Floss Me, Doctor...

"Is it safe?"

I go faithfully every six months now, but in my early adulthood, I had a fickle relationship with dentists. I met Shelley when we were twenty years old, and we’ve been together ever since; but when it came to dentists, I had commitment issues.

I’m sure this reluctance is not unique to me. Who wants to go to the dentist? For me, it’s never been about pain. It’s more about guilt, much like how I felt in my Catholic childhood about going to confession. “Floss me doctor, for I have sinned. It’s been two years since my last appointment.”

The true guilt comes when the hygienist gazes inside my mouth, and with the skepticism of a mother catching a teenager sneaking in after curfew stinking of weed, always asks the same question. “Have you been flossing?”

This is not a question asked in good faith. It’s a question they already know the answer to. These are professionals who examine teeth all day every day. Your mouth is a cave, and they are highly trained speleologists[1] who can identify and carbon date every stalagmite of plaque growing between your incisors and your canines. They know exactly what’s been going on inside your mouth. They just want to know if you’re going to lie to them.

They’re like prosecutors springing a perjury trap.

“Have you been flossing, Mr. Skrovan?”

“Uh… sure…”

“Is that so? Then why don’t you tell the jury… WHY YOUR GUMS ARE BLEEDING!”

“I don’t know, Captain Hook! Maybe because you’re poking them with… A SHARP METAL OBJECT!”

Order! Order in the court!

In the old days, most dentists I visited lined their office walls with graphic photos of periodontal disease—images of skeletal grins showing red, swollen, receding gums. Much like renderings of the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno, these were not-so-subtle reminders of the damnation awaiting those who did not practice good dental hygiene. The Second Circle of Odontal Hell punishes souls who are driven by lust… for candy.

Thankfully, this rather Puritan approach to behavior modification has fallen out of favor. The dentist offices I frequent lately have adopted more of a spa aesthetic. Pleasant lighting, piped in easy-listening music, and in the case of my current dentist, a flashing catalogue of lovely photos he has taken on his many travels to exotic locales around the world.[2]

I noticed this change in the late eighties when the first LA dentist I saw had artful photos of desert outcroppings framed on his walls. Although, if I squinted a little, these jagged rocks looked strikingly like those old photos of gingivitis. Subliminal messaging?

In the midst of the Covid quarantine, a young couple with two delightful children, a seven-year-old girl, Annalie, and a four-year-old boy, Everett, moved in across the street. Under the watchful eye of their parents, the kids would ride their bikes up and down our quiet dead-end street. We managed to bond despite the social distance.

One day, Annalie excitedly bragged to me that she had lost a tooth. After chiding her for her carelessness, I asked her how much the Tooth Fairy had ponied up. Turns out it was a buck twenty-five. That’s at least five times more than I got back in the day, which admittedly was a day pretty far back.

I recommended she save that money, because the Tooth Fairy plan only covers baby teeth. Any permanent teeth she loses she pays for herself.

That’s a lesson I learned the hard way.

The Tooth Fairy had gone AWOL on me by the time I was in my twenties scratching out a living as a nightclub comic in New York City. During the stand-up “comedy boom” of the eighties, the New York comedians formed a professional association after one of our own had been hospitalized with hepatitis and no health insurance. We hooked up with an already established artists association that had a medical plan, and I was the one who found a dental plan. They’d start you with a free cleaning to establish a relationship with a dentist, who then would charge relatively reasonable prices for subsequent procedures – all laid out in a neat two-page brochure. Sixty-five dollars for a tooth extraction. A hundred and twenty for root canal. And son on.

It was mid-afternoon when I took the subway in from our apartment in Queens and stepped into a professional building on 57^th Street in Manhattan for the free cleaning promised by the comedians’ dental plan. Conveniently, I had just come from a commercial audition in the same neighborhood. I opened wide for the young dentist, who peered into my mouth and said, “Do those bottom wisdom teeth ever give you pain?”

I told him sometimes they would ache but that would eventually fade away. It was as if they were trying to poke their heads into the exclusive club that was my mouth “Studio Skro,” but were stopped by the bouncer, “Sorry, we’re all full up.” They’d slink away, “Fuck it, we’ll try again later.”

“One of them is pretty buried,” said the young dentist, “but I think I can get that other one out. I can do that today. Sixty-five bucks. Then you can come back later for your free cleaning.”

Flush with youthful idiocy, I said, “Okay.”

He shot me up with Novocain and started rooting around the back of my mouth with what felt like a post hole digger. After a couple of minutes, I thought something might not be right, when he braced his foot against the chair and started jerking my head back and forth like I was a dog hanging on to his favorite bone. Then after one mighty yank, I heard a snap, and the ambitious rookie dentist with a mortified look on his face muttered, “Oh, shit.”

He was holding the top half of my molar in his pliers.

Knowing in that moment he had just lost sixty-five dollars and most likely a new patient, he quickly excused himself to make a phone call while I remained in the chair to explore with my tongue the serrated edges of what was left of my obstinate wisdom tooth. Shortly, he returned, apologized profusely, packed my mouth full of cotton, and sent me around the block to his mentor, a veteran oral surgeon on tony Central Park South.

The business-like, seen-it-all, oral surgeon had the same disconcertingly calm demeanor of Lawrence Olivier from the movie Marathon Man, the Nazi dentist who loomed over Dustin Hoffman, intoning, “Is it safe?” He injected another dose of Novocain and shoved a piece of paper under my freshly numb jaw. This document was a release against liability just in case; while mining out the root of my molar, he accidentally severed a nerve. In that moment, it occurred to me that not much more than an hour before I had innocently strolled into a dentist’s office for a free cleaning. Now I was in the hands of what must be the fucking Father of Oral Surgery, who’s holding me hostage to the tune of $150 for a procedure that may result in my no longer being able to control the left side of my face, thus reducing my burgeoning stand-up career to impressions of Sylvester Stallone recovering from a stroke.

The FFOOS (Fucking Father of Oral Surgery) revved his dental saw like Elon Musk about to carve up the Social Security Administration. He sliced the rest of my wisdom tooth in half and extracted the pieces. He gave me a prescription for Percodan and sent my swollen yet apparently still functioning mug into the Manhattan twilight. Now it was going to be a race against the clock to get the pain killer before the Novocain wore off, all complicated by the fact that it was now rush hour, and I had to let two Double R trains pass before I could wedge myself into a third that pulled out of the station bulging like a Crayola box stuffed with too many crayons.

The unsuspecting Shelley met me at the door of our Queens apartment with the good news, “There’s a message on the machine. You got a callback for that audition!”

Great! Except, I can’t show up looking like Rocky the Flying Squirrel storing nuts in his cheeks. My ever-resourceful future wife sprang into action, scored the drugs, and then wrapped my head in a dish towel full of ice, tied on top like cute bunny ears. That was the extent of Shelley Nightengale’s mercy, because she spent the rest of the evening kicking my drugged-up ass in Scrabble. For the record, S-T-O-X-E is not a word in the English language.

The ice kept the swelling down enough that I made the call-back but didn’t get the gig, because I was still so high from the Percodan I couldn’t get a clean run through the copy without giggling uncontrollably.

I have no bitterness toward the rookie dentist, who much like myself was just trying to scratch out a living in the Big City. He’s probably retired by now, but I wonder if he remembers the time he snapped off the top half of a new patient’s tooth for a quick sixty-five-dollar payoff. And if he does, how does he tell the story?

That experience put me off dentists for another stretch of time. Five years later, when the hygienist peered into my mouth, she didn’t bother asking if I had been flossing. She knew she was going to have to rattle off the plaque between my teeth with a jackhammer.

As she worked, I squinted at the wall lined with artful photos of desert outcroppings.

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[1] One who studies caves.

[2] Much of Dr. Wertz’s far-flung traveling is for the volunteer dentistry he performs in underdeveloped countries, which he told me mainly consists of pulling out rotting teeth.