Reno

Indie Rock Girl is the same no matter where you go. She has thick black plastic rimmed glasses, a vintage t-shirt and some blue jeans on, even in Reno. I had just put a Pavement song on the jukebox and she smiled at me and poured out a Belgian beer. It was then I realized that I was in one of classiest bars in Reno, and that Reno isn’t at all what I expected it to be. The bar, the St. James Infirmary, looked nice; from the vintage lounge furniture straight out of Mad Men, to the TV behind the bar that played “Edward Scissor Hands” in black and white. I expected Reno to be full of domestic disputes, incompetent cops and a whole lot of meth and trailers. Instead I was in a swanky bar listening to Indie Rock Girl sell my recently discharged best friend, Mat, a $40 dollar bottle of beer. Mat is large; broad shouldered, bearded and wore a flannel shirt. Mat eventually gave into her unrelenting pressure and ordered it and out it came with champagne flutes and a bucket of ice. Called Deus, Biere de Champagne, a Belgian ale aged in champagne casks, and when poured, it came out bubbly and sweet. However it wasn’t worth $40 and even when Indie Rock Girl started to tell us about her dream wedding we began to get bored and realize this wasn’t the Reno we came to see.

We left the bar and headed back to the strip. It was nearing midnight and the bright neon lights of Reno were lit up and fantastic. We walked down the street and saw a man in a white shirt (his face gushing blood) run up the street. We asked him if he was okay and he replied that he had just been hit in the face with a pipe. I thought perhaps he was being ridiculous but half a minute later, a man came around the corner with a pipe in his hand, looked both ways very nervously and then scurried off. This is the Reno we had been looking for and its people were now telling us their story.

We ducked into a little casino called the Nugget real quick, figuring that would safer than walking the dark streets where marauders wielding pipes prowled. The front of it was a dingy, smoked filled room with video poker machines and slots ringing, their lights flashing. We walked to the greasy spoon diner in the back; looking like it had not passed a health inspection in decades. With only limited seats and a small counter space, teenagers looking for trouble and drunk tourists trying to order food with slurred words and spittle, idled around the small area. We ordered some burgers, their infamous “Awful Awful” burger, which came served on a huge basket of garlic fries. The burger emerged from the grill sizzling huge and sloppy; layered in cheese, dressing and a mound of saturated fats.

After the burger, with chests tightening up from cholesterol, we wandered for a few blocks back and found the Reno police department near the National Bowling Stadium. Apparently Reno Sheriff’s department is a fabrication from the popular show Reno 911! because Reno is in Washoe county and the city has its own police force. We took some photos of it and then a friendly policewoman came outside and asked us if we needed anything and we said no, we were only taking photos of their station because of the satirical show on Comedy Central. She rolled her eyes and laughed a little.

After this we wandered back onto the strip and entered one of the casinos. I don’t think casinos are my thing; smoke filled, the cacophony of slot machines ringing and buzzing ad nauseum, old ladies sitting in front of them oxygen tanks in tow. But the casinos are one of the reasons Reno is so famous. Mat decided to retry his luck at Blackjack and sat down at a table next to two middle aged men, throwing away their children’s college fund. Mat started to do well and continued to sit there and I was bored. I went over to a penny slot machine to see if I could understand what made these things so popular amongst the elderly. I slipped in a dollar and started hitting buttons and it started flashing and beeping and making all sorts of noise. Now I guess if I had grown up during the great depression, this would seem high tech and neat-o, but it sort of annoyed me, I just wanted my money without all the bells and whistles. But I kept winning and it kept going on. The next thing I knew I had won $30 dollars and I decided it was time to get up, because I wasn’t even expecting to get my dollar back. I went and checked on my friend who was now seated next to some gangsters sporting tattoos of 666 and eagles brandishing Kalashnikovs in front of a Mexican flag, and they were having a pleasant discussion about harvest time up in Oregon.

Sometimes a city doesn’t live up to your expectations and sometimes it does. Sometimes you run into a man who just got hit with a pipe. And sometimes Indie Rock Girl starts telling you about her dream wedding. But even though Reno is better known for its casinos and trailer parks, there are also a lot of other people; people who love to bowl and gorge themselves at an all you can eat buffet, people who love to spend their organized crime earnings at the black jack table, people who love the biggest little city in the world.

Dentists

My mouth, from an early age, has been unduly molested, poked, prodded, drilled and bled in the name of dentistry. This has made me despise dentists and the Lexus cars they drive (they all seem to drive a Lexus). Now I’m not sure anyone particularly enjoys going to the dentist, but I really despise it and the sadists lurking behind their drills, and I believe the amount of money that has been paid out to these gentlemen in my name and the time I have spent suspended upside down in their chairs has made me an expert of sorts, or at least qualified enough to expound on the subject from more than just your casual dentist patient.My teeth are a dentist’s wet dream. Due to a bad set of genetics, my mouth is too small for the number of teeth that I have, so they did not come in any normal and acceptable fashion and instead decided to grow in crooked and far too close to each other. This has made me the subject of several extractions of perfectly healthy teeth, braces, jaw spreaders, cavity fillings, and god knows what else that was perscribed to me under the pretense of dentistry and the dentist’s desire to pay off his Lexus sooner.

Dentists have to be sadists. Everything about the entire experience is completely disheartening and everytime they begin to destroy my mouth and self esteem, I question my sanity for subjecting myself to such an obviously demeaning way to spend an afternoon. First it begins with the uncomfortable waiting room furniture, the worn copies of US magazine, the overly chipper receptionist who for some unknown reason (because I wouldn’t want her touching my mouth) is dressed in scrubs. If the dentist is especially full of himself, he might post his degree on the wall next to a painful portrait of him with his family, dressed in a cheesy Christmas sweater that would shame Clyde Huxtabel. After fliping through half an issue of US magazine and deciding that America is going to hell, you will be called back exactly seven minutes after your appointment was supposed to begin and escorted into the back room where all the drilling and filling awaits you.

The actual room where the dental magic happens always looks the same. The walls will be painted in some soft and unobtusive tone such as brown or grey and will have a generic framed nature scene picture of a brook skipping over round stones in a wood hanging. If the dental technician is a woman (they all are) and especially sentimental (well, she’s a woman, so yes) there will also be a picture of a puppy with a droopy face, or small children doing amusing things, or small children with a puppy, affixed to the cabinet containing supplies with clear scotch tape. Always, and I have never ever been to a practice of the dental arts without this, there will be a small radio, approximately 15 years old, tuned to the easy listening adult mix FM station playing extremely tinny sounding music at a volume just loud enough to be audible above the drills. This tinny music will play throughout your procedure and will remain your only solace as you are subjected to excrutiating oral pain and will drive you absolutely crazy and cause you to buy an over sized hunting knife after your visit which you will forget about, but put under your front seat. The station will begin with a generically bad song from 1987 as your mouth is lubed up with orajel, continue on into a Kenny G song as the dentist enters and says (without fail) “Lets have a look at what we got here,” and ultimately crescendo with a late 90’s Phil Collins classic as you are gripping the arm rest for dear life as the dentist goes to town with the drill on the numb side of your face.

The chair they use is not entirely uncomfortable, but you spend most of the time upside down, and by the time they are on the second filling, you have lost blood flow to your hands. I just don’t understand the upside down chair. Why? I understand the bright lights, the gauze, the orajel, the silver filling substance they invariably spill on my tongue. But the upside down chair, not at all. Couldn’t they just lie me prostrate, and then adjust the level so its’s at their height?

And then there is the numb mouth. There is nothing like having a numb mouth and walking around drooling like a stroke victim the rest of the day. I think dentists have an inside joke about us, when they see us at the supermarket drooling on ourselves as we buy a can of cambells soup and chef boyardee (because we can’t eat anything more solid), they probably watch for a long time, holding back their laughter as much as they can, and then run around to the next aisle and laugh uncontrollably for hours on end. Those sick dentist fucks. I hate them.

Dentists will continue to exist because Americans are shallow and vain and have an oral fixation and love men poking around in their mouths. We all need to feed our inner masochist from time to time, and every six months or so we get our chance. Plus, taking care of our teeth is important because there is nothing more nauseating then a SeaBond denture strip commercial on daytime television.

What to expect

After devoting a good portion of my time to the Classy Jacksonville blog, I’ve decided that there are still a lot of issues that I would like to write about that do not relate to Classy Jacksonville or would be better suited in a different self created forum. Topics such as what I think about politics, books, music, beer, traveling, and my life in general. The blog’s intention is to explore the issues that my polymathic mind leads me to wander to or happen upon. I might even throw in a story or two that I’ve been writing. This blog is to be more personal and may perhaps feature less of the caustic humor that pervades Classy Jacksonville. I expect that less people will probably be interested in this blog, but I felt I needed to branch off from Classy Jacksonville and write for an imaginary audience about some other things. Hopefully, you’ll like what you see.