I was born with an odd number of wisdom teeth, literally-and-figuratively odd. Three. I’ve been told that’s rather rare, that most people are born with two or four wisdom teeth, sometimes none at all. My dad was born with eight of them and kept them all. Until death itself. I have heard tell the point of wisdom teeth is because the early-human diets were so heavy in difficult-to-process grains that we needed back-up molars for the later adulthood. We ground straight through teeth I believe. But I don’t know, I’m a librarian with a film degree, not an anthropologist. My dad said our family had irregular wisdom teeth because the northern-Italian parts of our descent involved more residual Neanderthal traits than most folks have, but he was also no evolutionary biologist. He was a blues-pianist stuck in a demonic munitions factory to feed his kids. Just what we read.
Two wisdoms lodged at the back of one side of my jaw, one in the other, I was born without the symmetry with which even my own freakish father was blessed. Uneven. Unbalanced, from the very start. Fold me down the middle and I wouldn’t match. They say that symmetry is the heart of beauty but, then again, without unbalanced motors, we wouldn’t have vibrating sex toys and where would we be without those? There’s worse company for freaks like me.
I learned this about myself in a dentist’s office in Sherman Oaks, during the time my unhealthy dreams were beaten out of me by the entertainment industry, minutes before I was anesthetized to chisel those odd teeth out. Even just three, they just wouldn’t fit inside this unbalanced head.
They gave me the wrong amount of anesthetic. Dunno if it was too much or too little, but when you’re part-Neanderthal, it happens. I am hard to plan for. Instead of slumber, I was suddenly a thrumming node of consciousness in a sea of burning white. Voices dead, living and yet-unborn all calling me, merging with me, saying I was a drop of water pulled from the ocean of infinity, but my drop was now returning. The part of me numbed by Catholicism said I was dissociating. The part that listened to Art Bell called this a “near-death experience”. I still don’t know which.
But I slowly came out of it either way, the feeling of distant jack-hammering inside my skull by unbalanced motors drawing me back to the San Fernando Valley. The concrete wisdom of spare molars replaced by the unsure wisdom of what was either a reassurance that I will never end in any complete sense, only change and rejoin the divinity, or that I should never ever try a harder drug than marijuana. I remembered some Latin my dad once taught me, “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” “everything changes, nothing ends”. It was either way a near-death experience but on a long-enough scale of time, that’s really all life is. You never know, but maybe it’s for the better.
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