Abbot and Costello Meet the Dentist Copyright © 2019 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #71, Sep-Oct 2019

I love going to the dentist.

The night before a dentist appointment, to me, is like…Christmas Eve.

Except of course it isn't. Nobody likes going to the dentist.

I remember as a kid I had to go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled. I'd wake up in the morning happy, feeling good about the homework I had done the night before, in particular my essay on the planets, which I was sure would impress the nun teaching my science class, who was young and who I had a schoolboy crush on, and then at some point, heading down the staircase in my pajamas, or sitting at the kitchen table redipping my spoon into the milk of my cereal, or taking another sip of my cold orange juice, I would suddenly remember. Fuuuuck! I have to get a tooth pulled out of my jaw next Tuesday.

It ruined that weekend before the visit for me. Absolutely ruined it. I just stared at the TV as the road runner outfoxed Wile E. Coyote once again. Didn't laugh once. That's a horrible thing, to have a weekend ruined. It's like losing the only copy of a black and white photograph of someone you love.

The day of the visit, I walked from my school across the sidewalks filled with the tallness of happy adults to my dentist's office (which was in his home. They don't do that as much anymore).

I couldn't focus on any of the stupid golf magazines in the waiting area. Kept swallowing.

After a long wait, past the appointed time, one of his children came out and looking up at the ceiling told me her dad was ready.

Seated in the chair, that bright light shining down into my squinting eyes, he fussied around my gums with a bad-tasting cotton swab, then swung that big syringe full of novocaine up (and they always try to hide it from your nervous eyes until the last moment). 'This might sting a bit.' No shit! You're forcing a hard metal nail into my wet pink gums. Once I was numb, he raised this pair of pliers big enough to pull the broken-off tip of a sword out of someone's stomach. Roughly positioned it on either side of the molar. Put his left hand against my forehead, yanking, twisting the pliers left, right.

And it didn't work! He could only yank the tooth halfway out of my jawbone. Sweat on his cheekbones, wetting the bottoms of his black-framed eyeglasses. So he had me get out of the chair, blue bib still clipped across my shirt, and follow his white jacket to another room, where there was 'better light'. Once the tooth at last released from my jaw, he held it up in his blood-dripping forceps like a prize catch, proud of his work.

When it was finally over, I felt like a roomful of cops had taken turns beating me for an hour with thick telephone directories.

And it was the greatest relief. It's done. I can go back to happiness.

"Bite down on this white cotton gauze Bobby, and keep biting down until the bleeding stops." I'm in Heaven. It's over. "And on your way out, make an appointment for, oh, let's say a month from now, to get two more of your molars extracted."

What?

I don't remember the first sequel I ever saw. I was a kid at the time. I'm sure my reaction was, Oh, they've made another movie about that same story? It may have been Bride of Frankenstein. I do remember thinking, Didn't they kill Frankenstein in the first movie? How could he marry? But of course Frankenstein was the doctor's name so…I guess. But the monster was still played by Boris Karloff, who played the monster in the first film. He was killed in the Bride film too, but then he came back for Son of Frankenstein.

(My Uncle Jimmy, my mother's brother, was shocked during one of my visits with him and his family at their home overlooking Long Island Sound that I had seen the Frankenstein movies. Children should not be exposed to horror films, and a whole bunch of other things, including the Rolling Stones, as it turned out, in later talks with him on his living room sofa.)

The same thing with other Universal movies, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy (and decades later, the Creature From the Black Lagoon). Each movie kills the monster at the end, but then in the next sequel, guess what? They're back.

And this keeps going on.

In the modern era, it's gotten even worse. There have now been twelve Friday the 13th movies, nine Nightmare on Elm Street movies, eleven Halloween movies. How many times has Freddy been killed? So we don't have to worry about him anymore, right? The franchise is finally over? But here the fuck he is again, in a new movie. So, what…he didn't 'really' die when he was blown up? He was just, like…'winded'?

And as bad as some of these sequels are (and a lot of them are really, really bad), they unintentionally illustrate one of the most powerful messages of horror. Nothing is ever resolved. The threat never ends. Amy Irving goes to the graveyard to pay her respects to poor, dead Sissy Spacek, and Carrie's grasping right hand shoots up out of the dirt by her gravestone; Robert DeNiro appears to die several times in Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, but then rises again, like Jason; every time someone shoots a home invasion villain, or insane ex-spouse, or crazy neighbor, you know they're going to suddenly reappear in the frame, trying to strangle the heroine. I keep yelling at the TV. Empty the fucking gun into him! What the fuck is wrong with you? But they never do.

There's always another dentist appointment.

At some point, you learn that in life. You never get your teeth perfect. You still have to come back in six months to see if more work is done. And more work always has to be done. And then six months after that, six months after that, for the rest of your life. That's just the way it works.

It's one sequel after another. The Dentist vs. Mothra; The Dentist Takes Manhattan; The Dentist: Here Come the Co-eds.

Horror movie sequels (Scream, Alien, Final Destination), remind us the toilet never stays perfect; it's going to have problems flushing again in a year or two, maybe this time flooding all the way to the carpet. That leaky kitchen sink faucet isn't going to fix itself. We're never going to kill the Halloween killer, just like we're never going to not need car repairs at some point. In life, you never resolve anything. You just patch it. That's the greatest lesson of horror franchises.

When the sequels end, the series ends. When the dentist appointments stop, it's because we've stopped. Going to the dentist, even when you don't want to, means you're still alive.