My Relationship with a Yellow Tooth

interest/tooth

The tooth fairy used to leave me quarters under my pillow. I know some kids who got dollars or Euros. I got quarters. Not that a quarter had any value to me. I didn’t know what I could buy with a quarter. Not much, even then. I talk like that was a long time ago. It wasn’t that long ago, but people have lived and died since I’ve been born. The unlucky ones, the family tragedies. I’ve known people who have lived and died within my lifetime. A quarter, though, has lost whatever buying power it had when I lost my teeth ten something years ago.

I lost another senior year of high school. In a rugby game. I got bonked, and even though I was wearing a mouth guard, my left front tooth cracked, I probably got a concussion, an hour and a half later the dentist pulled it out. No gloves, no warning, no Novocain, just in, back, snap, out. Left me with half a tooth.

Three days of being a high school senior with half a tooth missing. I lisped a little in French class. Then I got a root canal. The oral surgeon, at least, pumped my mouth full of Novocain. A nice gesture considering what happened next. Never mind the fucking around with my mouth, never mind the snipping of whatever is they snip in a root canal, never mind the ten minutes of noise in my mouth and feeling nothing and then WHAM, shooting pain behind my left eye, nose, and lip. I cried. But never mind all that.

What I’m talking about is before that, before the Novocain set in, before the snipping, before the pain, when the surgeon asked his assistant, “How was the wedding last weekend?” This was Monday.

“Wild,” she said. Already not what I wanted to hear.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, I’m still recovering,” she said.

Oh my. But I couldn’t say anything. The Novocain had just taken all life out of my tongue and left jaw. I would have sounded like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

“What were you drinking?” The surgeon asked. This was straying dangerously far from professionalism. They honestly might have forgotten they didn’t put me completely under.

But, see, that question isn’t even the worst part. Yes, it’s a little strange to hear your oral surgeon asking his assistant what she was drinking at a wedding two days before performing a root canal on a high school senior. Her response, on the other hand, really got me.

“Oh, what wasn’t I drinking.”

There. Right there. Right before this man snipped a nerve and made me cry. Holy shit. I’ll never be a dentist. I can’t manage that many magazine subscriptions. I also don’t like teeth. My own, yes, but not other people’s. I get jealous of people with perfect teeth, disgusted by people with disgusting teeth, and now, thanks to an unfortunate mouth guard, self-conscious. And I laugh a lot, which means my teeth are on display.

I’ll never forget what that assistant said.

You know the most interesting part of the whole thing? They put the wrong colored replacement in my mouth a few days later.

It’s a darker shade, bordering on yellow. For people who just meet me, it looks like a rotting tooth that might fall out during our conversation. How does that happen? Professionalism straight out the window.

Most of the time I forget it’s there. Until I walk into a job interview. I had an interview yesterday at a coffee shop. The owners were kind, the business going strong, I would really like a job there. But the whole time I was thinking: Wow, it must be strange to see my yellow tooth just sitting there, hanging on by a snipped nerve. Is it going to fall out? Is today the day?

I lied. That’s not the most interesting part. There’s one other thing that might take the honors. My teeth look straighter with the yellow crown than they did before my dentist ripped out my real one. Before that rugby game, my two front teeth were pointy, a little on the narrow side, and there was a small but visible gap between them, an isosceles triangle in the middle of my mouth. But then that same dentist put in the wrong colored crown and presto, straighter teeth.

Have you ever looked at Tom Cruise smile? Go look up a picture of him smiling and look at his teeth. They’re more off-center than a white supremacist. Tell me Scientology didn’t do that to him. I’m afraid now that I look like Tom Cruise. Teeth off-center, one yellow, nose broken in second grade and still lopsided when you look at it for too long.

I’ve gotten to the point in my relationship with my teeth that I think I’d rather have no gap and somewhat straight teeth, than look like a rabbit had his two front teeth shoved back into his mouth.

The saddest part of the whole story? The tooth fairy didn’t leave me a damned thing.