The Original Original Pizza Cookery

In those days, we used any excuse to stop by The Pizza Cookery. Friends visiting from out of town? Let’s take them to The Pizza Cookery. Need something from Fry’s? Let’s stop by the Pizza Cookery. Driving through The Valley for any reason at all? Let’s stop by The Pizza Cookery.

The Original Pizza Cookery, back then, was a vibe. Tucked into the corner of a shitty strip mall on Topanga Canyon Blvd., it was exactly what you would expect when you walked in the door. Sawddust sprinkled on the floor, Christmas lights strung around every inch of the walls, and complimentary peanuts at your table. 

The pizza wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but the complimentary rolls were to die for, the quantity of food was unrivaled, and the atmosphere was unlike anyplace else. Even the Northwoods Inn – the only other restaurant I’m aware of with sawdust on the floor – couldn’t compare to the vibe that was The Original Pizza Cookery. The anticipation of going to The Original Pizza Cookery back then was palpable.

Have A Baby They Said…

Sadly, we didn’t get to go to The Original Pizza Cookery that day. At the appointment, the doctor dropped a bomb on us, “We’re going to have a baby today,” he said. I’m sorry. What? I’m afraid there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. We’re here for a checkup, not to have a baby. The baby isn’t due for another couple of weeks, not to mention the fact that we have plans for lunch!. Our plans, however, were not to be. 

We were ushered upstairs, where Bonnie was put into a hospital gown, needles and tubes were shoved into her skin, and we were left to wait in a severely decorated room with a TV mounted to the wall that only played public service announcements about raising children. One of them was a warning about the dangers of shaking a baby. It was so silly and melodramatic that any message would surely be lost in its absurdity, but it had exactly the opposite effect. To this day, we still quote the deep, booming voice warning us to “Never shake a baby.”

We spent eighteen-odd hours in that room, listening to that TV. I’m not sure what the harm would have been in letting us duck out for an hour to grab a bite to eat before settling into that drab little room until the sun came up the next day. We really began to regret having skipped breakfast that morning. Bonnie especially. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, and she wouldn’t get to eat again for three days. 

The New Original Pizza Cookery

We would eventually eat at The Pizza Cookery again and with our children. I don’t, however, remember the last time I ate at the Woodland Hills location. I hadn’t been in years, though, when it moved to the Thousand Oaks Inn in Thousand Oaks. It seemed out of place there. The Thousand Oaks Inn had always had a coffee shop called Dupar’s on the first floor, next to the lobby. A coffee shop is more appropriate for a hotel than a pizzeria. Coffee shops serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and while I understand that many people enjoy cold pizza for breakfast, I don’t think anyone is willing to pay for it at a hotel. 

Nevertheless, overcome by hunger and nostalgia, I couldn’t resist popping in for lunch as I passed by. I walked into the main entrance, though there was nothing to indicate that it was the main entrance. The single, unmarked, non-descript, darkly tinted glass door looked more like the side entrance to the bowling alley that used to be next door than the main entrance to a reputable and shockingly expensive restaurant.

The little door opened up like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory to a spacious but poorly utilized foyer. There was a podium to the left that held menus, so I knew I was in the right spot. An assortment of shit cluttered the wall to my right. I wasn’t sure if it was tat for sale or tchotchkes for ambiance, which tells you that neither was working. Straight ahead, a young, average-looking blonde woman and an older man were having a discussion about Jesus. I stood patiently if not awkwardly, waiting for someone to acknowledge my presence. 

Will Customer Service Ever Recover From COVID?

Eventually, after what I felt was an inappropriately long time to have to wait during an obviously slow period in the day, the blonde girl approached me and asked in an almost offensively patronizing tone if there was something that she could do for me today. Taken aback that my purpose for being there wasn’t blatantly obvious, I was momentarily dumbstruck. I stuttered and stammered, waving my arms in a way that she correctly interpreted as “I want a fucking table.” She said, “Oh. Dining in today?” As though everyone she encounters at that little podium has a different agenda. Then, she pulled a menu out of the podium and led me to the first table in a series of five comically tall booths that ran the length of the front of the restaurant. 

The booth sat against the wall, so it was very dark and sad. The hostess was either adept at reading people’s faces and body language or she frequently had customers requesting to be seated somewhere other than the dungeon because, without me saying a word, she asked if I would rather have a table by a window. Of course, I didn’t want to sit alone in the dark. I wanted to be able to look out the window while I waited for my lunch. She led me past the next table, where a father and daughter were already seated, and sat me at the table on the other side of them, next to a window.

Who Was This Booth Made For?

I laughed when I saw the window. The majority of it was frosted, and what little of the glass wasn’t frosted had hearts painted on it. Little did it matter because the window faced a stone wall ten feet away, so there was nothing to look at anyway. Perhaps that’s why the window was frosted in the first place. I climbed up onto the booth as the hostess laid my menu on the table. As she was walking away, she said that she would get me some rolls. I quickly replied, “No rolls.” She seemed a bit surprised but didn’t say anything more. She just returned to her bible study. 

The Original Pizza Cookery At The Top Of Jack’s Bean Stalk

I didn’t pick up my menu straight away because I was distracted by the height of the booth. It was so tall that my feet didn’t come anywhere near touching the floor. I’m 5’11’ with a 32” inseam, and my feet didn’t even reach the bar around the base of the table. As the edge of the booth cut into the back of my thighs, cutting off circulation, I couldn’t help but wonder who exactly these booths were made for. Did they find some 7’ tall carpenter on Craigslist to build these things? I cannot overstate how uncomfortable the booth was. My legs were all pins and needles when I finally left the restaurant. I’m happy to report, though, that since my visit, they have lowered the booths and tables to a human height.

The Gluten-Free Game Is Strong At The Original Pizza Cookery

I was so preoccupied with the absurdity of everything about this table that I completely forgot to look at the menu before my server came by to take my order. I already knew that all I wanted was a salad – The Original Pizza Cookery is sort of known for their generously sized salads – so it was just a matter of skimming the salad selection for the one that I wanted. Still, I wish I had taken the time to peruse the menu because then I would have found the gluten-free section, which I only found later on their website.

They have the largest selection of gluten-free options of any restaurant I’ve ever been to. I wouldn’t count on all of their offerings to be 100% gluten-free, though. For example, they have fries on their gluten-free menu but breaded mushrooms and mozzarella sticks on their regular menu, so the chance for cross-contamination is high. I was, however, impressed that they have two different sizes of gluten-free pizza, something I’ve never seen before. I ordered the Italian house Salad with blue cheese dressing and confirmed with her that it didn’t come with croutons. Before walking away, she confirmed that I didn’t want rolls, and I again said that I didn’t.

Italian and Gluten-Free Aren’t So Compatible

I seldom feel the need to explain to anyone that I can’t tolerate gluten, but I have learned that it’s best to make sure it stays out of my food. One day last week, I was eating lunch at Presto Pasta, and I forgot to ask if the salad came with croutons and, consequently, it arrived at my table covered with croutons. I picked them off, but the cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots also had crumbs stuck to them. So, I picked off all of the visibly contaminated components and placed them on a napkin next to my plate. An employee came by later to check on me and clear my dirty dishes, and I saw her check out the random pile of vegetables, croutons and the slice of bread accumulated on the table with an inquisitive look on her face.

I don’t expect people to read my mind, but if I were in their shoes, I like to think that I could and would pick up on little clues, make deductions, and extrapolate the information before me. If a man were to order his chicken piccata with the only gluten-free pasta on the menu, for example, I would assume that it wasn’t a preference but a dietary restriction because nobody prefers anything to be gluten-free. So, I would confirm with him that he has an allergy, and then I would be sure to send out his salad without croutons and his entree without a giant slab of stale garlic bread sitting right on top of his gluten-free pasta. But, hey, that’s just me.

We Just Lived Through A Pandemic, People!

Before she left me, the waitress took my drink order. I asked for a Pellegrino, and she asked if I wanted lime with it, which impressed me because rarely does anyone think to ask that, let alone proactively bring limes out with the drink. My impression turned to disgust when she set my glass down on the table by the rim. Why don’t you just stir the lime in my water with your fingers while you’re at it? She didn’t only carry my glass that way, either. I saw her place other glasses on other tables that way, too.

Imagine what she’s spreading from glass to glass by handling the rim of the glass that way. Someone has a cold sore; she picks up their glass by the rim to refill it, returns it to the table, picks up a glass from the next table by the rim, refills it, returns it, and before her shift ends, everyone in the place has herpes. Of course, I realize I’m in the minority of people who disdain straws and choose to drink from a glass like a proper adult, but it doesn’t make the way she handles glasses any less gross. I even saw her set down a mug by the rim. A mug! It had a fucking handle for fucks sake!

While I waited for my salad to arrive – which, by the way, took significantly longer than I felt it should have, considering it was just one whole head of lettuce, a handful of mozzarella, half a can of garbanzo beans, and one slice of nasty looking very unripe tomato –  I took in the scene that is the new and improved yet, somehow, Original Pizza Cookery.

Pizza Shouldn’t Be Political

The word that came to mind as I looked around the dining room was WASPY. Perhaps it was the Jesus talk when I walked in the door that tinted my perspective or that everyone in the joint was white and conservative. Whatever it was, I simultaneously felt at home and behind enemy lines. Later that night, Bonnie reminded me that during the lockdown, the owner of The Original Pizza Cookery, refused to shut down. Their disregard for public safety would explain the server’s filthy fingers all over the rim of my glass.

The More Things Change…

There were two tables off to my left, occupied by old ladies who could have easily been the same old ladies who sat in coffee shops and restaurants in Thousand Oaks when I was a kid. There’s something about old ladies in Thousand Oaks that I’ve never seen anywhere else. They share the aesthetic that comes with aging comfortably in relative affluence. They all look like they walked out of a brochure for an assisted living community, and they always have. For all I know, these were the same old ladies eating lunch here thirty years ago when this was Dupar’s. Someone periodically comes out of the back and updates their clothes like the animatronic characters at Disneyland.

Daddy Daughter Day

Since there was nothing particularly interesting going on in the dining room, and since they were sitting directly in front of me, I found myself drawn into the conversation between the father and daughter seated at the next table. The father was sitting with his back to me. He was probably in his early fifties, and what remained of his hair was gray, almost white. He had the familiar horseshoe of male pattern baldness, but his was fine stubble that had grown back since his last shave two or three days earlier.

When I was a kid, guys with the horseshoe hairline carried on like they had a full head of hair. They didn’t shave it. They grew it out like they did when they had hair. It was never a flattering look, but when more than half of the men you know all look that way, you only have the men blessed with a full head of hair to compare yourself with. Then Bruce Willis went bald and started shaving his head, and balding men everywhere followed suit. Even men with odd-shaped heads looked better without the weird furry ring, which, before long, became a novelty of old pictures and home movies, like wood paneling and bell bottoms. 

He would have looked like a nerdy software engineer if he grew his hair out. Not the young hipster software engineers of today’s Silicon Valley but the kind with Coke bottle glasses and pocket protectors that created the industry those young nerds occupy today. The daughter was pretty but in a forced, artificial way. Beauty didn’t seem to come naturally to her, but she was at an age and socioeconomic level that afforded her access to the progress of the feminine beauty industry.

Hot Tea At The Pizza Cookery

She explained to her dad that her man was traveling to Chicago for business. I didn’t catch if they were married or just living in sin. The way she spoke about him, though, it didn’t sound like she was married to the love of her life. It sounded more like a legal partnership or a marriage of convenience. He is an investor, she explained, with a firm based in Chicago and has found that showing up to certain events in person has benefits of some sort or another. It sounded to me like she was making excuses for him and that she didn’t really believe them herself.

The Service Begins To Slip

As I finished my lunch, I began to get impatient. My server had fucked off somewhere after bringing me my salad and never came back to check on me. I would have liked another Pellegrino, but now that I was done eating, I just wanted my check. I saw her stopping by every other table but mine. She finally came by my table and asked me if I wanted anything else. I told her I just wanted the check, and she said she would be right back with it. But she wasn’t right back with it. She went back to waiting on every other table in the place. 

While I was waiting, the conversation between father and daughter turned to grandchildren. It seems there was trouble with the ol’ baby makin’ factory. A year ago, they thought that they would be pregnant by now, but it’s just not happening for them. She and her man were checked out, and they’re both working properly. I got the sense that her man was more disappointed that they weren’t pregnant than she was. Even her dad seemed to be a little more disappointed than her. It sounded like she was more disappointed about letting him down than disappointed that she wasn’t pregnant. 

It surprised me to hear that she was trying to have a baby because the way she was talking about what her man does for a living sounded more like first-date recap information than I-share-a house-with-a-man-who-I’m-also-allowing-to-drop-loads-in-me information. I also thought it was strange that she was sharing so much personal information with her dad. They must be really close. I wonder what it’s like to be that close to a parent. 

I Live Here Now

My waitress finally brought my check, but I wasn’t quick enough with my card. She just dropped the tray and ran. I feared it would be another twenty minutes before she came back to pick it up again and who knows how long before she brought it back. Pride of The Original Pizza Cookery she was. I was beginning to fear that this booth was my new home, and I was never again going to know the feeling of my feet touching the floor. Little difference it would make. With the booth cutting off circulation to my legs I wouldn’t be able to feel my feet before long anyway.

This Woman Will Give Birth Before I’m Able To Leave

Meanwhile, the daughter started talking about how difficult it had been to get pregnant. “There’s a 10% chance every month,” she lamented, as though the odds of getting pregnant are so long that it’s a miracle anyone has managed it thus far. I realize that it’s harder for some people to conceive than others, but there are so many millions of people who have a harder time avoiding conception that blaming your struggle to get pregnant on “the odds” seems a bit self-absorbed. It’s like when Bonnie complains that it’s too hot at 75º or too cold at 73º, and I remind her that it’s not too hot or cold; you’re too hot or cold. 

My waitress came right back with the check which was equally surprising and welcomed as the restaurant was starting to get busy, so I was glad to be on my way. As I was signing the receipt, I heard the daughter say, “It would just be nice for me to be the first not to have any medical intervention.” Apparently, getting pregnant doesn’t come easily for anyone in her family. Ironic, I thought, as I walked past her on my way to the door, my feet tingling with each step. Twenty-two years earlier, without even trying, Bonnie and I conceived our first son just upstairs, in this very hotel that is now home to The Original Pizza Cookery. What are the odds?

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By the time I was paying for my groceries, she was standing right on top of me. She was close enough that someone could have thought that I was with this trio of freaks buying booze in togas. These were not college kids either. Well, maybe the daughter was, but the parents were way too old to be pledging a frat.

The most ridiculous part about the togas in public is that they were not elaborate costumes. There was no makeup, accessories, or even zippers or buttons. They were literally bedsheets wrapped around their bodies. They could easily have waited until they got to the party to don them. That they didn’t only proves that these are attention-seeking assholes. Look at us! They seem to say. We’re so fun and free-spirited that we wear our togas to the grocery store to buy booze on our way to our wild Saturday night toga party. Ask us what we’re up to. Please, please, ask us where we’re going.

No thanks; I already know where you’re going. Straight to hell, you pushy, self-involved cunts.

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The story begins…

On November 1, 2023, I was spray painting a bicycle wheel inside the garage. The air was so full of paint that you could see a faint cloud hanging over the workbench. I had no intention of spending any time out there once I was finished applying the paint, so I was not concerned about breathing in the fumes. When I was done, I cracked the garage door a few inches to let in some fresh air after I left. That was when my problem began. 

I completely forgot about the garage door until about midnight that night. I was already in bed and didn’t want to get up to close the door, but I knew if I didn’t, the thought of the door being open would keep me up all night. It wasn’t open far enough for any human to get in, but it was open enough for vermin to get in, and since we have strange cats loitering in our yard and a family of raccoons living in the Cyprus trees along the side of the garage, I thought it best not to tempt fate. So, I went out and shut the door. Fate, I would soon find out, doesn’t go to bed as early as I do.  

The next day, I went out to the garage, and when I turned on the light, I saw a little brown rat run under the workbench. I chased after it, but it was gone. I knew exactly where it went, though. Behind my toolbox is a hole in the wall where we store all of our Christmas decorations. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. It’s really the vacant space underneath the stairs that opens into the garage. It’s always been the preferred spot for vermin when they decide to take up residence in our garage because it’s the one spot out there that is left undisturbed for most of the year. 

I hated the idea of taking all the decorations out, putting them all back, and then pulling them all out again in just a few weeks when Bonnie was ready to decorate for Christmas, especially with no guarantee that I would be able to find or catch the rat, but I had no choice. I couldn’t just leave the rat to its own devices. So, I started pulling boxes out of the hole. When I got down to the tree and one wreath, I wondered if she was actually in there. Had I just wasted a bunch of time looking for a rat that wasn’t there? But just as I had this thought, I heard her moving inside the wreath bag. I slowly picked it up, and when she felt it move, she poked her little head out of a hole in the bag and then bolted. 

She ran across the garage, but it was such a mess from all the different projects I had going on that I had no hope of tracking her. I was in the middle of building seven picture frames for Christmas presents, so the garage was covered in sawdust, wood scraps, tools, and glass, and that was all just from one project. I also had several other projects in various stages of completion strewn about the space as well. I looked around but couldn’t find any sign of her, so I gave up, put the decorations back, and waited for her to show her ugly face again. Strangely, though, she didn’t. 

Fast Forward to December 6.

I didn’t see any sign of her again for about five weeks. I went out to the garage to record a video response to a comment some pedantic twat left on my pool table video, and I happened to notice rat shit all over the pool table. Great, I thought, she was still here. I had hoped that I had scared her off, but the evidence showed that she was not only not scared, but she was getting quite comfortable. I was going to have to deal with her, but there wasn’t time just then to tear the garage apart. 

I sat down and started recording my video. Suddenly, my AirPod case fell out of my pocket. I looked down to see what had fallen, saw it was my AirPod case, picked it up, and put it back in my pocket. I didn’t think anything of it. 

December 7, 2023

The next day, however, when I needed to use my AirPods, I discovered they were missing from their case. Where could they be? I’m not one of those people who leaves loose AirPods lying around. They are either in my ears or in their case at all times. I’m so diligent about it, in fact, that when I texted my boys to see if they knew where my AirPods were, my oldest said he hadn’t seen them other than in my ears. 

The only possible explanation was that someone took them out of the case. Eew, I thought. Who would do that? I’m all for a secondhand market, but there are just some things that I would never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, acquire used, regardless of the price, and earbuds are at the top of that list.

I started to panic a bit, thinking that we had been robbed. I looked around to see if anything else was missing, but nothing was. Besides, if someone had stolen my AirPods, why would they leave the case? 

I called Bonnie and asked if she had seen them, and she launched into the standard “help someone find a missing object” series of questions. When was the last time you used them? Where did you have them last? Do they show up on Find My? Blah, Blah, Blah. 

I had used them the day before on a long phone call with my mom. I was in the garage when we hung up, and I know I took them out of my ears, put them back in their case, and then put the case back in my pocket. That they’re not there means someone had to have taken them. There’s no other explanation. But who and why? 

Then Bonnie said something interesting. She asked me if I had recently dropped my AirPod case. I told her that it had fallen out of my pocket in the garage just the day before. She said, “They’re in the garage. I drop my AirPod case all the time, and when it hits the ground, the AirPods go flying in different directions.” I had already scoured the garage, though. Since it was the last place I had seen my AirPods, it was the first place I looked for them. I crawled around with a flashlight on my hands and knees and checked every inch of the garage, but they just weren’t out there. Just to be sure, though, I went out and I looked again, and again I found nothing.

An Absolutely Ludacris Hypothesis

It got me thinking, though. What if she’s right? What if they did fly out of the case, and I didn’t notice? Then, sometime in the eighteen hours between dropping my AirPod case and discovering that my AirPods were missing, the rat found my AirPods and dragged them off to her nest. It was a ludicrous thought. We’re talking about a rat, not a ferret. It was crazy. It was such a ridiculous idea that I was embarrassed to run my hypothesis by Bonnie later that evening. We were driving home after she picked me up from getting my haircut, and I started to tell her what I thought might have happened. As I did, though, it just sounded so ridiculous. I tried again, stopped, and finally, I just came out with it. She thought it was just as ridiculous as I did. Or maybe she just thought that I was ridiculous. Either way, she would know the truth soon enough.

So, it was down to two scenarios. Either some disgusting, ear fetish pervert – yes, kink shame – stole my AirPods but left the case behind, or a rat found my AirPods on the garage floor and ran off with them. At this point, I decided to never speak of this to anyone and die wondering what happened to my AirPods.

December 8, 2023

But then, the next day, I was getting my bike out of the garage, and since the door was up, I thought I would look around to see if I could see my AirPods from a new angle. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My left AirPod was lying beneath the bandsaw at the front of the garage. 

Had it been there the whole time? For a moment, I thought it was plausible that it had flown out of the case when the case hit the floor and slid 15’ across the garage before finally coming to rest under the bandsaw. It didn’t seem likely, but it was the only reasonable explanation I had. It was also reasonable to think that I had just overlooked it during my multiple sweeps of the garage floor. These “reasonable” thoughts were immediately replaced by the horrible realization that the unthinkable had come true when I noticed that the AirPod was missing the rubber earpiece. Then I noticed that the little plastic bit formerly attached to the rubber earpiece was lying on the ground next to it. My brain, however, wasn’t up to making the obvious connection that the rubber earpiece had been separated from the plastic bit and that that wasn’t possible from being dropped and sliding across the floor. I stood there confused, staring at my AirPod in my hand. As I examined it closer, though, I saw that the pod itself had been gnawed on. Suddenly, my brain came around and started to accept the reality before me. The little bitch really did steal my AirPods. I looked around for the right one but didn’t see it anywhere. It would turn up when I found her nest and destroyed her, I thought to myself.

Time To Take Action

I immediately set a trap under the workbench, baited it with peanut butter, and then set up a camera and waited. I waited all day. I checked on the trap periodically, but there were no signs that she was still in the garage until about 8 p.m. when my son came inside to tell me that the rat was on the pool table. My dad had given me his old TV a few weeks earlier. I have no immediate use for it, so it has been sitting, wrapped in bubble wrap, in the same spot I left it when I took it out of his car weeks earlier. The rat was in the bubble wrap.

I grabbed my pellet gun and went out to see. I could hear her crawling around on the bubble wrap. I imagine it’s extraordinarily frustrating to be so close to bubble wrap but too small and weak to pop it. I slowly lifted the TV. My plan was to shoot her through the bubble wrap, but she was too quick. She darted out of the bubble wrap, almost too fast for me to see, ran across the pool table, down to the floor, and under the washing machine. Our washer and dryer is a single stacked unit. It’s very heavy and very inconvenient to move, not that there was any point in moving it. She would have bolted as soon as I started moving it anyway. I climbed up on top of the dryer to try to see the narrow space behind it. I couldn’t see much, but I fired a shot down to the floor anyway, just in case I got lucky.

 At about 10:45 p.m., Bonnie asked me if I had checked the camera recently. I hadn’t, so I opened the app to have a look. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the peanut butter was gone. I went out to investigate. The peanut butter was gone. The trap wasn’t sprung, but the peanut butter had been licked clean. 

I went back and looked through the footage to see when she ate the peanut butter. I couldn’t believe what I saw. She had eaten the peanut butter just minutes earlier. She was playing with me. She didn’t steal the peanut butter and then rush off. No, she took her time, left, came back, ate some more, left again, and came back to get another taste. She was taunting me. She came back the last time while I was looking through the footage. This time, she wasn’t so lucky. She sprung the trap. I heard the racket through the camera. I switched over to the live feed, but the trap was no longer in frame. I ran out to the garage to investigate and found the trap upside down about three feet from where I had set it. She was still alive. 

I wasn’t sure what to do with her. I’ve never had to finish the job with a snap trap before. Once, many years ago, Bonnie bought a bunch of glue traps against my protesting. I told her that glue traps don’t kill the rat; they just immobilize it and leave you me to dispatch it. She bought and placed them anyway. Later that night, she stood in the garage yelling for me to kill the rat stuck to the trap while our son’s pet rat sat perched on her shoulder. She’s never been able to properly explain her simultaneous love for pet rats and disdain for wild ones. It’s not a huge mystery, though. Her house was overrun with rats when she was growing up. She used to lay in bed at night and listen to the rats running all over the house, so to this day, she has no tolerance for the tiny sounds of scurrying in the walls. Who can blame her? 

One night, when we were staying at our cabin in Arizona, a rat was scurrying around above the insulation in the rafters. The cabin is more of an unfinished shanty. The ceiling in the bedroom is just styrofoam insulation shoved between the rafters. Bonnie was freaking out. It was 2:30 a.m., and I was beyond tired. She wasn’t going to let us sleep until this rat was dead, so I got out of bed, grabbed my BB gun and a flashlight, and pointed it at the piece of insulation from which I heard the rat scratching or gnawing. I took my time and homed in on the sound. I carefully aimed with my ears, and when I was sure I had the rat in my sight, I pulled the trigger. I paused to hear where it ran to, but there was no sound. A few seconds later, a drop of blood ran out of the hole made by the BB. I crawled back into bed and slept in peace.

I could have put the rat in the trap down in the same way, but I didn’t want to. I always feel bad afterward. I’m glad that I didn’t because my decision not to kill the rat made the ending of this story so much more interesting.

I went back inside to look at the video of the moment the trap snapped. Seeing the footage, I fully understood why the trap didn’t kill the rat. When the trap sprung, it launched into the air. So much energy was lost to the force of launching the trap that there wasn’t enough left to break the rat’s neck.

I went back out to the garage about thirty minutes later, and she was gone. Not gone as in dead, but gone as in she somehow liberated herself from the icy steel jaw of death. She was nowhere to be seen, loose again somewhere in the garage. 

How Could She Escape?

The trap had snapped on her neck. If it didn’t kill her, surely it must have paralyzed her to some extent. A few years ago, I was riding my bike along the bike path here in town, and I came across a baby squirrel that had been caught in a rat trap. I don’t know how long it had been stuck in the trap, but it wasn’t dead. I pried the metal bar off of its neck, and it staggered away, seemingly unable to fully use the right side of its body. I can’t be sure if the damage was permanent because I never saw the squirrel again.

I imagined the rat running around the garage in circles, unable to use one side of its body or the other. I’ll never know, though, because there was no sign of her.

The Prodigal Pod Returns

I expected one of two things to happen. Either the garage was going to start to stink, or I was going to have to catch her again. To my shock, however, neither of those things happened. Four Days later, Bonnie ran in from the garage to tell me that my right AirPod was on the pool table. She wasn’t sure if it was the same AirPod that I found under the bandsaw or the other one. I picked it up, examined it, and then brought it over to the table where I left the other. I had them both. They were both missing the rubber earpiece, the little plastic bit was lying nearby, and they both had been gnawed on. If there was any doubt about the fate of my AirPods before, it was dispelled for sure now.

But What Did It Mean?

Was this a peace offering? Was she sending me a message? Did she want me to know that she was still alive and that this wasn’t over? Was she declaring war? Obviously, this was no ordinary rat I was dealing with. This was that Moushunt mouse. 

I knew what I had to do. I had to catch her again before I ended up tied up in a trunk in the attic. I rebaited the trap, but this time, I nailed it to a large piece of wood so no energy would escape by tossing the trap through the air. I learned many, many years ago from catching rats at my mom’s house that snap traps work better when they are fixed to something. I used to nail them to the rafters in the attic. One summer, when I was about 20, I nailed one to the rafter just inside the attic entrance. Every morning, I would climb up, empty the trap, rebait it, and wait for the next one. It was better than poison. A few years earlier, my brother set out poison for the rats, and one of them ate it and then died in the walls. The house stunk for a week and then filled up with flies like The Amityville Horror. My goal ever since has been to avoid anything like that ever again; that’s why I stick to snap traps.

I placed the trap in the hole, and I waited. And I waited, and I waited. The trap sat there undisturbed for weeks. The glob of peanut butter actually started to collect dust. No new rat shit appeared anywhere. She was gone. 

She wasn’t sending me a message after all, at least not a malicious one. I sent her a message. When I caught her in that trap, she knew I wasn’t playing. She knew her days were numbered if she stayed in my garage, so she split, but not before leaving my right AirPod on the pool table as an apology and maybe a peace offering.

And with that, the case of the mysteriously missing AirPods was solved. Hopefully, word will spread through the vermin community that my garage is not a place to build your nest. Or the next one who tries might not be so lucky.

You can watch a video about this ridiculous tale down below.

The post The Astonishing But 100% True Story Of How A Rat Stole My AirPods appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.

There’s nothing particularly special about it. It’s just a cassette tape of the old Animaniacs television show soundtrack. I probably wouldn’t have even paused on it, except that yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The one or the other wouldn’t ordinarily grab my attention, but put them together, and I’m taken right back to 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1994.

An Ordinary Three-Day Weekend

The night before, January 16th, was a Sunday. It was the best kind of Sunday night because I didn’t have school the next day, so it was like a bonus Saturday night. I had spent the weekend at my dad’s house, and we were sitting around his kitchen table, eating dinner, before he took me home. During dinner, the topic of earthquakes came up. I think it was my stepmom who brought it up. I don’t remember what was said exactly, but I remember the tone of the evening changed with the subject.  

If You Speak It, It Will Come

The mere mention of earthquakes always made me nervous. I grew up northwest of Los Angeles in the 1980s, so I was no stranger to them. I remember earthquakes being as common as bank holidays back then. We felt them at school during the day, at home in the evening, and I’ve even been in a movie theater during an earthquake on three separate occasions. (I don’t know if that can be chalked up to the frequency of earthquakes or how often I used to go to the movies.)

They were never very big, but they were a part of life, and they were always unsettling; probably more unsettling than they needed to be due to the looming threat of the proverbial “big one” that was always said to be overdue and expected at any moment. The “little” ones that I grew up with were terrifying enough without someone constantly telling you you think that’s bad; wait until “the big one” hits, and the whole state sluffs off into the Pacific Ocean.

Here’s a parenting tip: don’t tell children about hypothetical, impending, major catastrophic disasters over which they have absolutely no control, can’t predict, and cannot effectively prepare for. All it does is cause unnecessary trauma and anxiety. Despite years of earthquake drills, warnings of the “big one,” and TV specials about preparing for the worst, every earthquake I’ve ever experienced has caught me as off guard as the first one I ever felt. So, the mere discussion of earthquakes always gave me pause, and I’ll admit I did have a bit of a superstition that talking about earthquakes would summon one. Nothing that happened over the next 24 hours, by the way, would do anything to disprove that superstition.

As such, there was a pall over the rest of the evening. Strangely, about that same time, across town, my friend Dave and his family were having their own conversation about earthquakes. They lived across the street from me and my mom. They were Mormon, and, as Mormons do, they had a one-year supply of food stored for emergencies. Earlier that day, they had received an order of supplies to freshen their larder, and they were labeling it and rotating their stock. Dave’s older brother was complaining. “What do we need all of this for?” he griped.

“It’s for emergencies, like an earthquake.” Said his older sister. 

“We’re not going to have an earthquake,” the brother retorted, “we don’t need all this food.” 

“We could have an earthquake tonight.” his sister replied. A chill would run down my spine as Dave recounted this conversation to me the next day. His sister always seemed to be in touch with dark forces.

The Last Normal Night

The house was dark and quiet when my dad dropped me off after dinner. My mom wasn’t home yet. I went up to my room and turned on my stereo. For Christmas, I had received the new Paul Simon box set, and I was still thoroughly enjoying it. I rotated the tray in my 5-disc CD changer until it reached the third disc and turned the volume way up since nobody was home to complain.

The disc in that slot was Disc 2 from Paul Simon’s box set. It was a compilation of his 1970s post-breakup era hits; all of those songs with the electric piano and the gospel and Dixieland influences that flavored his music before Graceland in 1986. There were a few songs on that disc that I had never heard before, and I was really into them. One was “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” and another was “Rene And Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After The War.” They were both slow and reflective. One might even call them sad, but soon, I would grow to call them depressing, even triggering.

Eventually, my mom came home, and I stopped the music to talk to her. I told her about my weekend with my dad, showered, and went to bed. It was the last normal night I would have for a long time, and even though I had no reason to suspect what happened next, something didn’t feel right. I went to bed thinking the night just felt off.

4:30:55 am, January 17, 1994

You might be expecting me to say that I woke up with a jolt. I didn’t. In fact, I don’t know how long the house was shaking before I woke up, but I remain convinced to this day that I may have slept through the whole thing had my mom not been running through the house screaming my name. “Richard! Richard!” she shouted as she made her way down the hall to my bedroom, throwing the door open as I sat up straight, forced to take in what was happening. It was pitch black, loud, and terrifying. Everything was falling off shelves and furniture. I wasn’t sure that we would make it out of the house alive.

The worst of the shaking had stopped by the time we made our way downstairs. We were in shock. We walked through the kitchen and looked out into the backyard. There was nothing to see, but we could hear the water in the swimming pool sloshing about and spilling onto the deck. The kitchen was a mess. The contents of every cupboard were deposited into a pile on the floor.

We quickly turned to make our way to the front door before the shaking started again, pausing briefly when we saw that the picture window in the living room had shattered. As my young mind tried to process the large shards of plate glass I saw hanging in the window frame, I blurted out, “Holy shit.” I had never cussed in front of my mom. I felt bad, but she didn’t react; she just said, “Come on, let’s go.” 

We walked outside, across our driveway, and over the short wall that divided our driveway from our neighbor’s lawn. There was a half-moon in the clear sky, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing strong from the northeast. Hollywood has given the Santa Ana winds a reputation for being a majestic, magical force that makes anything possible, but the reality is that they just muss your hair, knock down trees, and make Southern California unseasonably warm in the winter. Before dawn in January, however, the Santa Ana winds blow cold.

We crossed our neighbor’s lawn in our pajamas and knocked on their door. I don’t remember who opened the door, but they let us in, and we all gathered in their family room, talking about what had just happened. As a kid, I was grateful to have someplace familiar to go that felt safer than my own home at that moment. As an adult, though, I look back at my mom and me seeking refuge from our next-door neighbors and cringe.

I would, of course, graciously offer succor to my neighbors if they found themselves in a similar situation, but I also see my parent’s divorce and subsequent reliance on our neighbors, friends, and family as a failure on their part to handle their own business, and not be a burden to others by making their problems, someone else’s. But that’s a story for another time. After a few minutes, we decided nobody was going back to sleep, so we might as well get comfortable. Since it was cold and there was no heat, my mom and I went back home to get dressed. 

I hustled upstairs and rummaged through my ransacked bedroom to find warm clothes to wear. My biggest concern at that moment was not to be naked when the house started shaking again – this would be a significant, recurring concern for the rest of the year. I dressed as fast as I could, but it wasn’t fast enough. As I was pulling my pants up, the shaking started again. It was a small aftershock, but it was enough to kick me into high gear. I put my socks and shoes on, grabbed a sweatshirt, and ran down the hall. When I got to my mom’s room, I called to see if she was ready. She told me to go on without her. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I ran downstairs and out the door.

Since earthquakes are a part of life in California, they spend a day every year in school teaching kids what to do when the ground starts moving. At an assembly earlier in the school year, they told us that if we lose power during an earthquake, we shouldn’t light any candles because if there were a gas leak, we could blow ourselves up. It was an interesting bit of info that I filed away in my fun fact reserves, but I didn’t give it any more thought until I walked back through my neighbor’s front door just as she struck a match to light a candle. I stopped dead in my tracks and said, “Well, at least we know you don’t have a gas leak.”

“Oh my god,” she said, “I didn’t even think about that.”

Of course, now I know that had there been a gas leak that was big enough to blow us up, we would have smelled it long before enough gas had accumulated to be any sort of danger, so I’m not really sure what the emphasis on “never light a candle after an earthquake” was all about. 

My mom showed up a few moments later, and the five of us sat in our neighbor’s family room, talking and riding out the aftershocks until dawn. It was only a couple of hours, but it felt like dawn would never come. I learned that day that in mid-January, the sun sleeps in until 7 a.m. Waiting for the sun to rise can be a lonely and desperate eternity, even in a familiar house with four other people. I suppose that’s why horror movies tend to end when the sun comes up.

There’s something reassuring about the light of dawn that breaks the tension of the unknown darkness of the night and promises that everything will, in fact, be all right. Sunrise has the power to completely change your mind. Things that were terrifying just an hour ago are suddenly inconsequential when the sun comes up. But in those intervening hours between being rattled out of bed and the start of a new day, we had no choice but to wait for something, anything, good or bad.

Sunrise

When the sun finally came up, we went back home. In the dim light of dawn, we explored the house, assessing the damage. There was nothing left unaffected inside or outside of our house. Inside the house, everything that was in or on anything else was now on the floor. We already knew the state of the kitchen, but it was even worse than we thought. What, in the dark, had been an amorphous heap in the middle of the kitchen floor was now, in the light, a huge pile of many, many objects that would all have to be sorted through. Meanwhile, outside the house, every wall in the backyard was damaged in part or entirely. Eventually, we would discover that the whole house had shifted, causing the east side of the house to rise three or four inches. 

My parents bought this house, new in 1967. The street was cut into the side of a hill. The houses on the south side of the street were built into the cut, but to build houses on the north side of the street – the lower side of the hill – the developers brought in fill dirt; a lot of fill dirt; 25 feet of fill dirt to be precise. My childhood home sat on 25 feet of uncompacted earth. The earthquake sent a wave underneath our house from east to west that vibrated that 25 feet of soil like a Magic Fingers. That’s why there was so much destruction on our side of the street. Meanwhile, across the street at Dave’s house, the extent of the damage was a single picture frame that was knocked askew. Bedrock, apparently, absorbs a lot of the trauma of an earthquake. 

We spent the day cleaning up the mess. We had no water, no electricity, and no gas. I had never experienced anything like it before. Blackouts were a semi-regular occurrence when I was growing up, but I had never lived without running water before. It fascinated me that the phones still worked, though. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around that. Losing power back then wasn’t like losing power now.

A transformer in my neighborhood blew a few months ago, and we lost power for 13 hours. It felt like we were cut off from civilization and sent back to the stone age. In almost every driveway, people were sitting in their cars with their engines running, presumably charging their phones. Back then, it just meant no TV, music, or video games. It was boring, but newspapers were still delivered, and if you had a battery-powered radio, which everyone did, there was no reason to feel cut off from the world.

The aftershocks continued throughout the day, and by late afternoon, my nerves were frazzled. Just before the sun went down, Dave came over to see how we were doing. We sat at my dining room table, exchanging stories about our experiences that morning when a decent-sized aftershock interrupted our conversation. I tensed up, expecting another jolt like the one that shattered my house before dawn, but this one was nowhere near as strong and passed after a few seconds. “I hate the shaking!” I said, “I just want it to stop!” Dave looked visibly confused by my statement. He wasn’t bothered by what happened at all, and so he couldn’t understand why I was so shaken. Nobody understood. I didn’t even understand.

I would quietly and privately deal with the trauma for the next year or so. For most of 1994, I slept on the floor of my mom’s room. Later that summer, a friend would see my makeshift bed and ask if I slept on her floor. I, of course, denied it. During the daylight hours, I was okay, but at night, I was a nervous wreck just waiting for the ground to start moving again. I dreaded being home alone at night for the rest of 1994, but alone I was most nights.

A Latchkey Kid In A Broken Home

Being home alone had become my new normal during those post-divorce years. My mom distracted herself with extracurricular activities after my parents divorced, so she was rarely home. Almost every night of the week, she had one commitment or another, five, six, even seven nights per week. Sunday was softball with her church team. On Wednesday nights, she was in a bowling league. She worked with developmentally delayed athletes, so the rest of the week was walleyball, baseball practice, track and field, fundraisers, dances, and other social activities. I don’t even know what all.

Most nights I had no idea where she was or when she would be home. These were the days before everyone was constantly connected everywhere they went. If you wanted to get ahold of someone, you had to know where they were if you stood any chance of reaching them. If you didn’t know where they were, all you could do was wait for them to reach out to you or come home. Nighttime was lonely after the divorce, but after the earthquake, it was downright scary. I didn’t want to be home alone when the house started shaking again, so I looked for any excuse to avoid it.

On Wednesday nights, I tagged along with my mom to the bowling alley. I liked it there for several reasons. One was because it was familiar. I had been going there with her since I was a little kid. The first time I remember going with her was when I was in kindergarten or maybe even preschool. There must have been a snafu with my school schedule or something, and she had no choice but to take me with her because the bowling alley back then was not a place for children. It was made very clear in the parking lot that I was to be on my best behavior. I was to sit down, be quiet, and not give anyone any reason to throw my mom out of the place. 

By the early 90s, though, it was a very different sort of bowling alley, one that encouraged whole families to come bowl. They doubled the lanes, replaced the drab, smokey, brown and orange decor with blue and white, and they brightened up the whole place. That was another reason I liked going to the bowling alley on Wednesday nights. It was well-lit. Even with every light on, our house was never what anyone might consider bright. The walls were yellow, but a dark, sad yellow, except for one wall in the living room that was dark brown wood paneling; the carpet was dark brown and gold; the furniture was all brown and dark wood tones. Actually, now that I think about it, it was not unlike the bowling alley before the remodel. It was not a place for a child to be left alone.

At home alone, I would spend my nights on edge that the ground would start shaking again, hesitant to even go to the bathroom because I didn’t want to get caught in an earthquake with my pants down. Plus, it was lonely in our big, dark house. There were lots of people at the bowling alley, so it felt safe. I always ate dinner in the coffee shop on Wednesday nights.

Every week, the guy who ran the diner would ask me why I always came to the bowling alley and if I found it boring. I didn’t. I actually really enjoyed it. It was almost like being on vacation. I would bring my Discman and a bunch of CDs and hang out in the arcade until it was time to go home. When I ran out of quarters, I would crawl around and look under all of the machines, looking for loose change that people dropped but were too lazy to look for so I could keep playing. A skill I would later teach my boys.

The bowling alley was only a respite from my fear and loneliness one night a week, though. The rest of the week, I was stuck by myself in our big, dark, lonely house. Twice a week, I went to a tutoring group after school. It was over by about 8 p.m. My mom couldn’t pick me up one night, so she arranged for me to get a ride home from someone else in the group. When we left, I asked them if I could go home with them. They agreed, albeit reluctantly and somewhat bemused. I spent 45 minutes sitting by myself at their dining room table, waiting for my mom to pick me up.

Nobody understood why I didn’t want to go home, not even my mom. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I was afraid to have to ride out another major earthquake at home alone. Especially since everyone else seemed to either be over it or totally unaffected. 

Coping

I turned, as so many people do, to television to distract me from my brain. I rented movies as often as possible and found that light-hearted comedies worked best to transport me away from my dark, lonely house. There were two movies in particular that I watched repeatedly: My Blue Heaven and Captain Ron. I liked them because visually, they’re both rather bright with many sunny daytime scenes. Both also have very upbeat and tropical soundtracks, which can’t help but lift spirits. I watched them over and over and over again. Even now, 30 years later, I still watch each of them once a year.

I didn’t, however, continue listening to my Paul Simon boxed set that I had enjoyed so much the month before the quake. It was cursed with bad juju, as far as I was concerned. I had been listening to it one night, and the next thing I knew, my whole world was being shaken apart. Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War and The Late Great Johnny Ace left me with a deep, suffocating despair. It would be years before I could hear those songs again without anxiety.

As winter turned to spring and spring to summer, the days got longer, and the distance from that awful morning grew. It became easier to be at home alone because the sun stayed up longer and the aftershocks diminished. I found myself spending more time outside. By the fall, things had returned more or less to normal. And by winter, I cautiously gave Paul Simon another chance. But that was still a year away. 

Back To…Normal?

After we recapped the morning’s excitement, Dave returned home for dinner, and my mom set up a camping stove on the patio table on the back porch to cook some frozen vegetables and chicken that had been thawing all day in the powerless freezer. It would be another couple of days before power was restored. The days were short, making the nights spent in the house lit by candles and flashlights feel interminable. So you can imagine our relief and excitement when our power was restored at approximately 6 p.m. on Wednesday. We were eating dinner at our dining room table when the lights came on. Suddenly, fans were humming, lights were blinking, and oh-so-many clocks needed resetting.

When the power comes on, some appliances like refrigerators just start working again. You might not even notice them come on. But more complex devices such as stereos take longer. First, the amplifier has to power up and run through its processes to ensure there are no shorts that might overload itself or any attached components. Once it determines that everything is good to go, a relay clicks, which allows an amplified single to leave the amplifier and go to the speakers.

At the same time, the 5-disc CD changer is also running through its processes to ensure everything is operating smoothly and to see if it has anything to play. It rotates its turntable, stopping at each of its 5 CD slots to see what, if anything, is in each one. Once it has taken stock of the CDs it has onboard, it cycles back to the disc in tray #1, and with confirmation from the amplifier that everything is good on its end, it begins to play the disc. The whole process takes probably 20 to 30 seconds. 

If the stereo were in the same room you were sitting in, you would hear the CD changer rotating its turntable, and you would hear relays clicking in the amplifier, and you would know something was about to happen. If the volume were turned up loud enough, you might also hear a hum from the speakers shortly after you heard the click from the relay. Of course, if the stereo were in another room, say, upstairs in your bedroom, and you were downstairs in the dining room, then you might not even notice that the stereo was coming to life.

And with everything that had happened in the past few days, you might have completely forgotten that 72 hours ago, you had the volume on that amp cranked all the way up while you had the house to yourself. And so both you and your mom would be caught completely off guard when, twenty to thirty seconds after the power was restored, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot begin singing the Animaniac’s opening theme at concert-level volume. IT’S TIME FOR A-NIMA-NIAC’S … A sudden start that I assure you, after all of the surprises and shaking over the past three days, your frazzled nerves do not need.

It took me a second to process what was happening, but once I did, I ran upstairs and shut it off as quickly as I could. Once we realized we weren’t under siege or at risk of the roof collapsing on us, we laughed about it, and I felt at that moment that life was finally getting back on track. Thirty years later, though, I can see that it hadn’t been on track for a long time before the ground started moving. I just couldn’t feel it yet.

The post Are We Absolutely Sure That Wasn’t The Big One? appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.

I guess I was about 14 the first time I saw Gallagher. My mom and I were visiting my brother in Colorado. The three of us and his girlfriend were sitting around the living room in their old, rundown, single-wide trailer when Gallagher’s “We Need A Hero” special came on HBO after whatever movie had previously been playing. The general consensus from the 3 adults in the room was something along the lines of, “ Oh, it’s Gallagher,” the way you might speak under your breath at the sight of an old, forgotten acquaintance who was always sort of creepy or annoying. I thought he was funny right away. That seemed to surprise everyone else which made me feel like I was simultaneously missing a joke and the butt of one.

I grew up listening to Bill Cosby – I had a collection of his tapes – and I was familiar with George Carlin but I don’t think I had ever seen a comedian perform. I had only ever heard them on tapes and records.

In fact, when I would listen to my Bill Cosby tapes I would always wonder about the context of the performance. There was clearly an audience and he was obviously doing visual gags that the audience was responding to but where was it all happening? Was he just alone on an empty stage? I always pictured him sitting in a big, comfortable chair holding court with his audience. Then I saw a picture of a stool in the liner notes. I began to imagine him telling jokes while seated on the stool. My perspective was widening. It was such a foreign concept to me that someone would literally stand on a stage in a theater and just monologue to a group of people. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw Gallagher’s act for the first time.

He was such an odd man both in appearance and behavior. Throughout the 80s he looked like someone drew David Crosby from memory but in 1992 he shaved his head but not his mustache. A bold move considering that by that time the mustache was synonymous in many people’s, minds with serial killers, pedophiles, and other creepy, infamous, and otherwise undesirable deviants.

Watermelon Man

Fortunately, for the public at large, his only victims were the watermelons that he pulverized with a giant wooden mallet at the end of every show, and the unwitting or possibly masochistic audience members he splattered with watermelon goo like some sort of alt-life bukake fetish. It was the sort of buffoonery that could only have come to be in the 1970s or 80s. You could never develop an act like that today. You would be banned from every club and theater in the country not just for the expense of cleaning up the mess but for the lawsuits that would inevitably follow. 

I wonder, though, if his tomfoolery didn’t overshadow his perspicacious observational comedy, as anyone only ever talks about the watermelons. Perhaps he was just a shit comedian that only a teenage boy would find funny. Whatever the case, some of his jokes are still as fresh in my memory as they were the first time I heard them.

Jokes from his “We Need A Hero” special like how disappointing it is to see a million-dollar football star running down the field with a referee running backward alongside him with his hands in the air while blowing on a whistle. Or like how to the rest of the world America is a bunch of lazy-ass drunks that can’t keep their shit together because Budweiser, Lazy-boy, and some medicine that keeps you from getting the runs sponsored the Olympics.

To this day I still tell anyone who offers me soup that soup isn’t food, it’s what’s left over in the dishwasher after a good meal. Then there’s the image of Madonna hanging around a truck stop, blowing on a tire gauge, and wearing a Dr. Scholl’s footpad as a panty liner. Certainly a cancel-worthy joke by today’s standards, but nobody could argue that it doesn’t paint a picture. And whenever I hear Michael Jackson singing The Way You Make Me Feel I always think, who, the monkey?

I even mastered his bit on the inconsistencies and peculiarities of the English language. I performed it for my English teacher one day during sophomore year and she called on me to perform it for the class a few weeks later. She thought it was my original bit. I hadn’t tried to pass it off as my own but I also didn’t correct her when I got the sense that she thought that I had come up with it.

As I stood there before the whole class I tried to convince myself that if my teacher had never heard this bit before then surely none of the kids in my class had either. (I was kind of a dumb, naive kid.) I felt like a fraud when I finished and a girl in the class said, “Hey, isn’t that a Gallagher bit.” So acute was my embarrassment it’s a wonder I was ever able to speak in public again.

The Party of The Century

Gallagher would largely fade from my radar until he reentered my life in December 1999. This time, though, it wasn’t through some corny premium cable special, but in person. It was Y2K and everyone was out of their minds. We thought the world was going to end and we were dealing with our excitement and confusion in myriad ways. Some folks were stockpiling weapons, others collected antique tools to survive when the grid failed. Most people, however, were just throwing parties. Gallagher’s daughter, Aimee, belonged to the later group.

She was throwing a New Year’s Eve party in a vacant rental property that her father owned. Now, the rumor was, Gallagher had evicted his tenants just before Christmas with the sole purpose of throwing this party. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it’s more likely that they just conveniently moved out at that time but who knows? All I know is that they booked me as the DJ for the big Y2K event. 

Never Meet Your Heros

I showed up around 6 pm. I was slightly taken aback when I saw the state of the house. It was totally vacant. There was no furniture anywhere. They weren’t messing around. This was going to be the party of the century. Or at the very least the last party of the century. They staged me in a tiny loft overlooking the empty living room that would soon become the dance floor. While I was in the middle of setting up Gallagher came up to the loft. He was wearing his standard newsboy hat and a sport coat. Under his coat, he was wearing a t-shirt with his face on it. He stood there before me holding his coat open while making the same face depicted on his shirt.

Then he handed me a C.D. and said, “Play my hit.” It was a comedy song, as one might imagine, but I can’t remember now what it was about. I put it on and thought, wow, this guy’s kind of a pain in the ass. When the song was finished playing he came back up to the loft and took his C.D. back. I was surprised. I thought he’d let me keep the C.D. because it seemed like he was trying to promote it. It was reminiscent of so many movies where a businessman asks for their card back because they only have one. I did end up with a free C.D. that night, though. Someone gave me MTV Party 2 Go 1998 so I could play a song that I didn’t have. C.D.s were expensive so I took any chance I had to add to my collection for free.

Gallagher Fades Into The Night

Midnight came and went and as far as anyone could tell civilization had not collapsed. After the party, one very drunk girl admonished me because I “didn’t even mess with the EQ”. As the worst complaint of the evening I can say the party was a success. Her boyfriend dragged her back downstairs and I finished tearing down. Then I loaded up the truck and drove off into the year 2000 and a brand new century. 

Gallagher was almost entirely off my radar for the next 2 decades until I heard about his death this morning. Over the years I would occasionally see his name in the news. Usually, it was regarding a lawsuit or one of his many heart attacks. I never saw him again in person or on t.v., though, and I’m happy about that. I’m glad my final memory of Gallagher was more interesting, strange, and amusing than any joke he could have told or any fruit he could have smashed.

After I played his “hit” that night on New Year’s Eve I expected to see him milling around the party supervising things, and making sure the kids didn’t get out of control, but I didn’t. He seemingly disappeared. Then, later in the evening, I was walking out to my truck to get a cable, when he suddenly emerged from the bushes planted along the front of the house. Our eyes met as he passed in front of me but he didn’t say a word. He just disappeared around the side of the house, into the dark night, and I never saw him again. It was exactly the sort of unexpected thing you would expect an eccentric, mustached, watermelon-smashing man to do; leave them going, hmm?

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I really, really didn’t want to go to the dentist. My experience with dentists hasn’t been bad or traumatic other than the pain in my wallet. But in the middle of a pandemic, I didn’t want to be the only person in a tiny room full of strangers not wearing a mask. However, a month earlier I forced a peanut into a cavity and it felt like it broke through the bottom of my tooth. What followed was a month of intense pain and many fruitless attempts to mitigate it. There were also many sleepless nights as well. After a month I pussed out. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Plus, I figured it would be better to get it taken care of before the weather cools and the virus starts spiking again. Oops, missed that deadline by a few weeks. But I made the appointment anyway.

Things Were off To A Rocky Start

Even before I left the house a pall was cast over the whole ordeal. As I was getting ready for the appointment – brushing, flossing, etc. – I was using a water pick and blew the crown off another tooth. The crown was 13 years old. I had it done in 2007 when I was 29 years old. I asked the dentist how long it would last and he said only about 10 years. 29 year old me heard 10 years and thought 10 years! That’ll be 40 years old Richards problem. I’ll let that guy deal with it. And just like clock-work, 10 years later, almost to the day that tooth started giving me trouble. I would find out an hour later that the tooth was rotting from the inside. But for now, I just put the crown in a little baggie, put it in my pocket, and walked to the dentist’s office.

The First Visit

The dentist’s office was in a dumpy little building a half-a-mile from my house. I walked through the door into a tiny little waiting room. The receptionist was on the phone when I walked in so I stood there looking around the room. It didn’t look dirty, but it didn’t feel clean. I examined all of the surfaces to find some tangible justification for the feeling I was having but there was nothing obvious.

A mom was waiting with her son. He looked to be about 10 or 11. She looked like she was in her mid-thirties. I continued to stand. The receptionist finally hung up the phone after a few minutes and asked me if I was Richard. I walked over to the counter as she pulled out forms for me to fill out and a laser thermometer to check my temperature. I worried for a second that I might be too warm from my 20-minute walk to the office. My temperature was only 98.3º, though, which made me wonder about the accuracy of her thermometer.

I took the clipboard and sat down across the room from the mom and her son. Someone called him back seconds later. I filled out the form and then I put it back on the counter and sat back down again.

Big Bird

As I sat there I noticed the woman sitting across from me had a great big nose. It was a detail I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all but that she was wearing her mask wrong and her giant nose hung over the top of it. She had the look of an aging “hot girl” who peaked in her early twenties but now was just past her prime. Again, a detail I might not have noticed but for the fact that she was pissing me off sitting there wearing her mask wrong. A few minutes later they called her back. I thought she was just going back to be with her kid but I found out later that she was being seen too.

They called me back just about a minute later and told me to go to the first room on the left. I looked down the hallway and saw 4 doors leading into individual exam rooms. That eased my mind slightly. Some other dentists’ offices that I’ve seen have a much more open floor plan that could spread germs more easily. Of course, any ease I may have felt was about to evaporate.

Into The Chair

The dental tech followed me into the room and started taking things out of drawers and preparing the room. I sat down on the exam chair and looked around the room while I waited. It was decorated in the style of early austere. There were no posters of teeth; no shelves with oral hygiene products the dentist was flogging. Just mostly bare walls coated in Navajo White paint. The wall to my right had a large 4 x 6 mirror mounted to it. I noticed I could see the counter behind me that the dental tech was working at. To my left was the x-ray gun mounted to the wall. It’s funny how dental x-ray technology is exactly the same as it was when I was a kid. The pictures are digital now but the rest of it is exactly the same.

As I sat there I could hear the whirring of the dentists’ drill coming from one of the other rooms. I thought about how the person he was working on, maybe the mom or her son, wasn’t wearing a mask. They were well over 6′ away from me but it still made me uncomfortable.

The X-Ray

The dental tech said she was going to x-ray my tooth. I said ok. I was watching her in the mirror. She was still at the counter doing something, she hadn’t even touched the x-ray machine yet. She said, “You can take your mask off now.” But the x-ray machine is still flat against the wall, I thought. Bring that thing over here, get everything ready, and then I’ll take my mask off. But she insisted so I reluctantly pulled my mask down.

I felt buck-ass naked sitting there with my bare face on display. She laid a lead bib over my chest and then fiddled around with the instruments a moment longer before she finally came over and shoved a piece of plastic in my mouth. Then she quickly ran out of the room and a second later I heard the x-ray machine buzz and she hustled back into the room and pulled the plastic out of my mouth. I pulled my mask back up the second the x-rays were done.

Photo Bombed

The dentist came in a few minutes later, just as I was snapping a selfie. As I hit the shutter button I saw him turn the corner into the room behind me. He was a tall thin man. From what little I could see of his face I guessed he was probably in his early to mid-forties. He had a dispassionate air about him. He reminded me of me actually.

After more than a decade in the carpet cleaning business, I began to feel the way that he looked. I took great pride in my work – always tried to do a good job – but I didn’t care about what I was doing. As far as customer service was concerned my stance was something along the lines of don’t bother me; just let me do my job and get the hell out of here. I got that vibe from him too. He didn’t lecture or shame me for the atrocious mess going on in my mouth. He just spoke matter-of-factly with a sort of callous resignation.

He looked at the x-rays and then poked around in my mouth for a second and said I needed a root canal. I already knew I needed one so I was sort of like, ok, what are we standing around for, let’s get crackin’ doc, some of us are in pain. Of course instead of saying that I pulled the little baggie containing my crown out of my pocket and asked him what we could do about it. He stuck his steel pic in my tooth. Then he said, “It can’t be saved, it’s already all squishy, it needs to be extracted and we do that too.”

Squishy? My tooth is squishy? Is that a medical term, doc? Squishy? It was an unpleasant image but I would come to learn later that it was an apposite description.

Getting To Work

With everything diagnosed the dental tech began laying out all of the tools. The doctor left the room, to work on another patient, I think. I could hear the sound of his drill coming from another room. It took a few minutes to set up and then we got to work. The dentist stuck me in the jowl with the novocaine and then left the room again. The dental tech finished what she was doing and left too. So I took this opportunity to snap a picture of the tray with all of the tools on it, you know, just for posterity. And wouldn’t you know it, that damn dentist walked back in the room just as I hit the shutter button…again. The first time was slightly embarrassing but this time I just felt like an ass.

Let the drilling begin…

The dentist tilted my chair back and started drilling. The dental tech sat to my left doing her thing. I liked her. She was Johnny-on-the-spot with that spit sucker. A lot of dental techs aren’t so vigilant about it but she sat there poised over me scanning my mouth for spit. When she saw some she pounced on it. Meanwhile, the dentist was raping the shit out of my tooth with his little drill. I just sat there as still as I could, trying to focus on the sounds of 90’s country music coming from the lone speaker mounted in the wall in front of me; the only thing on the entire wall. I flinched. He said, “The novocaine was wearing off,” as he stopped drilling. Then he asked me if I was doing alright. I said yes and to just keep going.

I’m Not A Masochist. Really.

The last time I had a root canal the root wouldn’t accept the novocaine. I would flinch and the dentist would stop drilling, reinject me, start drilling again, and again I would flinch. We went through that cycle 3 or 4 times until I was numb all the way up to and including my scalp. The nerve never went numb and I told him to stop sticking me and just drill. I white-knuckled the armrest of the chair and just powered through the pain. I was still numb from my 2 pm appointment at 11:30 pm that night. And then all of a sudden at 11:30 pm the sensation began to return to my forehead. It felt like a horizontal line of warmth and feeling moving down my face like when a cartoon character eats a whole bunch of hot peppers or something.

So when this dentist said he was going to reinject me I told him to just drill. He said he didn’t want me to be mad at him. I told him if I was still numb at midnight I would be mad at him. He injected me anyway and started drilling again. He would drill with one bit and then switch to a different bit. I could tell because they all felt different in my tooth. One of them, the biggest one, vibrated my whole face up into my temple.

Should We Be Doing This Right Now?

He was drilling and spraying water. The water, mixed with spit and tooth dust and god only knows what else, was splashing off my teeth and spraying all over my face. I lay there thinking about the other people in the office also laying there without masks on and everything that was spraying out of their mouths and all over their faces and into the air.

When he reached the bottom, he told the dental tech to take another x-ray. He wanted to make sure he got it all and I could get on board with that. Then he left the room again.

It was during this bit of downtime that I became aware that the HVAC system for the whole office was in the room that I was sitting in – without a mask on. It was a very warm day, and the air conditioner was on. I could hear the motor running. I could hear it sucking the air through the intake below the furnace door. It was the very same air that at least three other maskless people in this office had recently exhaled. The air, used by everyone in this office, gets sucked through my room. And then what? I scanned the room for the register. It was directly above me on the wall to my left. The first exit on its return to the atmosphere was right above my maskless face. But I had no choice but to lay there…buck-ass naked.

The Drilling Is Over

After a short eternity, the doctor returned. He examined the x-ray and then he and the dental tech resumed their positions over me. The dentist poked around in my tooth some more but he was done drilling the root. The only drilling he did after that was to grind down the top of the tooth to prepare it for the crown. When he was satisfied with the job he had done he told his assistant to “mix it up” and I took that to mean the cement he was filling my tooth with. She handed him a little cup filled with purple schmoo and he began packing it into my tooth.

A few times he briefly held a UV light to my tooth. I assume it aided in setting the cement. When he would use the light the dental tech would hold a transparent yellow ping pong paddle in front of his face. It made me laugh because while she was protecting his eyes from the UV light with the paddle, the paddle was reflecting UV light into my eyes. It’s one of those design flaws caused by not testing products in real world applications.

As he shut the overhead light off and pushed it up and away he mumbled something about the schmoo he just filled my tooth with. I didn’t catch what he said and I didn’t care to follow up about it. Instead, I just pulled my mask up and got up out of the chair.

Thank God That’s Over

I walked down the short hallway to the receptionist’s desk to schedule my next appointment and pay for my root canal. She set me up for the following Thursday and then told me I owed $975. I handed her my card and as she took it the phone rang and she answered it. She was busy talking to the patient on the other end of the line while she ran my card and placed both copies of the receipt on the counter. I signed one and left the other where it lay. I walked out the door into the waiting room. As I walked the 3 or 4 steps across the room to the door the receptionist stopped talking to the person on the phone just long enough to say goodbye.

I stepped out of the office, into the hallway, and untangled my headphones. I plugged them into my phone and started a Spotify playlist as I walked out the door of the building. As I was walking down the street thinking about everything that had just happened I realized that they never gave me a copy of the estimate. They showed it to me and told me how much it would be for the root canal and the crown, and also how much it would be to extract my “squishy” tooth. They also said they knocked $180 off the crown but they didn’t give me a copy of the estimate. That would end up being a problem the following week. But I wasn’t going to worry about that now because my tooth was coming alive and starting to hurt.

The Pain Has Only Just Begun

As I walked the 1/2 mile back home the pain began to intensify. As I turned the corner into my neighborhood I began to panic a little. If it hurts this much now, while I’m still numb, what’s it going to feel like in an hour, or 2 hours?

I walked in the door of my house and immediately went to the kitchen sink and washed my hands. Bonnie walked in just behind me and asked what the dentist said. “What they said”?, I said, “I just had a root canal. They raped the shit out of my tooth.” She was a little surprised that they just did it right then and there. As soon as my hands were dry I took 800mg of ibuprofen and took a hot shower. The pain just kept getting worse.

This Ain’t My First Rodeo

I’ve had lots of root canals before and never felt pain afterward. In fact, when I had my first at 18, everyone said it was going to be awful; the worst thing I’ve ever been through. And to be fair there is a reason people compare every miserable experience to a root canal. But it wasn’t bad. There was no lingering pain and I ate pizza for dinner that night. So this experience had me worried. Was something wrong? Or was this what everyone had warned me about 24 years ago?

It was after 5 pm now and I didn’t know what to do so I called the dentist. I told the receptionist that the pain was intense and getting worse. She put the dentist on and he was like, yeah that happens. This guy reminds me of when Collin Jost would play Pete Buttigieg on SNL during the Democratic primary last year. He basically told me to take ibuprofen and stop being such a little bitch. I hung up and sat perfectly still staring into space. The pain was intensifying. There was no escaping it. It wasn’t the kind of pain that hurts and then subsides for a bit before returning; it was constant. And then finally at about 6:30 pm it peaked out and started to ebb. By 7:30 pm the pain was gone completely.

I slept like the dead that night. It was the first night in over a month that I went to sleep and woke up with no pain. I wished that I had made the appointment sooner. A month ago would have been good but a year-and-a-half ago would have been better. But that’s in the past now. The important thing is that I’m taking care of the problem. One appointment down – two to go.

The Second Appointment

“Wait, what? Two more appointments? I thought it was just one?” I said as I jumped out of the chair lunged towards the reception window. The receptionist had just dropped this bombshell on me when she asked if I wanted to make my next appointment now or after my tooth extraction. I set the clipboard holding the dentist’s cancellation policy form that I was signing down on the counter. The receptionist had forgotten to have me sign it last week. Yeah, that’s not all you forgot lady.

I was pissed. Not just because I was going to have to come back and expose myself for a third time. And not just because that meant an additional 2 weeks of isolating by myself in my bedroom away from my family. But because they didn’t tell me when I was there the week before that it would be three appointments. I told the receptionist that my last root canal was done in two visits.

She started to get snotty and said, “We’ve been in dentistry for 20 years and root canals are always done in three appointments.”

Perhaps I’m wrong about the two visit root canal, but it really doesn’t matter if I am or not. It’s irrelevant; totally beside the point. The point is that someone should have explained the whole procedure to me before we started. And then we could have avoided this little argument about how many visits it should be! This whole situation could have been avoided with a little communication.

A Promising Sign

I sat back down, furious. They called me back a few minutes later and sat me in the same room as before. I noticed immediately that the A/C wasn’t on. It was much cooler outside than last week so it wasn’t necessary. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from running the A/C. My next-door neighbor runs their A/C all year long. One evening I was sitting in my backyard and I got cold. Just as I got up to go inside I heard the A/C come on over the wall. I pulled up the weather app on my phone. It was 61º. 61º? And their A/C is on? There’s no way their A/C could cool their house down to below 61º Why not just open a window if you’re too warm in there? I guess some people like to burn their hard-earned cash. So I wasn’t holding out hope that the A/C in the office would stay off for very long.

There didn’t seem to be any other patients in the office so that made me feel better. The dentist and the dental tech both came in right away and they got to work. He started off by drilling out the temporary filling that he put in my tooth the week before. He sculpted my tooth and made a mold of it, and set a temporary crown. That all went by painlessly. Then we got to work on pulling the “squishy” tooth.

The “Squishy” Tooth

I still don’t know exactly what he meant by “squishy” but I think it may have had to do with the fact that I could press it with my tongue and feel it move down into my gum. I discovered that neat little trick the night before. It seemed that the tooth was in worse shape than I realized and it made me feel better about yanking it. I didn’t want to have it pulled but knowing that it was basically rotting from the inside out made it a no-brainer.

The dentist swabbed my gums and cheek with a Q-Tip covered in pink schmoo. When I aksed him the week before what it was he didn’t really have an answer for me. I asked if it was benzocaine and he said, “Yeah, well something like that, some kind of caine.” I got the feeling that he didn’t want to talk but also that he genuwinley didn’t know or care what he was using in my mouth. It sort of made me feel like a sucker for wanting to learn all aboout the different chemicals I used to use to clean peoples carpet. And you just walk on carpet.

He started sticking me with the syringe almost immediately. Stabbing my gums and then bending the needle this way and that. It seemed like he used a lot more novocaine this time than last week. It certainly took longer to inject me that’s for sure. He finished and put the syringe down. Then he stood at the counter behind me playing Candy Crush or just staring at the wall. I don’t know for sure what he was doing. After a few minutes, he asked if I was numb yet. I told him I was numb instantly. He replied that he wanted to make sure it really took.

Cutting It Out

What happened next was the single most unpleasant hour of my adult life. I’ve had teeth pulled before but I don’t remember ever experiencing anything like this torture. The dentist started out trying to just pull it out with pliers but he gave up on that approach rather quickly. I thought that since I could move the damn thing with my tongue that it would be a cinch to just yank the bastard out but it wasn’t. So he busted out the drill and started drilling.

Now, I can’t be certain but I think he actually cut my tooth in half. Then he busted out the old Craftsman 1/4″ Flathead and shoved it into the crack he had just drilled and began prying the tooth apart. I could feel and hear every crack and grind. The dentist got up to get something and the dental tech asked if I could feel it. She said I shouldn’t be able to feel anything. I told her that I was numb but that I could feel and hear grinding and it was just like nails on a chalkboard.

This went on for a whole hour. About halfway through the novocaine started wearing thin and I flinched. The dentist stuck me again and put my nerves back to bed. Then it was more grinding, more cracking. I could feel little bits of tooth flying around inside my mouth. A few landed at the back of my throat and when the dentist stopped to change tools I tried to move them to the front of my mouth. I sat up and I motioned to the dental tech to give me the vacuum. She held it close to my mouth and I latched on with my lips letting everything in my mouth get sucked out. I laid back down and the dentist proceeded.

Things Can Always Be Worse

I just lay there with my eyes shut tight thinking about all of the people throughout history that had to endure this with no anesthetic at all; all of the children that fought in the civil war and had limbs removed with nothing more than whiskey to dull the pain. It was a harrowing thought. About another half an hour later I flinched again. The dentist was prying something with all his might and I could feel it all. I expected him to stop and stick me again but he didn’t. He just kept going. Then he pulled his tool out of my mouth and said, “that’s the last one.” I opened my eyes and just thought, thank the fuck Christ it’s over. But then I also thought what if he didn’t get it all. But just as I had the thought he told the dental tech to do an x-ray.

She threw the bib over my chest, shoved the plastic thing in my mouth, set the gun, and then ran out of the room. When she came back in the doctor was right behind her. He looked at the picture and said that he had gotten it all. I was so relieved.

The Bag of Guaze

The dental tech gave me a baggie of gauze and showed me how to fold it and put it in my mouth as she stuffed a folded up a little square of cotton in my tooth hole. She told me to change it every 15 minutes until it stopped bleeding. Jesus, I thought. Every 15 minutes? I took the little baggie from her as I asked the dentist what to expect about pain. He said it wouldn’t be bad because there’s no nerve in my tooth hole like with a root canal and to just take ibuprofen.

What the fuck is it with this guy and ibuprofen? I’ve been to dentists before that couldn’t wait to write me a prescription for some kind of gateway to heroin but this guy’s just like, suffer bitch. It’s fine, I wouldn’t even fill a prescription if he wrote me one. It’s just his total lack of concern for my well-being that bugs me. Maybe after a few visits, I’ll level up and earn compassion.

As I walked through the waiting room, past the receptionist’s counter she said good-bye and I could tell that we had animosity between us from the argument that she started earlier. Fuck her I thought. One more visit and I’ll never have to see her again so who cares if we have beef. It’s not as if there is anything remarkable about this dentist that would make me come back. At least nothing remarkable in a positive way.

2 Disgusting Hours Begin

As I stepped outside the building I started my music. When I opened my phone I saw that Bonnie had texted to see how I was doing. I told her I was on my way home. As I turned the corner I saw her turning left into the church parking lot ahead of me. I was a little disappointed because I was enjoying the walk home. It was probably for the best though. The gauze in my tooth hole needed to be changed anyway, so I pulled up my mask and got in the car. It had been in my mouth for probably ten minutes already. It was already soaked with blood and spit and it was only going to get grosser after a 20-minute walk.

I washed my hands and changed my gauze as soon as I got home. It was 1:51 pm and I sat down at my computer and started working. I had barely done anything when the timer went off to change my gauze again. So I got up and went to the bathroom, spit the bloody wad of cotton into the trash, and then folded up a new square and shoved it into my tooth hole. Then I sat down at the computer again. It seemed like no sooner had I sat down than the alarm went off again. This cycle went on for 2 hours. Every time I spit the gauze out I hoped to see less blood than the time before but it didn’t seem to be letting up.

My Black Hole

I looked in my mouth and found a gaping black hole where my tooth used to be. I shined a flashlight in there and saw that it was pooled with blood. Bonnie suggested that I might be pulling out the clots every time I take the bloody wad out. She asked me if it looked like there were clots on the gauze. I didn’t know but I jokingly said they were in the trash if she wanted to look. She went into the bathroom and pulled a bloody wad of cotton out of the trash. (She’s a trooper.) She brought it to me and said, “Yeah, see this? Those are clots.” I was disgusted and impressed. She suggested I stop with the gauze and see how it does. I was glad to if for no other reason than it was unbelievably intrusive into my workflow.

The pain was minimal just like the dentist said it would be. I took Advil to keep the swelling down. Over the course of the next two weeks, I would take a small flashlight into the bathroom and look into the hole where my tooth used to be. It looked like a bottomless black pit. But as the days passed and it began to heal it became pinker and less painful when an errant bit of food found its way into the gap.

Now that that tooth is missing the function of that side of my mouth has changed. I can fit my tongue more easily into my right cheek now but as far as chewing goes it has become somewhat useless. I still have the teeth above and behind my new tooth hole. But I am missing my very rear upper molar. So now I have this weird skip set of teeth where both of my back top and bottom teeth have no matching tooth to grind up food with. That’s going to be a problem. Still, it’s better to not have a rotten tooth.

The Final Visit

I was sitting at my computer the day before my appointment to have my new crown installed when that horrible receptionist called. It was about 12:30 pm. She informed me that my crown came in early and asked if I wanted to come in today instead of tomorrow. I thought for a moment because Bonnie and I were taking our oldest son to the DMV to take his driving test at 2 pm, and then asked what time today? She said 5 pm. I said that was perfect and we hung up. Daylight saving time ended 3 days ago so it was nearly dark when I arrived at the dumpy little building where my dentist’s office is located.

The Temperature Facade

I walked into the office and just as I sat down I saw the receptionist walking out to the waiting room with a thermometer to take my temperature. It seemed odd and terribly inconsistent. She didn’t take my temp last week so why does it matter now. There’s no point in taking safety precautions if you’re not going to apply them universally.She walked toward me and I stood up to meet her halfway. She held the gun to my head and pulled the trigger but the thermometer was broken. So she hustled back into the reception area to get another thermometer. This one worked and apparently, my temperature was acceptable because she just walked away without telling me what it was.

I sat back down and noticed that there was another A/C intake in the lobby right next to where I was sitting. Egads. That means that the air people are exhaling in the lobby – like Big Bird with her mask under her nose -is also being blown throughout the office where it’s breathed in by all those poor maskless sons-of-bitches. Whatever. It’s the last appointment. Let’s just get through it.

3rd Date, Can’t Back Out Now

About ten minutes after I arrived a hygienist came out of the back office and met someone at the door. She wouldn’t let her through the door until she had taken her temperature and asked her some questions. I thoiught that was very strange. Nobody did that with me. And why was a hygienist handling this type of front office procedure? Perhaps it was because the receptionist was busy laughing and talking loudly on the phone with a patient that had been in earlier today. Apparently, just after she had called me to come in early, the office lost power. The person she was on the phone with was unable to pay for his cleaning or whatever he was in for because they couldn’t process his card. So she was calling to collect.

Once the hygienist approved the patient for entry she brought her in the back and told her to sit in the last room on the right. The receptionist hung up the phone and asked me if I had lost power today too. I told her that I hadn’t. She was surprised and said, ” Oh, I thought you said you lived right around the corner?” I felt like she thought that she caught me in a lie but I wasn’t about to explain to her how electrical grids are laid out.

This Fuckin’ Receptionist

Over the little counter in the back office where you pay and schedule your next appointment, they’ve hung a piece of plexiglass from the ceiling as a barrier between you and the receptionist. Now, I couldn’t see exactly what happened but the receptionist somehow managed to knock it down. I might not have even noticed but for the commotion, she caused alerting the whole office to what she had done. She couldn’t fix it because a screw went missing.

I began to grow impatient and started noting the time every few minutes. After 20 minutes of sitting in the waiting room, I still hadn’t been called back. The 90’s country music playing softly in the background had lost the nostalgia it had 3 weeks ago. Now it was a bit annoying. I was getting irritated and nothing was helped by the receptionist on the phone with an insurance company feeding one-word responses to the computer on the other end of the line.

You Never Want To Be Someone’s Last Appointment

Further back into the office I could hear the dentist’s drill. It’s the sound of me not being called back anytime soon. It’s about this time that I start to regret my decision to take the earlier appointment. After 16 years in the service industry, I can tell you that you never want to have an appointment at the end of someone’s day. You’re not going to get their A-game. I started to wonder why they had me come in at 5 pm anyway if they were not ready for me. But then I remembered that the power outage put them behind schedule.

At the 27 minute mark the entire staff, the dentist included, were all enlisted to try to find the missing screw. Apparently, it’s lost forever. As a result, it can’t be rehung and so that counter is now a hotbed of disease and danger. The receptionist’s solution is to have everyone come into the waiting room to pay and make their appointments. So now there are two patients standing in the lobby with me and neither of them is the chick that the hygienist interrogated at the front door. That means that there are at least four patients, including me in this office right now. Three of them, presumably, had their masks off at the same time. The A/C just shut off so all of their nasty COVID breath is just hanging in the air back there.

It’s been 30 minutes since I showed up for my appointment and another patient just walked in the door. It’s getting crowded up in here. 2 minutes later they finally called me back. They directed me to the first room on the left just like before and I sat down on the chair.

I’m Finally Called Back

The dentist came in and started pulling tools from the drawers in the counter behind me and placing them on the tray. I heard the sound of stainless steel hit the vinyl floor and the dentist made a “whoops” noise. I heard him bend down and pick up the tool but I didn’t hear him set the tool on the counter. And I didn’t hear the drawer open again as one might expect to hear one someone has to get a new tool out of a drawer to replace the one he dropped. He paused a moment behind me and then placed more tools on the tray. I can’t be sure, but I think he placed the tool he dropped on the floor right onto the tray!

The crown installation was relatively quick. I mean relative to the amount of time I had spent on this appointment so far that day. 22 minutes after I was called back I was walking out the door. I spent the next two weeks isolating in my bedroom.

What Did We Learn Today Children?

It was a long 5 weeks that, strangely, didn’t seem out of place in 2020. Spending 5 weeks alone in my room; wearing a mask when I went into any other part of my house; Facetiming my wife in the next room just to chat felt like a natural progression in a year that has taken any and all norms and run them through an industrial shredder. That’s not to say that I have accepted the past 5 weeks as normal. But in the scope of this year, it’s the type of event that I’ve come to expect. I hope I never have to do anything like this again and so the overarching lesson here, kids, is: take care of your teeth so you don’t have to spend 5 weeks and $2500 in the middle of a global pandemic getting them fixed!

Not long after my last appointment, the weather cooled down and the numbers from our County Health Department began to rise as I expected that they would. The state ordered a shutdown of all non-essential business, again and I am so very grateful to have gotten in and out of this whole ordeal during a lull in viral activity. I only hope that I can get through the rest of this pandemic without having to raw-dog it in a tiny room full of strangers again.

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In the summertime, it feels nice to walk into the cool store and escape the heat outside. In the Fall, it’s filled with seasonal smells and foods that you might not buy again until next year, like those crispy onions you put on green bean casserole and candy and other goodies that you can purchase year-round, but in the Fall, dress up for the holidays to bully you into buying them with fear of missing out on the unique, limited edition packaging; black and orange through October. Brown and orange through November, then in December, everything goes red and green. And then, just after the silver, black, and gold New Year’s decorations go on clearance, everything becomes pink and red a month too soon. It’s like clockwork. You can rely on it. I suppose that’s what’s comforting—the routine.

The Routine of the Grocery Store

As a kid, I enjoyed that routine. Every week, we’d park, get a cart, go inside, walk down the same aisles, and pick out the same foods: sandwich bread, bologna, pudding pops, cereal; always meandering through the same loop around the store, we’d grab a sample if they had them, and then check out. 

At almost every single register was a familiar face. Each cashier had the number of years they had worked for the grocery store printed on their name tag, and I always looked to see how many years they had been working there. Anything over five years was unfathomable to my young mind. As I grew up, the same faces were still at the registers. The numbers on their name tags were getting big, their hair was getting a little grayer, and their faces were beginning to betray their age.

They were a lot like teachers when I was young. I wondered who they were, what else they did, if anything, or did they just live in the grocery store. I never saw any of them outside the store. Come to think of it, I never see them outside the store now, either. It seems elitist and wrong. It’s an indictment of suburban homogeny distilling our neighborhoods into socioeconomically segregated islands the help can’t afford to live on. So, interactions with people above and below your own social status are limited to business transactions like checking out at the supermarket. 

The Supermarket Sweeps Away Your Cares

After checking out one time when I was about 7, I was pushing the cart as we were walking away from the check stand, and I ran over the back of my mom’s heel with the front of the cart. Not on purpose, but because I had the spatial awareness and attention span of a 7-year-old. She turned around and smacked me across the face in front of a dozen or so unfazed customers and cashiers. And yet, even after that totally unfair and unjustified moment of public humiliation, the grocery store remains a fixture in my mind of good memories and warm fuzzies that come and go with the seasons.

There For Us Even In Hard Times

Every week, every month, every season, every year. The grocery store is there; the routine is there. And it’s a very privileged thing, isn’t it? It’s a sign that you have a minimum level of wealth and status, but whoever stops to think about that?

When the shelves were bare in March and April, I didn’t hear anybody saying that they were grateful that the grocery stores were still open and that they were able to continue to buy food to feed their families. They just complained about what wasn’t on the shelves. Nobody had to resort to hunting the neighborhood squirrels. Even in an unprecedented time of crisis, the grocery store was still there for us in a significant way. Sure, our routine was interrupted, but it wasn’t lost. It was temporarily altered. We couldn’t buy all of the things we are used to buying, and that can be a stressful thing when we rely on our routines of consumption to comfort and soothe our troubled minds. It forces us out of our comfort zone when we must make even a small change to our routine.

That’s why diets don’t work.

They replace the most fundamental routine of our day with new foods that don’t work to comfort us. Then, when tensions rise, we retreat back to our old ways. Routine 1 – Diet 0.

Henry David Thoreau warned us to “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” I say beware of all diets that require new food. Not that I have anything against trying new things. But temporarily changing the food you eat will not change YOU. Sure, I’ve cut things out of my diet for extended periods of time; Sugar, alcohol, dairy, but it’s never for very long. They always come back because, like Jerry Seinfeld said, “a diet is what you eat, not something you do.”

Diet Dogma

We all know the meat and potatoes guy who wouldn’t be caught dead eating a vegetable lest anyone think he was less than a man. He’s not on the manly meat and potatoes diet; he just has a limited palate. Everyone knows a vegan who would never eat any animal products, but that’s considered a lifestyle, not a diet. I would never eat that fermented shark they consider a delicacy in Iceland, but you wouldn’t say I’m on the no rotten shark diet. I even know someone who claims that they can’t eat a salad because of a GI disorder, but they drink Dr. Pepper by the gallon. Are they on the Dr. Pepper diet? No, they just have a touch of Munchausen.

A diet is what you eat, not something you do. And, at least, in Western society, what we eat has somehow become entangled with our identity. We cling dogmatically to our diets, sometimes to the detriment of our own health, which is why the only diet that works, the only diet that will actually stick, is to make a complete lifestyle change. 

I didn’t know it while we were following the path we’ve spent the past 20 years wearing into the floor of our local grocery store, but that’s exactly what I was about to do. 

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