The Dentist

by Michael Moon for the Winter 2025 issue

I. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

I remember going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Greenwich Village one summer with someone from high school who would later become a rather close friend though we weren’t really all that simpatico at the time. We’d probably bagged a few beers each, most likely in the vicinity of Washington Square Park to kill some time before the midnight showing at the Waverly Theatre (now the IFC Center) on 6th and West 3rd.

In my Bermuda Triangle of memory, which thankfully hasn’t worsened all that much at fifty-four, I have to admit I’ve lost a considerable amount of plot & character and would be very hard-pressed to remember much about the film. What has stayed with me most about the movie though was Steve Martin’s memorable portrayal of the mad, sadistic dentist who tortures then murders his patients by employing the most unusual methods, e.g. feeding his victims to a genetically mutated, implausibly large and carnivorous human fly trap. I can’t explain it, but Steve Martin in an eye patch and lab coat flashes through my brain every time I’m scheduled to go in for a dental appointment.

II. But What If Impressionists Were Dentists?

The other thing I invariably think about in the dentist’s chair is my all-time favorite Woody Allen short story, “What If Impressionists Were Dentists?”, from his collection Without Feathers. Frankly, I don’t recall much from that story either, but I seem to remember it being structured around a series of correspondences between the impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh, reimagined as a dentist, and his brother Theo, whom I supposed Allen didn’t have to reimagine as doing anything else besides being a wealthy benefactor, whom both the historical and fictional Vincents relied on for financial support in order to continue their practices. The book was either gifted to me by an ex-college girlfriend, discovered in the used books stacks of The Strand, or possibly both. I do distinctly remember her pulling the battered copy off my shelf one lazy, snow-laden Sunday morning and reading that story out loud, barely getting it out between convulsions of laughter. It really was a masterwork of comedic writing, so much so that I’ve completely forgotten all the other stories in the collection.

The general impression I got from Allen’s story (bearing in mind I’d only been to a dentist once in my life at that point, and that was seven years earlier) was that dentists were seen as extremely precious people, with delicate egos in constant need of stroking, who lamented the lack of recognition for their practice among the more revered cardiologist, neurosurgeon, or even anesthesiologist.

III. My very first visit to the dentist 

My very first visit to the dentist was freshman year of high school. The dentist turned out to be the mother of a girl in the year ahead of me, whom I’d had feelings for since first setting eyes on her darkly smiling, curly locks on the very first day of seventh grade. I remember said unrequited crush’s mom complimenting me on how straight my teeth were, which flipped into genuine horror upon hearing that I’d never been to a dentist before.

I don’t recall ever going to a dental office in college either; or when I was in Brooklyn where I moved after graduation, living first in Brooklyn Heights, then Park Slope, then back to Brooklyn Heights again over the course of three odd years; or, for that matter, even in Seoul where I lived on and off for the next five, very much not working on the novel I’d intended to write there, but for what I still considered to this day a rather forgivable excuse: I was simply too busy falling in love with my future wife and running around demonstrating what good husband material I was and how malleable I was committed to becoming in her hands. Anyway, she wasn’t all that interested in the dental arts either.

It wasn’t until after our daughter was born and started developing teeth of her own that we looked into dental options in our neighborhood here in Jersey City. In fact, my second dental checkup was with my daughter’s pediatric dentist who’d playfully offered me a choice between sugar-free lollipop or smiley face sticker, but whose smile quickly vanished when I asked if she had cherry-flavored.

By my calculations, nearly twenty years have elapsed between my first and second dental visits. We felt like we should start going in for regular checkups and cleanings with a dentist for adults, which looking back on our early thirties, was cute of us to think we already were adults, but with baby in tow, we were certainly well on our way. We eventually got a referral from one of our daughter’s friend’s mom several years later for our current dentist who was married to one of her friends, whom my wife had actually met on several occasions when all the Korean-American moms with kids similar in age to ours and who lived within walking distance of our apartment would get together to socialize information and chat about all the unexpected personal transformations that tended to accelerate and accumulate at an alarming rate when living with small children. Though most of those friendships have cooled over the years, as was entirely natural with our daughters inevitably growing up and taking over responsibility for maintaining their own social calendars, we still go to the same dentist every year.

IV. Other pop cultural representations of dentists that come to mind, miscellaneously

• The dentist as sexual predator, as envisioned in an episode of a popular sitcom I recall bingeing all six seasons in a single, long, and solitary winter in the early aughts
• The dentist as inveterate golfer, though I’m not sure where I get this impression from
• The dentist as pushover husband whose wife is contemplating having an affair; for some reason, you don’t really see a lot of female dentists depicted in movies or on TV
• The dentist as impressionist?

V. The Root Canal, or How to Disappear Completely

Let me be unequivocal here, I have absolutely no issues at all with the dentist I currently see. He’s fast, his cleanings are top notch, he explains complex dental situations in a way that’s easy to understand, and talks you through every procedure with a gentle bedside manner. With all the dental work my wife and I have received over the years, you’d think we were making up for lost time. Come to think of it, he’s probably earned enough off our neglected teeth to pay for that semester abroad at the University of Madrid he pretended to gripe about his daughter not having even started packing for yet, with enough left over to subsidize that addition to his house he’s always wanted, but somehow I’ve never had to pay a nickel, though I am subjected to what feels like a lot of unnecessary x-rays.

There were two new interns in their late-teens or early-twenties observing and assisting with my root canal that day. I have to admit that I let their nervousness affect me. First, the dentist numbed my outer gums using a cotton swab to apply a topical anesthetic. Then he left me to watch the news while the feeling drained from the right side of my face. Open a new bottle, I heard him command one of the interns from somewhere behind me. He panned slowly into view holding a startlingly long needle, wearing a pair of ridiculous glasses outfitted with fully-adjustable mini-binocular lenses.

“I don’t want to lie to you, this is going to hurt maybe more than just a little.”

Without further ado, he angled the overhead lamp to illuminate the recesses of my molars, whose cavities betrayed a certain lack of wisdom when it came to regular flossing, before injecting another numbing agent, this time into the roof of my mouth, while pinching my cheek, which hurt more than the actual needle. Their three masked faces huddled over me and hovered around a halo of blinding light. Okay Mr. Park, let’s get started and see if we can’t get you out of here by 3:30. He turned to the male intern and asked for some dental tool I’d never even heard of and whose nightmarish name I’d failed to catch as my tightly-balled fists held onto nothing. The male intern’s face dropped out of my field of vision. Suction! The female intern handed the dentist a rubber tube whose end curved into a hook, which he hung off the corner of my mouth, then rested his gloved hand on my face, prying open my mouth with his fingers, which meant I both smelled and tasted rubber. You have to be careful twisting off the cover, he warned, shaking his head, otherwise, you’ll break the instrument. It’s very delicate…and expensive. He inserted said sharp, metal instrument into my mouth and proceeded to scrape away the temporary filling he had set two days prior during my initial visit. All three faces leaned in again for another closer look, which I always found extremely unsettling and more than a little upsetting, such that I just had to close my eyes. 

I’m not here. This isn’t happening.

I’d inadvertently kept in my left earbud, but felt fortunate when my favorite Radiohead song rose to the top of the playlist because, even if it was playing at pretty low volumes, it was still audible enough to serve as a distraction. 

“We don’t put anything on the patient’s chest,” the dentist chided. I opened my eyes to glimpse the female intern quickly pick up a handheld light that I hadn’t even realized had been placed there. She apologized, and I said it’s alright, but between half my face being numb and my mouth fully occupied with gauze pads, several fingers, and a scraping tool, the sounds came out all garbled. She seemed to understand the intention though behind what I’d been trying to say from tone and context alone, even if her apology had been misdirected, IMO, at the dentist.

A salty sweat drop

that evades the dentist’s sleeve

drips into my mouth

“Alright, I need another x-ray on upper R5.” He pulls off his binocular glasses and uses his sleeve to dab at his forehead. I am filled with an indescribable rage and disgust, and yet find myself composing conventional—or old-fashioned, depending on who you ask—haiku, which I suppose isn’t really all that strange because, after all, I’m not really here and none of this is actually happening.

It hadn’t even occurred to me until I’d taken out my earbud that I shouldn’t have kept it in during all those x-rays. Wasn’t that dangerous? I recalled overhearing the dentist ask my wife to remove her earrings and necklace on previous visits before she was asked to bite down on the cylindrical, handheld contraption wired into the x-ray projector. It felt a little like my brain might already be buzzing from all the technological insults, which I hoped caused no permanent damage, or it may have just been psychosomatic. After all, your body is the only object in the world you have telekinetic powers over (which I dare science to disprove).

“That was in this whole time? Huh.” The dentist made no further comment, and I didn’t ask any follow-up questions. “Okay, meet me at the front desk. We need to schedule the crown fitting.”

All told, I’d spent a torturous two hours in the chair and left the dental office feeling gently violated. But despite having my sympathies grown more closely aligned with The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s portrayal of dentists as demented, I’d agreed to come back in three weeks’ time after my trips to Delaware and Texas and his trip to Spain between my two trips.

A desire not to stay too close to home or endure too long a drive landed us in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, just beyond the familiar bounds of the Jersey Shore, which I playfully pronounced the Joy Z Sure in my thickest native accents for most of that weekend to no one’s amusement but my own. We stayed two nights, breakfasted in the hotel both mornings, drove twenty minutes to what was advertised as a world-renown boardwalk, parked the car, set up camp in the sand on a recently vacated site, was chided by an old lady wearing a colorful collection of lanyards—at the end of the one she held out for examination was an official-looking, laminated municipal-issued ID that had the name Sharon White printed on it underneath a photo of a much younger version of her—for my improper beach umbrella set up though I’d taken care not to block anyone’s view of the Atlantic, dipped our feet as swimming wasn’t allowed due to a hurricane further off the coast that was roiling the waves into walls of water reaching two stories high before they came crashing down on the shoreline, reconfiguring it with every ebbing and knocking over those who had ventured too far out and got in trouble with the lifeguards who whistled sharp, metallic reports while gesticulating wildly to stick closer to the shoreline. The beach along with the crowds enjoying its bounties continued into vanishing points to both the north and south for as far as the eye could see. A mad flock of seagulls numbering in the hundreds of thousands circled and darkened the skies. People raised their phones to take videos to post on social media later once they got somewhere with decent wi-fi. There was something sinister in the shape-shifting/fluttering curtains effect that their sheer numbers created. I remember we had a greasy lunch on the beach and zoned out the rest of the afternoon. 

“Hey, isn’t that our dentist?” The three of us all craned our necks in perfect K-pop unison to peek out from underneath our properly readjusted beach umbrella. 

Well, well, so it was.

“I thought you said he was traveling to Spain to drop off his daughter?” 

“That’s what he told me.”

“Huh, don’t you find that just a little odd? Wait, look…is that his daughter?”

“Maybe…oh no, no definitely not.” My daughter and I make, then immediately break off all eye contact. Our dentist slid his hands down his young companion’s back, and pulled her closer at the waist, planting a long, lingering, sloppy even from a safe distance kind of kiss somewhere along this slow, sensual process. It was an understandable mistake though; she was young enough to be his daughter after all. My wife and I exchanged looks, then she turned to look at our daughter, while I turned to look at the latest batch of tides battering the shore. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my wife pointing her phone’s lens at the dentist to snap a series of photos. She shrugged off the judgmental look I lobbed her way. 

“Evidence,” she explains vaguely.

In Austin, the only people wearing cowboy hats were from out of town. It didn’t help that mine gave off considerably stronger migrant farmer vibes than the badass, gun-toting hombre ones I’d actually been going for. The secondhand hat was woven from straw that made my head itch. The four of us had flown in from Newark, New Jersey, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, California, and the part of Switzerland where Italian was spoken. Our driver from the airport, a feisty mom with strong opinions and deeply local roots by birth, referred to Austin in a rather denigrating drawl as West Cali while weaving dangerously in and out of traffic at knuckle-whitening velocities.

It’d been fourteen years since the four of us had gathered together, so we crammed as much fun as we could into the three nights we were able to wrangle from other obligations as if making up for lost time. We gorged ourselves on Texan barbeque and beer, swam in pools, rivers, and natural springs, wandered in a daze through late-night crowds, swollen from it being the Labor Day weekend before classes at the University of Texas started, past windows where the drugged and drunken youth inside played at being musicians, dancers, singers, comedians, or gawkers, all out looking for a good time. We mugged for the camera in front of waterfalls and rivers and tables covered in slow-cooked meats and alcohol and took videos of each other singing karaoke to show our wives and children back home, as if to say, Yes, we actually did it! We revelled in nostalgia for the old boomer music we grew up on as well as the overlapping enthusiasms derived from more recently consumed films, news articles, novels. Before we knew it though, we were already packing it in and parting at the airport where our paths diverged towards different boarding gates on opposite ends of the terminal.

My return flight was delayed twice, so I ended up losing several hours due to the air traffic controller shortage over at EWR, which never occurred to me before probably came from nEWaRk airport, so as not to get confused by foreign visitors with airports in New York. I looked up how much air traffic controllers earned, but dropped it when I learned you had to apply before turning thirty, which I had blown past decades ago.

I couldn’t concentrate on the blockbuster action movie running on the tiny screen attached to the seat in front of me or make much sense of the sentences that comprised the new work of autofiction I had up on my phone and had been looking forward to reading all summer. Stray bits of dialogue from the past several days kept drifting in one ear and out the other, disrupting any narrative from cohering properly: Hot Italian sausage? Oh yeah, now you’re speaking the language of love. We were very different, sexually; I had appetites aplenty, while she, not so much; now we’re finally somewhere in the middle. Laid off? That sucks. People keep saying that to me; I’m almost embarrassed to admit that that hasn’t been my experience at all of what from the outside probably just looks like I’m unemployed. I’d say liberating, or invigorating, maybe? At first, getting old is kinda novel; but then getting old just gets old, too. Why are we even listening to this dipshit talk about lenses? Ask me again later as your non-compete comes to a close. You wanna take these rubber bands with you, you know, just in case? I seem to recall at least a couple of episodes where they really helped MacGyver get out of a jam. That’s so Hollywood; I say this of course from a place of deep-seated love and jealousy. No, you’re thinking of Little Shop of Horrors. Steve Martin wasn’t even in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I’d tuned out of the conversation for a bit after that correction to wonder whether I should be more concerned about having confused the two musicals in the first place. Sure they both counted as bizarre cult classics, but they were so fundamentally different! Maybe there was something to all the offhanded remarks my wife had started making with increasing frequency these days concerning my mental acuity. Maybe I should go in for some routine screenings of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Even as I conceded the point, I knew I wouldn’t actually go through with it, unless she took the trouble to make all the arrangements herself. That way, at least, I could be guilted into going.  

When I finally reached home, the dog was the first at the door to greet me. His tail was a blur with wagging. In fact, he was so thrilled to see me, he started squirting all over the place, which I put off cleaning in favor of embracing my wife, who’d stood above us, smiling down beatifically with infinite love and patience. She must’ve just showered; her still damp hair smelled like a stroll through strawberry fields. I whispered that I could understand our dog’s feelings now, pausing to let the enigmatic overtones broaden before supplying an explanation. If I had a tail, it’d be wagging like crazy right now, too. I missed you. Missed you, too. How many times, I wondered, have we exchanged those exact greetings, held this exact intertwining pose? A singular sensation spread through me just then that felt like every life-altering decision I’ve ever had to make on my own had miraculously turned out to be exactly the right ones, since exactly those decisions had to have been made, precisely when and how they were, in order to bring us to this exact and perfect picture frame of space & time. I thought for a moment, but try as I might, I couldn’t even recall who had just said what, as if just a minute ago was suddenly synonymous with ancient history. I grew conscious of her ever-expanding presence rippling its warmth through me and infinitely in all directions. Under those specific set of circumstances, I supposed it didn’t really matter who said what first so much as my gratitude for our somehow reverberating in indistinguishable, psychological sync.

VI. The crown fitting

“How about Monday morning then?”

“Mmmm, do you have anything in the afternoon?” I liked to leave my mornings open for composing and listening to music, but didn’t feel like telling him that.

“Yes, I think I can fit you in right after lunch. 1:30, okay? Okay, why don’t you go ahead and take a seat in the waiting room?”

It had started off as one of those polite conversations consisting mostly of questions.

The cozy waiting room had enough seats for four patients, maybe five max if three of the people already knew and actually liked each other. Academic credentials and professional certifications tastefully framed hung from each wall alongside dental product advertisements and patient testimonials. Several of the testimonial letters, written in crayon, seemed suspect based solely on the probability that children who composed letters to their pediatric dentists in purple crayon wouldn’t have phrases like “top-notch” in their vocabulary. The impressive assortment of magazines on the corner table, within easy reach from wherever one was seated, displayed a surprisingly literary bent. 

In the waiting room, I closed my eyes and flashed back to Texas, flashed back to Delaware, flashed all the way back to my earliest memories playing back at speeds pushing a thousand x real time and just as vividly as when they were originally forming. Maybe it was down to my humble origins, but I found it funny how I hadn’t wanted to make any of my college friends uncomfortable by discussing the financial concerns that began to warp family discussions at home once the unemployment insurance payments stopped coming in and my wife grew increasingly alarmed by the ease with which I was still taking things, with no secure income on the horizon, just like when she finally agreed to marry me, lol. It was easier in a way to discuss financial concerns with the friends who’d grown up as resourceless as I did rather than the ones I’d met in a private college that was as flush with cash as its natural landscapes were lushly beautiful.

The dentist returned.

So Dr. Song, you never said how your family trip to Spain went? Get your daughter all settled in for the fall semester?

Mmmhmm, yeah all good, he drawled uncertainly, pretending to be distracted examining my latest batch of x-rays. 

You said you wanted the crown in porcelain, yes?

Yes, I’d considered gold, joked about jade, and settled on an inconspicuous mother of pearl porcelain. 

VII. The closing bit

My wife was happy for me to spend time and money on old friends, which I was admittedly doing a lot of lately, and even encouraged my musical pursuits, but it was my cavalier attitude in the end that she just couldn’t countenance, much less my easy, unwarranted confidence that everything would just work out in the end. 

I think my wife’s concerned that I’ll get too comfortable in my unemployment, which is really pretty funny when you pause to think about it because my main concern is how little time I actually have left to put out and promote a new album before my non-compete clocks out and I get too busy for personal projects, too busy for a lot of the family stuff I’ve been deriving so much joy from lately, and stressed to the point of perhaps inducing another major nervous disorder. But between the will and way I go. 

I guess the first test I’d had to pass was whether I could still write songs that were even worth the listen, and then whether I could generate enough of them to release an entire album, which I supposed was an outdated format, but Gen X is outdated after all. Facts are facts. But if there were a Mr Brightside to twenty soul-eroding years of day-in-day-out, it’s the modicum of discipline it ingrained in me to really exploit the unpredictably volatile bursts of creativity that I never really did anything with before. Honestly, I’d been too busy starting a family with the woman I fell in love with to even care. So it turned out that some facts are also opinions, or at least disguise themselves as such.

I watched my daughter, who’d been putting off her return visit to seal up a couple cavities, scroll through her phone as I turned the page on a New Yorker article I hadn’t actually read and mainly held in my hands as an alibi for my eyes. She smelled of mature sweat and fierce effort and was still in her tennis clothes since we didn’t have time to stop by the apartment first. She snorts and starts smashing the surface of her phone in an all-out thumb war. After a message sent bloop sounded on her phone, I tried testing out her receptivity to a little light-hearted banter.

You know, I think I’m okay shaking this dentist down for a small donation to my new LLC, I volunteered completely unsolicited. We have the pictures. Of course, I’ll throw in a gesture of good will by subjecting my physical body to the maximum number of x-rays that our dental insurance is willing to cover for the next couple of years or so, so it’s really the insurance company funding this shakedown. And who knows? Dr Song may even stand to profit from it himself as long as my brains don’t get fried. It’s really a win-win type situation when you stop to think about it.

Strike one.

I know you don’t want to encourage parental prying, I said casually, after letting a sufficient length of silence pass unremarked, but a certain amount of information does need to be volunteered for a conversation to actually work. I felt a bit hypocritical—and manipulative too, but only in hindsight—saying this and thought of the vague impression I’m aware of having left many an evening out carousing with old friends and acquaintances, due to my long habitual social M.O. of volunteering next to nothing of myself, which no one ever seemed to notice anyway as I tend to hold up my end of the conversation, albeit largely in the form of supplying running commentary, asking followup questions, interjecting flash back jokes, et cetera; in other words, generally reinforcing rather than enlarging whatever discussion I partook in. I could then reveal/perform more of myself under completely controlled conditions. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t help myself from pointing it out in her. But really, who could possibly fathom the deepest mysteries of human psychology with any degree of confidence when it changes so wildly, so malleably from underneath the weight of simply being observed? I wouldn’t place any real money on dentists, or impressionists for that matter—they’re just too sensual a bunch—but perhaps I’d be willing to wager a modest amount on solo performance artists. I didn’t know how these things came to pass exactly, but it seemed to me that they’re the ones making most of the insightful statements that society needs to hear these days.

She looks up briefly from her phone and performs a brittle little smile instinctively, without really knowing why. Probably just not paying attention, so strike two.

Sometimes it’s enough to just say you’re going to do the right thing, out loud, you know, to begin to feel bound to your word, reinforcing its value, which may just tip the balance into committing yourself to actually doing the right thing. Like I’ve always said, with a shake of my head, these are mostly just mind games for solitary times.

“Mr Park? I’ll see you first. We’re just going to need a few more x-rays. For both of you.”

My daughter and I exchanged knowing grins. 

Strike three, I’m out. 🏁

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