HOT TOPIC: YOUR GRILL AIN'T RIGHT

 

I had been putting off going to the dentist for so long. 15 years to be precise. I blame a lot of it on my parents, we just didn’t have the dentist on speed dial, and I had watched my father’s mouth bleeding as he brushed his teeth often enough that I thought it was okay.

My teeth could only hold out for so long before the landscape went from glistening cream coloured pillows, to a dingy and dangerous den of rotted pitholes, molten gum blood and deadly broken ridges.  Only a tiny part of the state of my teeth can be attributed to having shameful and neglectful parents, the other two parts are due, mostly to my liberal attitude towards brushing and rinsing and flossing (and picking and whitening and…), mixed with my insatiable lust for Slush Puppies (preferably of the purple variety) and Cadbury top deck chocolate.

Oooh, the pain. Did I mention the pain of gums and nerves disagreeing with rotted and cavities filled with bacteria feasting on sweet treats and meats. I remember one particularly rough time, being on tour with my homey Sibot in the UK, a low point where I was gargling vodka, morning, noon and night…and swallowing, for the pain. Just to get some peace. It resulted in an especially rambunctious Mathambo, one I am sure we will not be seeing around these parts for a very very long time. Simon was equally amused and disgusted…and worried. 

I guess I hit rock bottom on a night of fine dining with Schlachthofbronx at one of the better steakhouses in Johannesburg. The weight of the bill was on the promoter, so I ordered the biggest rack of steaming, seething, sticky pork ribs. After initial thoughts ‘to be careful’ with the rib-eating because my teeth are so fucked up, I kicked the Florence Nightengale act to the side and got freaky with Bab . As I was reaching heights of ecstasy I’d previously thought impossible, I noted I was disappearing into the ribs, becoming one with the sinewy pork and grissle, my lips wrapping around the bones, my gums intergrating into the meat…my teeth…hmmm….

After getting through my 400grams of supreme carnal pleasures, I proceeded to play clean-up, using an assortment of tooth picks, bent menu corners, pieces of card…and eventually stooping so low as use a dirty ten Rand note.  Just thin enough. I flung tongue around and noted…low and behold…I’M SWALLOWED A TOOTH IN MY GLUTONY. Well, a chunk of the tooth…what was a rotten, bipolar, split up tooth…one part on a quest for liberting and independence (in my shitstream), the other loyal and down for the unit, down for Mokgata!

Anyways, so I walked around with this rank and rotting remnant of a broken tooth in my mouth for close on a year…adjusting my smile, style of speaking, and the way I drink gin and tonics…to the left, to the left, like Yellowman would now do. I was becoming the toothless African rapper, as opposed to the grilled out American rapper who doesn’t just have a dentist, but also a dental jeweller. I got used to it, and even got into it…keeping HR from Bad Brains as my icon(until I noted he’d fixed his tooth).  

I was used to being too broke to go to the private dentist and too posh to go to the public hospital. I was content to be the toofless broke ass rapper…fuck it, we’re all dying anyways right?

Luckily I’m not alone, I have a loving wife and a handful of friends who care for me not to look like Yellowman. And so pressure became more pressure from the love-corps and after an ill conceived scheme to sort out my teeth in Eastern Europe, I settled on a proudly black-owned and run dentistry in Johannesburg, a certain Dr Mdluli.

 

With R3000 in my hand and a head full of dank chronic smoke, I walked into the good doctors offices to find an obese but handsome woman in her mid-40s, twirling a pice eof chewing gum on her finger.

“Mr Mokgata?”

“Yes, Mr Mokgata.”

“He’s not ready for you…he’s running…late.”

And so after a brief temper tantrum I settled into an article in GQ magazine about how to keep a long distance relationship spicey through 3-d cyber sex…and remote control vibrators…and skype sex...The waiting room was populated by a brother and sister act, the sister, young, nerdy and clearly nervous; the brother, older, and clearly bored, occasionally letting off loud and guttural sighs. There were also two middle aged women gossiping and laughing in hush conspiratory tones.

“Mr Mokgata?”

“Dr Mdluli?”

“Come in.”

 

And lying there I was drooling, my jaw clumped down on a rubber block, a spotlight beaming into my mouth, two plastic tubes of varying size acting as saliva suckers, a syringe pressed into my gum and then agian into my pallete…all the while trying to make up excuses for why my case was so bad. He had heard it all before and proceeded to turn up the volume on the Thelonius Monk on the stereo.

Hard as I tried to fade away into my high and fall asleep, the drilling and pulling, chipping and chiselling, as well as my paranoia of swallowing more chunks of my tooth and eventually rendering my intestines and rectum nail ripped, kept me up…I was not to miss a moment of the action, the brutish force…he practically had his foot up on the chair and was yanking the chards of tooth out with all his might. I was bleeding…and could hear the mouth vacuum-cleaner chugging the blood down…what would they do with all the blood?

An hour later, Dr Mdluli beamed with a proud smile. The brute.

“All done, here’s your rotten tooth…and the root.”

“Can I see that?”

“You can have it as far as I’m concerned.”

I felt very alone. 

“You will have to get a filling.”

“How much would that cost?”

“Well, that depends…”

“On what?”

“The treatment that I would recommend would cost R10 000…but there are other options.”

From the moment I heard “R10, 000”, I blanked out and cashed my chips for the day, I was going to go home.  

 

When I got home and told my 98 year old grandmother about the money, she chastised me for consulting with a black doctor before I had seen a white one.

“He has no brain”, she said.

Johannesburg is just the way I had left it.