October 17, 2007

It was refreshingly gray out, and I wore a jacket. Not so much because I needed it, but because I could, and because it's the time of year where one starts wearing jackets, sweaters, socks, layers; when you get to armor yourself after months of just a thin thin barrier between your skin and the hot air, your skin and others' skin on the bus. It's an advantage of having seasons.

But LA has something more like a gentle biannual phase shift. Just a few degrees and some smog-clearing rain. So three blocks from home I unzipped my jacket, and a block after that I took it off.

The dentist's office made me think of a blood donation center, or a shabby DMV branch -- low-slung cement and dingy windows that don't open, designed with the assumption of air conditioning.

I wondered if it might've been wiser to choose a dentist in Beverly Hills, or even just northeast of me in Los Feliz, where the well-off hipsters live.

I waited with my feet up on another chair, deciding that if they were offended, then next time they could be ready for me at my actual appointment time.

The dentist was a big guy with immaculate teeth and breath like my Sudanese friend in Chicago -- sweetly spicy like licorice maybe. Not bad really, but not minty fresh, either.

He overelaborated the importance of gum health, pointing at pictures of horrifyingly blackened tissue. I started to get the feeling it was more or less a sales pitch for the "deep cleaning" he was now recommending. I agreed to it, partly just to get him to put away the pictures, and decided to make sure my massage patter was both less repetitive and more encouraging.

An assistant came by to take my credit card to make the payment before the service. It seemed a little odd, but I figured it probably had to do with the poor immigrant populations around Hollywood.

The dentist tilted the chair back and, without warning, stuck a needle in the gums by my molars.

"Gngh," I grunted with surprise at the sharp pain. Had it hurt this much in the past?

The next jab, midway to the front, was even sharper, and I gripped the purse on my lap with both hands. Before I could take a breath, he jabbed again by my front teeth, and panicky pain seared through my head and down into my chest.

"Stop," I said, and involuntarily grabbed his arm to pull the damn thing out of my mouth. I wanted to slam my elbow into his fat face, but since that seemed impractical, my fury welled out immediately through my eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You could've warned me, dude -- I just needed warning," I choked out through alarming unwanted sobs.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he and his assistant watched me cry. "You have such nice teeth, you're not used to this," he said.

His assistant handed me a dixie cup of water while he raised the chair. I stared out the high square window and tried to breathe, choke-choking.

"Get her the gift bag," he quietly ordered the assistant. She must have gestured at the plastic bag sticking out of my purse. "Oh," he said, and I wondered if he would scold her later for being too quick with the gift bag. As if a free toothbrush and floss were deeply placating.

"I'm sorry, I've probably needed to cry all week -- I should've done it before I came here," I said, not sure if that made any sense to a dentist and his assistant. They just watched me. "Could you give me a minute?" I said.

"Sure, sure," he said, but kept watching me.

"I mean without staring at me," I said.

"Oh," he said, and they moved away, out of the semi-enclosed area, like a teeth-pulling cubicle.

I stared fixedly out the window and tried hard to breathe. When that didn't work right away, I tried to reassure myself by thinking about the fact that I was going home for a visit to Chicago in only a week. That seemed to have the opposite effect, so I went back to breathing.

After longer than I'd hoped, I called them back, let the chair be lowered down again. The assistant squeezed my hand nicely, and I tried not to think while he scraped and poked and plucked at my bits of exposed skull.

When it was over, I got up and turned the wrong way to leave, disoriented as if I'd just emerged from a train station in an unfamiliar city. I turned around and found my way out of the low-slung concrete, and escaped into the sunny day. The gray had cleared away already. I reached up and touched my lips, which were neither swollen nor drooling as it felt they might be.

I put on my sunglasses and crossed the street. The huge Mexican grocery store was right there, so I decided to check it out and get something in my stomach to settle me.

The entrance was in the back, through the parking lot that I'll almost certainly never use. I walked through the sliding doors and was greeted by a decent-looking array of produce. Not as well-lit or clean as the Korean grocery, but the avocados were 3 for $1, there was an assortment of cheep beer, the cantaloupes were $0.79 each, and there were frozen bean and cheese burritos for $0.69. I grabbed a few to try, figuring Mark would like them even if I didn't.

My left arm loaded with a cantaloupe, 3 avocados, and 4 burritos, I inspected a red tea kettle for a couple minutes, until I realized I wasn't feeling capable of making qualitative assessments, and put it back down. I looked at the mops, but like every other L.A. market I've visited, they only had the string kind, not the spongy kind to which I'm accustomed.

As I walked around, I noticed I was the only person there who wasn't Mexican, and wondered how much I stuck out. As I dumped my foodstuffs on the conveyor belt, I imagined the woman behind the register saying "Did you see that drooly gringa wandering around like a pollo perdido?"

I put the objects in my purse before they could plastic bag them. She counted out my change in Spanish, but said thank you in English. The pimply teenage bagger grinned at me, not with me, I felt, as I walked away.

On the walk home, my jacket tied around my waist, I looked at the pink houses, orange houses, green houses. I hadn't walked down that block before, but, I realized, I might get to a point where I knew each house by sight. This was a place I would probably come to a hundred times, over the next few years. I tried to imagine what that would mean:

I saw an image of myself as efficient and preoccupied, walking briskly home with a weekly quota of tomatoes and avocados, thinking about complicated issues of work, people, systems of organization, frustrations, and triumphs of which I don't yet know the shapes or names.

I turned a corner and found myself canopied by sycamore trees that leaned gracefully over the street. A breeze drifted over my face and arms. I took a deep breath, and it tasted green and good.