What the Dentist Said

By Conor | February 17th, 2010 | No Comments

If, God forbid, I should ever slip into a vegetative state, there are two people I want there by my hospital bed. The first is my wife Liz, who shall hold my hand lovingly and put deodorant on me so I don’t get some smart-ass nickname from the hospital staff like B.O. McHoolihan or Sir Smells-a-Lot, and my son’s first words don’t have something to do with the olfactory.

The second person I want there is my dentist, Dr. Siu.

Dr. Siu is an old friend of my brother Dave. Dr. Siu is not merely the finest dentist in New York; he also performs his dentistry while pontificating on almost any topic under the sun. Moreover, he does this breezily, without so much as an awkward pause, with virtually no response from the other party, whose jaw is open just wide enough to insert a sofa. And he does all this as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

He is – and I choose these words carefully – one of a kind.

Also, while by my bedside, Dr. Siu could also floss my gums as I lay comatose. Halitosis is no joke, people. Ask Keith Richards. (Better yet, ask his wife. And have you seen a photo of him lately? He looks like an unwrapped mummy.)

I wrote about Dr. Siu some time ago, in a blog entitled “I, Teeth.” I have not had much opportunity to see him since. But a couple of days ago I went to see him after having my front tooth – a fake tooth, thanks to a soccer game when I was ten years old – knocked loose by a rather embarrassing incident involving my 11 month old son. It is a story that I do not care to relate here, since I may one day claim it was knocked loose while I was saving a panda babies and I’d rather not leave a paper trail.

I would say that Dr. Siu was in rare form the day I visited him, but that would imply that he has any other form. He was pleasantly energetic, as always. We began, when I still had full use of my tongue, with a discussion of Nepal. His receptionist was Nepalese and he always took an interest in Liz and my organization, Next Generation Nepal. We work with trafficked children. I was talking about illegal adoption.

Much like the recent controversy in Haiti, where there were children being put up for illegal adoption even though they still had parents, Next Generation Nepal searches for families of children who are in danger of being adopted, even when we suspect their parents are still alive and believe they are merely in Kathmandu to get an education. It’s a terrible situation (more on that at www.nextgenerationnepal.org, btw).

This led to a conversation about the inherent perils of international adoption from certain countries.

“In the end, it’s all about overpopulation,” Dr. Siu was saying. He put that straw sucker thing into my mouth and that was the end of my side of the conversation. My jaw would be open for the next 30 minutes. You might think that would put a halt to the dialogue. You would be wrong.

“Let me tell you something about overpopulation. Mongolia? That’s a country that knows something about population control. You know how big Mongolia is? It’s like Western Europe. Twice the size of Texas. We have to measure it in sizes-of-Texas, right? Anyway, they have maybe two and a half million people. Two and a half million!”

I wasn’t sure if that was a lot or a little. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t talk. But I could tell he wanted a surprised response, so I grunted, kind of like a little bark, from the back of my throat.

“Huucch!”

“Not that I’ve been there,” he admitted. He squinted, knowingly, pointing a small silver hook at me. “But I’ve read. I’ve studied it. I know a thing or two about Mongolia, believe me.”

I believed him. He pirouetted neatly from Mongolia to Greenpeace to Japanese whale populations. “In the early seventies,” he told me, “a whale would have to swim seven miles to find a mate.”

Again, not sure if that was supposed to be a lot or a little. I was only sure that the appropriate response was incredulity.
“Uggg?” I said, unable to enunciate a word, but the rising inflection made my intention clear.

“Really!” he said happily.

I tried to say “amazing!” but my lips were unable to close to make the “m” sound. I experimented with a few other words before coming upon “crazy” as something I could say with a wide mold hardening against my lower teeth. When I moved my jaw to speak, the giant plastic mold flapped ridiculously against my upper teeth. I must have looked like a Nutcracker.

So from them on, I called everything crazy. Crazy good, crazy bad, crazy crazy. With Dr. Siu, you had to wait nary a full minute until he said something that could be deemed crazy. Minutes later, we were onto the young woman he rescued from practical servitude in Mexico when he was eighteen, for whom he found a job in a chicken processing plant before leaving to come back to the US.

“And would you believe it – a few years later she married one of the wealthiest men in Cancun. She was a real looker, I’m telling you! Not that I cared about that – I just felt sorry for her. She was so young.”

“Hrrr-AZY!” I exclaimed.

“I know, right?!” he said. “Ok, let’s get that mold out of there. Open wide.”

I did.

“Thank you,” he said, pulling it out gently. He took a look at the mold.

“Beautiful,” he said. He put the mold down on a small tray and looked thoughtfully out the window for a few moments. It was impossible to tell if he was talking about my mandibles, or if he was back in those days as a rebellious teen, driving through 1970’s Mexico, a hero to that beautiful young girl in the dusty village, the future Mrs. Richest Man in Cancun.

The thought held him in place only a few seconds before he was pouring me a tiny plastic cup of water.

“The King and Queen of England are illegitimate, you know,” he said, handing me the cup and turning back to his instruments. “It’s true. The real King of England – the blood relation – is a retired Australian truck driver.”