I Broke A Tooth
A writer suffers for his art
My daughter and I went to an ice hockey game a few weeks ago, and during the first period a shred of pork from my barbecue sandwich got wedged in the cleft of a premolar. I bit down, and the face of the tooth —the one on the upper left, next to the eye tooth — sheered off like a glacier calving an iceberg.
I mention this dental mishap because we writers are wont to complain that, unlike the characters in our stories, our lives are dull. We eat, sleep, work. We care for families and pets. We social mediate. Et cetera. Dull stuff, dull as the blades on a old pair of skates.
Then a tooth comes apart! At a hockey game! Compared to workaday scuffling for the puck, a broken tooth disrupts the game of life like a flash of unsportsmanlike conduct.
I called a timeout and retrieved the pebble of enamel from my mouth. Pinched between thumb and finger, the whitish grit was something that wouldn’t be noticed at the bottom of a tub of popcorn, yet it was hardly insignificant, having been a part of me for over fifty years, chewing my food and keeping my smile whole, without complaint, asking in return only for regular brushing. I felt a genuine loss as I studied the thing. As a man drafting the early chapters of his old age, the succession of physical losses — of hair, of hearing, of what we may delicately describe as natural virility, and so on — is a mournful spectacle. And just as I was settling in to be diverted from all that, along comes a fresh loss.
At another time and place I would have shown the bit of tooth to my daughter, clumsily seeking comfort, but the urge was checked by the portraits of the hockey players shining down from the Jumbotrons. High above where I sat, ten times life size, the men’s smiles — missing incisors, eye teeth, and premolars galore — deflected me as neatly as a shove into the boards. No whining! the picket-fence grins said. Get in the game!
So, grasping the moment, I manned up. Setting aside thoughts about how much the tooth was going to cost to fix, and having found a way to protect the damaged remnant with my tongue so I could still drink my beer, and last but not least seeing that my team was up by a goal, I got busy with the only game that really interests a writer: Is there a story here?
Not at first bite, so to speak. The puck hadn’t strayed from the ice; I hadn’t exchanged blows with an opposing fan; my very slightly tipsy feet hadn’t even stumbled on the high, narrow steps of the arena. I’d simply bitten down on a tooth that was primed to split like seasoned firewood.
While the facts offered no story, the sensations could still be filed away: the out-of-place snap in the mouth, followed by a glacial sting. Gently, foolishly, I tested the tooth with a sluicing of beer. A needle of pain jabbed into my skull, pricking the back of my eyeball. I must have croaked, or screamed, or flown out of my seat, or something, because my daughter looked away from the game long enough to ask if I was all right. (I assured her manfully that I was fine, after my brain returned to working order.)
Cataloging such feelings was good, but I wasn’t satisfied. I squeezed the toothy shard for deeper insight. Why me? Why now? Why here? Though the tooth might have failed anytime, fate had decreed that it would go at a hockey game, and the gods of fiction do not allow coincidences. I groped for an idea.
The gods of fiction don’t believe in accidents.
What if the hockey arena were haunted? What if it visited dental problems on fans who disrespected it, as an offering perhaps to the godlike, tooth-challenged figures who smiled down from the Jumbotrons? I warmed to the idea, which dovetailed with a number of frustrations I was experiencing with the fans around me. In fact, an entire system of paranormal justice sprang to mind. Not putting trash in the proper receptacle, for instance, a minor offense, could earn the offender a pang from a hitherto unsuspected cavity. Draping one’s legs over the row of seats in front, more serious, might be punished with a loose filling. And so on, all the way up to full puck-in-the-face retribution for capital crimes like hogging the armrests and taking up two spaces in the parking lot.
And my crime? What had I done to feel the wrath of the arena? As my daughter and I left after the game, I made a point of being extra nice to the usher who’d earlier asked to see my ticket when my hands were occupied holding beers and barbecue sandwiches. Regrettably, in that instance I hadn’t been as polite to the gentleman as custom dictated; the arena had taken note. I wanted no more trouble.
