TEETH & MOUTH

Off to the dentist today, a cleaning: the bitch, the gal who cleans my teeth and gums, her own biting mouth covered by a corrugated paper napkin, and this see-through plastic helmet that descends over the top of her face, a low-budget Darth Vadar with blond hair pulled back tightly.

“Very nice,” she says, stabbing and prodding my gums, her inquisitorial spotlight aimed right at the damn teeth like they were Judy Garland in one final curtain call, and I moan, out loud, I mean, it’s not easy to converse with the mirror and the water jet torture machine jammed in there, along with the gizmo that sucks out the water and the blood. Thank god for that, it keeps me from a tragic drowning incident, right there in Westwood.

Very nice? I mull that over, heat crawling around my neck. A matching pair of jolts, little current zaps, stun the gaps where my two molars used to be, now occupied by metal screws. Zap, zap. The molars were ripped from their places of honor by a different sadist, the endodontist, at least he had good drugs, they called it ‘twilight’ anaesthesia —that’s when you’re nearly catatonic, but awake enough so you don’t retch all over the bastard as whacks the side of your tooth with a mallet to rip and shred the roots away from your jaw.

Oh yes, “very nice” indeed, toothless in Westwood and she thinks it’s nice.
It’s true enough, the damn missing teeth are in the back of my mouth, one on each side, so that, under daily conditions, I don’t look like some kind of Appalachian refugee, unable to express myself because of the gale force of whistling that comes from such gaps. Except when I laugh, I mean when I cut loose with a true guffaw, when the lips pull back, and point towards my ears as they reveal the pathetic missing teeth. Then they show, and I don’t even know it until it’s too late.

I think of Betty Ann Babbage from high school, the one with the page boy, the industrial metal mouth and the irrepressible giggle. Her arm was like Dr. Strangelove’s the minute the giggle erupted, boom, the palm of her hand would cup over her mouth, over the armament in there, and you’d hear her aunt Mabel say, “Oh honey, don’t cover your face with your hand like that, you have such a pretty smile.”

“Very nice, indeed,” I think, “thanks a fucking bunch,” as Marilyn, the hygienist retracts her hands and the instruments of torture they clutch. I pull out the suction thinggie, and I look right up at her.

Lies, all lies, I confess to myself, there you go again. She’s not a bitch, this Marilyn, constantly pleasant, unflinchingly professional, concerned, competent. Well, except that one time, when her X-ray failed to detect the absess at the root of my M-2, that gigantic upper molar. Hence, the endodontist. And the howling gap, soon to be filled with fake new teeth, if the rest don’t fall out before February.
“Home care, that’s the secret,” she croons. “Home care.”

“That and six grand for the fucking titanium posts and another couple for the fucking crowns,” I think, as I shut my eyes and visualize Betty Ann’s right paw, covering her mouth, while the other one claws the TV screen, trying to grab the Beetles on Ed Sullivan, to find a way to transcend the torture of orthodontia.
Some might say my feelings about Marilyn were spiteful, even resentful: hell hath no fury like a tooth extraction patient. Especially when-- maybe, just fucking maybe -- the tooth didn’t need to go. This woman should buy me a car. Is she covered by insurance? I discussed this entire matter with my therapist, and he encouraged me to discharge the anger with constructive, bark-like sounds, so I crawled on the floor of his tasteful Santa Monica condo, barking and wanting to pee on some priceless antique he acquired with my money. Complaining about overcharging to a therapist, well, this is carrying coals to the Westside equivalent of Newcastle -- Torrance maybe.

You demand the truth, is that what I’m hearing? Truth, you say, dental truth, Shakespearean dental truth? Well, it’s most likely my DNA, mother had soft teeth, bridges over her troubled bicuspids, top and bottom, and a bad bite, charming as a beauty queen, that fetching overbite, but hell in the later years. Genetic hardship nothwithstanding, it could have been the drugs, prodigious quantities of speed, dissolved in a wash of Jack Daniels, coating my naked mouth area for days at a time, hell, weeks at a time.

Could have been that. Or my periodontal predelictions.

Dentistry, like sobriety and monogamy, cannot easily be boxed in by simple moral concepts like truth. Lost teeth, like lost love and the occasional binge, most often fall into the domain of wisdom, not truth.