In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [62]
XX OLD MAN PULASKI AND THE INFAMOUS JAW-BREAKER BLACKMAIL CAPER
There is a vast, motley mob of Americans, untold millions, who even today, years after the consummation of their original sin, are paying the Piper. Paying in many ways, the most notable of which is sheer, stark, shrill, agonizing, bone-shattering pain which sometimes strikes its debauched victim late at night and sends his shuddering frame into the gray fringes of near-madness. The agony sometimes becomes so poignant that men, strong men, unweeping men, have been known to toy actively with suicide and even worse as the only escape. And in some instances, not as rare as might be thought, have actually taken that final, fatal step, the pain unbearable that made the sharp, crashing impact of a Thirty-Eight slug behind the ear child’s play by comparison.
Yes, the sinners are paying, as they have always paid in the end, and will always pay. There is no escape!
These poor, innocent citizens are Victims, and they seldom even know the origin of their ordeal by fire of what has lately become known in some of the more advanced medical textbooks as “The Juju Baby Plague,” sometimes termed “The Root Beer Barrel Rot.”
Anyone who has ever experienced a first-degree, Big League, card-carrying dedicated toothache in a major molar at 3 A.M. in the quiet solitude of night has stood at the very gates of Hell itself. There are no words in the language that can adequately describe the ebbing and swelling, ebbing and swelling and then rising to even greater heights, then again deceptively receding, only to turn again to the attack; insistent nagging, dragging, thudding, screaking ache of a tooth that has faced more than its share in a hard, rough and tumble lifetime of Juju Babies, Root Beer Barrels, Jawbreakers, and countless other addictions devoured during the innocent days of childhood. And like all sinners, Orgiasts of all stripes, he looks back upon the very thing that reduced him to a shuddering, denture-ridden, cavity-wracked hulk with bleary-eyed, teary nostalgia. Everywhere, daily, dentists—cackling fiendishly—reap the harvests sown years ago in Penny Candy stores across the land.
Well I remember the Pusher that sent me on that long rocky road that finally led to $765 worth of silver alloy and various plastic compounds which I now carry in my skull as a mute reminder of past, fleeting pleasures. The fillings are not permanent, but the cavities are!
In the throes of a toothache, all men are one. It is the one affliction known to Man that is truly the Great Leveler. Kings and commoners, Generals and simple peasants of the field all bow to this basic, somehow singularly humiliating curse that has been known and endured as long as there has been Man on earth. George Washington became a Revolutionist because of a bad set of incisors. And no wonder!
Recently there was a dispatch from Burma that told of a rampaging tiger that in a single night, without warning, killed twenty-eight Burmese in a quick dash down the main street of a jungle village. The native hunter who later bagged him simply said:
“He had bad teeth.”
One afternoon recently, while staring bleakly out of a waiting-room window, having tired of the ancient National Geographies and the Currier & Ives prints, attempting to blot out of my consciousness the sound of muffled moans and occasional sharp yelps of pain which were mingling with the Muzak, my tortured mind—perhaps out of some deep-hidden well of submerged masochism—plucked out of my vast file of sinister Life Experiences and dredged to the surface Old Man Pulaski and the great Jawbreaker Tie-In Sale. While waiting my turn on the Rack, I began to piece together the whole sordid tale.
Pulaski, a blue-eyed, blue-jowled native of the Midwest, operated a mercantile establishment that was the Steel-town Indiana version of The Candy Store. Nobody ever called it by that name. It was just “Pulaski’s.” On the side of his red brick, two-story store there was an enormous Bull Durham sign that showed this great, dark red, arrogant, fully