I didn’t like this dentist to begin with. He was always complaining about the neighborhood. I lived in the neighborhood. He had his office there. The basement of a brownstone by the park. His car was vandalized twice, and his wife, who I didn’t like either- she lost my insurance forms, was mugged transporting teeth to a lab down the street. Besides his complaining about the neighborhood, this dentist would step on my feet when approaching my mouth for dental procedures.
One day, the dentist and I were alone in his office. “The last customer,” he called me. His wife had left for the lab. I was gassed up and numbed with banana flavored needles for the second stage of a root canal. His root canals were always five stage events, like historical restorations. My face was paralyzed and I was starting to float from the chair toward a dusty fluorescent light fixture overhead. Until I noticed him. Throwing down the drill, the drill still going, and then slowly taking off his light blue dental shirt, revealing a yellowed V neck T-shirt and a red spotted chest with sprouts of black hair. He was looming closer like a dark cloud over my body.
Pig! I thought. Dental lust! All that polite leaning into me to remove my decay. It wasn’t my bad teeth he was after, or my insurance plan! It was me! As I began to struggle in a daze to sit up, he kept removing more items from his body - a watch, his gold BEST DENTIST charm and chain, and then he began fumbling with the zipper of his pants. But he didn’t stop me from sitting up. He was distracted by something behind me and was staring at the door.
He started shaking his pants upside down (they were in his hands now) pulling the empty pockets out. I tore the pipe, which was watering my mouth off my lip, and turned toward the door. Two teenage boys wearing wool caps were standing in the doorway. One of them held a knife and kept pointing it back and forth at me and the dentist. The other was poised like a waiter in a restaurant about to announce the specials, with a hand covered with a white cloth napkin. Except the covered hand was steadily aimed at me. Who knows what he had underneath it.
There were no words spoken. Everything was understood by where the knife was directed. I found myself standing by the dentist, Kellerman was his name, as this language unfolded. The boy pointed the knife at my watch. I gave it to him. He pointed it at my ring. I gave it to him. My bag on the back of the dental chair was his with the slightest gesture. Then the knife motioned us both to move down the hallway to enter the bathroom. We followed, and the bathroom door was slammed behind us. I could hear them jamming the door from the other side.
Kellerman and I stayed anesthetized with fear in his tiny bathroom for about fifteen minutes. Then Kellerman in his underwear, which I started to notice had small blue toothbrushes on it, threw his large body against the jammed door, and screamed, “I should’ve never got an office in this horrible neighborhood!”
I was sitting on the toilet, dazed at the sight, sound of him, and his discontent that echoed in the small space and fell on me. Starting to feel the numbness leave, I began to wonder if he would bill me for this stage of the root canal. Kellerman threw his body once more against the door. Thump. “How the hell are we gonna get of here!’’ he shouted.
How should I know, I wanted to yell back. You’re the dentist! I’m the patient!
I don’t remember when I first saw the toilet plunger. I jabbed him with the wooden tip of it and said in a slurred, cracked voice, “Try this.”
Kellerman took the plunger, leaned against the tiny bathroom sink, and with the stance of a warrior attacking a fortress, he ran three feet and jammed the plunger against the bathroom door’s edge. It worked. He rushed to the phone in the reception area where his wife usually sat and called the police, still armed with the plunger.
“You know you’re lucky you were never attacked,” he told me, as he sat down on a wheeled office chair that rolled him backward as he spoke.
He billed me two weeks later.
