a foray into a new little project…personal essays, or snippets rather, about how I got into debt…good times!

How I Got Into Debt

J-Ride

They started growing in my sophomore year of college. I had some vague memory of my Dad getting them taken out when he was in his thirties and I had no recollection of my sister ever dealing with them or getting them taken out or anything. I was perplexed by them, but maybe out of some morbid curiosity, I chose no action as my course of action.

And so I ended up with two extra teeth. Wisdom teeth. I was 19 with new teeth growing in at an infinitesimally slow rate. They were on the top and one grew in fairly straight and the other grew in sort of side-ways. Not horribly side-ways, but enough so that it constantly rubbed the inside of my mouth. A few years later when I had been on my own and out of school for about a year, my boyfriend, Davis, discovered that he needed his impacted wisdom teeth removed. The oral surgeon was just a few blocks from my house, would let patients break up the payments and was nice. Seemed like as good a time as any for me to take care of my teeth as well.

Dr. Muse agreed. “You’d never be able to keep them clean,” he explained. “They’re just way too far back.”

Davis started calling the good doctor “J-Ride,” J being his first initial, and with both of us visiting J-Ride several times and me taking care of Davis after his surgery, I heard reference to J-Ride quite a bit.

I’d never been put under before and my first thoughts when I woke up in the chair were, “Man, when are we going to do this thing?” I was so groggy that it took me several minutes to realize that my teeth had already been cut out. My next thought pertained to the man leaning over me. “Do not call him J-Ride. Do not call him J-Ride,” I told myself.

As I stumbled out to the reception area, with the help of a friend from work who came to pick me up and drop me at home, I found it hilarious that I had to pay for the procedure after it was over. I was so drugged I could barely sign my name on the credit card slip. And, honestly, I would have signed for any amount at that moment.

Advertisement