things that puzzle me, part 1
I’ve been watching DVDs of The Wire, which might be the best TV show you’ve never seen, which if you haven’t seen you ought to fix like right now if you can. Anyway one thing is really confusing me: all the drug dealers have fantastic teeth. Gorgeous straight pearly white (but not “fake white”) beautiful little jewels in their mouths. I don’t get it. They’re all drug dealers and most of them, at least the lower-level ones, are pretty skanky-looking otherwise, but they’ve all got fantastic teeth.
Now I KNOW it’s a TV show and those aren’t real drug dealers and they’re actors and actors have good teeth (usually). But it would be easy to make them seem to have not-quite-so-good teeth, or at least give a few of them something to make you eternally grateful for your company’s shitty insurance plan. But no, they’ve all got stunning teeth that any Crest Toothpaste commercial would be proud to display.
A ha, you say, they’re drug dealers, which means they’re rolling in dough, and can afford to get their teeth capped, bleached, porcelained, veneered, braced, or otherwise cosmetic-fied, just like they do on Extreme Makeover. But noooo, not all of them are lighting cigarettes with hundred-dollar bills for fun. Some of them are living in burned-out tenements with no running water yet their teeth shine with the brightness of a new diamond. I can understand the high-level drug dealers having good teeth but not some of these corner boys. (I am also puzzled as to how the high-level guys, who are apparently raking in $50,000 or more per day, appear to be storing their money in random places like inside walls–which can be robbed–instead of finding a good Cayman Islands offshore.)
Which brings me to another thing, one of the “rules” these drug dealers follow is that nobody touches the product. They’re mainly selling heroin, and nobody NOBODY is supposed to be using it. To which I say: are you naïve or what? You’ve got all these people, kids really, who grew up in the projects where it seems (on the show) that everyone and their mother is shooting up day and night, and yet this group of people who are staring at it all day long never touch it? I find that hard to believe.
By the way, they do have one guy who is missing a tooth but he’s a mere user, not a dealer. And for a long-term hardcore heroin addict, he seems to be pretty well put-together.
Anyway this is the first of a few posts wherein I shall outline things that puzzle me. Why? Because I want to, that’s why. Next up: the proliferation of “secrets” that are going to be revealed within the pages of trashy magazines sold at the supermarket checkout counter. I even took pictures for that one. How can they be secrets when millions of people have just been told what they are? 