The “good news” is that an implant will be just $5,000 and quote, unquote: “You’ll be buried with it!”
Even better news: “I can pull it out right now.”
With novocaine! I balk. Novocaine.
Shiver. No can do. Not today.
I pad defeatedly out to the waiting room. Charlie goes in next. He emerges, looking pale. Because we’re damaged goods, he too needed a tooth pulled. However, being a cheerful WASP (“I’m unkillable!”), he just went for it, on the spot. His queasy report: “She kind of put her knee on my chest and there was this ‘EE ee EE ee EE!’ ” He makes a squeegee sound and moves clasped hands back and forth as though jacking up a car.
There was no choice but to schedule oral surgery the following Monday and to medicate. I got Valium, Vicodin, and amoxicillin when my (possibly infected?) sinus went temporarily numb.
The night before my procedure, it was a bottle of merlot and the only movie I could stomach, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. I felt after three hours of watching raggedy Scots beat the hell out of one another, a simple Glendale tooth extraction would seem like a spa treatment.
And it was. Wow!
I’m thinking of naming my first grandchild “Anesthesia.”
And of changing my Facebook relationship status to “In love with Nam Cho, DDS, Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery.” But perhaps I’ll wait until the pain medication runs out.
“Winter” Is Coming HERE
“January”
Welcome to the Jungle (aka: Mice!)
I AM IN A household that’s less mixed race or mixed religion than—if this is even a phrase—mixed pest.
My creed? I believe creatures of all types may live in this world. Just not in my kitchen. I pay the mortgage. This is my building. These are my rules. And the first rule is, no ants. If I see a trail on the floor or cluster in the sink, gently swarming, I will grab a Windex bottle and frenetically pump the plastic trigger, spraying the magical blue fluid everywhere, until all is still. Then I’ll wipe up the whole mess with paper towels and stuff them in the garbage.
Unfortunately, the human pests—I mean, inhabitants—in my home do not approve.
To begin with, my two daughters, Hannah, fifteen, and Sally, eleven, are idealists. Bossy young idealists. I didn’t make my daughters that way—California did. California really is different. It’s not just the election that showed us that. California just is. All the jokes are true.
Think of our longtime former leader Jerry Brown. Years ago known as “Governor Moonbeam,” that’s long over. I don’t know how it happened, but once he started losing his hair and not replacing it, Jerry Brown just got older and tougher and more leathery and didn’t give a damn, like some dude from the HBO series Oz.
Jerry Brown survived a deficit and fires and droughts and Jane Fonda (right?). And so it became “We’re California, everyone, f@#$ you!” We’re armed with hemp bullet vests, pita chips set on stun.
In Hannah’s California public middle school, there was supposed to be a debate about gay marriage, but the teacher couldn’t find one student to argue against it. The teens literally couldn’t fathom what such an argument would be. Now in high school, Hannah is in the LGBT Club, like all the other cool teens. It’s the law, but what she’s really become passionate about is the environment. She follows various things about it on Instagram, which I could describe to you if I understood Instagram, or Snapchat (is that still a thing?). Bottom line, the sight of plastic bags makes her nauseated. “People are just so lazy,” she says, snapping her gum in disgust. “People are lame.”
As am I.
“COMPOST? We don’t have a COMPOST?” Hannah exclaimed recently, rolling her eyes.
“Why don’t you start by picking up all the old Halloween candy stuck to the floor of your room?” I said. “Or is that some kind of ‘compost’? PS: Ants in your ‘compost’—have you noticed?”
My fingers itch for my Windex bottle. And roll of paper towels. Which Hannah points out is killing both innocent living creatures and forests.
Hannah’s younger sister Sally is one of California’s disturbing new wave of child vegetarians. I think she caught it from a youthful, pretty vegan yoga teacher who was mysteriously allowed on public school grounds. Although some child vegetarians catch it from the other child vegetarians. It is not because these children like tofu and actual vegetables. Oh no. #secretbacon. The reason for the vegetarianism is always more connected to a vague emotionally upswelling dreamscape. There are misty eyes, there is tearing up. As part of the tale, the sullen overweight family cat is—against his wishes—tightly cradled. It’s the same cat that kills birds and leaves them headless on the bathroom floor. The fish feed is, as usual, forgotten. (Never mind that fish eat other fish.)
The bottom line being, Sally refuses to let me kill anything, not even a spider. We’re supposed to trap it in a water glass and release it gently into the wild, even if this is a project that takes the greater part of an hour.
And finally, of course, we come to Charlie. Both divorced from our first and only marriages, we’ve been cohabiting for eight years. We’ll leave aside the matter of equality. Yes, because I make more of the money, Charlie theoretically does more of the “housework”—although in practice that’s a loosely defined term.
We’ll leave aside the fact that ours is the sort of couple where the man believes his woman is neurotic, impatient, and continually overreacting. Which is to say, I’ll observe something with my own eyes—
Perhaps the computer is acting up. A porch bulb has burned out. Flames are coming out of the dishwasher—
And, not even looking up from the New York Times food section, Charlie will tell me why what I’m seeing is not possible. (A girlfriend of mine is married to an extremely intelligent, know-it-all paramedic. In her pregnancy’s third trimester, she turned to him in the middle of the night and said, “My water broke.” Literally in his sleep, he said, “No, it didn’t.”)
We’ll leave aside the fact that Charlie, a Scotch-Irish white-as-the-driven-snow Columbia English major from Evanston, Illinois, is a practicing Hindu. And I don’t mean California Lite Eastern Mysticism, where a single “Om” after yoga class is followed by a trip to Whole Foods for kombucha tea. Charlie chants loudly in Sanskrit at home before his little attic altar and attends, without laughing, Hindu fire festivals.
So, re: insects. Charlie (a) doesn’t see insects, (b) believes, if they do appear, they have the same karmic rights to exist as us, so (c) no action should be taken as, in any case, they are natural, seasonal, and ebb and flow on their own (he one time asked, “Aren’t maggots seasonal?”), and (d) he has this thing about toxic chemicals.
“You’re spraying Windex over where we eat!” he’ll say. “You’re poisoning us!” Fair enough. So over the years, thanks to YouTube and wikiHow—I love wikiHow!—I’ve developed what I call the Organic Killing Fields.
I’ve learned how to keep pests at bay in a more healthful and organic manner. For instance, did you know that ants do not like mint or peppermint? So to disinvite them, just smear the threshold of your kitchen door with toothpaste! Do you know “wikiHow” to make a fruit fly trap? Simply take a plastic deli container, fill it with an inch of apple cider vinegar, and jab holes in the top with the sharp tip of a meat thermometer—jab, jab, jab! It’s very satisfying.