Yuckmouth

My teeth were a pediatric dentist's nightmare. My bottom jaw was too narrow to accomodate them all, so one of my bottom teeth had no room and was growing directly behind the others, and they were a crooked mess. Up top, I had an extra set of vampire incisors and a huge gap between the front two. So before I got my braces when I was 11, I had three extractions.

I will never forget getting those braces put in. My braces were all metal, all wraparound and were applied to my teeth with a barely neolithic instrument that worked with a trigger-like thing on the side that the technician would pull back and release, causing a metal drill to deploy force down. The technician's hand slipped once, slicing a two-inch gash into my upper gums. Blood gushed, and she and I both started crying. I was sent home to heal for a week before the rest of the braces could be applied.

So I really was a metal mouth for three and a half years during the most awkward period of any girl's life. It was so embarrassing, especially my freshman year in high school, when everything is already embarrassing. I did my best to speak with my lips as close together as possible to hide the nearly always-filled-with food unironic grille I was sporting.

Those trips to the orthodontist to have them tightened are probably the worst memories of my childhood. I knew going in each time that I would be miserable and hungry for three days after. And no matter how much I complained about the wires digging into the insides of my upper cheeks, they’d always tell me to use wax and rinse with saltwater. I have deep scars to this day from the ulcers those wires caused.

I got the braces off before my sophomore year. My teeth were straight, but I still had a horrible overbite -- if I bit down on my back teeth, I could touch the roof of my mouth with my finger -- but my orthodontist had taught me to just hold it forward so that my front teeth met.

As a result, I developed chronic TMJ. My jaw popped and locked up constantly. I had a headache and sore neck for the next five years, until my mom made me an appointment with a plastic surgeon to assess my weak chin. He told us to make an appointment with an oral surgeon as soon as possible.

We made the appointment, and the surgeon recommended TMJ surgery. Unfortunately, before he could do anything, my upper palate would have to be stretched and my teeth realigned. Orthodontically.

So the summer before my senior year in college, I got my second set of braces (from a new orthodontist). At least this time, they were the stick-on kind, clear on the top and metal on the bottom. As a bonus, I was equipped with a palatal separator: a big hunk of metal that attached to my back top molars and sat a few millimeters from the roof of my mouth. In the middle was a rectangular, expandable bar that I turned with a key each night. Each turn of that key forced my palate to expand, and each turn produced a shot of pain that I could hear and feel through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

The pain I could deal with. The speech impediment I could not. Try spreading your fingers across the distance of your back molars without touching the roof of your mouth and saying, “The inquisitive queen, in search of a clue, was quite curious as a calico cat.” All my hard c and q words were impossible to pronounce.

The worst thing I experienced as a result of my tongue not being able to touch the roof of my mouth and function properly came when I went to buy tickets to see my favorite band in the world for the very first time. It was the days before Ticketmaster got us all over the barrel and we could buy concert tickets from multiple vendors without a 30 percent markup for "convenience fees." I went to the guitar shop in Burlington and placed my order and was issued two tickets for Motley Crue. “Not the Hrew!,” I shrieked. “The Hure!!”

My surgeon and orthodontist were both in Wilmington, three hours from my college. I was never (and still am not) a morning person, but during my senior year, I arranged early morning Tuesday/Thursday classes so I could be on the road by noon in my sad orange car with plastic seats and no air conditioning to be there for 3 p.m. appointments and be back at my apartment by 7 p.m.

I’d finished with the palatal separator, so I was able to give my oral reports with a little more confidence. I did make a big point to grin wide when I had my first legal to buy license picture taken. I still bitched and moaned about having my ID constantly scrutinized when I was buying beer or going to bars. (I wish I could go back and slap 21-year-old me.)

Still had braces when I moved to Raleigh and got my first crappy job. My employers, who paid me a whopping $5 an hour to write biographies, were gracious enough to let me come in at 11:30 on the days leading up to the surgery when I had to go see my doctors in Wilmington, as long as I stayed late to make up my hours. I’d leave Raleigh at 6 a.m. for my 8:30 a.m. appointments and come dashing back.

One time in particular, I came tearing into the parking lot at work and saw black-clad, rifle-bearing swat team members racing across the street. I found the door to the office locked and was reaching for my key when a co-worker opened it and jerked me inside. A wanted murderer was holed up in the motel across the street.

In October, I went in for my pre-op consultation with my surgeon. He told me he hadn’t yet decided whether he would wire my jaws shut after surgery. If I were wired, he explained, I’d have to keep a pair of wire-cutters on me at all times in case I threw up, so I could hack through the wires and prevent a premature rock-star choking-on-vomit death. He also told me to go hog wild and gain 20 pounds, as I would lose that much during recovery and was already very slender. (Again, I would love to go back and slap 22-year-old me.)

My surgery took place over Christmas break that year. I took two weeks off without pay. The surgery involved making diagonal breaks in my lower jaw to slide it forward and secure it with bolts. My chin was to be sawed off across, lifted up and bolted back on. As a bonus, since I was already to be under anesthesia, my surgeon would scrape the cartilage that formed the little parakeet beak that was my nose and reattach it to the tip, giving me a dainty turned-up nose.

I took the single Valium I was prescribed at 4:30 a.m. and my mama drove me from Shallotte to New Hanover Memorial in Wilmington. I changed into a hospital gown and was wheeled to anesthesia. The nice practitioner put the mask over my face and told me to think about the beach. “I don’t really like the beach,” I thought. “I’d rather….”

My next thought was that I really needed to throw up, but I panicked because I didn’t know if my jaws were wired shut. I’m told I sat straight up and spewed projectile blood that had been dripping down into my stomach from my tubes in a 90 degree right-to-left projectory, then passed back out in my recovery-room bed.

My mama was there with me a few hours later when I woke up. She told me I didn’t really need the mirror I was requesting and squirted water into my parched mouth. Unfortunately, I had no feeling in my bottom lip, and the repeated water squirts dribbled down my chin, causing a horrible rash.

Tonya, my best friend, came to see me the next day. My mama left the room and Tonya started crying. I hadn’t had access to a mirror yet.

After two days in the hospital bed, I was allowed to get up and go to the bathroom on my own and saw the horror first hand. Both my eyes were blackened, my face was swollen to "Mask"-like proportions (Lord forgive me for making that comparison), my lips chapped and bleeding, and my chin was raw and blistered.

The following day, I was released. My mama had bought me one of those early 90’s shiny nylon windsuits. I normally would have rejected that outfit outright, but I didn’t have to pull it over my comically huge head. So I sported it with my Doc Martens.

I spent Christmas in bed in Shallotte with my mama’s overweight ginger cat. The television in the room wasn’t hooked up to cable, and it didn’t have a remote, so I watched a lot of local programming and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

All I could think about was how filthy my hair was, so against doctor's orders I took a bath. I laid back in about four inches of water and worked shampoo into my hair. But my head was so huge and heavy I couldn't sit up. Not wanting my mother to see me naked, though she gave birth to me and had overseen my catheter a few days earlier, I just laid there as the water got cold. After a while, I was able to perform a great act of gymnastics and rearranged my body 180 degrees so that my head was under the faucet and I could rinse out the shampoo. I reached up and turned off the water. My hair was nearly dry and my body temperature was probably falling dangerously low before I was able to hoist myself up and out of the tub. That was probably the first time in my life I was grateful that nobody was paying attention to me.

Two days after Christmas, my mama took me to my follow-up appointment with the surgeon and he gave me the all-clear to go back to Raleigh. Before she drove me back, mama took me to the GNC at Independence Mall to get my quick-weight-gain powder and supplements. Mama was still using a cane from getting hit head-on a few years earlier and I had a big pumpkin head and two black eyes. A woman in the mall approached me, put her hand sympathetically on my arm, and asked what happened to us. “Cosmetic surgery,” I replied.

Rexy was ready and waiting with lots of high-calorie blender recipes to supplement my regimen of Ensure and baby food. One afternoon, he came home with a big Bojangle’s bag and I whimpered. He put some chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy in the food processor and gave me the dinner for which I will always be most grateful. Rexy did such a good job with the high-calorie food that he gained 20 pounds as I lost 20 pounds.

In the meantime, I resumed my life with two black eyes and a huge, swollen, chapped face. Tonya and I had a blast going to the store and making up stories to tell the nosy strangers who asked what was wrong with me. “Stepped on a rake.” “Jail beating.” “Alien abduction.”

When I drove down to Wilmington for my follow-up appointment two weeks later, my surgeon decided I wasn’t taking my soft-food diet seriously enough and wired my jaws shut. I drove straight to work and a co-worker asked me how I was doing. I shrugged and smiled. “If you don’t feel like talking, just say so,” she said snottily. So I scribbled an apologetic note and asked her to tell everybody else (this occurred in the days before interoffice e-mail).

I was only wired shut for a week, but OMG, it was the longest week of my life. I couldn’t say a word. If you know me personally, you can immediately grasp the difficulty that week presented me. I couldn’t smoke, so I had Rex exhale his second-hand smoke directly into my face. Rexy changed the answering machine to let callers know I couldn’t speak. I walked around with a notepad, and on a trip to the mall I ran into a high-school classmate and had to write him notes. (Saw him again at the 20-year reunion and we laughed about that.)

Got unwired, stuck to my soft-food diet and completed my follow-ups for the next few weeks. Had the wire stitches pulled out of my nostrils and will always use that as a benchmark for pain.

The following summer, when I was 23, I was back to normal and had my braces removed and a permanent retainer was placed on my bottom teeth. I popped it out and had it replaced twice before I gave up.

Two years later, I had a painful bulge along my bottom jaw. I figured it was a wisdom tooth coming through and made an appointment with my oral surgeon. He did an x-ray, then removed the bolt that had worked its way out. My sister Jill found this hilarious and reminded me over and over that I’d had a screw loose in my head.

It’s now 16 years since my surgery. I’m pain-free in my neck and head, I have a bit of a chin to speak of, my teeth fit together and I like my nose. Unfortunately, my bottom front teeth moved right back into their chaotic, crooked mess. More power to them, I say. I’m not touching them again. I think they have character. And I married an Englishman.

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Living up to the spaz writer stereotype

My gmail hasn't been working well lately and friends haven't gotten my e-mails. I sent my final-round News and Observer entry from gmail last Thursday when it was due, and I haven't heard back either way and am freaked out that it might not have gone through.

So tonight, I Googled Southern nonfiction calls for entry and came upon one for an anthology. I followed the rules closely, submitting "Genius Is in the Eye of the Beholder" in the required font and size, along with my personal contact info.

The call for entry required a 50-word bio, so I wrote:

Leigh Ann Frink is a writer living in Raleigh. She grew up in a small town on the N.C. coast and studied at Elon College and the University of London. She married an Englishman who has learned to appreciate collards. They have a cat named Eudora. She blogs at thatgirlfromshallotte.blogspot.com.

I felt pretty good about myself. Then I went back and reread the call for entry rules. The deadline was March 1, 2007.

So I feel suitably silly in my stress-induced mania. But at least I have a 50-word byline I feel pretty good about.

Girls who like boys who like boys

(from left: Greg, Rex, LA, Jason)

I love gay men. They make the best friends for straight girls. They can get right up next to your heart without the stress of intimate straight male/female relationships or the passive/aggressive nonsense girls give each other.

Plus, they'll listen to your stories, agree that your girlfriends are bitches and men are asses, they'll tell you when your outfit looks stupid, and they can lift heavy objects for you.

The intimacy of straight women and gay men is a story as long as time. Fancy ladies always had companions their rich husbands could trust to escort them to events. My mother had a friend who loved taking her out to fabulous events and having her on his arm because she was so pretty. He was a pageant judge. Enough said.

My next-door neighbor, Michael, was a year older than me and heart-breakingly beautiful. His family moved in when I was 11 and he was 12. We were just like peas and carrots from the get-go. We started out playing hide and seek. Before we knew it, we were making up elaborate dance routines (including dramatic lifts) a la the Solid Gold dancers. In 1983, though he was a Carolina fan, he watched the NCAA Championship game with me and hugged me tight when my Wolfpack won! During my Duran-Duran crazed Freshman year, Michael would come over at 11 p.m. to stay up all night watching "Friday Night Videos" with me, as our hometown didn't yet have MTV.

He was my friend, but he was my mother's pet. He spent hours at our house talking to my mother. Michael was a football hero in high school and a top scholar. But he never had a girlfriend. On prom night, when he was a junior and I was a sophomore, we both had "dates" we didn't care for, but we posed together in my parents' living room in our finery, and for years after, I showed friends the picture of the two of us and said he was my date, because he was so much cuter than my real date.

Just after college, my best friend Tonya and I were total club girls. We loved early-90s techno and were more interested in dancing than being hit on, so we started going to gay bars in Myrtle Beach (where she lived) and Raleigh (where I lived). We were at Offshore Drilling in Myrtle Beach one night and ran into Michael for the first time in five years. He swept me up into his arms and spun me around. With no conversation at all, we had a mutual love and acceptance moment. Then we ran off to dance to Utah Saints.

I didn't see Michael again for three years. The next time we met, I was standing in the bathroom at my parents' house putting on makeup before my sister's funeral in 1994. He walked right in and put his arms around me. We stood there for a good minute, crying and not saying anything. That was the last time I saw him. I've heard he lives in Atlanta.*

At the time of that very bad thing, I was living with Rexy. I'd sped home three hours away with no clothes and had to call Rex the next day to please bring me some. He not only packed me a bag of clothes and girlie underwear, he packed himself a bag and stayed for the funeral. After that happened, he welcomed my sister Jill, my best friend and my boyfriend into our flop apartment and never complained.

Fast forward a few years, I was living in the house I bought with my by-then ex-boyfriend and was working retail. I couldn't pay the mortgage by myself and needed a roommate badly. A friend recommended one of his friends, a straight guy. He moved in and we immediately clashed. His girlfriend freaked my cat out and made him throw up. We rarely spoke and I was relieved when he moved out after six months.

But I found myself without a roommate and source of income, so I put the feelers out among my friends again. Enter Jason (J$). J$ and I didn't know each other at all when he moved in. He was a chef (voted #1 in the Triangle in the Spectator while he lived with me) and worked completely different hours from me. I'd come home from work at five and he and his crazy boyfriend would have already got the party started.

My favorite J$ story was when he and his boyfriend took me to Flex, a leather bar, on a Sunday afternoon around Thanksgiving. I was the only girl in the place, which didn't bother me a bit. After a while, a group of bears and leather daddies started setting up a table and bringing out covered dishes a la a family reunion. It was beautiful, me and the fellas having Thanksgiving together, and none of them treated me as anything less than a member of the family.

Jason moved out after 18 months and I was in a position where I could pay the mortgage by myself. I was working at the agency then. I went to a going-away luncheon for a co-worker about a year later and sat next to a designer named Greg. He told the group he'd bought a condo that was under construction and was planning to move back in with his mother until it was finished.

"Don't go home, move in with me!," I blurted out.

So he did. Greg and I barely knew each other, but on the night he moved in, I invited him to a Christmas party at Rex and Ray's, and he went along and a beautiful group friendship was born.

That was on a Saturday, and the following Friday night, as we were both single, we decided to spend the evening together, getting to know each other. We'd established we both loved 80's music trivia, so we bought "Songburst" on e-Bay and settled in to play. "I want to play you a song," Greg said, putting a remix of a Cher song on the stereo. I stood there listening for about a minute before I blurted out, "This is killing my buzz."

For the next eight months, we played Songburst, listened to 80's compilations we could both agree on, cuddled up under a blanket on the couch to watch movies, shared the occasional smooch, and took care of each other. Though I hadn't intended on having a roommate again, I was sad when my Greggy moved out.

I spent the next few years on my own at home, though I had regular play-dates and vacations with my boys. Rex, Greg, four other friends and I were in a beach house for a week (a tradition that's on its sixth year now). I needed something from one of them and said, "Hey Angel?" Greg and Rex both responded "Yes?" in unison. Then we all gasped. I felt like I'd been caught cheating.

Rex and I went shopping and had fabulous dinners and parties at his house. Ray and I spent hours swapping Southern stories. J$ and I got in lots of trouble. Greggy and I cuddled up and played games regularly. Robby was my number one state fair ride buddy, Will Ferrell movie and concert date.

The time came, though, when I realized I needed to find a straight boy companion, as I wasn't getting any younger. I can't remember how I stated it in my match.com profile, but I pretty much said, "If you're scared gay boys are going to hit on you, don't contact me."

I met and married Steve, who became best buds with all my best buds. And if I'm a queen bee, he's a lesbro. At least three of our girlfriends call him their fake husband.

-----------------------------------

*(UPDATE 8/1: Michael found me! He's in Atlanta and is happy, safe, warm and loved by a wonderful man. Check out this pic he sent me: it's the two of us at the NC State Fair in 1982.)

Ray-Ray's pearls of wisdom

My friend Ray told me tonight: "If you want to never be criticized, haul off and do nothing."

No story needed. Perfect advice.

Thanks, darlin'!!

Welcome home

I blew off my 10-year high school class reunion. Didn’t regret it until my mama sent me the write-up, complete with a picture, from our hometown weekly. I took it over to show my best friend from home who was living on Morgan Street. Her roommate saw it and asked, “Who are all the old people?”

Tonya and I were still single and living it up. “We should have gone!” I told her, “We still look good!”

Ten years later, I got an e-mail from our class valedictorian with plans for 20th reunion festivities. Classmates were invited to tailgate at Friday night’s homecoming game, and Saturday night's main activity was a catered dinner (no mention of alcohol) at a golf club, described as an event for classmates and spouses, with a footnote saying, "We realize child-care problems may arise. Please advise if you need to bring your children."

I wrote this to my two girlfriends from school:

"Is there a tasteful way to ask for the number of ‘bringing children’ responses before replying to attend the dinner event on Saturday?”

After a good deal of debate, my friend April and I decided to go. We had, after all, grown up in a small town where everyone had gone to school together from kindergarten through graduation.

I sent in a check the month before, and the reality set in. There was no way I could lose 20 marriage pounds. What if I ran into the boy I’d been crushed out on since third grade, after my mother ran into him five years ago and he asked how I was doing, and she told him I'd been in love with him all those years?

On the three-hour drive down, I was a nervous wreck. When we blew into town, we stopped at my favorite Scotchman convenience store to stock up on adult beverages.

We got up to the counter and I gave the clerk my card. As I waited for it to go through, I admired an impulse-purchase rack of Halloween novelties. I picked up a severed ear and realized upon touching it that it was made of that slimy, floppy, rubbery stuff little kids like to play with. I screamed, "OH MY GOD, IT'S GROSS!"

Beside it was a severed tongue. I picked it up and spun around to Steve and said, "Look, I'm Gene Simmons!" It was then that I saw the five people lined up behind us and became embarrassed. I turned too quickly to put the tongue back on the rack and in the process knocked a bunch of things off it and onto the floor. I ducked down to pick them up and put them back and even more stuff fell off. I shrieked, "It's getting worse!"

At that point, Steve announced to those waiting behind us, "I'm sorry about my wife." Then he crouched down and told me to sign the receipt while he picked everything up and put it back.

April met up with us at my parents’ house. They were out of town, leaving us alone there for the first time ever. She was even more freaked out than I was, and we were talking a million miles an hour, fussing over our appearances and pacing the carport (no smoking in the house). “We’re really doing this,” we assured each other as we had our personality drinks.

We really did it. And we really loved it. We spent two hours hugging people we hadn’t seen in 20 years, shrieking in surprise and lying, “You look just like you did in high school!”

Even my darling husband, who comes from a land without proms, yearbooks or reunions enjoyed himself. It was a sociological experience for him, observing me slip effortlessly back into my native accent of flattened-out vowels and unenunciated diphthongs. Plus, he got to feel like a rock star when classmate after classmate told him how much they loved his English accent.

I’m so glad I went, and I was a little sad leaving the next day. We stopped at the Scotchman to gas up the car. The same clerk was working. The novelty rack had been moved.

Careers: Where dreams go to die

We totally didn't have time to do it, what with all the jobs and meetings flying around, but feedings are an unfortunate biological need, so my friend and I dashed across the street to Chick-Fil-A at noon today.

"I can't believe I wanted to be a writer when I grew up," I told her as we waited to cross.

"I wish I could go back to college," she replied, "just so I could tell the graphic design majors that their careers would be spent mostly making changes."

"I'd tell the writing majors to just give the clients what they want. It's just not worth the fight," I sighed. "I sometimes wish I could just go work in a store."

So we started fantasizing about the perfect jobs for us if we could make the same salary we now make.

We decided we'd work at Trader Joe's. She would be the wine specialist and I'd be the sample lady. That way, we could work within chatting distance and hook each other up all day. And we'd never have to worry about what to wear to work, as we'd have our sassy Trader Joe's Hawaiian shirts to wear with jeans.

On the downside, we realized, we'd probably have to undergo quite a bit of team-building, which we both hate. "I could deal with that," I told her, "as long as I could work the cash register, ringing the bell and shouting 'We've got a landlubber!' from time to time."

If I could shout several times a day, I think I'd be a very happy Leigh Ann.

No place like home

I grew up in a happy, safe, little town on the coast. Most locals subscribed to the Wilmington Morning Star or the Myrtle Beach Sun Times newspapers for daily and AP news. There wasn't a whole lot of major news out of Shallotte, and when there was -- like a bank robbery or the busting of a corrupt town official -- it was picked up by one or both of those dailies.

For real Shallotte news, we read the Brunswick Beacon, our hometown weekly. The Beacon reported on everything from the occasional truck break-in to the high school's sports to the activities of the Long Bay Garden Club. It ran the weekly television schedule, school lunch menus and tidal predictions for the fishermen and surfers.

When I did really well on the SAT in the seventh grade as part of the Duke University Talent Identification Program, I was featured in the Beacon. Wish I had a copy of it. I had waist-length, bone-straight, North American field mouse-colored hair and a mouth full of metal. I was quoted as saying I enjoyed reading, writing, drawing and sewing (I was taking classes for the last two and was really bad at both, but my mother was in the interview and coaching me).

My mother always sent me the Beacon when I was in college and the first five years after, when I was a struggling editor here in Raleigh. I loved reading the wedding/birth announcements and court docket to keep up with the people I knew. But by the time I was 24, it seemed like my former classmates who stayed back home had peaked out, so I cancelled my subscription.

The Beacon went online last year, and I started reading it again, but I complained to my mama that the content was very limited. So she got me a subscription for Christmas. I try reading it once a week when it arrives in the mail, but I've been gone for 20 years and don't know any of the names in my former favorite sections, and half the obituaries start out with "born in (not Shallotte)," and that's just not something I want to know. I like thinking it was preserved in a time-capsule just for me.

I was flipping through the latest issue yesterday and saw an eighth-page item that warmed my heart so much I ran into our office to show my English husband.

"Giant collard," the caption read. The photo was a little old Shallotte native standing above her eight-foot collard plant. The copy read: "She said it isn't the first oversized collard plant she has cultivated. She said all she did was fertilize and tend to the plant."

So now I'm craving a good pot of collards -- not the fancified ones you can get at "new Southern" expensive restaurants in Raleigh -- the ones grandmas and great-aunts bring to family reunions back home. Collards washed and chopped a day in advance, then cooked down slowly with fatback and some sugar.

I'm also craving that safe, happy little world of my childhood.