Corbin Bernsen: A Source of Anxiety

Corbin Bernsen had a very profound effect on me based on two roles. Arnie Becker in L.A. Law, and the dentist in The Dentist.

Some scary stuff, y’all.

Some awesome stuff, y’all.

I’m fairly certain that if you ask lawyers who are about my age (thirty- something) what TV shows inspired them to become a lawyer, many of them would name L.A. Law. If any of them name Ally McBeal, take them out in the backyard and shoot them directly in the face.

L.A. Law is to the color TV-generation of lawyers what Perry Mason is to the black and white TV-generation of lawyers. Or Matlock. If Matlock wasn’t so stupid and not in black and white. Stupid Matlock. Ooh, I’m cantankerous! Ooh, I went to Harvard law and then opened up a criminal defense practice in Atlanta, Georgia where I talk with a southern accent and eat grits! If you can’t tell, I hated Matlock. Who hates Andy Griffith? Who hates Matlock? I do. That’s who. And here’s why, from Wikipedia: “Matlock was known for being very thrifty with his money. His favorite food was hot dogs. His thriftiness, hot dogs, and the demands he placed upon his investigators were often points of comic relief in the series.” Really? Hot dogs and thriftiness are comic relief?

You just take your grey suit and your hot dogs and you go straight to hell.

I’ll tell you what counts for comic relief in a television show. This guy:

the most lovable mentally ret-, er challenged character on television… besides Donna Martin.

After googling “L.A. Law retard” (quite unpolitically correct of me, I know), this guy pops up. You know what else pops up? This most awesomest quote about this guy: “remember the guy who played the tard on LA LAW? i always thought he did a most excellent tard rendition. then he later went on to prove what a real tard he was by starring in dr. giggles.”

But back to the point of this post.

Corbin Bernsen is also, more profoundly, the reason why I hate going to the dentist. Have you seen The Dentist? What about the Dentist 2 (Electric Boogaloo)? People, they are both scary.

Basically, Corbin Bernsen plays a mild-mannered dentist who has an obsession with cleanliness. He then finds his wife having an affair with the pool boy… the filthy dirty pool boy, and loses his mind. His descent into madness starts by poking some poor girl in the gums with that poky thing dentists use to scrape the crap off your teeth. The movie’s pivotal scene is when he straps some chick to his chair, starts blaring opera music, and then begins to pull out the chick’s teeth one by one. I think he even cuts her tongue out. It’s basically my worse nightmare. Watching that movie in 1996, when it came out, is pretty much the reason I hadn’t seen a dentist between 1996 and about 2004. I’m not kidding, folks.

But in 2004, I realized not going to the dentist is stupid. (Not as stupid as Matlock, but close.) So I made my first appointment. And ever since then these people will not leave me alone. They expect me to go every six months. Every six months? For reals? No way. I’ll go once a year, but that’s it!

So I schedule appointments every six months. They call to confirm. And I call to cancel. It’s a little dance we do. But now they’re on to me. They’ve started refusing to cancel my appointments. They are really serious about my teeth, y’all. They charged me 80 bucks once when I canceled the appointment on the day of the appointment. I tried to cancel my appointment today, (because I forgot to call and cancel on Friday, and by the time I remembered it was too late), but they were going to charge me for the cleaning. As between spending 105 dollars to get my teeth cleaned and spending 105 dollars because I’m too much of a wuss to go to the dentist, I chose the former.

Now, my dentist really is quite pleasant.

My dentist is a smily white man, so this could be him. They all look the same.

And I think I’d probably be able to tell if he were planning to cut my tongue out or remove my teeth without my permission. But really, you never know with dentists. They’re the most hated people in the world. More hated than Nazis! More hated than hemorrhoids! If hemorrhoids were people and had souls! That’s got to weigh heavily on a person’s mind. “As between a boil on their ass, and me cleaning their teeth to a sparkly shine, people would rather have an itchy boil on their ass. My life sucks. I’m jumping.”

My dentist has got two hygienists. I’ll call one the devil. And the other one, the angel. I went to the dentist this afternoon and got the angel. She soothes my fears about going to the dentist. And she doesn’t harass me about not having had my wisdom teeth pulled even though I claimed I was going to do it two years ago. During my last dentist trip (which was about one year past when I was supposed to go), I was unlucky enough to see the devil hygienist, and I could tell she had it in for me. “I see you haven’t had your wisdom teeth removed.” “Yeah, funny that. I was planning on getting them taken out in February. But then you know what happened? I got diagnosed with a brain tumor. So, you know. It seemed more important to deal with that first.” Dead silence. I can tell she doesn’t really understand what a brain tumor has to do with wisdom teeth, and to her credit, they are totally not related. But I was going for shock and awe (and empathy.) You can’t get mad at someone for not having their wisdom teeth out once you find out that person has a brain tumor, fer Christ’s sake. That’s just inhuman. So I could tell she knew I was working her and manipulating her, in the way that the movie Pursuit of Happyness worked and manipulated me last night (I knew it was going to be sappy! And I still fucking cried at the end! Damn you, Will Smith and your adorable son! Damn you both to hell!), and she took her anger out on my teeth. She didn’t pull them all out or anything. But she wasn’t exactly being gentle as she wielded the poky thing and stabbed around my gum line.

Today, however, I had the angel. She asked me if anything had changed medically. “Nope. Still feeling brain tumor-y.” She didn’t even say anything about the fact that I still have my wisdom teeth aside from “Man, it’s hard to clean those wisdom teeth since they’re growing every which way but loose.” Ha! Clever. Get it? Loose teeth? Well, she didn’t actually say that. But she could have. And that would have been awesome. But she did give me a CD and headphones to listen to, so that was awesome enough. All the whirring and buzzing and awful drill sounds were masked by the “Sounds Eclectic” CD I was listening to.

Well, thank you Jennie. You’re the best hygienist in the world. And I made an appointment in March which i will keep–because in April, Jennie goes on maternity leave, and you can bet your rotten wisdom teeth, I won’t be going back to the dentist until Jennie goes back to work.

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