dental adventure

It doesn’t matter when you show up for your dentist appointment, you’re always screwed.  If you’re early, you still have to wait until it’s your turn.  If you’re late, the people who signed in before you get to go first, even if their time is after your scheduled time.  So you find yourself waiting, watching the bald man sleeping, watching him sprawled out and taking up one whole couch to himself.  There are ten other people waiting, but only two couches.  So the rest of us are relegated to chairs.

But I eventually get through this, and graduate to one of those kinky dentist chairs that raise up and down and recline to a horizontal line. I’ve been here dozens of times, and I always have the same dental assistant.  I don’t know her name, but she knows my name, my sister’s name, and my ex-step mom’s name.  But that’s it.  From the name on, it’s all constant reacquainting.

At first, I would tell her the same thing every time.  Where I go to school, my major, my relationship status.  But this gets old, so I find myself making up more and more blatant lies about who I am and what I do.  This is a harmless activity because, after all, she’s not really listening.  She’s scraping my teeth with the pointy tooth-scraper of death.

And I reel in pain, then rinse and spit out blood.

She laughs so damn much while she does this, and I can feel the little pools of blood form in the corners of my mouth.  Every time the metal touches a nerve, I flinch.  During this whole affair, she is managing to understand my responses to her inane questions, even though her hands are in my mouth and my syllables are coming out as what sounds like nonsense to me.  This is a common ability to all those in the dental community, and one that impresses me quite a bit.

I let out a sigh of relief as she puts the strawberry cheesecake-
flavored fluoride in my mouth.  It doesn’t taste very much like strawberry cheesecake, but it’s a three-minute reprieve from the scraping and gouging and having to make up bullshit about what my fake job as an EMS technician is like.

My giggling dental dominatrix hands me the remote, assuming I don’t want to watch cartoons on the little television in front of me.  She’s kind of right.  I switch the channel to different cartoons, better cartoons.

Three minutes and twenty-seven later, I rinse and spit out foul-tasting pasty junk.

She’s talking about my dad and about how all the ladies in town think he’s a catch while she puts the sealant on with the small instrument with the spinning rubber end.  She’s kind of buffing my teeth with some waxy substance that doesn’t seem to be much of a match for the cigarette smoke, alcohol, and battery acid that I expose my teeth to.  She keeps asking me expectantly if I get along with my sister, if my sister gets along with my dad, if my dad gets along with his ex-wife, if I get along with my dad.  She wants me to say yes, and I do only because it’s easier than giving a real explanation.

As you can tell, these chats with Giggles are not why I come to the dentist.  Unlike most people, I don’t really care about my teeth.  I brush once or twice a day, and never floss.  No, the only reason I come here is to see my dentist.

She’s not beautiful in some kind of supermodel way.  She’s beautiful like the sixth grade teacher you have a crush on, a kind of prettiness that is as much in her manner as her appearance.  Her hair is kind of a mix between brown and shining blonde, but what does it for me is her eyes.  The whites are perfectly white, and and the brown rings of color around her pupils seem to just drink in the world.  Whenever she is looking in mouths, she has these big, black-rimmed glasses, with lenses maybe a centimeter thick.

And she’s crouched over me now, with the little flashlight and her gloved hands probing my mouth.  Her own mouth is covered by a little mask, and of course she is wearing the glasses.  They make her eyes two sizes bigger, and this is definitely a turn-on. 

Her name is Denise, and she has two little kids.  I was asking around about her, and it seems she is happily married to a banker or something.  If I were him I would be jealous of me right now in this chair.  She is feeling my gums and scraping things and focusing all her attention on my teeth.  Whenever she hits a nerve, it’s not the same as when Giggles does it.  It’s an almost sexual thrill that makes me tingle. 

And she’s pointing at the little computer screen with the x-rays of my teeth and she says:

“See this little indentation in the molar here?  That’s a small cavity.  If we fill it soon we can prevent it from spreading to this tooth right next to it.”

Other people would be upset by this, but not me.  To me it just means I get to spend even more exclusive time with my own personal tooth fairy.  She releases me from the kinky chair and I stop to chat with the receptionist, making a return appointment for the next morning.

***

And I’m back in the chair.  I don’t even have to deal with Giggles today, as all my business requires hard-core dentistry. My shining savior is standing over me, tapping the end of a needle.  I open wide as she numbs my gums and she gets out the little sheet of rubber and the metal contraption to make a dental dam around the suspect tooth.

While she does this she is leaning on me, my shoulder touching her breast.  She’s hovering five inches over my face, and I am inspecting her for facial blemishes.  I can’t find anything wrong with her, as even the inside of her nose looks immaculate.  I want to take her back into her office and play naughty games with nitrous gas and forceps.  But that’s just an impossible dream.

I’m shaken from my temporary reverie by the grinding sensation of a drill on the side of my tooth.  It’s not really pain, just a different feeling as the gnashing metal echoes inside my head and reverberates from my open mouth.  She has complete focus as she drills through the decay, stopping every few seconds to vacuum blood from inside the little plastic barrier between the inside of my mouth and the rest of the world.

Now she makes a little filling and places it into the gap.  She’s holding it in place with some kind of metal instrument, gripping my shoulder for support as she shoves it in as deep as it will go.  The way she does this makes me feel happily violated, if just for a second.

She takes the smaller drill and sculpts the edges of the filling into the shape of the original tooth.  She makes me bite down on a piece of what seems like wax paper to see if my bite is normal again.  After several repeats of this process, she’s done, and I’m tired.  I feel like we’ve just completed some depraved erotic encounter, and now it’s time for me to sneak out of her office before her husband finds out.

But first, I must rinse and spit.