By Herbert Hadad

The single thing worse than a bad toothache is an out-of-town bad toothache. I was working in a small New Hampshire city when one struck on a hot fall weekend.

My boss called his dentist, who agreed to open his office, though once I got there he was more interested in the World Series playing on the TV behind him than his patient. He took a cursory look at my mouth and said, “It’s bad. The tooth’s got to come out.”

After a brief struggle, he handed me, as though it were a small velvet pillow bearing a rough gemstone, a pad of surgical gauze holding the bloody remains of a tooth. It had resided somewhere in the lower right front of my mouth.
“ Take a few aspirins,” the dentist said. “You also might want to pick up a pint at the state store. Rub whiskey where the tooth used to be, and gargle with it.”

The aspirins didn’t work, and it was painful to eat, so I retreated to my rooming house near the center of town. Having majored in economics at Northeastern, I’d calculated that a quart of whiskey was a much better buy than a pint and acquired the larger supply. As the afternoon slipped into evening and the throbbing intensified, I began to dab my gum and gargle.

The next morning, I awoke with a start—a thud, actually, because I’d fallen out of bed—to discover my room had been ransacked. Chairs and a table were overturned. Remnants of dishes and glasses and papers were strewn everywhere. I found the phone under a cushion and was about to call the police when it occurred to me to try the door. It was still locked.

Slowly, everything came back. Despite the consumption of enough whiskey to fell a rhino, during the night my jaw started to ache with such intensity that the alcohol’s effects burned away and I shot awake in a rage of pain. I had gone berserk in the room before collapsing back into unconsciousness.

Why did I recall this episode recently? It reminded me my teeth and I have
not been on friendly terms for a very long time.
For instance: I didn’t really smile for most of my life. It sounds weird—I was a husband, father, community activist, writer, teacher, and holder of a sensitive government position—but I had not been blessed with nice, even choppers, and I was convinced my smile would cause people, especially women, to become queasy and flee.
Still burned into memory is the day my class posed for the high school yearbook. “Smile,” said the photographer. I did. “Close your mouth for the next one,” he said, and that’s the shot they ran.

Later on, caps were installed over some of my front teeth. Even that measure ended unhappily.
The most prominent tooth had a habit of wiggling loose at the strangest times. On the final night of my vacation in Prague last year, as my wife and daughter and I toasted our good fortune in being together in a riverside café, it popped out.

I went to the men’s room and found myself staring in the mirror at a jack-o’-lantern. The next day, I spent nine hours squeezed into a seat on Swiss Air, imagining the flight attendants having a good laugh at the food station about “Herr Pumpkin.”

Back home, Dr. Amsterdam—one of two dentists asked to ponder my case—made an emergency repair by taking a paper clip, snipping off a piece for a post, and gluing the tooth back in.
For a dentist, Dr. Amsterdam was fun. He once told me I had young lips. When I relayed this to my wife, Evelyn said, “That will be your Indian name: Man with Young Lips.”

The tooth stayed in for a while but dropped out again the Saturday morning we were leaving for Albany to help celebrate my brother-in-law’s retirement after thirty years as a New York State assistant attorney general. Plus, in two days I was scheduled to appear on a cable TV show.

Dr. Amsterdam kindly met me at his office to reinstall the tooth. “You’re not going to charge me for the paper clip again, are you?” I asked. He laughed. Then he said the time had come for us to make some serious decisions.

He asked to see photos of me as a smiling younger man. I brought in what I could, but they all showed no more than a tight smirk, the sole exception a series of frames taken in a penny arcade photo booth (I’d been alone at the time, of course).

Eventually, he and the oral surgeon, Dr. Cohen, came up with a plan that involved extractions and the creation of a denture, with implants to follow. It sounded like a long, painful, and expensive process. “I have an alternative,” I said to Dr. Cohen one day as I sat in his chair. “I’ll just die.”

Numerous visits to both doctors ensued, for x-raying and the taking of impressions. By and large, the visits were not unpleasant. Dr. Cohen liked to pause in his endeavors to reflect on everything from geopolitics to child-rearing. Dr. Amsterdam employed as assistants two gorgeous women who worked in pastel jumpsuits and acted as though pleasing patients was the most important goal of their day. And Amsterdam was a character, too; years earlier I’d written an article for the New York Times about the false tooth he’d made for his beloved German shepherd Max after the dog ran into a spade he was wielding.

Throughout the months-long project, I wasn’t quite sure where we stood. I just kept showing up for appointments.

One afternoon, I sat in Dr. Cohen’s chair as he studied x-rays. On his instrument table was a denture. It looked like something my grandmother used to keep in a glass of cloudy water.

He turned back to me: “Ah, exactly what do you expect we’ll do today?” I heard the sympathy in his voice.

“ I think I’m in for a few extractions,” I said.
“ How about nine?” he replied. He waited for my shock to subside, then said, “It’s all up to you. Think it over. We’ll do it another time, if you wish.”

The years of dental problems weighed on me. I stared at the false teeth, took a deep breath, and said, “Let’s do it.”

An hour later, Dr. Cohen handed me my extracted teeth and the name of a refining company that could remove the gold they contained. (The company sent me a check for $51, which will pay approximately one-third of 1 percent of my total dental bill.)

The new denture covered my entire upper mouth and had to be inserted immediately onto, shall we say, sensitive gums screaming to be left alone. I was sent off to Dr. Amsterdam and his two assistants, who fussed over the fit.
“ I told you you’d look cuter,” the good doctor said.

Since I wouldn’t be eating regular food for a while, one assistant recommended I buy a liquid nutritional supplement. “Vanilla’s the best,” she said.

The other assistant suggested another stop, at the liquor store, for Bailey’s Irish Cream. “Mix them,” she said, “and you’ll sleep like a baby.”

During this period of adjustment, feeling as though I were walking around with half a set of joke-shop teeth in my mouth, I paid a routine work visit to the press room in downtown Manhattan’s federal courthouse. Here, something happened that finally resolved my dental identity. Like a lot of stories through the ages, it involves a striking blonde.

A reporter had brought his daughter to the office. I heard her voice first, then saw her as she toddled down the hall in my direction. She was breathtakingly beautiful, with soft blue eyes and curls that bounced as she moved. She was three. Her name was, appropriately, Bella.

I kneeled down to greet her. She reached out and brushed her little hand over my pate of short hair. “That’s fun,” she said, “and I like your glasses.” I was falling for her, as one can with a wonderful child, and smiled, wide and happily. “I like your smile,” she added.

That was it. That’s all it took. A wife, children, friends, colleagues, dentists, dental assistants—all have their agendas, even if they are gentle ones. But this little girl could be entirely spontaneous.

My wife said to me playfully one evening a short time later, “You’re smiling an awful lot these days. Is there someone I should know about?”
I told her about Bella.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and award-winning writer, doesn’t understand what people see in the movie Jaws.