Going to a ghetto dentist to get your teeth fixed.
I know it sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what I did, back in the day.
I thought of this as I bit down on something hard and my tooth said “What you talking bout Willis.”
Now-a-days, if I hurt my tooth, I got to a dentist. I have insurance. It’s a no brainer.
But back in the 80’s when I was stupid college kid eating raman noodles and glass, dental care was iffy.
So I had to improvise.
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 a Latin King.
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 Pasadena. It’s amazing what you can do with a few frat brothers, a couple of 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. luckily 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 Pasadena 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 grammatical compatibility. 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.
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 whizzing 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 reconnaissance 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 sapling, 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 recommend a prescription of franks and beans and whiskey 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 anesthetized 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.
Looking like the elephant man, with a lip so swollen, and a tooth so “jacked”, I was in need of serious dental care. The problem? How to get relief on the budget of a Haitian dock worker.
I was a 20-year-old USC senior. I had cobwebs in my wallet and no insurance. I did however have a nice tan and I was in rock solid shape. How does that matter in a story about dental care? Keep reading.
I needed a tooth fixed and I needed it quick. I was living at an off campus apartment on Scarff Street. We were the only USC students in the 12 unit building. The rest of the residents were families from the neighborhood, mostly Hispanics, and a few African nationals.
Scarff Street was across Adams, just 2 blocks from campus. But 2 blocks from USC might as well have been a socio-economic light year away for the people on Scarff Street.
More on Scarff Street in the chapters to come, but needles to say, we were known as the crazy white boys at the end apartment overlooking the alley and the chop shop gang known as the Harpys.
Our next door neighbors came and went. At this particular time, it was a laconic African Dude who cooked food that stunk so bad I often found myself checking to see if the neighborhood dogs were missing.
I saw him with an ice bag on his tooth one day, so I thought, what the hell, maybe he knows a local dentist.
I banged on his heavy security screen. The inner door opened and I see two white eyes staring at me.
The smell of vinegar and mustard and dead dog floats through the cracks. I want to projectile vomit, but instead I ask the question I need to ask.
“Hey African Dude. Whose that dentist you told me about on Slauson?”
The eyes stare at me intently, trying to steal my soul. I notice a twitch in his hand through the mesh security screen.
I watch a nervous African dude spy me suspiciously. I gaze down to see him holding a revolver quietly by his hip. African dude always carried a revolver. It was protection. It was what it was. On Scarff Street, packing heat could be the difference between getting robbed and keeping your wallet. It could be the different between keeping the Harpy’s (the local street gang) from stealing your car battery. A handgun by your side just meant you were packing like everyone else on this deceptively evil little street.
“Dr. Wiggins,” he said in an accent so thick I have way expected to see a zebra bounce out from behind his couch.
And with that African Dude slammed the door closed. BAM.
“nice talking to you too African Dude,” I said my nose an inch away from the mesh screen.
When in South Central, you do what the locals do. If African dude says go see Dr. Wiggins that was good enough for me.
Monday morning, I was on Vermont avenue somewhere south of MLK blvd. It was pure ghetto filled with liquor stores and check cashing places.
I pulled up to a non-descript off-color stucco building. Like all the other buildings in this crime scene of a city, it was two stories tall and every portal was equipped with heavy metal security bars. I looked at the piece of paper in my hand and matched it to the address. There was nothing to indicate this was a dentist office.
I got out of my car and made sure that the doors were locked twice.
I walked up to the building’s entrance, passing a man sitting on the sidewalk drinking from a paper bag.
“Dr. Wiggins office?” I said pointing at the building.
The man sputtered something incoherently and pointed at the building mimicking me.
I was getting a bad feel as I walked to the entrance.
The door was heavily fortified with metal mesh. The windows had boards in them. The entrance was as inviting as a ballerina with a canker sore.
The sign near the door says: Boxers ring buzzer.
“Boxers,” I mutter aloud.
I think about walking back to my car. Then I run my tongue along the inside of my bridgework. It feels like paper clips and bobby pins. I swallow deeply and decide to push the buzzer.
BUZZZZZZZ.
After a moment there is a static filled woman’s voice that fills the small speaker.
“who dere?”
I feel awkward. “I’m here to see Dr. Wiggins. To get my tooth fixed.”
“You a boxer?” came the reply through the speaker box.
“A boxer?”
What the hell kind of question is that? I think to myself.
“No I’m not a boxer,” I respond.
“whatever.”
BUZZZZZ
I hear the security door unlock. I grab the door and pull it open and walk inside. I let the screen mesh metal slam behind me.
I am standing inside a narrow, dingy stairwell. There are 2 mailboxes on the wall. One of the boxes says: WIGGINS.
“What the ….”
I start walking up the stairs. The walls are lined with photos of boxers from obscure fights and gyms.
I get to the top of the stairs. The 2nd floor is brighter, illuminated by sun light filtering through half a dozen windows. Unlike any dentist office I have ever seen, the 2nd floor is one big open space. There are no walls, no barriers, just a large space, like a dance hall. The waiting room is next to the stairs. I know this because there is a floor rug, complete with chairs and receptionist desk. A black woman is behind the desk and eyes me suspiciously.
“You the boxer?”
“No I’m not a a boxer.”
“You in shape boy. And that busted lip. A white boy seeing doctor Wiggins and all. You sure you ain’t a boxer?”
I smile politely and point to my lip.
“No I just need a dentist.”
“Take a seat,” the receptionist says gruffly. “Dr. Wiggins will be right with you.”
I sit down and look at the magazines on the table before me. Ring Magazine, Boxing Illustrated, and Ebony magazine fill the space.
Since there are no walls, it is easy for my eyes to gaze past the waiting area in the large, open space. In the center of the room, like a boxing ring itself, there is a dental chair and some medical equipment. A young man in his 20’s is getting out of the chair. He is wearing a tank top and he is muscular, angular, like a boxer.
“Thanks Doc,” he says with a heavy Jamaican accent. He grabs his jaw and adjusts it. “I’ll pay you from my purse,” He says heading to the stairs.
An older black man in a white doctor’s coat turns to face the boxer.
“You win and I get 15%,” the older man says.
The boxer flashes a grin that reveals a gold tooth. He eye balls me suspiciously like a shark eye balls a bucket full of chum.
His stare is harder than his body, which is cut like a piece of granite. He nods to me as he heads down the stairs.
“You can see the doctor now,” the receptionist says pointing at the center of the room.
I eye-ball the old man and his Frankenstein set up in the middle of this odd office and I feel the flight or fight instinct saturate my adrenal glands.
What the hell am I doing here, I think to myself. I feel my feet pawing at the floor, looking for traction in case the order to run is issued. At the same time, my tongue pushes against the broken glass that doubles for my teeth.
“You a fighter?” the dentist shouts.
If I’m not, I sure should be, I think to myself.
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 octagon of death. The maniacal ghetto dentist stands at the ready, his water pic raised, waiting to slaughter the lamb at the altar 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, nowhere 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 phloem.
I notice “WIGGINS DDS” embroidered 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 spelunkers climbing through the mucous.
“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 semblance 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 altar. 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 Michelangelo. Someone should have hung 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.
Life’s Crazy