Violence.

 I was terrified of the dentist's stairs. For weeks I'd worried about his practice being on the second floor and had visions of my staggering from his chair and, wild eyed and spitting blood and enamel, and immediately falling down his stairs. I'd remembered them as wide, white marble, with golden stair-rods, like Liberace's fire escape. In fact, they're narrow, carpeted, with sturdy banisters on both sides. I'd completely misremembered them. 

I've had these teeth, like The Archies' "Sugar Sugar", stuck in my head for a very long time. We've been through the good times and the bad, but they've always been there for me, except when bits were falling off them, cracking and discolouring and throbbing. But today seven of these life-long bad tenants are being evicted. I could name them: Achey, Splintery, Barely-therey, Chippy, Stainy, Mouldery and Coral-Castle-In-An-Abandoned-Fishbowly. But I won't. I'm not sentimental. 

Seven is a lot. But you have thirty two teeth, and if you remove seven you still have twenty five and that's plenty, right? 

I'm nervous. The waiting room is empty but for a red-faced bald man angrily thumbing at his phone. The receptionist seems cross and superior but I don't know why. This must be a gift of a job. No one is here, no one is ringing in, they're just staring at screens. That's my downtime. There's probably a bit more to the job. 

There's a TV on the wall over my head so I don't have to see it. It's showing The Apprentice. Why does every medical facility in the world have to have a plasma screen pouring shit into the waiting room? I'm paying a lot of money for this bespoke torture but the customer experience is practically identical to my lengthy waits in the Dole Office a couple of years ago: the same angry women behind protective glass, the same angry men stabbing at their i-phones, the same babbling bullshit from the TV. Except here I can hear a drill being deployed beneath a barrage of Lord Sugar's piss-weak, scripted one-liners. God, he's a cock. 

My foot's going to sleep. Maybe I could focus on that while they're ripping my face to pieces. Will they tear the corner of my mouth this time? Will bits of other teeth chip off as collateral damage? I've had some cowboys up in my grill in the past. 

The bald man has gone. I'm alone in the waiting room, scratching into my notebook, when the dentist appears, beaming beneath his mask. It is is time to make my appointment with the dentist's chair. 

Midway through the treatment, my mouth numbed in four separate directions - like wearing a beard of ice - the dentist starts to chat to me about my film career. His first cousin has directed films for the festival circuit. He gives me the name but I don't know it. He then admits he's never seen any of them. I attempt to describe the latest film but my mouth is compromised in some complicated ways. My bottom lip is rubbery, like a split inner tube. I feel my mouth falling into a full Cumberland sausage sulk. My plosives are impossible: I'm the bad ventriloquist and the dummy combined. 

Things I find out about myself in the Mastermind chair: I am surprisingly resistant to anesthetic. "It happens," says the dentist, mysteriously, and I think he suspects me of being a long-term heroin user. I find out I have "complicated roots". The first tooth is out almost immediately, before I think he's seriously engaged with it, and I think "This is brilliant - we'll be out well under the scheduled 45 minutes". But the next tooth is IN there - the sword in the stone of my gums. It's not shifting at all. A drill is produced - vibrating through my skull and causing strange heart palpitations. Great, I think, I'm going to have a heart attack in the dentist's chair. That's what people do now - dying in your fifties is fashionable. I flinch and he stops. 

"Are you okay? Are you having pain?"

I have neither the verbal equipment or mime skills to indicate I'm about to have a heart attack, but the sensation abruptly stops when the drill isn't fracking my skeleton, and he returns to snipping the roots off my complex tooth. 

We stop proceedings to take an X-Ray of my jaw to make sure all the bits are out - my teeth have a roots complex like a mighty oak, and I note the irony that my feeble, butter-milk teeth are incredibly resilient beneath the gum-line. How typical there is a lot going on beneath the surface that is pointless, stubborn and does me no good at all. The roots on this tooth appear to be heart-shaped, and I think of the roots of the mandrake, and what a boon to a witches' cauldron a heart-shaped tooth root might be. Anyway, it's out. Two down, five to go.      

I should say I'm wearing sunglasses throughout this ordeal. Bono-style wraparounds. They're provided - I didn't bring them from home. They're so I can stare into the halo of white lights above me. When I close my eyes I can still see the lights, like spilled pomegranate seeds, red on black, as the drill pushes in again. It's hard work. 

I think what it must be like to be a dentist. To wake up in the morning with the certain knowledge that at an agreed time you will be pulling teeth out of someone's head. Get up, shower, bit of toast. Drive to the office. Bit of chat to the receptionist, some admin. Then drilling holes in people, dragging teeth out of them, snapping the roots, numbing their outraged gums. Spot of lunch. Sandwiches in a Tupperware box. Gloves still on. 

Must be odd. 

At one point the dentist can't work his drill ("It's never done that before") and at another a wheel falls off his trolley. It's like Norman Wisdom starring in "Marathon Man". At some other time, I can no longer tell the precise order of events, someone else is in the room with us, bustling around, and I feel like an alien abductee. I'm lying there, gob open in my Peters and Lee specs, staring into a halogen lamp with a petrified jaw. I'm not aware of anything barring the blazing white and the occasional gloved hand dropping into the dead mouth I've dissociated from. The lower part of my head is someone else's playground, like a paddling pool or an an odds 'n' sods drawer for people to rifle through, looking for bits of string or bayonet light-bulbs. 

I listen to the radio. It's tuned to a station that likes to pretend no music has been made in the last 25 years: "INXS' "The Devil Inside", George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You", Coldplay's "Clocks" (inevitably)and Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire". "Clocks" soundtracks a particularly vigorous bit of digging, my teeth like trenchant potatoes, and one accompanied by what the dentist repeatedly calls "sound effects" ie the audible cracking of my teeth. It doesn't exactly hurt but I can feel the resistance, deep in my jaw and neck, hear the crack of my splintering enamel, feel the drill deep into my roots, into the meat of me.   

The last two teeth are, of course, the worst. We've been at it for well over an hour and my anesthetic is beginning to wear off, so I'm getting more and more injections. The last two teeth require stitches and I'm treated to the uniquely peculiar sensation of someone pushing a needle and thread through my naked, empty gums. They say you should experience everything once in life, but there have been quite a few events over the last hour and a half (forty five minutes, my arse) that I don't feel were an ornament to my life experience. This was not swimming with dolphins. 

And then...I'm done. There was a lot of late minute action, a final skirmish, scrabbling to get over the top... and it's done. The dental assistant, who has not said a single word throughout, swabs my mouth and chin, and I realise I'm probably covered in blood. Of course I am - I've been swallowing copper juice throughout, some of it must have leaked out. Luckily I'm wearing shades and a pinny. 

I sit up and plump my hair (still cool) and ditch the shades for my proper glasses. I feel like I've been given a thorough going over, and may be in mild shock. I have the hare-eyed expression of a man who has been mugged by a ghost and now has to tell people about it. The dentist, flushed, mask still on, congratulates me for doing so well. He has been calling me a "good man" throughout, no doubt recognising I decided not to have a heart attack during the ordeal, sparing him additional paper-work. He tells me to alternate paracetamol and ibuprofen, not to eat "difficult food" (ok), not to drink "piping hot drinks" and to swill my mouth out with salty water, but not until tomorrow. He asks me if I smoke and looks doubtful when I say no - he's seen my teeth, which make me look as if I do everything. 

And that's it. I bowl out the door, easily negotiate the stairs and meet the stern receptionist, only this time I can't talk. This seems to make her like me more. I pay her an enormous amount of money  and make an appointment for two root canals in a months time. I use their toilet and the light goes off twice while I'm pissing. Seems to be the way it's going. 

I head outside. It's dark now but there is Susan, waiting for me in the car, waiting to take me home. Numbed and speechless, a reddening paper towel to my lips, I let her.