You can reach the author at basementfiles@hotmail.com

Thursday, June 05, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Basement Files: Whining

The first in a two-part series

1. The Appointment

Three weeks ago, I sat in a dentist's chair having my teeth cleaned. The cleaning was accompanied, as all of mine are, with a pained narration of the manifest failure of my current brushing techniques. An archaeological record of ruin and decay was made and methods for future preservation offered. It was suggested that I begin approaching my oral hygiene as a teenage boy would approach his second shot at lovemaking, with the idea of being more gentle, more controlled and less prone to haste.

Over the years, I've noticed that going to the dentist is like joining a cult. At first, your will is broken with stern lectures on "neglect" and vague threats of "surgery." And only after you're made pliant with repentance can you be built back up, reborn as a better, more obedient, rigorously flossing convert. I think the chair is part of it. You're restrained, drugged and threatened with injury, which makes anyone more susceptible to programming. But amid the tension, there's also the elevation and subtle angle, which triggers the same floating dream-state you find in all reclining chairs.

It's just a more anxious version of the barber's chair or the airline seat. You recline and you're lulled into a realm of blissful quietude, with only small fragments of distant conversations piercing the silence. You're caught between meditation and sleep when certain key trigger words, words like "Dodgers" or "Scotch," reach through to the subconscious, your head lurching in drowsy obedience toward the source. And those few words that are allowed to penetrate are forever imbedded in what's left of your free will. In this way, you're talked into styling gels, frequent flier programs and $300 sonic wave toothbrushes.

2. The Injury

I was just settling in to this vulnerable state when things went terribly wrong. A sudden and distressing note of panic escaped the hygienist's masked mouth and her fingers rushed into my mouth like firemen into a house of flames. She bade me lean forward and avoid the temptation to swallow. The aggressive, vibratory cleansing had dislodged a filling and her alarm suggested that its constituent elements were poison to everything but my mouth.

Soon enough it was retrieved and her innocence in the entire affair amply explained. The filling was loose, she said, floating like a gardenia in its enamel bowl. I was lucky, in fact, that it had been torn loose in these professional environs. Otherwise, it could have been lured from its moorings by a hastily eaten Snickers and its toxins smuggled into my digestive track by a nougaty courier. She'd actually done me a great favor. And if I would just return next week, she'd continue the cleaning and see that a new filling be cemented into the jagged void.

3. The Dilemma

And I would have returned in a week, had my car not broken down in six days. But it did. And as I sat by the side of the road, trying to coax one last ignition from a fuel pump beyond caring, I knew some hard choices were ahead of me. I could fix my car or my mouth. But certainly not both. My mouth had the advantage of being able to argue for its own repair, but angry business owners weren't threatening to tow my mouth. In this way, decisions get made for you.

That I have to choose at all is a function of my lusterless career. I'm a freelance writer, which is what you say at parties when you can't bring yourself to form the words "my life somehow got away from me." And like many freelancer writers, I have no dental insurance. Which is odd, really. Given the number of third-rate hack writers in America, you'd think we'd be a constituency so large and powerful as to demand cradle-to-grave pampering. But, alas, we're a self-absorbed and isolated people, little prone to the grassroots organization and strong-armed lobbying that Congress ransoms with benefits.

For this reason, and hundreds more, penury is now a permanent lodger in my home. (He always visits when I can least afford to entertain, though, in fairness, he eats next to nothing.) As if to acknowledge the intrusion, penury has agreed to share the trundle bed with misery, who, desirous of company, arrived some weeks before. (Misery, too, treads lightly in the pantry, but he's hell on the liquor cabinet.) And all three of us agreed that the car should get priority.

4. The Decision

So my car is rushed into surgery and my mouth lies waiting in the triage tent. And it's a great decision for about a week. But then the pain comes. That little filling had been a capstone sealing off a Hadean underworld of lambent flames and anguished screams. It would be sorely missed.

You have to admit that dental pain brings with it a certain clarity. Within a day, you have a pretty good mental snapshot of the catacombs beneath your gums. Within two days, you have a blurry wiring diagram of all the nerves affected. "Okay, I get it, so there's a nerve I've never felt before that somehow runs from beneath my jaw up into my fucking eye socket."

It's like the cartography of the 15th century. A new world is discovered, but at the cost of great indigenous suffering in every land mapped. And things can only get worse. Working separately, pain and poverty have long ushered man toward rash calamity. Working together, they drag him there. And I'm well on my way.

Next week: The travails of self-medication and what they don't tell you about Vicodin. Or what they probably do tell you, but that I didn't bother to read.