When I was just eighteen years old, the dentist said my wisdom teeth had to come out. He showed me an X-ray – they were at an odd angle to the my molars, and the roots looked like tangled and greasy hair tickling the inner recess of my mouth.
My father heard this and went ballistic. He had a strange and countrified fear of doctors and dentists that seemed both religious and pagan, and he said this was a make-profit scam for the oral surgeon. As I write this, my father has almost finished a complete dental reconstruction to the tune of $60,000 Canadian, because, for the past decade, his yellowish-black teeth had been falling out at night and he’d been finding them on his pillow. I think I made the right decision when I agreed to get them the hell out.
There are a number of ways to do wisdom teeth extraction. I suppose if one were a really tough mofo, you could get a local and sit there like a boss while the surgeon yanked away and blood poured out of you. In most cases you are put completely asleep under a general anaesthetic, and wake up later.
I would have gone under, but the son of one of my mother’s colleagues had died during a routine surgery. He’d been killed by the general anaesthetic and she was terrified that the decision to take out my wisdom teeth might lead to my death, so we went for the middle ground. I would get a large dose of local anaesthetic to numb my jaw, and then I would get a intravenous drip of valium. I wouldn’t go to sleep but I would be high as a kite.
I don’t remember much of the operation. Even though the surgeon’s hands were in my mouth the whole time, I talked to him constantly. He even drilled a hole through one tooth, looped a length of string through, and then pulled it out of my head. Afterwards I was taken to where my mother was waiting, and I plopped down into the seat and began to flirt with a pretty girl who was likely about to suffer the same fate. I was led to the car, taken home, where I collapsed and slept for the rest of the evening and through the night.
The next day I subsided on berry milkshakes. I had a prescription of Percocet which I was afraid to use (Not sure why; perhaps I had a fear of addiction), and nothing but time to recover. My mother suggested I watch a few movies. What movies did I want to see? she asked me. Get Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, I said.
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Released in 1990, Henry tells the story of killer and drifter Henry(Michael Rooker), who hooks up with a man named Otis(Tom Towles). Henry is a full-time killer, and in between socializing with Otis and Otis’s sister, he kills a lot of people.
At the time, it was considered the movie to get if you liked violent movies, and not the preachy, moralizing violent movies that always had to serve some parables alongside. Henry was done on a shoestring, and everyone in the movie seems like an amateur, except Michael Rooker, who – with his inbred cheekbones, dull eyes, and voice that sounded like it wasn’t used to talking with living people – seemed like a real-life serial killer who had been hired by anscrupulous director. The movie looked cheap, and today it looks as cheap as the beheading videos out of Iraq. It cost $110,000 to make and it was hailed as being real and important.
It was based on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who was reputed to have killed hundreds of people, but was probably lying about most and was convicted of eleven. Further estimations have suggested that he only ever killed three people, which seems like nothing if you are velocitized by his initial numbers. Both the real-like Henry and the fictional Henry seem to sub-human drifters who kill as easily and as thoughtlessly as some people smoke cigarettes or chop down trees. This is important – for anyone who ever wondered why some of these guys do it, these films can help a little. If you look at serial killers pragmatically enough, you can see them as brutal, shallow men who don’t think too deeply about what they’re doing.
This is the movie I watched the day after I got my wisdom teeth yanked. I was glad to see it, but I was disappointed: I expected more gore, more sensationalism. I was expecting Darth Vader evil, and instead I got Bubba and Cletus going human-hunting. Evil is often banal.
