“We need to clean it out up there. It won’t take but ten minutes. You have the time to do it now?”
I said, “Sure,”
He brightened. “Great.”
I sat there and clasped my hands on my lap. While I did feel a sense of betrayal that I was genetically defective, I also felt grateful that I somehow got off the hook. After Mac cleaned out my mouth, whatever that meant, this whole thing would be behind me.
A moment later he reappeared holding a needle that was at least a foot long. Suddenly, he no longer looked brilliant. He looked insane.
Before I could say anything he stuck the needle into my mouth, instantly ending all sensation above the neck.
Then he produced what appeared to be a common art director’s X-Acto knife, and the roof of my mouth was opened back like a car hood. I didn’t feel anything, but the sound was hideous: like sawing through Styrofoam. Plus, I had the very new and unnatural sensation of feeling the roof of my mouth lying across my tongue.
There was intense pressure as he began pulling at something with pliers. “We’re just gonna clean this whole area out,” he said.
I was breathless with the shock and violating horror of this sudden mouthal rape. It was a total Central Park Jogger moment, and I was feeling very close to blacking out. I willed myself to stay awake—in exactly the same way that I will the plane to stay aloft while flying—because if I did go unconscious, I had a feeling he might be so focused on his excavation that he wouldn’t even notice.
And then just as suddenly as he had begun, he was closing me back up, stitching the roof of my mouth back in place, pulling out the great wads of deeply bloody gauze that had somehow been stuffed in there. Then he was stuffing more fresh gauze back in.
He had me up and out of the chair a few minutes later, and he was tucking a prescription into my hand. “We’ll have the results of the biopsy sometime next week,” he said, “so call maybe Wednesday, Thursday.” Like we had tentative dinner plans, not like I had possible oral cancer. Noticing my alarm, he added, “Don’t worry. A biopsy is just standard procedure.” And I thought, that’s exactly how all horrible things begin: with those words “standard procedure.”
An hour later at home, a dull, thrumming sensation began, like an awareness under my nose. Was this the tip of excruciating pain carving a hole into my Novocain cloud?
My mind kept replaying the surgery. I was powerless to stop the movie in my head. Only now, my brain added visuals to what before were only sensations. Where I had felt the roof of my mouth being carved open and pulled forward, now I could see it. I could see inside the bloody hole, too. Over and over, these images played, a loop of gore. Many people have a fear of the dentist. Because they are terrified that exactly this will happen to them. Everybody knows that dentists are capable of great destruction, but few people actually experience it. At that moment, I would have traded two impacted wisdom teeth and a gingivectomy just to be free of my internal horror movie.
I had gauze pressed firmly against the roof of my mouth, and I kept worrying that when I pulled it out, the skin would stick to it and I’d end up with the roof of my mouth in the palm of my hand.
Looking in the mirror, I saw thick black stitches tied around my front teeth like ropes around a dock. The roof of my mouth was anchored to my teeth; otherwise it would collapse onto my tongue.
I thought, I am not ever going to get liposuction, a nose job, or pec implants. Nor am I going to get that new dick-enlargement surgery.
No elective surgery. Ever.
I wished I could fast-forward three weeks into the future. Or at least eight days, when the stitches would be out.
How was I gong to walk around in public with these ropes tied around my teeth? Thick, black ropes. Holding the roof of my mouth in place.
Imagine, I thought to myself, what a transsexual must go through.
I stayed home from work the next day because of my “roof work.” I couldn’t eat anything, but that didn’t matter because I discovered that I liked codeine. I looked forward to taking it and wished I had more pills. A year or two’s supply. It felt like such a gentle lift. I could easily get addicted. Unless I already was.
Codeine became the highlight of my day, if not my thirties. If the doctor had given me more than twenty pills I most certainly would have taken them all, right down to the cotton in the bottle. And then I would have brewed tea from that.
I took two more pills on top of the previous two that I had taken a few hours before. I wasn’t taking them for pain now but for pleasure. If a person has to have parts of his head split open with an X-Acto knife, it only seemed fair that he should then get to have some fun.
I felt like ordering Chinese food, but I was kind of afraid to eat anything until the following day. I didn’t want to stretch the sutures or get debris lodged up into the roof of my mouth. The last thing I needed was to live the rest of my life with a small nugget of General Tso’s chicken tucked somewhere inside my head.
I decided to take one more codeine to make up for my starvation.
I wondered, too, if I could ask Mac to give me a few more. I looked at the prescription bottle, and it didn’t say anything about refills, so I assumed that meant no. I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn’t make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted only to these?
Maybe this is why dentists become dentists in the first place, so they can cop handfuls of these pills anytime they want. What other motivation could there possibly be to open people’s mouths and scrape their gums and clean their scummy teeth or fill cavities? But then, didn’t dentists have the highest suicide rate? So I guess those few dentists who don’t kill themselves spend their lives making their patients wish they were dead.
As I held the amber plastic prescription bottle up to the light to admire it, I thought about my family’s unfortunate history with The Mouth.
My mother, a smoker since late childhood, experienced a cancer scare when I was eleven. The dentist had noticed some suspicious white patches in her mouth and told her he was concerned they might be malignant. This caused my mother to bite her fingernails and smoke two cigarettes at a time until her biopsy results came back negative.
The alarming incident had scared her to the point where for many years later, she was unable to light up a cigarette without saying “I hope to God I don’t ever get some awful cancer of the mouth.”
My father, too, had his own problems. He was seemingly unable to brush his teeth or see a dentist, ever. As a result, his teeth were brown, with deep black spots along the edges. My father’s teeth were quite literally rotting in his head. Which wouldn’t have been surprising, perhaps, if my father had been somebody who gutted animals for a living or maybe was a careerist woodsman. But my father was a high-ranking professor at the university. So his gory, ghoulish smile was quite a shocking surprise.
Yet, until now, I’d seemingly escaped the mouth issues that ran in my family. I’d never had so much as a cavity my entire life. And while my teeth were not movie-star straight, they weren’t crooked, and I didn’t have too many of them. I had what my dentist called “excellent teeth.”
But then, this wasn’t about my teeth. This was about my mouth, my head. This was about being genetically defective and about now paying the price.
I set the prescription bottle back down on the table, and an alarming thought entered my head. What if the biopsy came back positive? What if I had late-stage mouth cancer and had to have large portions of my jaw removed? In this case, I decided, I would go on Valium immediately, along with codeine and something else. I would also make sure I had a flask with me while they removed my mouth and other parts, part by part.
I was lonely now and wished I knew Bob better so he could come over and snuggle up with me and tell me if I should eat anything or not.
I wanted to see a movie. I wondered if popcorn was really bad if it was soaked
in enough butter. I tried to imagine.
It might be okay.
Maybe I’d phone the theater.
A week later, my stitches were removed, and I was able to smile. Not that I would, but now I could, without looking so pasted together and temporary. I went back to work at the ad agency and felt immediately sickened by the stack of conference reports, job orders, and messages on my desk. My biopsy had come back negative, and I now realized that I was slightly, oddly, disappointed. Not that I didn’t have cancer but that I didn’t have something. I needed something to distract me from my ordinary life, and at least the “roof work” had done that.
Fuckhead Bob canceled plans with me tonight so he could go upstate and visit his ex-boyfriend. He’s blown me off and is hoping that I’ll just get the message and go away.
It’s the modern, passive, gay way to be direct. I know this behavior because it’s something I would do. This is how compatible we are. Anyway, I think it’s because I told him that I smoke. Ever since I mentioned that I smoke (“only when I write”) he’s mentioned smoking in every single e-mail, and the e-mails have been dwindling in their frequency.
I understood the score very quickly and went ahead and placed another personal ad on AOL last night, after he canceled.
I love placing personal ads on AOL. It’s exactly like a combination of ordering from the L. L. Bean catalogue and writing a letter to God, only you get replies. My experience has been good with AOL. I always meet somebody interesting that I wouldn’t normally meet in my social circle. Especially considering that my social circle consists almost entirely of faces on a television screen. Placing a personal ad feels proactive, not so much like changing destiny but helping it along.
So I placed this ad, and I asked for an Italian or a Greek because I love that dark swarthiness. And I placed the ages between twenty-nine and thirty-five, which incidentally places Bob entirely out of the category because he is Jewish and forty.
So now that my “roof work” is over and I still have my mouth, I feel ready to bring something new into my life. Screw little Bob, who will eat a small dead lamb but will not date somebody who smokes leaves, I’ll find a new person, and this will be my Something. A handsome, hairy-chested Greek man is far better than mouth cancer, and he will occupy just as much of my thoughts.
It then occurs to me that I am mentally unstable.
So I decided to close my office door and go online. Maybe I can do some research and find out what’s wrong with my personality and then fix it.
BEATING RAOUL
I
t’s good to mix ’em up,” Raoul says of the martial arts. He currently holds a brown belt in karate but hopes to have his black belt by autumn. In the meantime he’s taking tae kwon do to supplement his judo. He’s also a semiprofessional downhill skier and a former investment banker who retired a multimillionaire last year at the age of thirty-three. He is extremely handsome (a former model) and articulate, and read Ulysses when he was thirteen. (“It really shaped me in many ways.”) He is fluent in three languages, four if you count Mandarin, which he can only read. He tells me all of this while he plucks a slender, nearly transparent bone from his steamed Chilean sea bass.
I nod. “That’s great,” I say as I stab a leaf of kale and fork it into my mouth. It tastes nothing like the bacon cheeseburger that I wish I were having right now. A greasy bacon cheeseburger at home, on the sofa, in front of MTV.
I’m thirty minutes into my first date with Raoul, and I am surprised by the intensity of my hatred for him. Truly, it is stunning.
“I don’t watch TV,” Raoul says, when I ask him if he likes MTV.
“Never?” I ask.
“Rarely. Sometimes a little PBS or CNN. I used to watch a couple of shows, but not anymore. Not since I stopped drinking.”
I try and veil my glee by adopting a mask of compassion. “So you had . . . a drinking problem?” I want to pound the table and cheer. I want neon signs to appear, huge arrows that point at him, flashing FLAW, FLAW, FLAW. I like flaws and feel more comfortable around people who have them. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.
“No, I didn’t have a drinking problem. But you know,” he shakes his head, “who needs the extra carbs?” Raoul’s teeth are so white they look plastic. Though I am certain they are real and that he has never had a cavity, because no doubt he flosses four times a day.
And this is where I notice that all the bread sticks are gone. A trail of crumbs leads from the basket to my side of the table. When Raoul takes a sip of mineral water, closing his eyes, I quickly brush the crumbs off my shirt.
“CNN had a thing about carbs the other night,” he says. “You see it?”
I never watch CNN. I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live. “No,” I say. “I missed that. But I agree, carbs are just awful. I usually don’t eat them. Except, you know, when I eat out in restaurants.”
Raoul smiles. “I thought you said you always eat out in restaurants, that you never cook?”
“Well,” I backpedal, “I meant restaurants with tablecloths.”
I have been on a spree of answering personal ads lately, and Raoul is the tenth date I’ve had this month. I believe in the concept of personal ads because you get to meet the interior of a person first. As opposed to meeting somebody while standing in line at a movie, falling for them because their looks make you swoon and only discovering much later, after hundreds of dating dollars, that you find their insides as appealing as Alpo. At least theoretically. In practice though, I’m not sure there’s much of a difference. After all, I answered Raoul’s personal entirely on the basis of his picture, which was incredible. I only skimmed the content of the ad, skipping over words I didn’t like (“spiritual,” “motivated,” and especially “experiential”). Instead I downloaded his photo, enlarged it in Photoshop to scrutinize it, and then replied with a brief, witty note and a picture of me standing in a field, shirtless.
“The soup is really good,” I say.
“It’s a little salty,” he answers.
I immediately agree. “It’s good in a salty way. My body must crave salt for some reason. Maybe I didn’t drink enough at the gym and I’m dehydrated.” Why am I doing this? Why am I shapeshifting in front of this man? And the answer is, of course, because he is handsome and perfect, and I feel I am neither.
Raoul takes a large sip of water. “So tell me about you,” he says, smiling.
“Well, I’m in advertising. Like Darren Stevens on Bewitched.” I have used this line hundreds of times, and sometimes people smile.
He doesn’t smile.
I nod and go on. “So that’s what I do for work. For fun, I really like going to movies. I see pretty much everything.”
Aces align in his eyes, like a winning slot machine. “I love movies,” he says. Finally. Something in common.
“Yeah? What’s your favorite?”
“American Beauty,” he says, not having to think. “I saw it ten times. It’s the most incredible movie about Buddhism I’ve ever seen.”
I can’t stand spiritual gay men. They annoy me more than flavored coffees. A spiritual gay man simply means he has a yin/yang tattoo on his ass, which you can be sure has had electrolysis. “So you’re a Buddhist?” I ask, pleasantly.
“Put it this way,” he says, clasping his fingers together under his chin, “I’m very interested to know as much as I can and experience as much of the moment as possible.” The candle between us flickers when I cough. “What about you? What movie did you really like recently?”
Suddenly my mind goes white, and I cannot remember seeing any movie, ever. This happens to me. Somebody asks me a simple question, and my petulant child of a mind turns away and faces the wall. “I liked Deliverance. The pig scene was great.”
After dinner Raoul shocks me by asking me out again. “We could take a walk in the woods up in Inwood. It’s really beautiful, more untouch
ed than Central Park. And it would be really nice to be together in Nature.”
Because I am so surprised by his invitation, as I’d assumed that Raoul didn’t like me either, I say, “Okay.” Even though I am wary of Nature. After all, where do most manhunts for escaped serial killers begin? Exactly. In the woods. After I agree, I ask myself why. And all I can think is that I’m doing what my friend John once told me to do: dismiss the first date, write it off. You have to give somebody two or three dates before you can really know.
I tell myself how good this is that I am making an effort, giving Raoul a fair shot, not being so judgmental.
The following Sunday I meet Raoul at Inwood Hill Park, at the northern tip of Manhattan. I have never been above Seventy-Third Street, so this is something of an adventure, and I am carrying two hundred dollars in cash in case of an emergency. When I see Raoul sitting on a bench, I smile automatically. He is wearing shorts and a loose T-shirt and appears very casual and sexy, yet at the same time very wholesome and down-to-earth. I suddenly feel crazy and judgmental, not to mention shallow.
“It’s great to see you, Augusten,” he says, extending his hand.
We shake, and then Raoul pulls me close in a hug. “And you feel great,” he tells me. “Man, you must work out all the time, you’re just all muscle.”
I am deeply flattered by this, much more flattered than I should be. My feeling is, now I will follow him anywhere.
As we walk, Raoul tells me a little more about himself. He feels that life is an adventure and that if you want something, you just have to go out there and get it. “I wanted to have enough money to retire at thirty-three, and that’s what I did,” he says. “I’m living proof that you can’t fail if you have a plan. You only fail if you don’t have a plan.” As we walk past bushes, Raoul extends his hand to touch the leaves, often identifying them by their Latin names. He wants to know if I am where I want to be in my life. “Are you on course?” he asks.