An Unfilmed Love Scene
The drill bounced against my tooth. An upper back tooth. Everything narrowed to it, it was a little island of crazy bright whining pain, but I sat very straight in the chair with my hands gripping the armrests and my feet flat on the platform, so I wouldn’t go crazy and start kicking, but the thing in my mouth…it was a hooked plastic thing that caught onto my lower lip and teeth to drain the spit away…the thing didn’t work right and got crooked, and water dribbled down my chin, and more water with a metallic taste began to form in a puddle at the back of my mouth, so I began to choke and the dentist said, “Hold still or I’ll drill right through your cheek—” and there it went again, the whining pain like fire right up into my jaw, screaming like a jet, right up past my jaw and into my head—
“Hold still! Hold still!” cried the dentist. I could smell how he was sweating. He was a fat, angry man, out here at the prison on Wednesdays, with a lot of work to do, and his stomach pressing against my forearm, my forearm was bare, my sleeve was worked up to my elbow somehow with all the tension and pain, and when he paused with the drill I opened my eyes to get some reality, some contact, but the pain dizzied me so I could only see the wavering wiggling lines of pain, out there, in the air. A thing had been yanked down in front of me, with a light shining out of it, right into my eyes. The dentist was muttering to his assistant, a plump soft-looking plain little girl with a pony-tail, “Go get me some…hand me that thing…what’s slowing you down?…I’ve got six more of these to do this afternoon, hurry up!…his breath is so foul I may lose my lunch.…You’re going to have some real trouble, my friend,” he said to me, angrily, making the drill buzz against a piece of metal, “just wait till that rot hits your nerve canals!…you never brush your teeth, of course not, which is why your teeth are green and your blood stream polluted with decay and your gums…Jesus Christ, your gums would make a display in a special issue of Dental News!—” Here he began drilling again. It was a different drill now, a low rumbling whirring one, very strange, coarse, like a slowed-down saw, and his voice got mixed up with the whirring— “All rot! Rot! Rot! They expect us to drill out the rot and get the hole clean and fill it in again with silver, do they, eh?—and all this standing on our feet for eight hours a day five goddam days a week and half a day on Saturday—and who is it for?—it’s for criminals, rapists, murderers, and potential sadists, like you, what’s-your-name, cringing in the chair—lucky for you this isn’t an electric chair, eh?— or maybe it is?—eh?—they say the electric chair gets it over quick, too quick for some of the disgusting bastards who get strapped in it, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of others, frankly, but this is one chair where you don’t get it over with quickly, is it, my boy? Is it? Hold still! This doesn’t hurt and you know it. You’re a coward. The last man in here, he fell asleep under the drill—fell asleep—because he trusted me, he didn’t flinch against me, he didn’t set himself in opposition to me the way you are— Betty, hand me that towel. What the hell?—where is this blood coming from? Betty! All right now, sit still, it slipped a little but who’s to blame, eh?—with you wiggling all around in the chair like a little weasel—lucky for you my schedule is packed or we’d have to do something about that wisdom tooth on its way down, it looks crooked to me, if the X-ray machine was working we’d get the low-down on that little number!—now this might hurt a little, because the hole is exposed now to the air and—”
I began screaming.
When the screaming stopped I could hear it echoing. The dentist was backing away. “I’m through!” he said. “Call the guard and get the little bastard out of here! I don’t have to put up with torture in the line of professional duty—this is going too far—this is an outrage— And my stomach hasn’t been right since he came into the room, his breath is an outrage—”
The side of my head by the tooth, the right side, on up and through the back of my skull it rang with pain, all pounding and fizzing with pain, and inside it someone was yelling at me: “—could puke, the creatures I have to treat! —could keel over and puke—and now he’s got an exposed root and it serves him right, let him feel some human pain for a change, instead of stinking up the place with his pyorrhea and his armpits—the little ape!—if the tax-payers of this state could peek in the door here and see just what their money is being poured into, the kind of rat-hole their money is being poured into—”
The girl helped me out into another room. I staggered, I couldn’t see right. My eyes were filled with tears. Another prisoner on his way in gaped at me and said, “Jesus Christ…” and whimpered, and the girl let me sit down for a minute because my knees felt wobbly. She said something to me but I couldn’t hear. I was hunched over, both hands pressed against my jaw. The girl was standing over me, wringing her hands the way one of my mothers did. She was saying, “Aw heck, hey, don’t cry—hey—hey, your name is Bobbie, ain’t it?—Bobbie?” She came around to face me, squatting down. She stared up into my face where my eyes were out of focus. Her thighs stretched the white material of her dress; the skin of her throat and her face was so soft, so soft-looking, one touch would mar it, one poke of a finger would destroy it, her lips were pink with lipstick and were murmuring words I should be hearing.…“That wasn’t fair of him, I saw what he did, he didn’t freeze your gum and that was a dirty trick…just to save a few minutes, so he can get out of here faster.…And that wasn’t true, what he said about some guy falling asleep in the chair, well, that was a lie, it happened back in town with his own practice and the guy never fell asleep but had a heart attack or a stroke or something and had to be carried out feet first.…I don’t know why he tells such lies, right in front of me! I hate him! I should report him for drilling you without Novocain, on purpose to torture you, then see how he likes it!” She shook her head angrily. Tears came loose in her eyes. A tear rolled down her cheek. She was my age, sixteen or seventeen.
But I hated women. On principle.
* * *
One of the exhibits is the Defendant’s notebook of “obscene drawings.” They are mainly circles meant to represent the female body. The circular parts are drawn lightly and sloppily, the other parts—the holes and slashes—are filled in brutally, angrily, blackly, and it is obvious that the Defendant broke the point of his pencil sometimes while drawing these things—When the notebook is shown to the jury, all the jurors gasp and look away, men and women both. It is shocking, and saddening, to see the graphic workings of a sick mind.
* * *
My Old Man up at that prison taught me how to hate them. Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate them Bobbie. Baby Bobbie. “Baby Bobbie Gotteson” was one of my names. My Old Man’s name was Danny Minx also known as Danny Blecher and he warned me, he whispered in my ear in his meaty hot-breath warning, just a friendly warning, “If you even think about them, Baby Bobbie, I’ll cut off your balls. How’s that?”