 Want an e-mail when there's something new? Join the e-mail news list today! monkey times blog Little Shop of Horrors I get the point of the dentist but the reality of the dentist has tended to undermine my vision for it. I don't know if my disillusionment began with the Palestinian dentist who commanded me to "bite" down on a metal tool to have part of one of my teeth fly off. "Tap, tap!" he exclaimed, as if he hadn't just barked "bite" at me. Or perhaps it was the Minnesotan surgeon in this large, factory-like, dental surgery multiplex who, just before I was going under anesthesia, I heard tell the dental hygenist staff "Let's roll this one out. Oh, he's still awake? Sorry!" But today's dental experience definitely reached a new nadir.
1-800-DENTISTS wasn't doing it for me. The nearest surgery they had listed was 30 minutes away on the subway. It's the dentist. It has to be easier than that. Really, to convince most mortals to go there, one would expect a government education program that included limos, live music, and something that — as Ken, my friend from Kentucky would say — involved floating there on clouds of titties. Really. Maybe it could be extended later for cancer patients. I wasn't quite prepared to knock on the door underneath any of the ghetto dentist signs down a block or two, but there had to be someone nearby. Ah, Google! So I find a place, call, and ask for an appointment. "We're walk in," comes the receptionist's response. This should have been the first clue but I was so dazzled by the mere three blocks distance between my front door and theirs, that I set off. The surgery was in an apartment building. I was prepared to take that at face value. Entering the office, there was a certain charm about a dentist's office in a pre-war apartment building, with all the wooden trim and Victorian windows. It was a sign of my preoccupation with the inevitable that I didn't even register my thought, as I sat down in the waiting room, that I hope the surgery is cleaner. Maybe it was the guy in the white coat, standing up chewing orange wedges and dropping their peels on the table, while glued to daytime television, that started me on that train of thought. After filling out the inevitable forms giving the state the right to use my dental records as it sees fit in the ongoing fight against terrorism — maybe they could try throwing my teeth in the air and see if Bin Laden magically appears — I turned my attention to the television in the waiting room. Divorce Court is perhaps not the best stress reducer prior to a dental appointment, but the hysterical on-screen tagline for one of the plaintiffs, "THINKS ARMY TURNED HER HUSBAND INTO A WHITE MAN," somehow made it all okay. The husband, Brandon, was definitely black, but his white wife, Amy, was complaining that "the army had changed him" — meaning, and the following are things that she actually said in front of a national television audience — that he didn't wear baggy pants, act like a thug, or use slang any more. It was a tragic, car wreck of a television show. The dentist came out. While the staff and technicians were Latino and African American, this was a white guy. An old white guy. He greeted me, looked extremely disappointed when I said I was just in for a cleaning, and asked me to go through to the surgery and take a seat. It was at this point the hygene aspect raised its very ugly head again. There were piles of stuff everywhere. Dust, dirt, and...on the light mirror that hangs above the chair, splatter stains from tools at work in previously gaping mouths. But at least, my denial noted, as it shifted into highway-ready fifth gear, at least it did have little plastic bags tied round the handles on the mirror light! Their colorful, cheery presence in the midst of the filth mocked the very notion of hygene. C-Town, the name of a local supermarket, was written on the side of one. And the chair! The chair probably was installed around the time the apartment was built. The antithesis to Ken's cloud of titties, this chair was designed for the unconscious, as nothing sentient lying on it could possibly fail to notice that this performed none of the functions one expects from a dentist's chair. At eye level, the tray of surgical instruments. I finally looked. The handles of them were pitted and worn, with unidentifiable stains. On the handles for sure, I just couldn't bring myself to look at the business end. Some things are truly better not to know. The presence of a modern-looking electrical cleaning brush, with disposable heads, was the only thing that kept me from bolting. If I'd been here for anything more than a simple cleaning, I'd have been so completely gone, so very quickly. But part of me had retreated to my inner cinema and just wanted to see where all of this was going to go. Note to self: Read butt-obvious metaphorical implications of previous impaled cat story on this blog more closely. "Do you smoke?" asked the dentist. "Yep," I said, "I'm trying to give up." Now, I'm ready for dentists to give me good reasons to give up smoking, but this story began at his birth and ended up in the ovens of one of the concentration camps. If I wasn't certain that smoking was going to kill me before the talk, he left me in no doubt by the time he was finished, that I'd be breathing through a tube and eating through my throat. I took comfort from the fact that this was definitely a long story, as he leaned over me in excitement, not forgetting to include pleasant vignettes about how his wife started smoking after being offered a cigarette by another man on an ajoining balcony with the kind of tone one would have expected from Woody Harrelson about Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal. And thank you God, for the various graphic scenes that he'd seen in his years as a dental surgeon, removing parts of cancerous throats and tongues and eyes, helpfully illustrated with hands-on demonstrations on my prostrate body. I shit you not. Somehow, watching war criminals getting hung at Nuremberg had something to do with the story, but the connection is escaping me at this point. The fact is that every single one of his friends who smoked is now dead, including the guy who founded the boxing supply company, Everlast, who died of cancer even though he sold his company for $50 million, and whose funeral was apparently last week. And how he, at age 86, still works every day. At some point, actual dentistry began. And that part was really distracting. You don't want to find yourself, wide-eyed at the points that the dentist has his back to you while fumbling for something, staring desperately around the dental office for the familliar sterilizing tray that you never managed to find. The visual cues from the whole experience suggested that they probably did it on a stove top somewhere — and that's the hopeful version of this fantasy. So, we've gone over the "chair", we've gazed into the splattered mirror light that my mouth is wide open under — did I mention he was an "Open Wide!" barker too? — and then the fun part came. The drill-like, dental power tool, circa 1950, that he's using to do the main surface cleaning on my teeth is overheating, so he asks the assistant to stop doing the squirting thing in my mouth and squirt it on the side of the power tool, which — again, I shit you not — hisses and produces steam. "Piles of bodies," he continues. "I have seen many people die." Some internal warning system that apparently still functioned, but was strangely unconnected to the current dire threat in front of my eyes, noted in my consciousness that any discussion of my role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would probably not be a good topic at this point. And while there's a water tube squirting into my mouth to cool the ready-to-explode drill, these guys haven't been told that there's supposed to be an extraction tube to suck the water out so that you don't choke. So every minute, he's urging me to spit into that little left-mounted circular sink that dentists have. But I hadn't seen one of these sinks before. No graceful pume of spiraling water was there to wash away my semi-vomitous spitting down a beautious white porcelin sink. As I gazed down the dry for years plug hole, I was confronted with a glimpse of something....something yellowed and... something old. In trying to google a graphic for this section, to somehow illustrate the un-illustratable, I came across a page from a non-profit organization which includes a diary of aid workers visiting a dental clinic visit in Guatemala. Looking at the pictures of their shiny, stainless steel, 'we wear masks' type of dental surgery, I definitely enjoyed a wish I was here moment. I got to hear some of the stories again, when the old guy forgot he'd told me them earlier. I eventually escaped, $60 poorer albeit with clean, terrorized teeth, nascent post-traumatic stress disorder, and the memories of the old guy yelling at me in the corridor: "I've seen it all! The fellows with dentist signs up on the streets around here don't know what I know! They haven't seen what I've seen! They haven't witnessed the removed throats, the cancerous tongues! I have been practicing dentistry for 60 years! I lecture at New York University. I was president of their dental school! Oh, I'll take that credit card, I do everything here." more from this section  • A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System (Thursday, May 15th, 2008)  • Contact from Suha Arafat (Friday, March 21st, 2008) • Open Letter to Women Considering Using Internet Dating Sites (Sunday, July 9th, 2006) |
      
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