An Inconvenient Tooth

I had been in the chair for an hour before Doctor Kanji finally came around to having a go at the molar. I had been in a bad mood already that day but the delay, and the swollen, rotten fruit feeling of lidocaine in my cheek, made me almost tearful with frustration.

“Chrissakes Harry, do you have to give me so many jabs?” I managed, the cotton swabs in my cheek and the electric pinch, like crackling fuses, causing me to gag.

“Very sorry Mister Marcus, but we need to make sure you are quite ready before we begin the extraction.”

Doctor Kanji was always exquisitely polite, it was one of the reasons I paid for him by the hour, but he had a way of smiling with his old turkey skin face that made me want to throttle him.

“I’ll just need to wait for the anaesthetic to take effect.”

“Well look sharp about it.”

That one tooth, one fucking tooth, could cause so much trouble was no mystery to me, and I would have guessed that of all the fangs in my maw that were apt to up and desert the cause, it would have been this one. It was typical bloody behaviour. The Benedict Arnold of my mandible.

I leaned back and watched Kanji try to grab the tooth with what looked like a pair of pliers. The instrument scraped and scratched against my other teeth, and when he started the old twist-and-pull, I saw the loose flesh in the man’s arms begin to wobble with strain. The old geezer had the physical prowess of a new-born horse on a frozen pond.

From the get-go the tooth had caused me nothing but heartache, cutting, then coming through a week after my fourteenth birthday. I can remember the embarrassment of waking up to find that I had drooled blood on the pillow, of telling people that I was teething again, when I had enough trouble trying not to catch a pole every time I saw a pretty girl or trying to stop my voice from cracking with the Alpine high-jump every time I spoke. The fucker gave me cause for hatred from the start.

“Just try to relax Mr Marcus, nice and wide, now.”

Kanji flashed his own, perfect, teeth at me with the confidence of a showroom salesman, and I felt sweat trickle under my shirt to pool at the base of my spine, soaking the elastic of my underpants. He began to drill into the tooth, and I felt the vibrations sear against my tongue and dance up my cheek to make my nose run. The phlegm dripped into the back of my throat and I had to slow my breathing to stop myself from vomiting.

It was an informer, that tooth, and without an ounce of shame. The family dentist at the time, before Kanji bought the place, was called Rourke, and he gave me a talking to soon after the new tooth arrived,

“Listen Sammy boy, this tooth is new, and it’ll tell me exactly how many sweets and chocolates you eat, and whether or not you brush your teeth at night.” I was fourteen at the time, a man. I hated being spoken to like that.

So, the damned molar had informed on me, telling tales of soda and candy, and my parents would listen to the dentist’s grim appraisal of my habits and nod, then kvetch all the way home about how I was ruining my beautiful teeth with dreck from the sweetshop.

The molar had been territorial too, pushing the other, well-behaved, teeth askew within a year and making my parents force me into an orthodontist’s chair for braces. I was a fat child, with those glasses that look like the bottom of a milk bottle and a father who wore a yarmulke. Having a mouth that looked like the railway didn’t make school any easier.

Later, sixteen and fat, with braces and mulch stuck in the grille, it was no wonder none of the girls wanted a slow dance. Not even the ones with the mullets and the faces from Night of the Living Dead would give me a look, so it was a year of having the pissed ripped out of me as a fat, frigid, speccy, braces-wearing Jew.

It got too much for me, and I went to my mother crying, telling her about the girls and the mulch between my teeth and the insults, and she’d said ‘Shush a leanbh, it’s not forever’ and hugged me, which made it worse. She hated the braces as much as I did, worse even, but she hid it and I took to not smiling for the two years until they came out.

Kanji prodded my arm, and the assistant was pulling the vaccuum wand from my mouth.

“I’ll have to break the molar in two to extract it.”

“I’m watching the clock.” I growled, but the numbness in my cheek made me sound like a punch-drunk stroke victim. I closed my eyes and reflected bitterly on my sad dental history.

When the braces came off, and I went to the city for university, what could I expect, some détente? More trouble from the little prick, after all I’d sacrificed to give it a good start in life. I was in the city for a week and it broke on me.

It was Freshers week at a traffic light disco; where people wear green if they’re single and red if they’re with someone, and I was prowling around with an amber jumper, trying to look cool. I was drinking a beer and one of the dancers bounced right into me, sending the neck of the bottle into my mouth. My glorious memory of that night is of blood gushing from my lips while the stocious girl who knocked into me apologised for her clumsiness.

She was a pretty girl, my mother would say she was a bit too zaftig, and gave me a tissue for my mouth, then the phone number of the house she was lodging at in Rathmines. She was wearing Amber too, and I would joke with her about it in the years afterwards, how she’d taken hints from the goon squad to break my teeth, so I’d notice her. I got it fixed for free, a hungover dental student from Athlone wearing last night’s green taking four attempts to get the enamel compound to set while his supervisor looked over his shoulder.

Doctor Kanji wasn’t free though, and as I sat in the chair feeling his thumb poke and prod amongst the ruins of my tooth, I had a sudden urge to march over to the dental school, just off Westland Row, and find some oversexed, beer-sweating youngling to do the job.

The tooth didn’t stay put.

There was the boxing gym, with its roped-off square of canvas and heavy leather slugs for punchbags, and I was paired to spar with a retired fellow of the university. He was a long gent, with a heron’s legs and an antiquated way of holding his fists, like a sailor from a lithograph. I figured it would be bad form to floor an old fella, until he dinged me with a left that would crack a safe. I had fitted my own mouth guard, as a money-saving exercise, and the cheap plastic of it moved with my jaw along the line of the punch and guillotined the crown from the molar.

They wouldn’t fix that one for free, so I had to pay, and the cheapest dentist smelled like a vintage clothes shop. They made me wait in the reception of his clinic on D’Olier street while the kebab shop below pumped the fume of baking meat into the room and I tried not imagine the laminate of grease on the linoleum of his office floor. He patched it up as best he could I suppose, but it was only ever a temporary fix.

I gagged, and wretched and old Kanji aimed me towards the little sink, where the soupy bile of a missed lunch heaved over my palette and out. He got a cup of water for me, and I rinsed my mouth out, fascinated by the chips of enamel and bloody pulp in the bowl.

I was more protective of the tooth after the second crack; cowed I suppose by how cruelly it could treat me. I made promises to myself that I would buy the expensive toothpaste, and that I would floss morning and night. I bought a snazzy electric toothbrush with a rechargeable rotating head but lost it when I moved flat. I promised the tooth that I would be good, that I would obey and honour it. I suppose I lied.

Life got in the way, with late nights and tobacco and reckless disregard for the future. My molar, its discontent growing, internalised its anger and decided to rot itself to non-existence, a dental hunger striker. First the tooth became translucent, and then little flakes of enamel would come from the walls of it, exposing and compromising the filling, which had to be replaced. Kanji did the honours the last time.

“This will feel like I’m pulling down on your chin, Mister Marcus”

There was the noise of snow crunching underfoot, or of a key snapping in the lock and Kanji’s hand emerged into view, and between the forceps the smaller root pulsed in a swansong of failing life. Then he clamped the pliers onto the larger root and it jolted free with an obscene liquid ‘pop’.

Kanji was ecstatic in triumph, “You see Mister Marcus, all that trouble for a little tooth. “

I grinned at him, blood dribbling from the crater in my gum, and passed out.

Perhaps it was my fault, something I didn’t do. If I had I showed it more attention, it might have decided to play nice with the other teeth and behave. It can’t be easy being the new tooth, and what did I do? Scorn it. I boycotted that tooth and it wrought its vengeance for such mistreatment.

As Kanji washed his hands, I picked the tooth from the instrument tray to look at it, to see what had caused so much trouble. It was almost blue with rot, with roots looking like the fangs of Kali, dripping blood. I took a fragment and put it in my mouth, between its surviving brothers, to see if I felt any warmth from it, but it was as cold and alien as porcelain against my numbed tongue, so I spat it out.

I smoothed my shirt and tie free from the plastic apron and talked to the receptionist briefly to discuss the bill for the work that day. I signed some forms, and, exhausted, went back into the theatre to collect my coat.

“Don’t forget that you should avoid hot food and drink for two hours, and don’t poke at the abscess with your tongue or the clot will break.”

I was awkward putting my jacket on and the assistant handed me a polythene bag with the remnants of the molar in it. On the way out, I passed a mirror and straightened my tie. For a moment, I saw myself, fat and speccy, braces and spots. Now I work out in the company gym and wear contacts, and my smile is almost perfect. Amber had called me twice when I was in the chair, so I made a note to call her before I went back to the office.

I hurried in the rain along Bachelor’s Walk, my mind full of the years I had with the lump of enamel clutched in my fist. As I walked along, the sounds of the city seemed dim and understanding, and I poked at the hole in my gum with my tongue, feeling the space where the tooth had been.