A clean cut Beach Boy song on the radio prompted H.E. to wax didactic about songwriter Brian Wilson’s not so clean cut ways. As with everything, H.E. was a knowledge cornucopia of the Beach Boy’s pharmacopoeia, but especially so because he’d met the man, and the man in his later wisdom told him that he couldn’t recall the years of his life during his heaviest drug use. Years! Wilson would be shown a photo of himself and others, and he could not for the life of him remember the who, what, where, when, why or how of the event.

I can’t imagine losing that much of my life to oblivion, being that out of control, that out of it, on purpose, for so very long and for no health reasons whatsoever. Whoever determined that being blind drunk or high or stoned was fun? I honestly don’t get it.

The only time I remember ever being high and completely drugged, I was getting my wisdom teeth pulled out. They hit me with some laughing gas to relax me, and before I knew it I was giggly and chatty and not at all afraid that four big honking pieces of my bone matter were soon to be ripped out of my mouth by the roots. I couldn’t figure out why everything was so funny; it just was. Never mind that the oral surgeon’s tools looked like they belonged in a dungeon or a torture chamber somewhere, and never mind that his face and the face of his assistant looming over me as my vision slowly blurred reminded me somewhat of the eerie accounts made by those who claim to have been abducted and operated upon by aliens—not my friendly pink snouted aliens, mind you, but those scary, skinny big-black-eyed gray ones.

Then the serious drugs hit me, and I went from watching their alien faces loom closer to watching their alien faces move away, for no apparent reason and with no apparent “in between.” I had the entire contents of Bob Vila’s toolbox in my mouth as I lay there, and I looked from the oral surgeon to the assistant, and back to the oral surgeon again.

“So when are you going to start pulling them out?” I asked rather groggily.

“I’ve already pulled them out,” he said. “You’re all done.”

“No, I’m not. You haven’t even started.”

“Oh, no, I’m already finished. Check it out for yourself, if you like. I’ve got pieces of your wisdom teeth here.”

Hmmm… I was never so skeptical of anything in my entire life as I was then. I mean, the man had just drugged me and left a little Hoover vacuum cleaner in my mouth. There was no fucking way (and yes, I used the F word, I was that skeptical) that he could be finished. I was absolutely certain the man was putting me on or outright lying to me.

In my doubt, I felt around my mouth with my tongue and was horrified to find pieces of flesh and bone floating around in there. Three of my wisdom teeth were pulled out cleanly before they ever had a chance to surface, so the flesh in those spots were stitched closed. My fourth wisdom tooth, however, had emerged long before the operation, so when he pulled that out, he had to leave a gaping, bleeding hole, and it was in that hole that I could feel all the truly gory stuff. From that, I was partly convinced that he did, in fact, do some work in there, but I was pretty certain that whatever he did, he left the job unfinished.

“You’re not done,” I insisted. “You left some tooth parts in there!”

“Nah,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” And I couldn’t really say anything to that because I wasn’t sure of anything. I hadn’t really been “there” to make sure he did his job right. I was paranoid and suspicious, skeptical and confused. Where did my time and wisdom teeth go? I’d been drugged, so I couldn’t be sure. For all I knew, he could have taken my liver and kidneys, too.

That was just hours in my day. I can’t imagine living years in that way. If I did, well….

I wouldn’t have Kodak Moments to share.

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