Sometimes a guy has to do what a guy has to do

I bit a dentist

     I must have been five or six years old.  He had an office on the second floor of a building on Irving and Lincoln, just a few blocks from our home.
     He had these pressed board cut outs of nursery rhyme characters all over this waiting room.  I think he may have been a specialist for children.
     He was not nice.  He hurt me.  We would go to the dentist as a group, my two brothers and me.  Sometimes my cousins Bob and Sally would go.  We all had the same complaint:  he hurt.
     Dentistry was different then.  I swear, they used Black and Decker drills to work on cavities and any teeth that had to be pulled brought out a Vice Grips.  Anesthesia?  For get it.
     Even having him examine our mouths hurt.
     So one day, when he was examining me, I chomped down on his thumb.  Hard.  He yowled.  Theh\n he marched me out of the examining room and took me to my mother.
     "Your son bit me!  Look at my thumb!  He is through as a patient here...find another dentist for him to attack."  (I have an amazing good memory for conversations that took place over 60 years ago...just saying)
     I became an instant hero.  Suddenly, my older brothers liked the moxie of the kid.  My cousins thanked me.
     We had all endured pain and suffering from this guy and no one complained or did anything about it...until I tried to bite off his thumb.
      It was a long time before I would go back to a dentist....I was deeply scarred. But when I did, we went to one of the gentlest, kindest dentists.  His wife was his assistant and office manager.  I went to him until somewhere around 1982, when on a Fourth of July weekend I broke a tooth and my dentist was out of town.
      We would drive in from Rochelle, visit the doc, visit my parents or friends, then go home.  Julia and Emily even went to him.....I think.
       I haven't bit a dentist since then....because I haven't had to.
       But I do put them on notice.