They didn’t do that.
The nurse just held a spit vacuum in my mouth, that’s all.
At times I was choking on blood.
But then the nurse would just let me hold the spit vacuum to get the blood out.
The way the dentist worked on my teeth was very different than my old dentist.
My old dentist, the one my mother’s health insurance kind of paid for, would do one tooth at a time and then move on to the next one.
The state-funded dentist ground all three teeth up.
Threw the filling on top of all three of them.
Then did the laser pointer thing with all three.
It was as if she was making three ham sandwiches.
Very assembly line-like.
It went quickly though.
Soon my teeth looked good as new.
I was very happy about that.
Out of all the things that have come out, advances in technology, computers, cell phones, cars, etc. I would say if someone asked me, “If you could save one piece of technology from destruction, what would it be?” I would answer the technological advances in dentistry.
SOMETHING WAS MISSING
I was at a giant supermarket the other night.
It was three in the morning.
Delphine was with me getting food.
When we were waiting in line to check out.
I noticed the guy in line in front of us had something over his nose.
It was a plastic shield.
I realized why it was there.
He had no nose!
The man had no nose!
The man’s nose was gone!
It was fucking horrifying!
A GREAT MENACE WEIGHS OVER THE CITY
Back in ’96.
A fourteen-year-old girl and her little sister were walking down the street.
It was a sunny day.
Some clouds. But the pretty white ones.
The girls lived in a cramped apartment with a mother who was drunk all the time.
A stepfather who was drunk all the time and liked to take the phone apart to look at the wires.
A van pulled to the side of the road.
A man jumped out.
The girls stood confused for a second.
Then the man pulled his dick out and started jacking off.
The girls screamed and ran.
The man got back in his van and drove home.
He got home.
His wife was there.
He went to the living room and sat down in his favorite seat.
His wife came in and screamed at him, “You no-good piece of shit!
“You are so fucking stupid!
“Can’t you do anything!
“What’s fucking wrong with you!
“Go mow the lawn you lazy no-good fucking piece of shit!”
American Sketches
THE DISH TANK
When I was nineteen I lived and worked at the Grand Canyon.
I worked there for a month until they fired me for drinking.
I worked at El Tovar.
The most expensive restaurant at the Grand Canyon.
Presidents, rock stars, if you had money you ate at El Tovar when you went to the Grand Canyon.
One table of six could amass a six hundred dollar bill at dinner.
I worked in the dish tank.
The reason I worked in the dish tank was because I was American and not in a good college.
The Grand Canyon got workers from all over the world through some program I can’t remember the name of.
If you were from Russia, France, Iceland, etcetera they would put you in the front of the house as a busboy or server.
It also worked the same way with kids from good colleges like Yale and Harvard.
The reason they would have the foreign workers work in the front of the house was because the name tags at the Grand Canyon specified where you were from. And the rich tourists would look at the people’s name tags and see Holland or England and think it was great.
They also only had to work three to four days a week for no more than four hours at a time while dishwashers worked five to six days a week ten hours at a time.
The front of the house people made more money per hour than the dishwashers.
They made $5.35 plus tips. We made $5.35 with no tips.
The people who had to do dishes were Americans from states like Illinois and Ohio, and the Native Americans.
There were two dish areas.
A front area where plates, cups, and silverware were cleaned.
And a back area where pots and kitchen utensils were cleaned.
The room where the kitchen shit was cleaned was a hellhole.
The walls had all the paint crusted off.
The garbage was filled with dead fish.
Old soup.
Meat.
It smelled like hell in there.
The room was filled with steam from the hot water.
There was a metal stand to put the dirty pots on.
There was a small radio that played the Grand Canyon radio station which was just the same four bad songs over and over again.
There were three huge sinks.
One to soak the plates.
One to wash them.
One to sanitize them.
Two guys worked that room together.
For the month I worked there, I worked with about seven different people because the Grand Canyon fired people constantly.
When I first got there, the head of the dish tank was this deranged old wastoid named Chuck.
He was about fifty years old.
Had a handlebar mustache.
Had worked at over five national parks.
He once said this to me: “I remember one of my past lives. I was a slave master in the Old South. I remember being in charge of a huge plantation.”
I looked at him and said nothing.
He would talk like everything he said would be life-altering and earth-shattering, which is common among people who don’t know shit about anything.
The guy wasn’t miserable though.
He loved living in beautiful places and having new experiences.
Which isn’t bad.
I knew a lot of people way more intelligent than him back in Youngstown, but they never had the balls to be happy.
Even though Chuck was dumb as shit, he always found a way to live in beautiful places.
Then after a shitty day of work he could walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon or to the hot springs of Yellowstone and smile.
The second in command was José, a Hopi Indian.
He had the most horrible teeth I have ever seen on a human being.
They were all black and broken up.
They looked like black gravel in his mouth.
It was fucking horrible when he smiled.
José would work really hard and look miserable the whole time.
He didn’t talk much either and no one could understand what he said.
He had a really thick Hopi accent.
The weird thing about José was that he could disappear and reappear out of nowhere.
Like you would turn around and José would be gone or you would look back and José was standing there.
You would say, “José, how long you been there? You scared the fuck out of me.” And he would respond, “Like ten minutes.” It was fucking weird.
José was a drunk.
As were most of the Indians at the Grand Canyon.
Well hell, most of the Americans working at the Grand Canyon were drunks too.
José didn’t show up to work one day because he decided to not stop drinking while down in Flagstaff and they fired him.
Which was sad because he was a really good dishwasher.
I saw him before he left the Grand Canyon and he said that he was going to another park deeper into Arizona to work.