My Dentist’s Monthly Newsletter
In the latest, an article about how laughing gas
was discovered in 1844 by Horace Wells,
a Connecticut dentist, as he walked past
a street show that employed what we once
called “Hippie crack” at Grateful Dead shows.
The strolling players magically levitated passersby
into barking, tearful, helpless hilarity;
when Doctor Wells realized the mist quelled pain,
he tried it on his patients with excellent success.
The little imp in me wants to ask my dentist
why he’s never run an article about Doc Holliday,
who infected even more victims with tuberculosis
while he yanked their teeth and filled their cavities
than he killed with his six shooters at the OK Corral
and in the random, .45 violence he was drawn to
like the rotgut booze he couldn’t get enough of.
But no need to rile a man who uses sharp
instruments in my mouth, and he already knows
about the not-so-good doctor, since we’ve traded
stories about him: my delaying tactic before
Dr. Unser’s horse tranquilizer-size needles can pinch
and numb me up for the torments he later performs,
“DDS,” after all, in the old Brooklyn joke,
meaning, “Dey Died Screamin’.”