Amphibologia

Amphibologia (am’-fi-bo-lo’-gi-a): Ambiguity of grammatical structure, often occasioned by mispunctuation. [A vice of ambiguity.]

It was a foot of wood. That’s all I needed to patch the side of my house where I had hit it with my lawn tractor. It happened when I was on my way to the dentist to have a crown replaced. I was driving full speed. I was driving my lawn tractor because my driver’s license had been revoked for going 85 in a school zone. It was 10 in the morning when I was clocked. Everybody was in class, why the hell do you have to go 15 if there’s nobody there? More government bullshit. The crossing guards are sucking us dry while my kids don’t learn anything useful. What the hell can they use US History for? The past is past. It’s over and it’s useless. It’s like moldy cheese or last year’s model toaster.

Anyway, if I was late for my appointment, my dentist would pull my face off. I think she has a problem. She keeps yelling at me to open wider—I can’t open any wider, but I try. She slaps me in the face and calls me a “jaw wimp.” Then, she pulls a giant syringe out of nowhere and jams it in my gums. My whole face goes numb and I can’t talk. She tells me if I feel pain while she’s drilling to raise my hand. She starts drilling. It hurts like hell, so I raise my hand. She nods her head and keeps drilling. I say “Reejus Rice!” That’s the best “Jesus Christ” I can do with my numbed face. The woman running the spit sucker is watching something on her cell phone and my mouth is starting to flood. I have to swallow and my tongue hits the drill. I hear my dentist say “Uh Oh. That’s the end of that. You’ll have to get an implant. They’ll screw in a new tooth for you. I’ll make you an appointment. See the office manager on the way out.” The crown wasn’t replaced and I was pissed off.

I had an appointment at “Dr. Puller’s Screw-in Teeth.” My damaged tooth would be removed and a new one screwed in. I arrived at Dr. Puller’s at 7:00 am. His office manager was dressed in black. She was wearing a necklace of gold crowns. Dr. Puller came out of his “workroom” to greet me. He had a black patch over his left eye and a black leather glove on his left hand. “Come in and sit in the chair,” he said with a small smile on his face. He had a hand drill in one hand. He laughed and said “Just kidding. Here, hold this little teddy bear while I do your tooth.” Dr. Puller placed the reddy bear in my lap. “That tooth’s got to go now!” He yelled and held up a small electric saw. He said, “Don’t worry about novocaine, I am a professional. If anything bad happens, we call 911.” Just then, his assistant walked through the door. She was wearing rubber gloves and was dressed like Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz.”

I decided to get the hell out of there, but my wrists were bound to the dentist’s chair. Suddenly, a thing that looked like a vacuum cleaner attachment came down over my face. I took one breath and was headed for cloud cuckoo land. As I fell into a stupor, a high pitched whining began. The last thing I remember was Dr. Puller yelling “Not that one!”

When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the little teddy bear in my lap had big blotches of blood on it. Then, Dr. Puller held up a mirror to my tooth and said “Welcome back.” His assistant had slipped a note in my pants pocket when I was sedated. I started to unfold it and she told me to read it when I got home.

My tooth looked ok, but what did I know? It was apparently screwed in nice and tight and would work well as a replacement. When I got home I read the assistant’s note: “If you got me pregnant, I’ll give you a call.” I’d heard about things like this on FOX News, so I didn’t give it a second thought. “Dorothy” was full of shit. How unprofessional.

The next morning I was awakened by the NPR theme song. I don’t have a radio in my bedroom, so I was puzzled. I listened hard and discovered the music was coming out of my screw-in tooth. I called Dr. Puller and he called me back just as the NPR morning news was coming on. We made an appointment to have it fixed.

I got to his office around ten and went straight into his “workroom.” His assistant told me how ashamed she was for writing the note. She wasn’t pregnant after all. I said “That’s ok.” And sat in the chair. Dr. Puller came in the room. “You have Radiohead. Your tooth is like a germanium diode radio. It runs off your body’s electric current. I have to “tune” it by twisting it like a radio dial—twisting it by mini-microns—until I land on static-free dead air.” It took Dr. Puller a couple of minutes, listening through a dental microphone temporarily mounted on my tongue. He was a genius.

When I got home, I sat in my chair, stared at the wall, and drank Johnny Walker black. The doorbell rang. I answered it and it was Dorothy from Dr. Puller’s. She told me she had lost her dog Toto and wondered if he might be in my bedroom. I let her in and we went to take a look.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.