I have bad teeth.

I guess I was fated to have bad teeth. See, I'm on the far side of forty, which means I grew up before the age of enlightenment. When I was a boy, people didn't know what they know now. Even the high school coaches, people whose job it supposedly was to tune and mold our fine young bodies, knew no better. The basketball coach gave us gum to chew during the game, and soda pop after. And this was in the days before Trident and Diet Pepsi. . . the effect was like soaking our teeth in a concentrated solution of sugar-water.

Things weren't any better in terms of prevention. As I've said, public awareness was limited at best. Fluoride had arrived, but was still perceived by many to be a communist plot to pollute our water system. As a result, Crest toothpaste was fighting an uphill battle to convince the public that it was, indeed, "an effective decay-preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care." That was a bit of a mouthful for anyone, with or without good teeth, and not everyone was buying it. Crest did better after they shortened the slogan to, "Look Ma, no cavities!" God how I hated that exuberant, smiling eight-year-old kid who grinned his pearly whites at me on the one snowy channel our secondhand black and white TV could pick up in those days. No cavities. I remember when I was twelve years old going to the dentist, and, "Look Ma, eighteen cavities."

Eighteen.

It took four visits to fix 'em all. And the fourth, wouldn't you know it, was my two front teeth, which miraculously, had never been affected before. So all my previous fillings had been silver, and I had four anxious weeks to fantasize what my impending sex life would be like with ugly metallic fillings forever messing up my endearing smile. Which didn't happen, of course. My front teeth were filled with porcelain, or something white, which didn't look all that bad, and though I was an awkward, confused, nervous adolescent and my sex life was no great shakes anyway, I didn't have my dentist to blame for it.

My dental problems continued into my twenties. I never had eighteen cavities again, but I sure had a good, steady string of 'em. I also gained wisdom teeth, if not wisdom, and the subsequent painful extractions, including one from a Spartan sadist who didn't believe in Novocain. "Take aspirin," he counseled me, when I gurgled the word "codeine" through bloodied mouth after twenty minutes of cutting and slicing to retrieve broken off roots. I took, as I recall, the better part of a fifth of scotch, and never went to him again.

By the time I hit my thirties, all of my teeth that had not been extracted had been so extensively drilled and filled that it seemed to me if I got any more cavities, there wouldn't be anything left to hold the teeth together.

There wasn't.

It was in my thirties that I first became introduced to crowns. "Gonna need a crown," my dentist said, nodding his head judiciously, and quickly dispelled any thoughts of impending royalty by explaining what he meant was that there wasn't enough tooth left to hold a filling, and he had to file the sucker way down and put a cap over it. The cap was an artificial tooth. It was made of metal, sometimes with porcelain on top, in case it was near enough the front of the mouth to show. It didn't taste all that great, but what the hell, it was better than going straight to dentures, and as I reached the end of my thirties and one cap followed another, I came to the happy realization that soon all of my teeth would be metal, and there would be nothing left to go wrong.

Naive me.

Welcome to the wonderful world of periodontics.

A sudden excruciating ache in one of my long-since capped molars sent me rushing to my dentist, who immediately diagnosed an incredible abscess. Teeth, I learned, even capped teeth, have roots. And these roots, if not properly nurtured, can decay, erode, suffer bone loss, abscess, and seriously endanger the future of an otherwise perfectly fine capped tooth.

Needless to say, the abscess was but a symptom of the problem. All of my teeth were in this precarious position. What I needed, the periodontist told me, with what I thought was ill-disguised glee, was immediate and total oral surgery. Of course, there was no coercion used to impel me to do this. There was an alternative. The alternative was to do nothing and let all my teeth fall out.

I opted for the surgery. In doing so, I learned the reason for the periodontist's glee. The charge for the surgery was thirty-two hundred dollars.

This posed a bit of a problem. I am not particularly wealthy. In fact, I am not even solvent. I have a wife and kid to feed. And I live in New York City, where things are not particularly cheap.

And I'm self-employed. Stanley Hastings, Private Investigator. Don't take that the wrong way. I don't carry a gun or have car chases, or do any of that other stuff that immediately springs to mind when someone mentions P.I. But setting that aside, the fact is I'm self-employed. Which means I have to carry my own health insurance. And it's minimal. And dental isn't on it.

My thirty-two hundred dollar gum surgery required a bank loan. I'm paying my mouth off on time. And if that weren't bad enough, it turns out the surgery is just the first step. Then there's the maintenance. In order to keep my teeth from falling out, I have to go to the periodontist's every three months to have my gums retreaded at eighty-five bucks a whack by one of the bevy of attractive young hygienists kept for that purpose. I suppose I shouldn't complain. I'm sure in New York City there are places where I'd have to pay much more than eighty-five bucks to have a pretty girl hurt me.

Be that as it may, no matter what I do, the debt just seems to keep getting bigger and bigger, and my chances of ever paying it off smaller and smaller.

Which is why I didn't throw Marvin Nickleson out of my office.

Copyright © 1990 by Parnell Hall