Tucked in neatly between cotton candy and my mortality, one of the fleeting thoughts I encountered while the dentist's fingers jammed into my mouth was the meth couple at McDonald's.
I took my older son to get ice cream (an ironic choice, I know, given the state of the aforementioned molar that barely avoided being pulled in favor of a relaxing root canal and crown double feature). My goal was to help him reconcile the fact that he's not the baby anymore, a supplanting that's generated a fair number of screaming fits in the last couple weeks since his baby brother dropped in.
Anyway, while he pressed a towering cone of vanilla into his mouth, I watched a mid-30s couple in a booth against the wall. At least, I think they were close to my age, but some habits age their prisoners so quickly. And before I sound overly assumptive, I'm confident in calling them addicts given the snatches of their conversation I overheard, all of which revolved around using.
I also saw the tell-tale sign of meth I first discovered on a site devoted to taking the romance out of using a few years ago. There are numerous ways in which this particular addiction tears down the body. The one I always come back to is what meth does to a user's teeth.
And thus the dentist. The man and woman at McDonald's were agitated. Between highs. Uncomfortable. The woman kept looking up and the fluorescent lights above and blinking as if to wipe the glare from her eyes. Each time she did, her cracked lips parted to reveal equally cracked teeth. At one point, her boyfriend asked her to fill his soda and she refused. He looked at her with what can only be described as a half-hearted snarl and his chiclets were also crumbling.
Back in the dentist chair, thinking about how even with my job and salary I wouldn't be able to afford getting my tooth fixed without insurance, I thought of their teeth. For a short moment, nothing but their teeth.
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