dental distastes...

The moment I walk out of the dentist's office is the most satisfying...the artificial mint-flavored foam-fluoride taste lingers for a few more minutes, but I savor the exit knowing that this is the moment furthest in time from my next encounter with alien overhead lamps, sinewy metal scrapers, a spittoon that resembles a Georgia O'Keefe-inspired urinal design, fluorescent blue polish grit, and lectures about flossing.

Each visit is an act of surrender. This morning, I sat back in that awkwardly contoured chair, and was lowered to a negative slope like a misplaced algebraic equation on graph paper...all those years of compacted dextrose candy tablets, piraguas, slurpees, dulce de leche, and pasta de guayaba...now recorded in amalgam topographies along my enamel ridge line. I felt like an REI catolog being fondled by a millionaire hippie mountainbiker.

The hygienist talked, and I tried to reciprocate with polite banter, anything to ignore the symphony of whirls and chirps...the smell of the fluorescent blue polish, the temperature of the water whitewashing my enamel...the blasts of air from the annoying aluminum geyser.

My grandfather's two brothers, Alberto and Benjamin, were dentists. My mother's cousin, Berti, is a dentist. His daughter is also a dentist. Root canals, crowns, and bridges, run deep in my maternal family lineage.

During a summer day in the mid-1970's, I accompanied my cousin Joaquito to Berti's office. Joaquito had been newly diagnosed with his first cavities and needed fillings. We were about nine or ten years old. He asked me if they were going to give him an injection of anesthesia. I told him that they'd probably give him at least two. His eyes widened, and he said "ni' pal carajo!" So he refused the anesthesia and I watched in disbelief as his body tensed up, and endured the process. After we left the office, on our way to buy piraguas near the plaza, he smiled and bragged about how tough he'd been. His refusal that day was the single greatest act of idiotic bravery I witnessed as a child.

That moment with Joaquito scarred me, and in an odd nostalgic tribute or conscious mimetic reflex, I tense up just thinking of my next visit.