Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [41]
I wondered, too, if I could ask Mac to give me a few more. I looked at the prescription bottle, and it didn’t say anything about refills, so I assumed that meant no. I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn’t make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted only to these?
Maybe this is why dentists become dentists in the first place, so they can cop handfuls of these pills anytime they want. What other motivation could there possibly be to open people’s mouths and scrape their gums and clean their scummy teeth or fill cavities? But then, didn’t dentists have the highest suicide rate? So I guess those few dentists who don’t kill themselves spend their lives making their patients wish they were dead.
As I held the amber plastic prescription bottle up to the light to admire it, I thought about my family’s unfortunate history with The Mouth.
My mother, a smoker since late childhood, experienced a cancer scare when I was eleven. The dentist had noticed some suspicious white patches in her mouth and told her he was concerned they might be malignant. This caused my mother to bite her fingernails and smoke two cigarettes at a time until her biopsy results came back negative.
The alarming incident had scared her to the point where for many years later, she was unable to light up a cigarette without saying “I hope to God I don’t ever get some awful cancer of the mouth.”
My father, too, had his own problems. He was seemingly unable to brush his teeth or see a dentist, ever. As a result, his teeth were brown, with deep black spots along the edges. My father’s teeth were quite literally rotting in his head. Which wouldn’t have been surprising, perhaps, if my father had been somebody who gutted animals for a living or maybe was a careerist woodsman. But my father was a high-ranking professor at the university. So his gory, ghoulish smile was quite a shocking surprise.
Yet, until now, I’d seemingly escaped the mouth issues that ran in my family. I’d never had so much as a cavity my entire life. And while my teeth were not movie-star straight, they weren’t crooked, and I didn’t have too many of them. I had what my dentist called “excellent teeth.”
But then, this wasn’t about my teeth. This was about my mouth, my head. This was about being genetically defective and about now paying the price.
I set the prescription bottle back down on the table, and an alarming thought entered my head. What if the biopsy came back positive? What if I had late-stage mouth cancer and had to have large portions of my jaw removed? In this case, I decided, I would go on Valium immediately, along with codeine and something else. I would also make sure I had a flask with me while they removed my mouth and other parts, part by part.
I was lonely now and wished I knew Bob better so he could come over and snuggle up with me and tell me if I should eat anything or not.
I wanted to see a movie. I wondered if popcorn was really bad if it was soaked in enough butter. I tried to imagine.
It might be okay.
Maybe I’d phone the theater.
A week later, my stitches were removed, and I was able to smile. Not that I would, but now I could, without looking so pasted together and temporary. I went back to work at the ad agency and felt immediately sickened by the stack of conference reports, job orders, and messages on my desk. My biopsy had come back negative, and I now realized that I was slightly, oddly, disappointed. Not that I didn’t have cancer but that I didn’t have something. I needed something to distract me from my ordinary life, and at least the “roof work” had done that.
Fuckhead Bob canceled plans with me tonight so he could go upstate and visit his ex-boyfriend. He’s blown me off and is hoping that I’ll just get the message and go away.
It’s the modern, passive, gay way to be direct. I know this behavior because it’s something I would do. This is how compatible we are. Anyway, I think it’s because I told him that I smoke. Ever since I mentioned