ONE OF THE WORST THINGS I considered wrong with my looks was the gap I had between my two front teeth.

So I sought out a dentist hoping he could fit me with braces that would close the unsightly gap.

I was extremely apprehensive about the visit. When I was seventeen, I’d gone to the dentist with a badly infected wisdom tooth. That visit was a horror that haunted me for years. The dentist pulled my infected wisdom tooth without giving me enough Novocain. As he was pulling the tooth, I kept trying to push him away. The more I fought – beating him about his hands and forearms with tears streaming down my face the more determined he was to get the tooth out. Later, when I’d recovered somewhat from the ordeal, he asked me why I had kept hitting him. I told him I was in extreme pain and I was desperately trying to get him to stop. He told me I should have just said so. I said, “Your fist was in my mouth at the time so I couldn’t talk.” He told me not to come back to his office anymore.

This new dentist convinced me that my teeth were so badly damaged from years of not visiting a dentist that he’d have to pull all my upper teeth. I was such an idiot. I was taught that grown ups always tell the truth and that especially applied to doctors. After-all, doctors have sworn an oath to ‘first do no harm.’ I’ve learned from hard experience that’s as much of a crock as that crap the Police use, ‘We serve and protect.’ Beware! Beware! Beware! Beware! People — even doctors, policemen, lawyers, co-workers, friends, family members – will lie to you and lie to you, and lie to you. They will think that they’re doing the right thing and lie to you for your own good. Poor pathetic retch that I was at the time, did not know that simple fact. I never doubted for a moment that what he was telling me was anything but the truth, so I let him pull my teeth.

NOTE: After researching this incident in nineteen ninety-one, I found out that The Stalkers/Voices had paid that dentist a huge sum of money to mutilate me in that way.