On a fine spring morning a few years ago, a coworker arrived at my desk, clearly distraught. “Coworker, whatever is the matter?” I asked in my most avuncular voice. “What worldly trouble shadows your countenance?” While my reputation is not that of an empath, I have it in me to behave nonsociopathically, offering to those in need, if not the whole milk of human kindness, then at least the low-fat variety.
“I just found out I have a cavity,” she said, almost in tears, her sparkling white teeth two rows of perfectly aligned Chiclets. She was in her late 20s, and this was her first cavity. Clearly a calamity. I did what was necessary to suppress a spasm of laughter. For a walking dental ruin like myself, a cavity is a trifle, a pothole on the rough road of tooth decay. But I imagine that for someone who had made it nearly three decades without one, a cavity could portend dark forces massing on the borderlands of their anxiety.
It could signify loss of innocence, that dividing line between youth and experience that we learned about in those wretched novels about teens on the verge of something like A Separate Peace or The Outsiders that we were made to read in English class. (What was it with those books? They all could have been named Teens on the Verge of Something, Volumes I-CMXCIX.) Perhaps the cavity was a symbol of something even bleaker, a harbinger of her own mortality—the tiny hole in her tooth a stand-in for the person-sized hole in the ground she would one day occupy.
Whatever it was, I didn’t have time for it. “Well, at least you don’t have my teeth,” I said, and returned to my work.
Let me tell you about my teeth.
I have 26 teeth. It’s common for adults to have 32 teeth, but I’ve lost a few along the way. (If I’m being honest, I should probably state that I have 24 teeth—my two front upper teeth were mostly knocked out in a bicycle accident in the ’90s and I have a bridge over their spiky nubbins.) The missing teeth are not in the front, so I still can smile in photos. My brother Paddy, rest his soul, had a missing incisor that he didn’t take care of for almost two years. Think of it: A man with a public-facing job and great dental benefits didn’t attend to a missing tooth in the front of his mouth. But I mean, I get it—to fix it, he had to go to the dentist. And who wants to go to the damn dentist?
My teeth are crooked—not comic, British crooked but slanted at enough jaunty angles that they might be described as rakish. My teeth are yellowing, but in a way that seems appropriate for my age and habits—the body keeps the score, to borrow a phrase.
I’ve suffered a variety of dental misfortunes, from five years of wearing braces as a child in the care of a casually sadistic orthodontist to emergency root canals to molar extractions gone sideways to toothaches so bad I had to knock myself out with vodka. There’s not a tooth in my mouth without some form of intervention, be it filling, crown, or bridge. I’ve also had many hilarious dental cleanings, including one in which the hygienist’s pick emerged from the back of my mouth with a marble-sized beef fragment on the end of it. Talk about your awkward silences as the gray bit of gristle sat there on the tray for the duration of the cleaning.
I know very well that there are other terrible afflictions of the mouth I’ve yet to encounter—dry socket, oral thrush, gum disease, getting the remainder of one’s rotting teeth ripped out for a full set of dentures—but given my track record, some of them are in my future. Indubitably. I associate dentistry with anxiety, loss of control, and pain. In a review of a vegetarian restaurant I penned in the late ’90s, I described the sound of a juicer, whose whine pierced the small dining room like a shrill klaxon as “dental drill unsettling.” That’s the harshest criticism I’ve ever written, and it’s connected directly to my teeth.
My teeth are…well, my teeth don’t get a great deal of my attention. I brush twice daily and use floss when something is stuck in my teeth, but they’re only on my mind when I’m in some form of dental distress. My dentist would tell me that my teeth demand more of my time, but that I am not giving it to them.
I have been going to the same dentist for 10 years now, a record for me. In the past, I’ve changed dentists every couple of years—it’s easier to just ghost them after a while instead of constantly postponing appointments. (One of my favorite things is to postpone cleaning appointments. It stands to reason that each time I push out an appointment a few weeks, I’m gaining time. At this rate, I might miss half a dozen cleanings before I die.) In between dentists, a couple of years might go by without a dental visit at all. I don’t think I saw a dentist at all in the halcyon decade from 1995 to 2005.
Let me tell you about my dentist. My longstanding dentist, the one I can’t quit.
My dentist loves my teeth. She loves my teeth way more than I do. I imagine that she thinks of my teeth the same way Suzanne Vega thought about Luka: She knows my teeth are being neglected, but there’s very little she can do. She can’t call Cuspid Protective Services on me. She gives me deep, searching looks and asks me how often I Waterpik, and I’m obliged to lie to her for both of our sakes. She doesn’t want to quit me either. And I love her for caring so much about my teeth. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t keep postponing my cleanings.
This article appears in August 2023.
