Lawn Boy(37)

Freddy had it all figured out. Discretion really was his middle name. He’d been collecting brown paper bags for a week.

As for me, my sales got off to a slow start. A kid with skinny jeans bought one of the CCR albums, but he saw right through my bundling scheme. And since I didn’t have proper change, I had to give it to him for a buck. A woman in a visor unlocked my Felcos and inspected the edges for nicks before offering me six bucks. Since I believe in momentum, I took it. That was it, though. Mostly, I sat there next to our Tupperware cash box with the wrong lid, increasingly discouraged.

Freddy, meanwhile, was irrepressible.

“This one here got Christy Canyon,” he’d say. “This here got Little Oral Annie.”

By two o’clock, I’d slashed the mower down to thirty-five dollars OBO. By three, I was down to OBO.

Freddy kept right on selling, his rapport with customers growing more familiar as the afternoon unfolded.

“You can have your shaved lady parts.” Elbow elbow, nudge nudge. “Old Freddy wanna look like a catfish when he come up for air.”

He was out of brown paper bags by three thirty, and up nearly sixty bucks, while I flatlined at eighteen dollars. At four, we packed up the remainder of our wares. I would’ve been a financial wash for the day if Freddy hadn’t kicked me down a fiver for gas and another ten for my trouble.

If there’s a silver lining to this cloud, it’s that we didn’t have to triple-park the Tercel in the driveway when we got home to unload. That’s because as we were swinging a right off of Division, we passed a tow truck. And I’ll bet you can guess what car it was towing.





Freddy, DDS




That night, the pain got so bad it woke me at 3:00 a.m. The nerve under that incisor was a live wire, crackling deep beneath the surface. Advil couldn’t touch it. This was the kind of pain that made you want to put an elephant gun to your head. The kind of pain that wouldn’t allow you to contemplate or even acknowledge anything but its very existence, that wouldn’t allow you to hope or pray for anything but its termination. I literally could no longer bear it. I would have given both my thumbs to be reclining in a dentist’s chair, with or without anesthesia. And I hate dentists.

Whimpering, I trudged into the darkened house, bumbling like a wounded grizzly down the hallway, where I woke Freddy, startling him.

“What the hell, boy?”

“You got to do it. You gotta pull it.”

“Shhh. You gonna wake up your mama.”

“You gotta get rid of it, Freddy. You gotta.”

“Come back in the mornin’.”

“Now, right now!”

That woke up Mom, who snapped on the lamp to find my wild-eyed, grimacing personage hovering half naked over her bed.

“What is it? What happened?”

“I can’t stand it any longer.”

The three of us convened in the kitchen, where I sat rigid and perspiring in a straight-backed chair, beneath the sickly glare of the overhead light.

“This is a terrible idea,” said Mom.

“If you’re not gonna pull the fucking thing, then please shoot me,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “I’m not kidding. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. It’s not worth it.”

“Boy, listen up,” said Freddy. “You cannot move, you hear? You gotta be strong. You gotta be a rock, you hear? You gotta put your pain in a box, okay? A little red box with a lid.”

Shining his Maglite into my mouth, he primed the nearly empty Chloraseptic bottle a few times and managed a meager squirt.

“There, now. You let that settle in, and I’ll prep my instruments,” he said clutching the needle-nose pliers.

I watched on desperately, tears clouding my vision, as he ran scalding water over the pliers, then took the added precaution of dousing the ends in peroxide.

“Now, if this don’t do the trick, we’ll move on to the heavy artillery,” he said, indicating the vice grips, laid out on a dish towel atop the counter.

I actually might have lost consciousness for an instant as Freddy rooted around with the pliers, trying to get a firm purchase on the offender, while Mom steadied my head.

“Now, now,” said Freddy. “Stay with me here, big guy. This is gonna be over real quick.”

Every second felt like an eternity as he worked the pliers around deliberately, Mom shining the flashlight for him. When he finally had a satisfactory grip, he said, “Now, I’m gonna count to three, and then it’s gonna be all over, okay, dog?”

I clenched my eyes shut and moaned by way of consent.

“Okay, now. Ready? One—”

That’s when he pulled it, on one. Immediately, blood started gushing out of my mouth, my mom frantically staunching it with a dish towel.

“Well, lookie here,” said Freddy, holding the pliers up to the light.

There was a tooth in the pliers, all right, cleanly excised, root and all. Freddy had managed a tidy extraction.

“What’d old Freddy tell you: easy as one-two-three.”

Though the evidence was right there in front of me, in the form of a bloody molar, something was terribly wrong. The pain had not relented one iota. If anything it had increased, which seemed hitherto inconceivable. The realization was not long in arriving. The tears came faster and hotter.