Appointment with a sadist
Some people have a morbid fear of spiders; with others it’s snakes, heights, rats or enclosed spaces. With me it’s dentists. Even hearing the word ‘dentist’ makes me shudder. Spiders rarely hurt you. Dentists inflict severe pain. Spiders make no noise. Visits to the dentist are usually accompanied by high-pitched drilling, nausea inducing scraping and, when I’m involved, loud shrieks of pain. For two weeks I have been trying to combat excruciating toothache with a combination of whisky soaked wads of cotton wool and industrial strength painkillers. All to no avail, so, this morning, I made a call I’ve been dreading and in a couple of hours’ time am due to pay my first visit to a dentist in many years. As I write this I am shaking like the proverbial leaf.
First step was to find a dentist. Everyone has stories about their dentists, and generally they are not terribly encouraging. Lovely Boyfriend offered two suggestions. The first name he mentioned I had heard of and instantly ruled her out. Two people had independently described her as a sadist, so I prompted him for further information on Dentist Number Two. When he looked a little shifty and proffered no more than a first name and the information that ‘he doesn’t use the most modern methods’, my suspicion was aroused.
And then I remembered that he had told me about this guy before. Years ago LB worked for his father during the summer and one day he visited the dentist next to the factory to have a filling. While he lay back on the chair to have the treatment, the dentist pulled a cigarette out of his top pocket, lit it, and during the whole procedure left it dangling from the corner of his mouth allowing the ash to drop to the floor – admittedly better than it dropping into LB’s mouth. He then asked LB if he did ‘beautiful things’, to which LB asked what he meant.
‘You know, at your age you do beautiful things. But they are not in isolation, they are with women. Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘Er, yes,’ Lovely Boyfriend answered, wondering what on earth this might have to do with his teeth.
‘Do you have sex with her outdoors? What positions do you do?’
After completing the filling, the dentist refused to accept any money for the treatment and LB beat a hasty retreat vowing to take better care of his teeth in order to never have to visit this lunatic again. The dentist somehow managed to track him down though…
A couple of weeks later he appeared at the factory and asked LB’s father to ‘borrow’ him for a while. Sensing reluctance, the dentist pointed out that he had administered a filling a couple of weeks previously and hadn’t charged him, so it was only fair to recoup the favour. A couple of odd-jobs later LB considered the debt repaid and assumed the Demented Dentist would now leave him alone. It was not to be. A little while later he reappeared at the factory. It turned out that he had a cousin who had recently taken up with a woman that the dentist deemed ‘unsuitable’, and he wanted to take LB to his cousin’s house to meet the scarlet lady in question to see what he thought of her. Not surprisingly, LB refused. Undeterred, the dentist took to appearing at the factory on a regular basis with similar madcap requests until eventually, after a few weeks of rejection, he finally snapped, breaking down and shrieking at LB, ‘That’s it. We’re finished. We’re not friends anymore’.
Hmmm. Caught between a rock and a hard place. Deranged, sex obsessed dentist with Victorian era instruments and Cable Guy personality, or known sadist with a widespread reputation for taking pride in inflicting unnecessary pain?
Suffice it to say, in two hours’ time I have an appointment with a sadist.
