Sometimes, You Get a Story About the Dentist

Maybe it's all dentists, but mine seems to be one of the lesser practitioners in Los Angeles. If his location wasn't so convenient to work, and if I wasn't so lazy, I'd surely find somebody better.

I really don't know what else to say.

Actually, it's hard to say much of anything when your mouth is full of gauze, water and Novocaine.


"How's work?" my dentist asks.

"Mfmph," I respond.

"Open," he commands, while I silently curse him because I only closed my mouth a little bit to try forming the words "work is fine." And really, is a phrase that mundane worth any effort in the first place?

"You're in real estate, right?"

I shake my head "no" and he reacts as if I just urinated all over his equipment.

"Whoa! Take it easy, buddy."

He nods at the hygienist and she sticks a suction tube the size of my first cell phone down my throat to suck up whatever that awful tasting past is he keeps dumping in there.

Mercifully, I'm given a chance to rinse and spit and for a moment, we can talk like normal people.

"Can you believe the paperwork they want to refinance a house these days?" he asks me, apparently still convinced I work in real estate.

"I know it," I respond. "I just bought a house last year."

He ignores the information about my life and continues his story.

"They kept bugging me about some check for $3,500 to cover some thing, and I'm like 'this is a two million dollar house; who cares about a few grand?'"

So much for normal.

I lean back into the chair and a new round of gauze is stuffed in, along with the suction tube and a few metal instruments that look like they were lifted from the set of the latest Saw installment.

I go to my happy place when the whirring sound of the cleaning brush starts, but my dreams about a Kansas City Royals World Series birth are quickly interrupted by an ear-splitting siren in the hallway.

"Oh, I forgot," the dentist tells me. "We're having a fire drill today."

"Hmphn?" I ask.

"We all have to get out," he says. "It should only take about twenty minutes."

"What!" I say, spitting gauze onto my bib.

"You should leave that in," the hygienist says.

"For twenty minutes?"

"It will staunch the bleeding," the dentist says as he walks out the door.

"This was just a cleaning. Why am I bleeding?" I ask the hygienist as she stuffs a fresh roll of the white stuff into my mouth.

She just shrugs and follows my tormentor out the door. Then I remember: oh yeah, my dentist sucks.