Individually Wrapped Horrors

by Eric Joel Kleinschmidt, Sr.

  So, that brings me to you people. There’s not really much more that I can say. It was a strange way to die for sure, but then I guess every way is. It was brutal and violent and sadistic, while loving and sexual and kind. I will live on for them always and I guess—in a way—I got the children I always longed to have. I really couldn’t have asked for more. I regret nothing and I’m more than happy that I stopped and rescued my little angel.

  ****

  The grizzled old lady in gypsy fortune telling garb at the head of the table said, “Thank you spirit, you have been more than generous with your unfortunate tale. Please go with our thanks and blessings and be free of this mortal plane. We release you.” The small gathering of folks she was holding hands with in a circle repeated the phrase, “We release you,” and I felt myself moving up. I looked again at all of them as they looked up at me. Their eyes all glowed yellow. I drifted…up…and up…and out.

  ****

  3

  “Side Effects May Include…”

  Crack! Immediate panic sets in even still, but not so immediate the pain. First comes the spitting out of the piece or pieces broken off, then the horrid realization of what just happened as the tip of my tongue scratches it way across the newly jagged point of what used to be a tooth. I usually follow this up with the pointless trek to the bathroom mirror to have a nice visual intake of my even further deteriorating smile. Mouth open to reveal the devastation that I call tooth decay, I revel in horror as I realize that I have only a few “good” teeth left, those are mostly black or several discolored and on their way out the proverbial door. Broke this sucker off in my sleep. I fascinate at the fact that I didn’t just swallow the two little splinters, but no, I had sat bolt upright in bed knowing the immediate circumstance at hand. Can’t even get into the dentist today to get another in a long, long line of root canals. No appointments on Fridays and anyway, one more point for missing another day and I was out the door at the factory. Jackie boy, I thought in disgust, why couldn’t you have taken better care of your teeth? They’re the last ones you’re ever going to have besides the fake ones. I shuddered at the thought. 35 years old and I was staring down the barrel of dentures. What a waste! The ads say: Dentures now a days are so realist looking that no one will even know you have them. People from all age groups and walks of life have them for all different types of reasons and no one is any the wiser. One ad even told me that I would be floored by how many celebs had fake chompers, of course I’m paraphrasing. It did make me wonder though. I know much of what I saw on TV and the big screen were real teeth, just with a lot of dental work added to make them appear perfect. It made me feel worse. To make a comparison, it’s why guys with below average-sized junk shouldn’t watch porn. We all wanted to be packing a John Holmes when we were mostly in fact packing a GG Allin. I certainly was not equipped with celeb style dental work. I had exactly 15 dollars in my bank account until after work today and I was fourteen days shy of my 36th birthday. I began to feel even more depressed than usual. Looking in the mirror for the umpteen-billionth time in my life, I noted again that I am not even handsome nor very well built. Just your average, going on pudgy, hair-receding, small-packaged, now nearly-toothless mess of a middle-aged American male slob. No girlfriend, not even any potentials out on the horizon. The factory that I worked at was predominantly male staffed and the few ladies that do work there had no time or desires for the likes of me. I ran through the notion yet again in my head that if I could just have a break in one aspect of my life, the rest of it would fall into line and maybe I could turn this train around before the inevitable broken track derailment I was so rapidly racing towards. Oh, and there it was. Staring in the mirror, tonguing the jagged fang I now owned, the massive pain shot from the exposed nerve and went straight down into my gums and jaw nerve and felt like a stab wound in my brain. I opened the medicine cabinet behind the mirror and pulled out the jar of clove oil and after dipping in a Q-tip, I proceeded to chew gently on said Q-tip, gagging at the flavor and smell of the clove oil and hating every square inch of my wasted life. With great effort, the pain was mostly squashed down into the back further reaches of my perception and I undressed and got into the shower. Had to get going or I’d be late for work and get that finally damning point anyway. Gonna be a long day I feared.

  The drive to work was mildly painful. My mouth closed, every bump made my teeth click and vibrate and I couldn’t get my mind to focus on anything but the situation at hand. Every bump had my other jagged little reminders screaming, too. My tongue wouldn’t leave the little chaos sights alone and just all in all, it was a painful reminder of how much of a loser I had become in life. I don’t mean to start this narrative of in such a glum gloomy way, but you gotta know where I was at in my head to really get the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey once was known to say). They say it’s not where you came from, it’s where you’re going that matters. To an extent, I agree. However, where you come from often can have the biggest impact on where you end up. I’ve seen this time and time again from relatives and friends and even co-workers that came from an abusive home or drug-filled environment and ran screaming like a banshee right back into it once hitting their adulthood. There were of course many cases of people who broke the vicious circle and moved on to better things. There are also case of those who came from a good loving environment and spiraled like a Japanese Zero Kamikaze into their own fated self-destruction. Whatever. All I know is that in my case, the theory is so far correct that where you come from can influence—directly or indirectly—where you end up. I came from nothing and seem to be just around the corner from coming home to it.

  The great and crippling drug of choice in the family of my youth was the ever-powerful, ever-seductive, ever-present…sugar. In all its grand and glorious forms. Man, we were some face down, sell-the-house-for-a-fix addicts. It has dramatically and all-encompassingly followed me into my adulthood. We woke up in the morning to sugar. Sugar cereal, sugar drinks, candy, snacks, hell, even the juice we drank like fiends is now considered by most dentists to be liquid candy! Pancakes drenched in the thickest, sweetest Wisconsin maple syrup we could find. Cereal with marshmallows galore! One time, they offered on the back of a box of marshmallow cereal a contest to win a box of all marshmallows! Oh, you better believe us kids tried to win that box. No success. But we sure ate a hell of a lot of that brand in a whole-hearted attempt. Our parents were just as crazy about the stuff. My mom’s joke was always: “I like my sugar and creamer with just a dab or two of coffee in it. Dad just used sugar, but boy did he use it! Scoop after scoop after scoop. Sugar in his coffee, blanketing his Cheerios, anything he could reasonably apply the stuff to. And Saturday mornings…whoa buddy. The box of doughnuts Mom would bring home from the bakery…Jesus Christ! That was a box of diabetes, plain and simple. Between the three of us kids and the two of them, a box of 30 or so doughnuts (plus a generous sprinkling of doughnut holes peppered in for good measure) would last us…oh, hm…I’m gonna say until supper time. We’d pick and peck and snack on those sweet buggers all day until around supper time, the empty box would go by the trash can and sit there for a few days until someone had the will power to get up and throw the damn thing out. Kool-Aid with three cups of sugar and three packs of the drink mix to one gallon of water.”High octane,” was what we called it. I—in my adulthood—cannot even approach that rich of a drink now. Sodas are fine but that sweet of a batch of Kool-Aid makes me nearly gag. Suckers, gum and chocolate bars in our lunch bags and also as our after-school snacks. Pop tarts, when there were any, left as a mid-evening/pre-supper snack. Then, supper was usually something good and wholesome like store bought pizzas or fast food burgers. Mom did not like to cook. Dad used to say she’d burn water! Ha, that’s still funny to this day.

  Anyway, we had a drawer in the kitchen—we adopted this from my grandparents’ house—that was nothing but red licorice! A whole entire drawer! The one at the grandparents’ house was a small neat little corner drawer th
at held about one bag of licorice. The drawer at our house was a big drawer meant for like utensils of big wooden spoons and such. Five or six bags—if you were really feeling industrious—could fit snuggly therein. By payday…that sad drawer would just be two or three empty bags that no one felt like throwing away. Bedtime was always the best. When the three of kids got our meager and probably undeserved allowance, we would walk down to the penny candy store. Not even sure if these are still in operation anymore. They were a smorgasbord of tooth decay! A whole aisle of nothing but plastic bins filled with a rainbow and a half of unwrapped candies of all flavors that a hundred other little boys and girls had already pawed through three dozen times each! Yummy! We ran down there like our favorite flavors were gonna be sold out if didn’t get there 5 minutes ago and grabbed the little bags for goodies and dove in! We’d always grab a few too many and the guy would count them up and have to put a few back. I thought back then, Well, I already touched them. He can’t re-sell them so why doesn’t he just give them to me for free? It’s stupid and not fair! Ain’t kids the best? These little goodie bags were stashed in our rooms in hiding spots so the other siblings couldn’t come in our rooms when were gone and sneak our treats. When they were gone, they were gone until our next payday. Glued to the boob tube and shoving this stuff inside our bodies like some type of demented organic playdough factory—including the production of the brown playdough coming out the other end—this was childhood. To be fair and honest, my parents made all of this possible, ergo hardwiring the programming into my subconscious’ subroutines—and now, I’m just screwed. Screwed because the best part of this whole little debacle was my dad’s wisdom of the entire field of dentistry: Nothin’ but a bunch of goddamned crooks! What a crock! All they do is scrape the enamel off so your teeth DO go bad, then they charge you exorbitant prices to go in and fix what they messed up in the first place. They’re as bad as doctors and lawyers! Bunch o’ goddamned crooks! And so forth…and so on…throughout all time and space in perpetuity…forever and ever…amen. I am so screwed. Oh, and one little note to the father of my youth—buy your kid a toothbrush for god’s sake!

  I have been trying really hard here lately to come up with a new diet. I don’t want to misinform you that I am diet-ing, but I am trying to put together a list of foods that are somewhat better for me than the junk food. It is a bit of a case of closing the barn door after the horse escaped. Sigh, I really just want to make one thing go right in this life that started off course in a really bad way and that I admittedly have done nothing real in the way of course-correcting thus far. On occasion, I would try eating things that I thought to be healthy for a human body, then the FDA or some other group of initials would come along and go: No, now that’s bad for you, too. Try this! And on…and on…and on. Apparently, the all-steak all the time diet is really not so good for your heart. The diet soda route is not only beyond tasting bad, it is also I believe in bad taste. Ever watch someone drinking diet soda who thinks that because it’s diet, they can have twice as many? Yup, fell into that category of people for a brief time, too. Finally, I was like, If I’m going to continue to drink soda, it might as well taste good. One by one by one, I got really used to the sound of “crack” and “snap” and of course, my own whimpered cries and moans as more and more nerves became exposed. This had to end. And it had to be soon!

  I had made up my mind to call that lunch hour to set up an appointment with a dentist to start making some concrete plans for the near future. This pain was beginning to rule my life by altering my thoughts heavily toward the negative. They weren’t open as far as seeing patients on Fridays—which I have never understood—but they were there to take calls and set up appointments. They had an opening for next Wednesday at 4 p.m. for a consultation. Probably want some x-rays and a hundred other things that’ll cost an arm and a leg and—NO! I thought to myself, that is my dad talking and not me! It is my own fault that I am in this mess and no one else’s so just quit it on that already! “Yes, ma’am, Wednesday at 4 will be just fine. Thank you. You have a nice day also.” I hung up. I didn’t feel any better physically, but mentally I knew I had taken the first of many steps toward silencing the painful battlefield in my mouth. I knew the easy part was over. I also knew I had some mighty big hurtles coming up over the horizon. The first one was getting the day off. My boss was not at all thrilled with me that not only did I need Wednesday off but that I would be needing further days in the near future as well. There hadn’t been any good feelings between me and this cretin for a number of years now but he was really being a child about this. Who would cover my shifts? How would the product get out on time? How could you be so irresponsible? Don’t you own a toothbrush? I asked him how was the product going to get out if he fired me and had to hire and train a new guy. It was just a few days I needed to be determined, not a kidney. He hemmed and hawed a bit more then gave in to reason. He really had no ground to stand on in this fight. He told me to just keep him informed and as long as it wasn’t a ridiculous amount of time, he would make it happened. But, he boomed, you owe me big for this! I was speechless…so, I turned and left. Back to work, I managed through another day at the plant. I knew my days here were numbered, too, but I had to bide my time. Nothing else on the horizon just then and I needed that insurance. I put on my safety gear and turned on the machine.

  That night, I got completely plastered, not out of alcoholism or sheep boredom, but to have a pain-free night for once. It would have been the best night I had for a very long time—if I had someone there to share it with me. Dad’s been gone these last five years from a stroke, Mom is back home in Missouri. I really never was very close to my brothers. I was the middle boy and true to the old wives’ tale, completely overlooked. My younger brother Ty went into the army after pop kicked off. He was in a transport convoy that got suicide bombed a year and a half ago. This may sound really bad, but we were all sorta glad pop was already gone when Ty went. That would have put him over the edge. Ty being his all-time favorite. Richard was a stockbroker out in Montana or Minnesota…one of those two. We lost touch even before pop died and—other than the funeral—that was really for the best. We were no good being in the same room together. Old tempers from long ago feuds grew restless. I send a letter to Mom every now and then, but the response letters come fewer and fewer. She keeps better contact with Richard and that’s OK, too. As long as someone is watching out for her, I’m happy. It’s funny when you think about it. All those sweets when we were younger and all of our lives so sour as adults. Tre bizarre. I’m up here in Denver. Not really enjoying myself here, but way too broke to go anywhere else. Besides, they say wherever you go, there you are. Or, if it’s more to your liking, put an asshole on a plane in Denver, and an asshole gets of the plane in New York. If I’m not happy here, probably not gonna be happy anywhere. Or maybe that’s a lazy cop-out so I don’t have to try anywhere else either. Who knows? If I could just straighten this teeth thing out, the rest is easy to fix. The debilitating thing about my teeth is the thinking that even if I went somewhere else, I am so hideous and repulsive that I still won’t find a girl to settle down with. No one wants to wake up to this smile every day. If I had better teeth, I wouldn’t want to either.

  The weekend passed, mostly sucking on Q-tips soaked in clove oil. The taste was immensely awful, but the feeling was slightly helpful. Terrible trade off, really. Wednesday came and at 3:45 p.m. I strolled into the dentist office and up to the window. “Yes?” The lady behind the counter asked. “Jack Goodman, I have a 4 p.m. appointment please.” She rifled around through some papers and said “Fill these out,” handing them over to me with a pen. I sat quietly filling them out as the other two patients were called back. I turned in the papers and was directed to wait until I was called in. Sitting down, I casually scanned the room. The usual sterile setting greeted me. Two short end tables with an assortments of throw-away celeb mags on them, a few flower vases with fake flowers, white walls with thick and heavy brown wood
doors, and chairs. Chairs, chairs, chairs. All empty now except for mine, but enough to hold half the town, I thought. Two doors leading to the back rooms, the main sliding glass door entrance, the receptionist window, another door with “his/hers” sign on it for bathroom and a final door off the left of the bathroom door. There was a window there and through the window I could see the jutting portion of building sticking out of the rest that accompanied that particular door. Offices, I’d guessed. A large ceiling fan spun slow and lazily about its circle pretending to do any good. The last thing was up in the far corner of the wall, near the ceiling, was a flat screen TV turned on but muted whereon SpongeBob was capering around in one of his ridiculously weird adventures. Oh SpongeBob, you card! About a half hour ticked by before I was politely escorted to the back room, room 3 to be exact, and asked to sit down and get comfortable in the chair and the dentist would be in in a few minutes. Another TV muted but this one had the brothers hunting for crap houses to refurb and flip. Gimme back my SpongeBob, I thought, any day of the week!

  The dentist made his way in, finally, a portly old German fellow with an astonishing lisp for a dentist. Dentitht…I mused. All pretty predictable after the initial greetings. X-rays were done, teeth nubs were gently tapped at with the instruments of torment I had come to know so well, appointments were made, decisions and suggestions were bandied about. Bottom line was this, my teeth were too far gone to be saved. At this point, not even throwing money at the problem could alleviate said problem. Just had to go for the big gamble here and get them all pulled and cut out what could not be pulled. I groan with resignation and made the follow up appointment for a week later. Was going to be a long week but I figured after that, I’d never have any real teeth again so a week was good to say my fondest farewells. I walked out of that place sick from the dread and the weight of it all. I felt like the world’s biggest failure. The dentist had tried to reassure me that a great many people the world over had dentures, some of them still in their teens. Many reasons brought people to this finalization. No one was judging me here and in my immediate future, the dentures would be so realistic looking that I was going to get that no one would know the difference unless I told them. My brain—my poor old wounded ego—couldn’t take that as gospel though. I’d know the difference, every time I looked in the mirror, I’d see the phony smile glaring back at me and I’d know…ergo, so would everyone else. After all, how many times had I seen someone with old or badly designed dentures and thought Gross? When I was younger, of course. These days, I kept my shitty opinions more to myself and judged not others until I had at first judged my own failures in that department. “Jackie boy,” I said out loud in the car to myself, “you really screwed the pooch on this one, buddy. You really did.”