”
I smile a smile full of new teeth that I helped install myself.
“I’ll do that,” I say.
I make my way down the stairwell lined with boxing photos. I push open the heavy security door and let the nauseating sunshine of the ghetto wash over me like unfiltered cigarette smoke being blown into a puppies face.
I squint and push my tongue against the inside of my teeth.
Smooth as a baby’s ass I think as I put on my Ray Bans and step over the miscreant with the army jacket lying in the doorway.
Armed with a new tooth and yet another story that nobody will believe, I head up Vermont Boulevard waiting to see what hand the Gods of Crazy deal next.