Madonna On…

Madonna Ciccone

I hate the dentist. It always smells of straw and manure because of all the horses lined up to get shoed. The heat is oppressive, too, what with the furnace blasting away all day and the dentist’s apprentice stoking up the fires constantly.

Also, I’m not a big fan of the clanging and banging going on all the time. It’s already a painful process because the dentist is a teetotaler and won’t give me some of that whiskey anesthetic more accomplished dentists use.

And don’t get me started on the actual pulling. My dentist usually lets his apprentice do the dirty work and that kid never picks the right-sized tools. One time he could barely fit the thing in my mouth and tore my cheek a bit.

So I had to go to the surgeon’s, but he wasn’t there and his wife took care of me. I don’t like getting stitched up by the wife. Her place is full of bolts of wool and cotton, to which I’m allergic. Do you know how hard it is to get that big old needle through my flesh when I’m having a sneezing fit? It’s pretty hard. And painful!

So painful that sometimes it doesn’t go right and I have to wait for the surgeon to show up. Now, the problem with the surgeon is that he just doesn’t wash his hands when going from one project to another. No, he’ll be shaving one guy’s face, then cutting some other guy’s hair and finally gets to me. By that point I’m bleeding all over the place and he just sticks his lathered, stubble-flecked hands in there. At least he gets the job done quickly.

Of course, after all this I need to hit the pharmacist’s for a poultice of some sort. I really hate going to the pharmacist’s. It takes absolutely forever to get my prescription, sometimes two or three hours, and it smells awful there. This is usually because the pharmacist is always pouring various liquids on lead, or into boiling lead, or putting lead in bags and waving it at calico cats, or poking neighbourhood children with lead, or sometimes just up and throwing lead out the window. This is usually followed by a shout.

Eventually he gets around to giving me my poultice, which is occasionally pleasant (unless he uses some manure he picked up at the dentist’s in the concoction), although sometimes he gets interrupted by some idea having to do with lead again.

The poultice is warm and fragrant, though it doesn’t always seem to do much and my raw, oozing cheek stays that way for weeks and weeks. Sometimes it turns black and the smell starts bothering my wife. By this point another tooth is usually bothering me. I hate it when that happens, because then I have to go back and do the whole thing over again.

Man, I hate the dentist.