This one doesn’t have to do with a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It’s not even a song I particularly liked. But sometimes songs you don’t particularly like can be ruined, and can ruin you, too.

It was the summer of 1986, and like most kids under the age of 18, I was hooked on pop radio and MTV. Even though the first wave of VJs was gone, and you could smell the hints of hair metal just around the corner, I still sat glued to the TV watching videos by Dream Academy, Mike + the Mechanics, and Level 42. It didn’t matter if I didn’t like the song or if the video was awful. I’d sit through it anyway. The three months of summer vacation were an unending sea of video bliss, until one fateful afternoon.

I went to the dentist, like I always did, and got X-rays, like I always did. But the dentist didn’t say “No cavities again!” like he always did. He showed me the X-ray plates. For the first time ever (and since), I had cavities. Two of them. I had to make an appointment to come back and “get my fillings,” which I guess sounded nicer than “get my teeth drilled.” Since I had never had my teeth drilled I didn’t know what to expect. My brother, an old pro, said that it hurt a bit but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. As a kid who didn’t even like having his teeth polished, I didn’t know what to expect as I made my way back to the dentist’s office in the strip mall to have my teeth gouged out.

My dentist was a forward-looking man. He had taken the unheard-of-by-me step of having a radio Walkman in his office. So before we began he handed me the Walkman and suggested I pick a station and turn the volume up. That way I wouldn’t hear the drill. I put on the big spongy orange headphones and turned the dial to the pop station, which was in the middle of an ad break. As the dentist brought the drill closer to my mouth the ad break ended and the music came back.

Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.

That was all I needed to hear to indentify the song. It was “Love Touch,” the rather banal theme song from the rather banal movie Legal Eagles, as sung by the rather banal singer Rod Stewart. I never really liked the song, and had I been in the car, I might have switched stations to hear something cooler. But I was sprawled out in a chair, staring up at the ceiling, with a dentist about to drill a hole in my tooth. It wasn’t the time to scramble for the tuner knob. After all, I reasoned, the song wasn’t that bad. The drill began its way through my rotten tooth. I kept my eyes closed tight – my brother had told me not to look – but I could smell the drill doing its work, and deep behind Rod Stewart’s profession of love, I could hear the drill whirring away.

‘Cause I wanna be good to you
Didn’t mean to be bad
But darlin’ I’m still the best
That you ever had
Just give me a chance
To let me show you how much
I wanna give you my…

GRRRZZNT!

Apparently my dentist reached the cavity sooner than he had anticipated. The drill went through the cavity and into the raw nerve beneath. I nearly shoved my head through the padded headrest, trying to pull my head away from that drill bit. The dentist pulled one of my earpieces away and said he was sorry. Then he said he was going to start on the other cavity. I wanted to run screaming out into the strip mall parking lot, with my paper bib still attached, and hide out at the arcade inside the Pole Position. But no. The dentist needed to drill my other cavity. It took all my willpower, but I opened my mouth.

You know it don’t matter
Who’s right and who’s wrong
Think we’re gonna find out
If this love is strong
Just give me a chance
To win back your trust
Gonna give you my love touch

The second cavity was drilled without incident. I was tipped back far enough that my tears of pain ran down the sides of my head, never once getting in the way of the dentist’s work. By the time I sat up, rinsed out my mouth, and began the procedure of having metal paste spackled into my teeth, Rod Stewart had faded into oblivion. Phil Collins had begun warning some guy named Billy not to lose his number. I headed home, the spot in my gum still throbbing. I thought about all the brushing and flossing I would do so I would never have to endure the worst pain I had ever endured – again.

Two days later I was at my friend’s house and, of course, MTV was on. We weren’t really watching – we were discussing what we wanted to do hat night, or something. The next video began. Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh. My gums flared. My tooth hurt. My eyes watered. I reached over, grabbed the remote, and turned the TV off. The song had become ingrained not just into my memory but into my jaw, and hearing the song made my teeth ache. Over the next few days I learned to recognize the opening seconds of the video. When the baliff told everyone to “please rise,” I turned on something else. ANYTHING else.

Luckily for me and my teeth, even though Rod Stewart is still as omnipresent as ever, the song “Love Touch” hasn’t survived. No radio station plays it any more and I can’t recall the last time I saw any part of the video. Even the ’80s nostalgia craze wasn’t enough to get the song played. And yet I wait, knowing that sometime when I least expect it…

Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.