Speedboat

I once had a friend named Dennis who was a dentist. From age zero to twenty six he had perfect teeth. On the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday he was smacked in the jaw by cricket bat and spent thousands of dollars on reconstructive surgery because when you’ve had perfect teeth for twenty-six years you don’t waste money on dental insurance. The surgery was a painful and arduous affair and many casual observers of Dennis’s life thought that this would abhor the dental profession for the rest of his life. Those casual observers (as many before them) were wrong. On his twenty-seventh birthday Dennis phoned his father and told him that he was enrolling in dental school. His father’s response was one of annoyance as Dennis was calling from Palm Beach, and his father lived in Tucson. The call was therefore of a long distance nature. This was back when that sort of thing mattered.

“What are you stupid or something?” his father said. It wasn’t a question. It was closest to an observation. “Why aren’t you using the ringback service I set up! You think I’m made of money. Oh, look! Now you’ve made Mandy upset! She’s crying now, Dennis. I bet you’re fucking happy now.” Mandy was Dennis’s much younger sister. They didn’t share mothers. You understand. You don’t need to focus much on her. She doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The last time I will ever mention her is in the following paragraph.

And so it was that Dennis started dental school with many misgivings and a remarkably heavy heart. And so it was again that a short while later he graduated dental school and set out on his exciting new career path of looking inside mouths and making comments about what he saw. Nothing much had changed in the intervening years except that Mandy was now dead. A classmate of hers had brought a switchblade to school and had stabbed her and five other students. She was the only one that died. In a half hearted attempt to reassure parents, the school installed metal detectors and dedicated a memorial garden in Mandy’s honor. Dennis and his father spoke every month but had not talked about what had happened. By the time Dennis noticed their collective silence, it had now been long enough that he was pretty sure they never would talk about it. He did wonder how he would go about even bringing something like that up. “Sorry Mandy’s dead, dad.”

There’s an old, running joke within dental circles goes like this: dentists are around a lot of chemicals that are derived from heavy metals so they have a much higher rate of suicide. That’s funny. It was the kind of thing that Dennis would laugh at, red in the face and fun at the yearly East Coast Dental Convention. He would sit at the bar of the Downtown Newark Hilton and get wasted on Macallan 12 and wonder how his life could have become so comfortable and also so boring. He had morphine and anesthesia back at his office. He also had knives.

It’s nice when the universe sends you a sign and when Dennis was hit in the jaw with that cricket bat he felt wonderful because he finally saw clearly where his life was headed. He could hear all of the stars and planets and galaxies talking to him: “You’re going to be Dennis The Dentist,” they said, and they meant it. And it was good.

Dennis discovered three months into dental school that he hated dentistry. He could not stand the smell of the polishing material, and with advances in our nation’s fluoride programs, most of his job was dealing with polishing material. He also hated teeth. And mouths. And tongues. And the office storefront at Pike and Rose Plaza that he already knew would be his until he retired.

If he was a different kind of man (if he wasn’t Dennis The Dentist) he would have laid on his back in his backyard on the eve of his thirtieth birthday and screamed up into the heavens: “WHY?!” But that didn’t seem like something he would do so he didn’t do it. He just kept going, kept living. Frightened. What else could he do?

“How’s the practice going?” his dad asked over piles of smoked salmon and ritz crackers at his retirement party.

“It’s good. It’s great. I’m buying a speedboat.”

“Good,” said his dad. “That’s good. I’m proud of you.” It was the best moment of Dennis’s life.