It must have been around 1975, before I had the motorbike, but I was already tearing around on two wheels like a complete liability. We were at my parents’ friends’ house—an Austrian couple who lived in a massive place clinging to the steep side of Son Vida.
They had three kids: two older girls who didn’t give me the time of day, and a boy, Edwin, who was roughly my age.
The grown-ups were inside, probably playing bridge or doing whatever it was they did to avoid paying attention to their kids. Edwin and I were outside, racing our bikes up and down the ridiculously steep road. I was, naturally, showing off.
At some point, a tennis ball came rolling down the hill.
Now, any normal person might have stopped it with a foot. Or just let it go. I decided to ride straight into it. Thought I’d slice through it perfectly with my front wheel. In my head it was going to look spectacular—quick thinking, brilliant coordination, all of that.
What actually happened was the ball jammed the front wheel instantly. I was thrown straight over the handlebars and landed hard. Everything hit the tarmac, but it was my front tooth that took the worst of it. Snapped clean off at the root.
It was agony. Not the kind you can walk off. But worse than the pain was the embarrassment—lying in the road in front of Edwin and his sisters, trying to act like it wasn’t a big deal while half my face was buzzing.
And it had to happen on a fiesta weekend, which meant everything was shut—including dentists. I spent the next three days lying around, watching black-and-white Spanish TV, drinking soup through a straw. It felt like the whole thing lasted forever.
By Tuesday, my parents found a Spanish dentist who could finally see me. He took one look and said, “The nerve must come out.” No crown, though—apparently I was still growing. So he left the stub and said we’d deal with it later.
So for a while, that’s how things were. Just me and my gap-toothed smile, hoping nobody would stare too long. I was probably about ten or eleven at the time.
Then, luckily, my dad met an English dentist on the golf course. He took one look at my mouth and said, “If you leave it like that, the other front tooth will shift to fill the gap.”
Next thing I knew, I was on a flight to London. They stuck in a lump of dental putty shaped vaguely like a tooth. It did the job, sort of. But it looked like what it was—an awkward stand-in, sitting next to its smug, untouched twin that somehow survived the crash completely intact.
So that was me, for the next few years. Off-kilter smile. Beige blob in place of a tooth. And one more reason to avoid tennis balls and steep hills.