If you have known me for a long time, you know, as well, that I used to have a fake tooth that was attached to a retainer. I lost that tooth when I was 17 years old while still living in Finland. The life in Finland wasn't always the easiest and I, among other friends, had to make a living somehow. This is where Russia, and its vast opportunities entered the picture. In the early 80s there was a huge demand for pantyhose, gum, pens, lipstick, hats etc. You almost could name it, and there was a demand for it in Russia, or Soviet Union, as it was called in the 80s before the wall came down.
My friends and I got a brilliant idea that we could do some smuggling to earn some hard cash. We started acquiring all of those wanted items, and planned our first trip over the border. Some of the items were hard to hide, but some of them were little easier. The hats fit nicely into the big camera bag under the soft foam. Pens were sewn into the lining of the jackets etc. The only hard items to hide were the pantyhose. So, we bought a bunch of small balloons, and stuffed the pantyhose into the balloons. Then we swallowed the balloons.
We crossed the border without an incident, and proceeded to our hotel in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). When we stepped out of the elevator in our hotel, each floor had a female attendant sitting on a stool at the middle of the hallway. This attendant opened the hotel room for us, and also entered the room and immediately started asking for items such as pantyhose, lipstick etc. We were always warned that some of these attendants might be working for the KGB, so we had to be very careful.
As the custom was, we started selling our items in the hotel room by bringing buyers in. This was done by word of mouth, only. Money started coming in, and the product flew out the door. Pantyhose was in high demand among the ladies, so they had to wait a little longer for them to "work" through our system. A couple of days later, we had pantyhose available.
As our luck would be, we were dumb first timers. One of the floor attendants reported us to the KGB, and we were taken in to the headquarters to be interrogated. We were separated into individual cells, and then taken in to be questioned by a cruel bunch of ugly men. All they wanted to know who the mastermind in Finland was for this smuggling operation. I couldn't give any names because, frankly, it was our stupid idea to do this in the first place. All I could say was that it was just us working alone.
Then the torture began.
I don't know if I was the first one to lose a tooth, and why they chose that particular tooth, I will never know, but we all lost some body parts. A friend of mine, lost his nails from his left hand. After a crueling couple of hours and a lot of blood and tears, we were let go. Just dumped on the street outside the headquarters. We all were in extreme pain, and were hardly able to get back to the hotel and then to the border. But we survived to swear that we would never do anything like that again.
And that is what I used to tell people how I lost my tooth.
It is a better story than the actual story that my permanent tooth never came in, and the dentist had to remove one of the teeth so the permanent tooth can be pulled in.
