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Hangout Review
The Dentist
Beverly Hills, Ca
November 9, 2004
When the nitrous begins to take effect–but before I’m off dreaming about beguiling and floating pandas in cozy sweatsuits–and my dentist has just begun to work on my teeth, I can see through his boxfresh, produced personality into his dirty, conniving core. He’s a scheming controller, this affluence stinking piece of shit. He hangs his own paintings on the wall and guilt trips his office manager about not going to his art opening. She, a pretty, equine-faced forty something, with giant gourdish fake breasts (that I imagine my dentist purchased for her), was bent over a desk when I first spotted her, her tits bursting pneumatically, angrily from her low-shouldered top, and I said, “Oh Jeez, Van! Look! Look!” But then she stood up, and they didn’t move back into place as normal breasts–any breasts, really–should. They just stayed put, defying the body they’d been forced into, daring me to look at them, threatening me to take pleasure in their peculiar structure. And in this office, a forgery of human values (even by its city–Beverly Hills’ standards), my heart is sullied, and I fall victim. I hate that I look at those fake fuckers. And I imagine touching them, as they lead their owner and me into one of the office’s four rooms, and I take the vinyl recliner. They feel cold, I think. The cold of a frozen deer on the side of Nebraska’s snow swept I-80, next to a smashed Caravan full of screaming, newly motherless babies. When I sit down, the assistant preps me for the root canal, sets the TV to Oprah, and questions me about the TV show, Lost. I’ve never seen, but she’s wholly interested, and the nitrous nosepiece doesn’t fit well over my glasses. The doctor comes in, looking all parts the rakish weatherman that learned his craft more from method acting than any scientific method. I’m getting a little stoned now, and I hate his cheery pretension. “I can see right through you,” I want to say. The assistant gets into Lost with him this time, and he doesn’t like it. He’s interested only in the breaks in her conversation, when he can shoot down her joy and point out the implausibility of the show. “Where’s it gonna go?” he says. “This is a movie plot. They can’t bring this to twelve episodes.” “I can feel your brain working.” I think. “I know this argument is another device for control. And fuck you for knowing ABC’s season schedule! Every Juicy-panted, Variety-reading motherfucker in this shitty little town is a show business expert. She likes the show. Allow her that.” He cuts off her commentary, asking for some instrument. Then he turns his attention to the TV, not even looking at my mouth as he scours the inside of my tooth with a three inch file. And before the pandas pull me off to the land of hugs and wallabies above the clouds, I swear to avenge …Whoops! …No….Oh, hey pandas! “No, I don’t feel anything.”
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