Going Once, Going Twice, and the Tooth That Whistled on Every S

A Voice for Hire

I sell other people's things for a living. Dining tables, tractors, deceased estates, a stuffed kudu head once, and on one memorable Saturday in Benoni, an entire bar counter from a pub that had closed after forty years. I have been an auctioneer for eleven years, and if you have ever stood at the back of a warehouse in Johannesburg on a Saturday morning holding a numbered paddle, there is a decent chance you have heard me.

The job is mostly voice. Speed, rhythm, clarity. You have to be fast enough to keep the energy up and clear enough that a seventy-year-old farmer at the back hears the exact number and does not bid by accident. I learned the chant from an old man in Krugersdorp who used to say that a good auctioneer sounds like rain on a tin roof: quick, steady and impossible to ignore.

What I never thought about, not once in eleven years, was my teeth.

The Biltong Incident

It happened on a Tuesday, at home, in front of the television. A piece of biltong, the hard dry kind my brother in law makes in his garage, and a sound inside my mouth like a twig snapping. I ran my tongue over my front teeth and found a corner missing from the left one. Not a big piece. The kind of thing you could probably ignore.

So I ignored it.

My wife Lerato told me to see someone. I told her it was fine. It did not hurt. It looked a little strange in the mirror, but I am not a model, I am a man who shouts numbers at strangers. I had a deceased estate in Edenvale that Saturday, the biggest job I had booked in months, and I did not have time.

The Room Heard It First

That Saturday there were about a hundred and twenty people in the hall. Good crowd. Dealers, young couples looking for furniture, a few of the family members of the late owner standing quietly at the side. I started the way I always start, slow and friendly, and then I picked up speed.

"Lot six, a set of six stinkwood chairs, who will start me at six, six, six thousand, sixty five, seventy, seventy five."

On every s there was a whistle. A small, high, ridiculous whistle, like a kettle in another room.

I did not notice for the first few lots. Then I saw a teenage boy in the third row nudge his friend. Then a woman near the front pressed her lips together the way people do when they are trying not to laugh at a funeral. By the time I reached a set of silver spoons, which is a word with not one but two s sounds in it, a man at the back actually whistled along.

People laughed. Kindly, mostly. I laughed too, because what else do you do. But I was rattled, and when an auctioneer is rattled he slows down, and when he slows down the room loses energy, and when the room loses energy the prices drop. The family of the late owner were standing right there. I felt that more than the embarrassment.

Learning How My Own Mouth Works

On the drive home Lerato did not say "I told you so". She did not have to. She just handed me her phone with a list of practices already open. I sat in the passenger seat while she drove and I looked through them, and for the first time I thought about what I actually needed.

I needed somebody near the warehouses where I work most weeks, so I would not lose a whole day. I needed someone who would understand that my front teeth are basically the tools of my trade. And honestly, I needed someone who would not make me feel like an idiot for leaving it.

Dentist in Sandton was what Lerato had typed into the search bar, because most of my week is spent between Sandton, Wynberg and Marlboro, and she knows my diary better than I do.

The Chair

I am a big man and I talk for a living, so it is strange to admit that lying back in a dental chair made me feel about nine years old. The dentist asked me what had happened and I told her about the biltong and, a bit sheepishly, about the whistling. She did not laugh. She asked me to say a few words with s in them, and I sat there in a paper bib saying "six, sixty six, silver spoons" while she listened with her head tilted like a piano tuner.

She explained that the chip had changed the shape of the gap between my teeth, just slightly, and air was escaping in a new way when my tongue made an s. It made complete sense once she said it. I had spent eleven years thinking about my voice as something that happened in my throat. It had never occurred to me how much of it is shaped by a few millimetres of tooth.

She also told me something I did not want to hear, which is that the crack ran a little deeper than it looked, and that ignoring it for weeks had not done me any favours.

Thinking About More Than One Tooth

While I was there, she asked whether I had ever been bothered by anything else about my smile. I said no, then I said, well, actually. I have a slightly dark tooth further back from a rugby knock in high school, and a gap I have always hidden by smiling with my mouth closed in photos. I had never once said this out loud to anyone.

I went home and spent an evening reading about what a Cosmetic Dentist actually does, because I had always assumed it meant film stars and very white teeth. Most of what I read was more ordinary than that. Fixing chips. Closing gaps. Making a tooth match the ones next to it. I did not decide anything that night. I just realised it was allowed to want to fix something for no reason other than that it had bothered me for twenty years.

Back in Front of the Room

The repair on the front tooth took less time than a long auction lot. I went back a second time a few weeks later for the darker tooth. The rest, the gap, I am still thinking about. Lerato says I should. My mother says I am vain. My mother also once said I would never make money talking, so I take her advice selectively.

The first auction after the repair was a farm clearance in Heidelberg. Tractors, implements, a small mountain of irrigation pipe. I stood up on the back of a bakkie with the microphone, I took a breath, and I started.

"Lot one, a Massey Ferguson, sixty five, who will start me at sixty, sixty five, seventy."

No whistle. Just rain on a tin roof.

What I Tell the Young Ones Now

A few younger auctioneers have started working with our company, and I have become, without asking for it, the one who gives advice. I tell them about rhythm and clarity and never letting the room see you rattled. I also tell them, which they find very funny, to look after their teeth.

They laugh. I laughed too, once. Then I tell them about the silver spoons in Edenvale and the man at the back who whistled along, and about the family who stood quietly at the side and watched their mother's things go for a little less than they should have.

These days, if a friend asks who they should see, I give them the name of my Sandton dentist and I tell them the same thing I tell the young auctioneers. Do not wait for the room to hear it first.