Cause and defect

The buttheadguyeffect, conclusion

It was 7 a.m. The Manila guest house dormitory was silent, but for the soft breathing of slumbering travelers and the quiet rustling of two early risers packing their bags.

“What the fuck?! Where the fuck is my towel?!”

I opened my eyes to behold a morbidly obese blonde Canadian in her late twenties. Showing no consideration for the nine other people sleeping in the room, she loudly accosted a Chinese fellow packing his suitcase on his bunk.

“You! You took my fucking towel, didn’t you?”

“I… no….” he replied, struggling with his English.

“Oh fuck, don’t even try to fucking deny it. I know what you fucking people are like.”

Then the Chinese man’s wife, who was packing her bag on the bunk above me, spoke up.

“Excuse me… he… he did not take your towel.”

The blonde snorted derisively and shouted at her in fake Cantonese. I cringed.

Then the Chinese woman said something in Cantonese, and the blonde answered. In Cantonese.

So she was speaking real Cantonese, then. Thank fucking God. Not that this significantly improved the situation. Switching back to English, the blonde tore the Chinese couple apart.

“I’m fucking sick and tired of you fucking people and your fucking shit! I’ve lived in your fucking shithole of a country for seven years, and I know all about the selfishness that goes on and how badly people treat each other there! So fuck you!”

By this time the miniature United Nations that was the rest the people in the dorm had awakened, and were staring incredulously at each other.

The tirade finally ended when the Chinese couple, who were luckily almost ready to leave when the abuse began, quietly shouldered their luggage and exited the room, their faces red with embarrassment and the wife almost in tears.

The door clicked shut, leaving the room in uncomfortable, wakeful silence. Nobody spoke for several seconds, probably because no one wanted a confrontation with this deranged, intimidatingly humungous racist.

But as the scorpion said to the frog, I had to say something. I considered my words carefully.

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer woman,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I guess I’m a bit stressed out right now,” she tiredly replied, as if that excused everything. With that, she flumped down on her bunk and went back to sleep.

* * *

The moment Chris D pushed my ten-year-old face into my school desk, parallel universes diverged. In one universe, the one I live in, one of my front teeth broke. In the other, the tooth collided with the desktop at an infinitesimally different angle, and didn’t break. And so, young Glen Callender became two young Glen Callenders: Broken Tooth Glen and Perfect Teeth Glen.

In the 25 years I’ve lived as Broken Tooth Glen, I’ve learned a lot about the cause and effect of causing a defect in someone else’s smile. Indeed, Chris D’s carefully-considered act of violence had consequences far beyond what he envisioned—especially considering that, I’m sure, he never meant to break my tooth in the first place. In the manner of young bullies, Chris merely wanted to cause me a few moments of pain and humiliation.

But accidentally or not, he did break my tooth, at least in my universe, setting in motion a hideous series of events that no one will ever fully comprehend. One of those events is happening at this very moment, for here I am writing this, the final installment of a five-part series about the evils my insidious broken tooth has inflicted upon the world. I think it’s safe to say that if my tooth weren’t broken, I wouldn’t be doing this.

Is there a bright side to being Broken Tooth Glen? After much thought, I’ve concluded that possessing this broken tooth has almost universally sucked. The only positive aspect I can imagine—and this is a bit of a reach—is that my many unpleasant experiences with this tooth have made me more cynical, which has perhaps given my writing more teeth than it might have had otherwise.

And if that’s true, well, I’d gladly knock those teeth right back out again in exchange for a life undiscombobulated by this disgruntling dental deviation. In fact, if anyone out there has a Parallel Universe Divergence-Point Reassignment Matrix—and knows how to use it (it is very important that you know how to use it)—I’d be much obliged if you would pop back to 1984 and swap me into the universe of Perfect Teeth Glen.

But you know what they say—be careful what you wish for.

* * *

I was awakened by another loud female voice. A morbidly obese brunette had entered the room and was talking with the blonde, again as if they weren’t surrounded by sleeping people. She was the blonde’s workmate and traveling companion, and had slept in a different dorm because mine hadn’t had two beds available.

“You know what happened to me?” the blonde said. “This fuckin’ Chinese guy stole my towel.”

The brunette gasped. “But—I stole your towel!” she exclaimed.

“Really?” the blonde shouted. Again, the miniature UN traded disbelieving glances.

“Yeah, you were totally asleep so I just took it.”

“Oh my God!” said the blonde, stifling a giggle. “I just gave so much shit to this Chinese guy for taking it. I guess I, like, totally went off on him ’cause he’s Chinese.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said the brunette supportively, as if this were totally understandable.

Wow. In their twisted moral world, heaping racist abuse on innocent Chinese was nothing more than an amusing faux pas. Remorse was not required, presumably because the Chinese couple she’d attacked were, after all, still Chinese.

Now I knew exactly who these people were. Bitter expat losers.

I knew their kind well when I taught English in South Korea. Intolerable, incompetent misfits in their home countries, they flee their mounting debts and thin job prospects to work in Asia—and end up stuck there, becoming more and more resentful toward the local culture. Why would this mouthy blonde have spent seven years in China if she hates it so much? Because she has no viable alternative.

Alas, this pair of rotund Canadian racists had taken a cheap holiday to the Philippines in the hopes of getting away from the Chinese for a few days, but unfortunately, they were constantly running into Chinese tourists, and this was pissing them off to no end.

Poor babies.

* * *

It’s easy to say my life would be much better if I were Perfect Teeth Glen. But there’s no way of knowing either way.

In fact, it’s possible that Perfect Teeth Glen never got this long in the tooth. Perhaps the universe offered him a few too many flattering compliments, a few too many lucrative opportunities, a few too many horny heiresses. The result? A Glen far cockier than Broken Tooth Glen could ever be, a Glen whose larger-than-life character and ubiquity as a top international toothpaste model brought him not only to the height of fame and wealth, but also to a tragic early death in a reckless, drug-and-arrogance-fuelled motorcycle crash.

And the tabloid headlines were Perfect Teeth Glen’s epitaph, repeating in heavy type his agonized final words:

“I am slain… by my own… folly… if only… if only something had… happened to me… in my youth… perhaps... in elementary school… a minor... but permanent injury… something that showed me… I am not immortal… something that taught me… a bit of… humilityarrrgh—”

And below that, in full color, the controversial paparazzi shots of 27-year-old Perfect Death-Grimace Glen—chest crushed, forehead lacerated, but his iconic teeth still intact and glistening white.

Yes, perhaps that unbroken tooth would have been the end of me. But I think I’ll go out on a limb and say... probably not.

* * *

A few minutes after the brunette left the dormitory, the Chinese woman returned and quietly approached the blonde, who was going back to sleep.

“Excuse me? I—I very, very sorry,” she said softly. She was still so upset by the blonde’s virulent anti-Chinese diatribe, she was willing to apologize for something her husband hadn’t done if it would set things right.

“Oh whatever, it’s alright, don’t worry about it,” the blonde replied in a curt, deliberately insincere tone of voice. She turned her head away and put her arm over her face, trying to ignore her visitor.

The Chinese woman attempted to continue the conversation, desperately seeking some kind of reconciliation. But after being rudely shushed and waved off a couple more times, she gave up and left for good, possibly more upset than when she came in.

Once again, significant looks were exchanged around the room. That malevolent bitch not only didn’t have the integrity to admit her mistake and apologize, she instead accepted undeserved apologies for something she knew hadn’t happened. In a deliberately rude way that only upset the Chinese woman more. Which was undoubtedly her intention.

Aren’t these people stupid, she was probably thinking, apologizing for something they didn’t even do. Fuck ’em.

I have never been so disgusted with the behavior of a fellow Canadian traveler. May she enjoy another seven happy years in the glorious People’s Republic of China.

* * *

They say that when a butterfly flaps its wings, it can cause a tornado on the other side of the world. I’m not sure about that, but I am sure that when a buttheadguy breaks a tooth, it can cause a motorcycle crash on the other side of the world. Not to mention an attempted mugging, a massacre of bedbugs, and a racist tongue-lashing of an innocent Chinese couple.

Yes, that deplorable incident in the guest house dormitory can also be laid at Chris D’s feet. For if my tooth hadn’t been broken, I wouldn’t have been in Manila, so I wouldn’t have slept in that dormitory, so there would have been two beds available in the dorm instead of one, so the two Canadian women would have slept in the same room, so the brunette would not have removed the blonde’s towel from the room, so the Chinese man would not have been accused of stealing it.

Merely by being there, I shifted the positions of the other travelers and created the circumstances that led to conflict. Just another strange and unpredictable consequence of my 25-year-old broken tooth being plunked into the vast bingo-ball tumbler that is the universe.

At this point, I think it’s clear that I must do everything I can to end the tyranny of my broken tooth over the future of life on this planet. Later this year, I will return to the Philippines and get a new crown mounted on the dental implant currently bonding with my skull. If all goes well, That Fucking Tooth won’t bother me—or anyone else—for decades. Hopefully it will never be heard from again.

But unfortunately for us all, the genie has been out of the bottle for 25 years. Even if I succeed in rebottling it, past events can never be undone. And instead of diminishing with time, the cascade of effects caused by my broken tooth appears to be multiplying and accelerating, like a tiny pellet of rolling snow becoming a snowball that becomes an avalanche, that crushes a tour bus containing the “Top 40 British Scientists Under 40,” thus delaying human colonization of space for generations and increasing by billions the death toll of the superflu pandemics of the mid-21st century. And so on.

This, dear reader, is the buttheadguy effect. The ultimate ramifications of Chris D’s ram-a-face actions will never be—can never be—known. All I know for sure is that there are many more unintended consequences to come. What horrors, I wonder, will the next sordid episode bring?

And I also wonder if the universe ever got around to busting any of Chris D’s teeth.

Three thugs and a tourist

The buttheadguy effect, part 4

I’d traveled in over twenty countries and I’d never been mugged. This is mostly because I have good instincts, and take care not to put myself in dangerous situations.

But when the game is backpacking in crime-ridden tropical countries, your winning streak is bound to end eventually.

And so, late one night as I walked home from a bar in Malate, Manila’s bayside tourist district, I realized that the street had suddenly become forebodingly dark and deserted. My spidey sense tingled.

“I’d better get out of here,” I thought. “This is exactly the sort of place where a guy could get—”

And it was at that very moment that a trio of young toughs emerged from an alley and headed straight for me.

Freeze frame. Cue title sequence:

THE BUTTHEAD GUY EFFECT

Peril and bloodshed that transpired in 2009 because Chris D broke Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984

PART 4: THREE THUGS AND A TOURIST

Action continues:

Their point man had a crappy white women’s belt slung over his shoulder. He was trying to pass himself off as a street hawker, which gave him a pretext to approach me—not that his ruse was at all convincing. He ran ahead of me and cut me off while the other two crowded around us.

Years ago when I took a self-defence class, the instructors warned us that the fancy-shmancy techniques we were learning would go right out the window in the event of an actual assault. When you’re attacked, everything happens so quickly you can’t think—you just react.

And they were right. The moment these three guys moved into my personal space, I just reacted. I waved my arms defensively and shouted, “Back off! No touching! Stand back! Get the fuck back!”

It was pretty much the same tactic I use to repel groups of street kids who swarm tourists and try to pick their pockets. And it worked. The trio backed off slightly, now unsure whether they wanted to take on this suddenly very loud and animated foreigner. They probably thought I’d quietly hand over my valuables based on the three-on-one dynamic. And perhaps that would have been the smartest course of action.

I was scared absolutely shitless now, and perhaps they were too. Their eyes were wide, twitchy and full of rage; from the look of them they could have been hopped up on shabu—the local name for crystal meth—and therefore experiencing a greater-than-usual impairment of their natural human empathy for foreign tourists.

Women’s belt guy was shouting “You give me money!” over and over. Then I turned and saw the yellow-shirted guy to his left swearing and conspicuously fumbling behind his back, as if he were about to pull a gun or knife. A gun or knife he probably had.

I had no doubt that these dudes were prepared to kill me. During my year-long stint in the Philippines in 2006-7, two acquaintances I met in Manila were brutally murdered. Martin the accountant was stabbed to death by a shabu-head during a Manila jeepney robbery; Julia the Peace Corps volunteer was randomly killed by some nut in a popular mountain town. Another friend was mugged by a group of men with handguns, just a couple of blocks from where I was standing.

The Philippines is a rough country. People get killed all the time—I’ve seen the chalk body outlines and blood for myself. I had every reason to fear the worst.

So as yellow-shirt guy fumbled, my gut told me that whatever he had, I didn’t want to see it—because if I saw it, maybe he’d feel that much more emboldened to use it if I turned my back on him. A dangerously stupid assumption, perhaps, but that was what streaked across my mind, and I acted on it.

Still shouting and waving, I turned away from yellow-shirt guy to find a space had opened up between the other two.

And I ran.

They didn’t chase me, as I was only a few seconds’ sprint from the next intersection, which would put me in sight of the security guards on the sidewalk outside the hotel around the corner. I passed by those guards without telling them what had just happened. I needed to get the hell away from there, and the last thing I wanted to do was talk to the cops.

Strangely, everything had happened so fast that the fact I’d just been the intended victim of a street robbery didn’t properly sink in for a couple of minutes. I rushed along, my whole body trembling, thinking, “What the hell just happened? Were those guys trying to mug me? They were trying to mug me!” I didn’t know it then, but the adrenaline that had flooded my bloodstream would prevent me from getting a wink of sleep that night.

It’s an awful feeling, realizing that you were probably within seconds of being shot or stabbed. What a shitty demise it would have been, getting rubbed out on the seedy streets of Manila for a cheap cell phone and a wallet with perhaps $150 in it.

And so I speed-walked home, my mind playing and replaying the frightening circumstances of the only attempted mugging I’ve ever endured. A potentially fatal threat that never would have threatened me, if not for the smile-sabotaging smackdown I suffered at the hands of a certain depraved someone, so many years ago....

Crane shot. Glen hurries off the street into his guest house and the camera rises up above the rooftops to close on an ominous panorama of the night-time Manila skyline. Cue baritone-voiced announcer:

“So ends another chapter in a sordid tome of peril that would never have been written, had not Chris D broken Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984. Tune in again next time, when Glen is not remotely endangered, but is forced to overhear the virulent anti-Chinese tirade of a morbidly obese white woman….”

Traumatic exsanguination

The buttheadguy effect, part 3

I awoke to a burning sensation on my shoulder. It was a strange, crackling pain, the sort of pain one might feel if one’s shoulder were being sprayed with an impossibly fine mist of hot cooking oil.

With a start, I realized I had felt this pain before. I jumped up and turned on the light, revealing several rotund little insects on my bed, fleeing to the edges of the mattress.

I crushed one with my finger, staining the sheet with blood. My blood.

“Bedbugs!” I hissed, my countenance a twisted mask of hatred....

Freeze frame. Cue title sequence:

THE BUTTHEADGUY EFFECT

Peril and bloodshed that transpired in 2009 because Chris D broke Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984

PART 3: TRAUMATIC EXSANGUINATION

Action continues:

I despise bedbugs, and not for the usual reasons. Forget about their cowardly, nocturnal blood-sucking—bedbugs engage in some of the vilest and most repugnant sexual practices known on this planet.

First of all, bedbugs are so perverted, their females don’t use their genitals for sex. Instead, the males have spiny, hypodermic penises that actually pierce the exoskeletons of the females and inject semen directly into their abdomens. Biologists call this traumatic insemination—parenthetical quip about this also being the general scientific term for bad sex deleted—and bedbugs are the world’s most evolved practitioners of this abominable sex act.

And it gets crazier. Male bedbugs are also known to forcibly inject their semen into other male bedbugs, where it can mix with the semen of those males and be passed along to their subsequent mates. Ergo, in layman’s terms, so to speak, a male bedbug’s offspring are not necessarily his biological children; they could instead be the biological children of the dude who fucked him.

Sorry, bedbugs, but I think you little bastards are crossing the line. And I’m more open-minded than most. As a practicing bisexual, I’m well familiar with the business of penetrating both females and males. In fact, it’s kind of my thing. But, like the vast majority of bi folk, I work exclusively with pre-existing orifices. I certainly don’t go whimsically creating and fucking new holes like some kind of amphetamine-crazed Abu Ghraib Prison guard with a bayonet.

And just when you think bedbugs couldn’t debase themselves any further, they find a way. For male bedbugs have even been observed traumatically inseminating other species. That’s right, a bedbug is the sort of insect who can come face-to-face with a critter not of its own kind, and think to itself, “Well, screw you.” And mean it.

Now, I happen to know that I have very fuckable skin. So as I examined my savagely bitten shoulder, I felt obliged to entertain the disturbing notion that some fucking bedbug had, in fact, just ejaculated into me. I could just imagine the conversation my shoulder was having with my immune system at that moment:

“Immunocontrol, this is Dermal Security, and uh, this is gonna sound crazy but it looks like we got, uh, bedbug semen comin’ through the epidermis of the left shoulder. Over.”

“Uh Dermal, not sure if I copy, could you please repeat? Did you say bedbug semen?”

“That’s an affirmative, over.”

“Uh, so what you’re tryin’ to say is we got bedbugs rapin’ our shoulder right now?”

“We dunno what we’re sayin’, but we got a confirmed hit on bedbug semen off our 20. We need plasma cover up here ASAP!”

Now, before all you entomologists out there start sending me letters about how unlikely it is that my shoulder was in fact traumatically inseminated by bedbugs, I’d like to clarify that I’m not claiming that most of them shagged me. In fact, I’m sure the vast majority didn’t. I’m thinking of the perhaps one in twenty that gets a bit randy when he’s drinking blood. You know the type.

Anyway, I disgruntledly texted the owner of the guesthouse, who rushed to my room within minutes. He instructed me to switch to a different room and put all my belongings—including the clothes I was wearing—in sealed plastic bags for washing. The mattress would be immediately destroyed, and the next morning, every inch of the room would be treated with the foulest pesticides available. He said the bugs had probably arrived in the backpacks of a sickly Finnish couple that slept in the room a week before, so hopefully I’d detected the infestation before it spread to other rooms.

Unfortunately for the bedbugs, you see, I am one of the minority who wake up when they are biting—most feel nothing until the bites start itching hours later. If those pervy little vampires had only left me alone, who knows how many Manila tourists on which they’d have successfully dined, and how far they’d have spread before they were noticed.

But alas, they’d bitten the wrong man that night, and as a result they would die swift and horrible deaths, with my freshly-sucked, life-giving blood still digesting inside them. A grimly satisfying thought, indeed.

And that was precisely the grimly satisfying thought I was thinking as I walked out the door—backpack quarantined and stripped down to my underwear—and looked one last time at my former mattress, that doomed hive of amoral, pansexual, blood-drinking, body-piercing bedbuggery that would have lived to feast another day, if not for the tooth-terminating transgression of a certain small-town bully, so many years ago....

Glen exits the room and the camera zooms into a seam in the mattress to reveal an ominous, writhing mass of blood-engorged bedbugs indulging in a hideous orgy of depraved sexual violence. Then they all suddenly die in such horrible agony that you almost feel sorry for them. Cue baritone-voiced announcer:

“So ends another chapter in a sordid tome of misery that would never have been written, had not Chris D broken Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984. Tune in again next week, when it will be Glen who is threatened with extermination….”

A scene for fleeing

The buttheadguy effect, part 2

When the motorcycle struck my taxi at high speed, shattering the driver-side window and shearing off the side mirror, I initially didn’t know what was happening. All I knew was there was a terrible thud and I was suddenly being showered with broken glass.

Then I saw the black-clad motorcyclist tumbling in the street, his unmanned bike scraping to a halt on its side.

A strange, quiet stillness descended. The rider lay motionless, sprawled face-down on the asphalt next to his bike.

My driver glowered at me, as if all this were my fault. I shakily paid my fare—50 Philippine pesos, about $1.35 Canadian—and got out of the cab.

The rider was still unconscious, a pool of dark red blood forming around his head. Fortunately he was wearing a helmet, but from the looks of it, his face had been smashed in. A crowd of onlookers milled about with worried looks on their faces, doing nothing to help the injured man.

Still numbed by the shock of the crash, I blinked, and blinked again, and realized there was a particle of glass in my right eye.

And I thought seriously about getting the hell out of there.

Freeze frame. Cue title sequence:

THE BUTTHEADGUY EFFECT
Peril and bloodshed that transpired in 2009 because Chris D broke Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984
PART 2: A SCENE FOR FLEEING

Action continues:

Now, if I had been in Canada, the idea of fleeing the scene would never have crossed my mind. In fact, I’d have been happy to give a statement to the inevitable police officer and get checked out by the inevitable paramedic. And someone’s insurance would have paid for any treatment to my eye.

But I was in Manila, and things are different there. Cops are notoriously corrupt. An ambulance might never come. And the only person at the scene with any kind of insurance was probably me.

When I was backpacking in nearby Thailand, an expat told me that if I, a white-skinned farang, were even peripherally involved in a car accident—such as being a passenger in a vehicle that got hit by another vehicle, or being a mere bystander who simply witnessed the accident—I should flee the scene immediately. If I didn’t, my relative wealth would all but guarantee that I’d be shaken down for bribes by the injured parties, the police, and anyone else who could make my life difficult.

Given that the Philippines is at least as poor and corrupt as Thailand, I had good reason to suspect that things could turn out just as badly if I didn’t put some distance between myself and this bloody situation. But since I didn’t know for sure, I texted a Filipino friend...

Motorbike hit my cab. Cab damaged, rider injured and unconscious. Should I run away now?

…and waited anxiously for a response that would never come, as my friend was asleep at the time. And so I stood there in the bright morning sun, my irritated eye reflexively blinking, my instincts screaming at me to run.

Three or four minutes had passed since the crash, and still nobody was helping the injured motorcyclist. People milled, and it was clear that a good percentage of their staring and murmuring was about me. My anxiety was off the scale.

Then the cyclist woke up, and only then did the bystanders move in to help him. They got him up on his feet—he definitely had a broken arm and shoulder—bundled him into a jeepney and drove off, another man following on the damaged bike.

A moment later, the cab driver jumped into his car and took off. There had been no communication of any kind between the cabbie and the motorcyclist. I guess there wasn’t any point. Without a word, or even eye contact, these two hapless fellows simply cut their losses and went their separate ways.

Well, I certainly had an answer to the fleeing question now. At this point, I was the only one who hadn’t fled. Clearly, fleeing was the enlightened thing to do. So I turned to flee...

...and realized that I really couldn’t. Because, as luck would have it, the collision had occurred at the end of my cab ride, just seconds from the office of the dentist I was going to see. An office that afforded me no cover, as the dentist was late for work and the place was still shuttered.

Alas, fleeing the scene of the accident would necessarily mean fleeing my destination as well. Fuck. And so I reluctantly put my fleeing on hold, instead opting to stand around outside the dentist’s office like an extremely conspicuous white tourist who’d just been involved in a nasty road accident only a few metres away, and hope the damn dentist would show up and get me out of sight before the wrong people arrived.

Then, right on cue, a police car approached. Shit.

Slowly, deliberately, the cops rolled by the lingering bystanders, the blood, and the broken glass, and... didn’t stop.

The car had just disappeared from view when the dentist pulled up on his motorcycle and opened his office, allowing me to finally—and at this point, extremely undramatically—flee the scene of the only road accident I’ve ever been involved in. A gruesome spectacle that would never have occurred if not for the dentally detrimental misdeeds of a certain depraved someone, so many years ago....

Crane shot. Glen disappears into the dentist’s office and the camera rises up above the rooftops to close on an ominous panorama of the smoggy Manila skyline. Cue baritone-voiced announcer:

"So ends another chapter in a sordid tome of human misery that would never have been written, had not Chris D broken Glen Callender’s front tooth in 1984. Tune in again next week, when it will be Glen’s turn to bleed...."

The Krazy Glue diaries

The buttheadguy effect, part 1

Chris D probably hasn’t thought of me in years. And why would he? We haven’t laid eyes on each other since 1991, when we graduated from high school.

I, on the other hand, think of Chris all the time. Because he was the preadolescent nincompoop who broke my front tooth in 1984, when I was ten years old. Every time I look at my false front tooth—which, through its many incarnations over the years, has never looked quite right—I am unfondly reminded of Chris D and his dastardly deed.

And I certainly couldn’t help but think dark thoughts of Chris on the morning of April 21 2009, as I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, a false tooth in one hand and a tube of Krazy Glue in the other, preparing to do something that most people would call “really, really dumb.”

* * *

The Day of the Krazy Glue was a long time coming—25 years, in fact. For a quarter century after my tooth was broken, a series of artificial teeth (crowns) had been cemented atop the remnant of the original, broken tooth. Every few years the crown needed to be re-cemented or replaced, but the broken tooth beneath stayed pretty much the same.

Then, last December, the broken tooth suddenly caved in, so a new method of anchoring the crown had to be devised. My best option was to have the broken tooth pulled and replaced with a dental implant—a 13-millimetre titanium post that would be inserted into the root canal and screwed into my skull.

It sounds painful—and it was—but the pain was mostly monetary. You see, I am a proudly self-unemployed freelance writer, a glamorous occupation famed for its lack of a dental plan, not to mention a lack of money in general. So when my dentist told me the implant would cost $5100, my response was to immediately book a flight to the Philippines, where I could have the same work done for $1600.

And so I jetted off to Manila and had my implant implanted. Now I must wait six months for the titanium to integrate with the bone so it can support a new crown. During this period, I have a temporary false tooth—a bridge—which is cemented to the teeth on either side.

Or rather, was cemented until it recently came loose, less than a third of the way into its six-month tour of duty.

Which brings us back to the Day of the Krazy Glue.

* * *

There I was in my bathroom, practicing the motions of squeezing a tiny drop of glue on each side of the bridge and then pressing the bridge into place. Rehearsal was essential, because I would only get one shot at this. Krazy Glue sets in as few as five seconds, so I had to be fast.

And careful. If I dropped the bridge, it would instantly bond with my bathroom counter and I’d be screwed. And if I accidentally glued the bridge to my teeth out of position, I’d be screwed.

In fact, even if I did everything right, maybe I’d be screwed anyway. It was hard to ignore the warning on the tube: “If swallowed, call a poison control centre or doctor immediately.” I didn’t like the sound of that word. Poison.

God damn it, I really didn’t want to be Krazy Gluing things to my teeth like some kind of depraved wino. But my finances had been drained by my trip to the Philippines, and the dentist said a proper re-glue would cost $100-$200—significantly more than the $1.00-$2.00 I was prepared to spend.

So I marched into a drug store and found a single-use tube of Krazy Glue. It was $1.25—right on budget. I weighed my options, and my wallet, and then made a decision that would forever cement my reputation as a risk-taker.

Squeeze, squeeze, position the bridge, and… press!

Nailed it! The bridge landed exactly in position and held fast. So far, so good. To keep the bridge dry and allow the glue to set as well as possible before exposing it to my saliva, I didn’t close my mouth for about 40 minutes.

When I finally closed my mouth, I immediately became aware of a foul chemical taste. And a suddenly sore throat. Which lasted for two days. After that, everything returned to normal. As far as I know.

It’s been 13 days since the Day of the Krazy Glue, and I think I got away with it. But alas, this gluey peril is merely the latest in a series of perils that I have recently faced as a direct consequence of my face’s fateful collision with my Grade 5 desktop. Indeed, my recent dental misadventure in the Philippines was a time of great peril—peril that could never have perilized me if my tooth had never been broken.

We’ve all heard of “the butterfly effect”—the idea that a single, seemingly trivial action can have massive, unforeseeable consequences, sometimes far in the future. This principle certainly applies here, because as you shall see, the breaking of my front tooth in 1984 caused events 25 years later, on the other side of the world, that young Chris D could never have imagined. Very, very bad events.

However, I want to avoid the term “butterfly effect” here, because Chris D was definitely no butterfly. So I’ve coined a new term which focuses specifically on the massive, unforeseeable consequences of a single, seemingly trivial act of male stupidity. Dear reader, come with me to the Philippines, and explore the dark ramifications of what I call… the buttheadguy effect.

Next week: I am covered in broken glass and a young man is face-down on the asphalt in a pool of blood. Where am I? Outside a Manila dentist’s office. If you miss the gory second part of “The buttheadguy effect,” who knows what the consequences will be....