You can’t be high at a dentist. That’s not a hard rule, it’s advice I guess, from me. But also probably not a regular-person situation? Like maybe the more in-check people, the more gathered a person you are, the less you are likely to show up blitzed to a cleaning. I haven’t run those numbers I’m just here to help.
I walked in and there’s 2 impossibly tall blonde women who do not look up from their screens and their clicking. What are you clicking? I don’t care, I’m just saying what are both of you doing right now you know? You have a joint pinterest account? One of you is doing maths and the other is looking at xrays? I doubt it. Say what you’re doing right now both at the same time.
The third person is a smaller gay man and he’s already mad at me even though he smiles and he says Hi welcome in, do you have an appointment and I smile to myself and bite my lip and I don’t laugh but in my head I say something like “no I’m just browsing”. He needs a driverse license or ID to scan and I give it to him before I hear my dad’s lawyer voice in my ear telling me to ask why he’d need to fuckin scan my fuckin drivers license at a dentist office oh well because now I have the world’s greasiest ipad and I’m sitting on a couch I’m certain I’ve seen in some late 2000’s gay porn and I’m typing all sorts of information into an online form that I’m not certain will actually go anywhere because the ipad’s at 2% and looks like it is the first ipad.
The problem with being high in a place that isn’t your apartment is that it makes you nervous and that makes you think and overthink and then you remember you were working on your shitty stand-up routine for the class you half-drunkenly signed up for and all of that brain power gets the plug pulled when you hear your name for a second time and you look up and three people are looking at you but you don’t know who said it and you say Hi Yes Im Nathan and the sweater vest in between the two Tilda Swinton’s takes the ipad back, probably to toss it in a loose bag of frito lay products and you are escorted back past the whirring noises and the reclined suplicants and past the little squirts of air and she had said a few things and you missed them all and you have to tell your heart and your brain to both relax a little.
You’re in the chair now and the screen in front of you is paused on season 7 of the Great British Baking Show and it’s a technical (St Honor Pastry) and they’ve paused it for some reason on the tall goth comedian’s face and you think about how it’s good of the Brits for letting comedians look weird because in America that guy would need to work in a shop that sold vinyl records and whiskey glasses or something. I mean that with love. I wish they’d press play but this woman’s got 4 of her 10 fingers in my mouth and I don’t want to seem like a child who needs his pastry show with the tall grim reaper man.
That was only the first lady, she eventually gets the second lady. The first one just kindof set me up and looked around. I don’t even know if she worked here, maybe she was from another chair and wandered over, I didn’t ask for her permits. The second woman, it’s all women in this place, I have no problem with that, except the sweatervest in front I guess, anyway the second woman is taller than the first. She has to bend down into my mouth like a tim burton character. She asks if I’m okay with the xray machine and I don’t know, structurally, what that question means. I say yes I love it and we both push past that. She says I just need to take some pictures and I want to ask if my insurance covers it but worst case she says no and still takes them, best case she’d have a follow up question like “what company is your insurance through” and I would not have an answer. If this tall woman bent down and placed the barrel of a gun to my head and said “explain to me what insurance is or I will kill you” I would actually just have to help her pull the trigger. I don’t ask these things and she does not either. She’s focused on making me bleed and wince and she is good at what she does.
She does two more things of note.
#1 She sits down next to me as if to teach me about the meaning of Hannukah and she flips up her little magnifying glasses things and I see she is human and she says the anterior ascent of your front cuspids is a little stained. I made these words up but she did too. If I had more time I would say something like “I wish they weren’t” or “You’re telling me sister” or “Ain’t that just the way” but I don’t have time because she smelled the confusion 3 words in and she’s got her purple fingers in my mouth now and she says “this” and I feel her index finger on the back, throat-facing wall of my front-bottom teeth. She asks if I drink coffee and she does so with 7 or 8 fingers in my mouth and I say “eee” (“tea”), and she says it’s okay, we can polish that up easy. And I hope she’s using the royal we because I’m kindof coming down and don’t like her or this or teeth.
#2 This is while she’s polishing the lateral slope of my fourth incipid, mentioned above. She uses one of her purple fingers, the ones I know now better than my own, and she touches one of my other teeth. I don’t know the names of the teeth but lets say one of the crunchers, not one of the tearers. She touches is a few times like a kid would tap an aquarium tank and she says, and I swear on my BluRay DVD player this is true, “has this one always looked like this”. Had my mouth been empty and had it been closed it would’ve fallen open like one of those taxidermied fish. It was actually one of the more beautiful moments in my life, it’s a shame I was sweating through my shirt and on another planet. My mouth full though all I can do is a long “uhhh” and she says “it’s fine”. She’s the only one who has seen that tooth in the last 4 years I bet. What does it mean “has it always looked like that”. How does it look now? Does it look as though it changed recently? What about it looks different from the other ones in there? We’re 25 minutes in, is the difference so subtle that you just now see it? Do you have a crush on that tooth? Do you like-like that tooth? Do you want me to see if I can ask the friends of that tooth if it would say yes if you were to ask that tooth to Sadie Hawkins?
Finally the last lady comes in. This one is smaller and has a white coat as if to remind me that she did go to medical school and she is a doctor with an MD and that should be respected. She’s smiling and asking how everything went in here and I smile and I say I love it and she says okay. She asks me to sit back. Turn towards her. A little more. Open wide. Wider. Good. This looks great. Did you get a root canal? How long ago? Did it hurt. Do you wear a nightguard? I remember I’m still working on my stand-up routine.
My dentist asked me if I had a nightguard, I said no I can barely afford an assistant.
My dentist asked me if I had a nightguard, I said no but I live in a pretty good neighborhood and I’m on the third floor.
My dentist asked me if I had a nightguard, I said no but we lock the doors in our apartment pretty consistently, and we have a reactive dog.
My dentist asked me if I had a nightguard, I said yeah his name’s Greg but he’s on leave, his mother’s ill. ■