Night of the Living Dentist

Illustrations by Yasiman Ahsani.

By the time we’d left the party, the tool belt on my hips was no longer weighed down by White Claws. I’d chosen to put my costume’s accessory to good use: getting as drunk as possible on a budget. This was important at 23. Almost as important as my Ty Pennington costume.

Ty Pennington from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a man with a small soul-patch and frosted tips. He tears down a house and creates a dream home for a family. Or, at least he did on the early-aughts feel-good reality television show. He was my blueprint for the perfect Halloween costume: something obscure, yet still recognizable enough to be funny. Also a man. Over the years I dressed as Colonel Sanders, Billy Mays, and Alex Trebek. During my first Halloween dating my boyfriend, we went as the MythBusters.

We arrived at the party house, a small Craftsman with a fenced-in garden on the edge of busy 35th Avenue NE. Its neighbor to the north was Loyal Heights Cemetery. We pushed open the garden gate and entered the party. Music thumped. People filled every available space. Every time someone asked who I was and I told them, they’d exclaim. I kept shouting, “Move that bus!” and drinking my tool belt Claws.

At one point, I marveled at a girl dressed as a dragon in a scaly mini dress and a long furry hat. She sucked on her vape and exhaled smoke rings. I made her pose for a photo shoot. A lumberjack played beer pong in the background.

Later, sufficiently drunk and tired, Tonio, Frieda, Nicole, and I stepped outside into the quiet late October air. A gust of wind swept the leaves at our feet. We were only 20 blocks away from home. Should we Uber? we wondered.

“Let’s walk,” someone said. “It’s not far.”

Probably, it was me who said that. Concerned about making small talk while dressed silly, the walk seemed like a better option than calling a stranger to pick us up.

Across the street, we spotted a LimeBike.

“We could bike!” I said.

A few weeks before, at Fremont Oktoberfest, my boyfriend Harry and I had experienced the joy of a drunk LimeBike ride. Tipsy from bottomless beer, we found two bikes and put the lipstick plant we’d purchased into one of the bikes’ baskets. We pedaled 5.1 miles across the city. Along the Burke-Gilman’s protected path, things were fine. They got dicier as we crossed the ship canal and climbed into Capitol Hill, biking alongside the freeway and then up impossibly steep 10th Avenue. Our bikes swerved as we pedaled. We laughed in between huffs of breath. When the stupor wore off inside Harry’s apartment, we realized the risk we’d taken. We’d been stupid. Arriving safe and sound was a freebie.

The universe punched my drunk bike-riding ticket when I swung my leg over the bike, kicked off, and immediately toppled over. I fell with a crunch, landing face-first on a cinderblock at the base of the cemetery’s fence.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” my friends asked.

I sat up. Blood poured from my lip. A dull, persistent thud pounded in my mouth. Please no, please no, I thought as I slid my tongue over my teeth to investigate.

It hit something rough, pointed. Something that couldn’t be my tooth.

“How bad is it?” Still seated on the ground, I opened my mouth. Frieda, Tonio, and Nicole leaned in to look.

Nicole’s eyes widened. “Um,” she said. “It’s a little broken.”

I fumbled for my phone in my tool belt. I first caught sight of myself on the dead black screen. My heart sank. I had to be certain. I swiped the camera open and stared at myself, smiling into the phone the way I’d done thousands of times before.

Every selfie I’d taken—and I’d taken a lot—had angled slightly upward, making my wide, straight grin the centerpiece of every snapshot. My whole life people commented on my smile. My stepdad often marveled at how I could “turn it on like that,” and he’d snap his fingers. I remember a tour guide on a family vacation calling it “a thousand-watt smile” as he snapped our family’s Christmas card photo. It was my best asset. My eyes are too small for my face, but they crinkle up into half-moons whenever I smile. They’re gobbled up by my teeth, by my outward performance of joy. My teeth are my smile and my smile makes my face make sense.

Footfalls pounded behind me. Tonio kept pace. Nicole and Frieda followed behind.

“Nat, Nat! Harry’s on the phone,” Frieda panted. I ground to a halt.

“What’s going on?” His voice sounded small and distant thousands of miles away on a weekend trip in Atlanta.

I mumbled what had happened.

“You’re beautiful no matter what,” he said.

He had no idea, I thought. He hadn’t seen the mess of my mouth.

“You don’t know that,” I cried. I hung up and kept sprinting.

Panting after running up the hill that is 75th Street, I fumbled for my keys and let myself in our front door, letting it slam behind me. In my room, I disrobed and slunk into the bathroom. The shower sputtered on. I stepped inside and poured shampoo on my head, scrubbing desperately and unsuccessfully to get the yellow out of my hair. I heard my friends come in. They called for me. I didn’t respond. I slipped out of the bathroom into the hallway, avoiding them. I climbed straight into my bed and searched “emergency dentist.”  

Too few hours later, my eyelids tugged free of last night’s crusted-over mascara. I blinked awake into the still-dark of not-yet-dawn. Sleep! I’d been asleep. Maybe that meant…

I sucked in a breath and hoped as I checked my teeth. As soon as I felt the jagged edge, I yanked my finger away. It hadn’t been a dream.

I pulled myself out of bed and stood in a pile of Ty Pennington’s clothes, shed like outgrown skin in a heap on my floor. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror as I tugged on my regular clothes. A yellow residue coated my hair and hairline. A shadow of a soul patch stained my chin. I gathered my sticky hair into a knot under a Hamilton: The Musical baseball cap.

My emergency dentist appointment—the only one I could find on a Sunday while searching drunk in my bed at 2 a.m.—was in Issaquah. The house creaked around me as I crept outside. My knuckles whitened around the keys clutched in my hands. In the driver’s seat, I checked my texts to see if my stepmom had fulfilled my late-night request: Could she send me a copy of my dental insurance? There it was, along with an “Oh no! I hope you are okay,” from her. As I reversed out of my driveway, in the rearview mirror I couldn’t look my reflection in the eyes.

“How did this happen?” the dental hygienist asked. “Riding a bike,” I said, leaving out the part where I was drunk and it was Halloween and hoping she couldn’t smell the hairspray or see the hangover threatening to consume me. “Well, you’re lucky it’s the front teeth,” she said. “Not much chewing involved. Back teeth are so much worse. ”

I took this to heart. Maybe this would be as easy a fix as I’d hoped. I could be in and out of here in no time, back home with working teeth like this had never happened. Little did I know how wrong I was and how wrong she was.

When the dentist dropped in, he looked fed up. I re-explained my incident. “And how old are you?” he asked. I told him. “So young,” he said. There was a “tsk” in his voice, an unsaid “and so stupid.”

He poked around in my mouth with gloved fingers. One front tooth remained intact, while only half was left of the other. The neighboring incisor had a chunk missing, too. “We can’t save either of these front teeth,” the dentist said.

Wait, what? Couldn’t they glue the tooth back together and send me home?

It was never that simple. The broken tooth was too far gone for a patch job. And a fissure ran through the intact tooth, threatening its viability. It would inevitably die. Or, at least, that’s what the dentist told me. “You’ll need two crowns,” he said.

Dentistry and I had never exactly jibed. The enamel on my baby teeth never fully formed, so I spent much of my youth in the giraffe-covered walls of my childhood dentist’s office, with drills in my mouth filling cavities. However, I’d never had any dental procedures beyond that.

Desperate to return home with two front teeth that day and to feel whole again, I signed the paperwork. I texted my parents asking them for the necessary cash. I did not ask for help or advice or think about a second opinion. I was already in the chair. I would leave with my hands washed of this whole thing.

They stuck needle after needle into my gums since the novocaine failed to last all four hours of the procedure. Awake and alone, I sat as they grinded away at my teeth. The dust blew up into my nose, acrid and chemical. Their tools whirred and buzzed. When the instruments made contact with my teeth, the vibrations reverberated throughout my whole skeleton. “Turn your head this way,” the dentist said, pulling my jaw so my head tilted toward him. His belly brushed against my face. I almost enjoyed the contact, convincing myself it was comforting and not clinical.

Hours later, the dentist left me alone while he went to make my fake teeth. Flakes of the rubbery cement mold hardened on my lips. I could see my reflection in the metal of the medical light above me. Tentative, I opened my mouth. In the small reflection, I saw the outline of the two nubs that now stood in place of my front teeth. I looked like Gollum. I cringed and vowed to never see myself that way again.

As she stuck my fake tooth on, pressing and pulling at the same time, the dental hygienist chatted about the front desk woman.

“Debra has a crown on her front tooth,” she said. “One day, it slipped out of position while she was talking to me. She was horrified!” The hygienist laughed. “Good thing she works at a dentist’s office!”

I don’t know if she thought she was being reassuring, but the hygienist’s comments terrified me. Crowns could fall out? I did not like reckoning with the impermanence of what felt like a very permanent procedure.

“The material is not sturdy enough,” the dentist said. “If we make it too thin, they will break.”

I said the teeth felt better. They didn’t. I did not go back to the Issaquah dentist. And, because I was 23 and had only been to a dentist once in six years, I didn’t have a fallback option, or someone I could trust.

Through a recommendation from a medical doctor, I found someone who I will refer to as Dr. S, a dentist and certified jaw pain expert who charged $200 for an initial consultation. This convinced me of his expertise.

Inside Dr. S’s downtown Seattle office that looked more like a study than a dentist’s office, I peered through the spaces between criss-crossing plastic on the contraption encasing my skull. Dr. S called the plastic headpiece a “football helmet.” Skyscrapers crowded the view of the room’s 14th-floor window. No matter. All I could focus on anyway was the Encyclopedia of Pain, the biggest spine stuffed inside the crowded bookcase.

Dr. S tapped an alligator-skinned cowboy boot as he observed the football helmet’s findings on an ancient computer. He was perched on a leather chair, his tweed suit creased neatly. He turned toward me then, his white hair gathered away from his face in a small ponytail, his bow tie stuck under his throat.

“Push your jaw out,” he said. I obeyed. He hummed as a bar of red grew on the screen behind him, mirroring my movements. Red did not seem to be a good color.

The nodes attached to the back of my neck and my temples buzzed faintly. I followed his instructions. The cut on my lip burned. My teeth—were they even my teeth anymore?—ached. Dr. S had read the Encyclopedia of Pain. Surely that meant he could fix mine.

Numb and in denial about my circumstances, I did not do any research on Dr. S. If I did, maybe I would’ve seen the Yelp and Google reviews calling him a grifter, a snake oil salesman, a fraud. “He should not be practicing and hopefully will get his license revoked,” one Google review read. “Avoid him!” On a website called Ripoff Report, which I now know exists, a post under his smiling face reads, “This dentist is a total scammer who rips off patients at all costs and tries to collect as much money as he can from them without caring and providing the right type of treatment.”

Dr. S’s cure for me was an “appliance”—a special kind of mouth guard meant to fix my jaw function. It cost thousands of dollars and was only partially covered by insurance. He took scans of my head, my mouth. He analyzed my face. Looking at the inside of my throat, he told me never to gain weight or I would develop sleep apnea. When would we put in the permanent crowns, I wondered? 

“When my jaw was corrected” seemed to be the answer. I got the appliance, a flimsy piece of plastic that balanced my teeth in a way where they almost sat normally in my mouth. As I sat in his chair hooked up to sensors, a crew of other dentists poked their heads in to observe. They had all learned from Dr. S. “You’re with the best,” one told me. 

Months went by. At a progress appointment, while measuring my jaw function—could it slide forward smoothly? Open wide without hitching?—I noticed his medical assistant spoke with a new lisp. She wore the appliance, too. “He treats me and my son,” she told me, fawning. He gave her a discount because she worked there. I noticed braces on the front desk lady, too, as I tapped my debit card.

The pandemic began. Appointments stalled. My front teeth were still encased in the same temporary crowns from Issaquah. Made from a cheap resin composite that’s rough and porous, they are meant to last between two and four weeks. Two months if they must. Mine had been in my mouth for almost five months. They looked gray and jagged. I learned to smile with my mouth shut. 

In May of 2020, Harry took me to Kubota Garden in South Seattle. We both had pandemic-era botched haircuts; he rocked a terrible, scraggly COVID beard. My temporary crowns were now six months old. The rhododendrons flowered. “Let me take your picture,” he said, asking me to pose among the flowers. I had never felt uglier in my life. After keeping it all in for half a year, I broke down. Fat, frustrated tears rolled down my cheeks, wetting my handmade cloth mask. 

“You need to find out when you are getting new crowns,” Harry determined. 

At the next appointment, I did. Dr. S put the procedure on the books. But they would not be permanent. My jaw still needed fixing. First, he had to make new teeth. They would be semi-permanent—a step above temporary, but not the smooth porcelain of the long-lasting versions. He yanked off my temporary crowns, which really does feel like your teeth are being pulled out of your jaw. I had brought in a mold of my mouth that the Issaquah dentist had made after the accident, when one of my original teeth still existed. Could Dr. S use that mold? 

“No,” he said. “We can’t do anything with that. We can’t recreate the teeth.” 

Oh. I kept the mold in my glove compartment. Just in case. 

 As he prepared to install the new teeth, he remarked about not having done something like this in a while. I shrugged it off and dutifully opened my mouth. Above me, Dr. S mused about how vaccines weren’t that effective. Just put the teeth in, I thought. Let me be free of this. “How do they look?” He showed me a mirror. I smiled. Wide buckteeth stared back at me. I looked like a cartoon. At least they were the same white as my other teeth. Mostly. “Can you make them any smaller?” I asked. He shaved the sides down marginally. I pretended that was enough. 

Slowly, I got used to them, even if I would sometimes mournfully scroll back to before October 2019 to look at what my teeth used to look like. For months, these were my teeth. Dr. S made no mention of a permanent option. I kept going to his office once a month for jaw scans.  Come December, one of my teeth—the original nub underneath—turned gray. It was dying. When I saw Dr. S, he didn’t remark on it. 

In January 2021, underneath the “face coverings recommended” sign pasted on the frosted window to his office, Dr. S had put up a picture showing people fishing masks out of waterways with the words “Good thing we got rid of plastic straws.” I started to consider a change. But first, I asked again about permanent crowns. “Hm,” Dr. S mused, taking a pause from bloviating about all the people he’d cured of ailments, his fingers in my mouth. “You’ll need root canals first.” 

“What?” This was the first I’d heard of this. “On each tooth,” he said, fingering one tooth, then the next. Then, after that, braces. 

Braces?

“Everyone needs braces to fix how the teeth move with age,” he said. “I just got a new set myself.” He grinned, showcasing a mouth full of metal. “I’m scheduled to put my daughter in braces again soon, too. She’s 40. I’ve put braces on my whole family.” 

This was enough to knock me out of my inoculated stupor. I needed out. I requested a referral to an endodontist for the root canal, then a referral to a different dentist who wasn’t him for regular dental things. 

He connected me with an endodontist—young, hot—in the same building. It was weeks before he could see me. At appointment time, my stomach roiled. I’d only heard horror stories about root canals. As I leaned back in the chair, the endodontist asked if I wanted to put my headphones in to listen to music while he drilled into my teeth and filled the roots with cement. I said yes and played “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets on a loop. The triumphant trumpets and swelling violins held me. The procedure was a breeze. 

It took multiple requests for Dr. S to give me the referral to the new dentist. Finally, he did. In March 2021, I sat down with a new dentist and asked her—a woman, finally—what it would take to get me new crowns. She examined my mouth. My gums were in terrible shape. The original dentist had shaved my teeth down too close to the gums, and the long stint with temporary crowns had left them infected, red, and angry. I’d need gum surgery first and then we could talk about permanent crowns. 

After that appointment, I emailed Dr. S’s office. I was done. Could they send my records to the new dentist? (Years later, I found records of a King County Superior Court lawsuit against Dr. S from patients who had undergone more invasive procedures under his care.)

The new dentist fixed what she could of my gums, and said they would now need time to heal. When it was time to talk about permanent teeth, I brought the mold of my old teeth with me. Could she make them look like this? She examined it, turning the now nearly two-year-old mold over in her gloved hands. “Of course we can,” she said. 

Three and a half years after my accident—in April of 2023—my mouth was ready for my new front teeth. 

The last step was a trip down to Renton to a dental laboratory that would hand paint my new ceramic crowns to match the rest of my teeth. I was all ready to go alone, as I had throughout this whole process, when Harry asked if I wanted company. I hadn’t thought to ever ask before. Most of the time, I didn’t tell him about the appointments. I would grit my teeth—all 30 of them—and bear it, entering a catatonic-like pliantness once they put those fucking sunglasses on my face and tilted me back in the dentist chair. What the hell, I thought. Let him come. 

There wasn’t much for him to do in the appointment. But he asked clarifying questions as the lab tech compared porcelain shades to my regular teeth. Just having another person there felt fortifying. I was less numb, and the end was on the horizon. 

We went out for pancakes near the airport after it was done. A few weeks later, Harry dropped me off to get my new, final set of teeth—the teeth I still have today. He met me outside with flowers. 

It was over. 

Except. Halloween will never hold the same excitement, the same gleeful joy it once did. It has been seven years since I’ve bitten into an apple, a corn on the cob. I think about my smile now. Does it look normal? Is it mine? This new one is the one in my wedding pictures, so surely it is. The last time I played laser tag—more recent than I’d like to admit—someone jokingly said, “Now we can see who has fake teeth” and grinned in the black light. Their teeth glowed. There were two dead spots smack dab in the middle of mine. And there always will be.