Can you see my roots?

Hi all! Hope you internet junkies are enjoying November so far. It is my birthday month, so how could you not? I can’t believe an entire week has gone by since my last post. All day long I was thinking, “Something is missing in my life. Sex? Sure. Money? Absolutely. But more importantly, I’ve not spread my joy and charm across this great land of ours in some time. That has got to change.” In my defense, I have been ushering a bunch of shifts in the past couple of weeks, so I’ve been pulling fourteen hour days, but that is no excuse. My readers have come to expect a certain frequency of reporting, and I cannot disappoint. So get off my back already.

A quick weekend update. I saw Borat over the weekend. Don’t go. You’ll laugh so hard your stomach will hurt the next morning. Mine still does. As horrifying as it is in points (like when the rodeo guy says America is working on hanging all the gays) it is refreshing to see someone finally portray George Bush’s America with some honesty. Granted he tends to pick the most extreme morons to interview, but those people’s opinions are really out there and it’s about time people started talking about them.

In other news, Time Warner came back and still can’t figure out what’s wrong. Nuff said. On top of that, my cell phone has officially broken, so if you’ve called and I haven’t called you back, don’t be offended. It seems I can’t hear anything anymore. People can hear me, but I get nothing unless I use a goofy headphone or speaker phone. And it’s a Treo which I’ve grown accustomed to using, but my boss won’t spring for another one, so I’m probably going to end up with a blackberry. I’m going to be one of those annoying people who check their email every three seconds. Most importantly though, my new George Foreman arrived! I’m grillin now baby!

So as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, the whole reason I’ve been ushering is to pay off debt. I’ve been making some good headway, but I’m still pretty buried. It’s the most frustrating thing to carry credit card debt, especially since the only thing I can actually remember buying is some really nice shoes. (Curse you Prada!) I guess it all adds up, but it sure takes a long time to pay off. By the time it’s all done with the shoes will be three seasons old and I won’t be able to wear them anyway!

The problem with trying to pay off debt is that while you’re busy picking away at the glacier of cold, hard numbers staring you in the face every morning when you log onto your bank’s website, life keeps happening all around you, and as we all know, life is expensive. I don’t have a car so thankfully I don’t have to worry about the constant drain on my budget that comes with owning a gas guzzler, but the cost of living in New York mitigates any savings I enjoy from not driving. I bought a half gallon of milk today. $3. I decided to get a salad for lunch. $11. I needed to get diet coke on the way home. $7. Spending $21 to do nothing? Priceless. And that’s just food. Entertainment is a whole other story. Cocktails? $8-$10 each depending on where you go, EVEN if you flirt with the bartender, who more often than not is straight anyway and is only working in a gay bar because he knows 30 something gay men are suckers for a tight body and a killer smile. Not that I would know.

But right now, the biggest financial drain in my life is my mouth. Before you say it, yes, I’m a loudmouth, but thankfully I’ve not said anything that actually cost me money. No, the financial drain is all dental. I have the good fortune of having a set of teeth that refuse to chill out. Like the war in Iraq, I am fighting an endless, expensive (not to mention immoral) battle to fix something that is fundamentally screwed up.

It all started in college, when I went to a dentist to get my teeth cleaned. Apparently, that “permanent retainer” wasn’t supposed to be “permanent”, it was supposed to be “temporary.” I should have just left it in. He plied it out, and took four good chunks of my teeth with it. The most damage happened to the two teeth on the bottom right. The very back molar had a hole the size of a lima bean ripped out of it. I went through about five fillings, but ultimately it had to be root canalled and crowned.

Despite many reports to the contrary, I actually have a small mouth. The petite nature of my frame extends even to my jaw, and most dentists can’t get their fingers back there to do the work. (This sounds really gross.) So when my last dentist, Dr. Thaw (I do not jest) did the root canal on the bottom tooth, she decided she had to file away some of the tooth on top in order to make room for her stubby digits. I said then that I thought she went a little too far but she completed the root canal and fashioned a crown out of metal that was anything but a good fit.

About once a year the crown would fall out and I would go back to Dr. Thaw, who would file a little more of the top tooth away to make room for a bigger crown that would inevitably fall out, and cost several hundred dollars. Somehow, they always seemed to fall out at the most inopportune times. Really, nothing says “Your place or mine” like a big hunk of metal falling out of your mouth and onto your plate. (That is a true story by the way.) The last crown she cobbled together lasted about a year and a half, until about April of this year.

I was ushering at The Wedding Singer when someone asked me the running time of the show. I was tempted to say “two and a half hours too long,” but when I opened my mouth I was stopped short by a familiar feeling of… emptiness where a crown used to be. “Oh thit” I said, just as the crown plopped onto my tongue and very nearly down my throat. I hacked it up into my hand, looked at the patron and said “Don’t worry, there’s more where that came from.” So now I had a big hole where the crown used to be, and fears of another few hundred dollars being whisked away from my checking account. “Enough is enough,” I thought. “This show sucks and I’m never coming back.” Then I thought, “I am going to a different dentist, someone who can fix this permanently.” Enter Dr. Fine. I’m not kidding.

Dr. Fine is a fine doctor, but I wouldn’t say he’s all that good looking. I was expecting someone much more Antonio Saboto Jr. like, and while Dr. Fine is rather tall and dark, it’s more of a Father Guido Sarducci look. As a new patient, I had to go through the whole process of getting my teeth cleaned and examined before he would consider putting on a new crown. $300 for the cleaning and the xrays. With my shiny new teeth, I went back to Dr. Fine’s office, and he asked to see my old crown. I pulled it out of my non-Prada bag and handed it over to him. “What. Is. That?” “That’s my crown,” I said. “That is… not a crown.” Apparently all this time Dr. Thaw had been putting what amounted to a massive filling over my tooth, but never really bothered to fashion a crown that involved an actual post that you put the crown on. The post, as it turns out, is key to keeping the crown where it belongs. Who knew.

When he patted my shoulder and said “We’ll fix you right up,” I was blinded by the diamond encrusted, three pound Rolex strapped to his wrist. “Self,” I thought, “this is going to hurt.” ”How much is a crown” I eeked out. “Oh, $1200.” At this point I had been ushering for about three months and hadn’t even made that much. I now was further away from being out of debt than when I started. Holding back the tears, I muttered something about being broke and he said I could work out a payment plan. I thought that was very nice of him, until I learned that the payment plan required a minimum of $200 a month. No one I know has an extra $200 a month lying around, and I sure don’t, but the receptionist could see this was really upsetting me, and she said she would make it $100 a month until I could afford more. There are some kind souls out there.

Unlike a crown that goes on your head, a crown that goes on your teeth has to be very carefully designed so that it’s a good fit. So they put a temporary crown in to try it out. (As if I hadn’t had enough of those.) After I chewed on a few of those pasty tasting articulation papers, Dr. Fine decided that the tooth above it would have to be filed down a bit to make room for a proper crown. I warned him. I said, “Be careful, because it’s been filed down several times already.” “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re nowhere near the pulp of the tooth.” I kind of gagged at that word, pulp, and prayed that this would end well.

Because I’m writing about it here, you can guess that it didn’t. That afternoon, as the novacaine wore off, I sat at my desk and realized that something very, very bad was happening inside my mouth. Instead of the normal, non-painful existence we all enjoy, I was going through what can only be described as a feeling similar to someone repeatedly punching me in my face. It was a constant, deafening, blinding hammer of pain every ten seconds or so. I hobbled into my boss’ office and said something like “My mgf hha bbe bpo” to which he replied “Jesus, go home.” I got home and popped three vicodin. I don’t remember anything after that.

The next morning I called Dr. Fine and told him that whatever he had done had caused a massive problem in my mouth and that he was going to have to see me that morning. He had to get his snotty kids off to summer camp he said, and could see me at 12. So at noon I went into his office and he did the “does this hurt” tests. Yes, yes, and fuck yes, that hurts. “Well,” he said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to do a root canal. This tooth is shot.”

"Shot?” I asked. “It was fine the day before yesterday.” Oh, the wheels were spinning. He could see exactly where I was going with this line of thought, so he got his yet-to-realize-he’s-gay associate, and they both poked around my mouth for a while until his yet-to-realize-he’s-gay associate confirmed that yes, the tooth was shot. I pointedly asked how much a root canal would be, and he said the root canal was something like $400-$500, and that the crown would be another $1200.

So in a matter of 48 hours I had amassed $3000 in new debt. This was not the way things were supposed to go. I was supposed to usher for six months and be done and onto bigger and better apartments in a building that didn’t smell like India. Not that I have anything against India, I just don’t want to smell it all day. Now all of that was shot. I was back to square one. Not even. I was back to square –25.

Dr. Fine and his yet-to-realize-he’s-gay associate came back into the room just as I had put together in my head exactly how much debt I had just incurred. I must admit that there was a small part of me that was relieved at finally, once and for all, having this tooth done with, but the amount of money I now owed was staggering. I was shaking and sweaty. But Dr. Fine sat down and said “I’m going to pawn off this here $16,000 watch and pay for your root canal, so don’t you worry.” OK, not really. But he did say that as I had very specifically warned him not to touch the upper tooth, he would assume responsibility for that tooth and cover whatever costs were associated with fixing it.

I didn’t know what to say. Here, at last, was a gentleman. I thanked him. Really, what else can you say in those situations? Somehow “You’re damn right you’re responsible asshole” just didn’t feel appropriate. But, he was responsible and I didn’t want him to forget that. So I left it at a simple thank you. I get my new crown next week. What a pretty prince I’ll make. I’ll be sure and take pictures.

Well, once again I’ve written a novel sized entry, but the throngs of compliments I get from my fans encourages me to write and write. So keep the comments coming! Meanwhile, have a great week, and be sure to floss.