Where the gains are made
March 19, 2014 § 21 Comments
One time Prez and I were racing through Pedro with Vapor on the old Donut Course. We’d sprinted away from the field and were barreling along Pacific Avenue doing everything we could to hold onto Rahsaan’s wheel. Things weren’t going well for us; it was like trying to keep up with motorcycle. Eventually Rahsaan kicked it hard, for real, and Prez and I dug so deeply we were scratching China.
Thankfully, we hit a red light. Prez looked at me, covered in slobber, eyes bugging out of his head, leg muscles so gorged with blood that he looked like a bodybuilder a minute before going onstage. “This level of pain,” he said “is where the gains are made.”
I’ve thought about that ever since, especially when the pain gets so intense that I pop and get shelled, making not so much gains as deficits. And I also wonder why pain in one venue is somehow endurable, but pain at the dentist isn’t. I can suffer on a bike — not MMX suffer, or Zink suffer, or Thurlow suffer, or Leibert suffer — but deep I can go. Unless it’s the dentist.
Extrusions of bone
“Big deal,” you’re thinking. “A post drilled down through your gum and into the fuggin’ bone of your jaw, or even a root canal can bring anyone to his knees.”
Except I’m not talking about posts and root canals. I’m not even talking about cavities. I’m talking about that most benign of dental operations, the dreaded bi-annual teeth cleaning.
“Bi-annual?” you say. “That’s fuggin’ disgusting! Your mouth must be nastier than a baboon’s ass!”
Indeed, my darling, it is. Nastier, for sure. But there’s a story behind it. You see, I have Davidson teeth. These are not the teeth of mortals. Pere Davidson, now in his 78th year, has never had a cavity. Grandpa N.F. Davidson (that’s “N” for “Nahum”) died in his 70’s without ever having had a cavity or lost a tooth. My brother Ian died with teeth that never felt a drill bit.
Davidson teeth are harder than the sentence of a hanging judge. They are impervious to sugar, fat, sugar, sludge, ice cream, abuse, never flossing, rarely brushing, bad diet, beer, sugar … they’re the only part of my body that has ever elicited the same reaction from health care professionals throughout my life: “Mr. Davidson, you have excellent teeth.”
Notice they never said “clean teeth,” or “pretty teeth,” or “well-aligned teeth.” No. Only “excellent,” as in “Any tooth that could withstand these four pounds of plaque and abuse and mistreatment and still be this strong and cavity-free aren’t teeth, they are diamond-plated extrusions of bone.”
Every advantage comes with a price
For me, the price began in Galveston at age 6, when I went to the dentist. He pulled two of my teeth for no reason at all, and he did it without anesthetic. I howled and screamed bloody murder. It hurt like a motherfugger, and from that point on I was terrified of dental work. Simply walking into the dentist’s office made me break out in a sweat, and I never sweat.
My lifetime of dental pain was as nothing when I went to Japan and met Mrs. WM. Japanese people have the pain threshold of an ox, and she held me in pure contempt. “Why you askin’ onna pain drugs? Thatsa for little kids.”
“Because my teeth are covered in seven pounds of plaque and it hurts like hell when he scrapes my teeth.”
“I like onna teeth cleaning. Kimochii. Even onna cavity he never gives me a pain drugs because cheaper.”
“You get your teeth drilled without novocaine?” I asked, sweating at the mention of “drilling” and “novocaine.”
“That’s nothin’. Even when a Japanese girl push outta baby there’s no onna pain drugs. ‘Girl, you baby time is normal and you ain’t gettin’ no pain drugs because, cheaper. An’ Japanese girl just push out the baby like a watermelon. You ain’t talkin’ to no Japanese girl about a tooth cleaning pain drug. She’s gonna think you’re onna girlman.”
She was right. In Japan I was the wuss of all wusses. One time her dad had a root canal without any pain medication. “Just a tooth,” he said.
I think I fainted listening to the story.
The paradox of Dr. Hayashi
In L.A., my dentist is Dr. Hayashi, a Japanese dentist. He is the bomb. He is incredibly delicate and skilled and careful and pro, but even he has to bring out the heavy duty equipment with Mr. Davidson shows up lathered in sweat and teeth covered in plaque.
Today was hell.
“Hmm,” he said. “You have a pretty big build-up of calculus.”
“Yeah,” I thought. “I got more fuggin’ calculus on my teeth than on an AP exam.”
He gently stuck the metal scraper into my mouth. I clenched and released four pounds of sweat. The metal hook caught on a tartar outcropping as he yanked a big chunk of calcified scum off my tooth. It sounded like a calving iceberg. “Looks like we have some work to do today,” he said.
“We?” I asked. “If I have to do anything other than sweat and moan, there’s a problem.”
Pretty soon the scraping became so intense that he had to drop the steel chisel and pick up the electric whizzer thingy with the vacuum spit sucker. The sound alone hurt. The plaque drill might as well have been stuck into my eyes, that’s how intensely I reacted, with little urine puddles and sharts mottling the dentist’s chair.
“Nurse,” he said, planting his boot on my chest, rolling up his sleeves, and pulling on his thickest rubber surgical gloves, “hand me the #12 bit with the diamond tip. And be ready with the extra-coarse sandpaper.”
After a brief while his rubber gloves were covered in blood as my soft and sickly gums spewed gore. His welder’s goggles were covered with shards of razor-sharp tartar, more tartar than you’d find in Crimea. His cute assistant tried to suction up the blood and spit and chunks of plaque as my mouth spattered the room with bacteria and bodily fluids of the most contaminated sort. After fifteen minutes his hands looked like they’d been plunged into a chest cavity. My mouth spouted blood and spit, which drooled down into my matted mustache and beard. The pain was unbearable as I fought the suction thingy with my tongue and clamped down on the drill.
“Mr. Davidson,” he said. “You’ll need to open your mouth so I can reach the teeth.”
After forty-five minutes, which seemed like forty-five hours, he gave up, having dug out food items from last November, pieces of GU wrapper, slivers of gristle, and part of an old Life magazine from 1955. “That’s all we can do today. Why don’t you come back in three weeks after your gums have quit bleeding. You’ve still got plaque deposits that I can’t reach, as well as what look like pieces of bicycle inner tube, some fish bones, and a hard-to-reach clump of hair wedged down below the gum line. I’ll have to special order a hand-drill and some low-grade explosives, but we’ll get it next time for sure.”
Have you ever heard of having teeth so gnarly that they have to be cleaned in stages? I haven’t, but I was so glad to get out of the chair that I would have agreed if he’d suggested a follow-up visit that included a lobotomy with an icepick.
You’d think that with such a miserable experience I’d learn, and start flossing regularly, brushing after meals, and wearing a condom. But he said the magic words when I left, the words that guaranteed my box of dental floss from 1982 would remain in mint condition for another year or two. “Mr. Davidson, you have excellent teeth.”
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Cycling in the South Bay 
After spending untold hours in the orthodontist chair 40 odd years ago, I can only say, “I understand.” There’s a reason that dentist’s have the highest suicide rate among health professionals.
Thanks for the laugh…..and cringe.
My dentists all have a very high murder rate.
oft-repeated misnomer that dentists have the highest suicide rate among health professionals. (oh, and BTW, there is no need for the possessive apostrophe “s”) http://www.newhealthguide.org/Highest-Suicide-Rate-By-Profession.html
Take gas. You won’t care what he does.
I certainly gave gas, which seemed to make him care.
I feel ya. When I go to Dr. Nakamura, she stops every couple of minutes to ask, “Are you SURE you’re OK? It seems as if you are in distress”.
Sobbing = Distress
I too, dread the dentist, but I go regularly, because Sal insists.
My initial plunge into dental-phobia was when I cracked a molar on a bike racing trip in ’78…nothing like finding a quack dentist in July, while at Super week, in Milwaukee, at 4 in the afternoon. He was clumsy and vicious, two qualities one never wants to have in a dentist. He hurt me, and I live in fear of dentists to this day. Even though the gas puts into to Wanky-land during the “Chair time”, I still have to watch the calendar as the dreaded day approaches, and then actually walk into that office, that smells, like, well…evil.
They’ve never gassed me for a cleaning. Yet.
What I dread is the inevitable fusillade of horrific anecdotes that follow any “dentist” story.
Then there was the time the drill slipped and went up into my palate and punctured my brain.
Your fear is my fear; I too have had the dreaded multi-stage plaque torture. Maybe you should think of it as a stage race with each stage being equivalent to doing hill repeats on Alpe d’Huez. I know I do. What is it about Japanese dentists who don’t use pain meds? I swear mine is still seeking revenge for WWII
It’s cheaper. And it doesn’t hurt. All that pain is just in your head.
My last cleaning took two visits. Of course the first one came on the heels of two root canals so maybe they were giving me a break. You go to three visits to cover one cleaning job, that will be something. I do feel your pain though.
They’ve got their work cut for them, extracting that piece of 2 x 4.
I have always had great dentists. Apparently my dentist from growing up in Montclair is still practicing.
I was kicked out of one practice because I had the unfortunately ability to receive a phone call and exclaim “That’s today?” too many times. My next Dentist played Grateful Dead music and if you even hinted at discomfort he would give you gas, caine, opiates, and muscle relaxants after first putting something down to protect his chair and floor.
That last Dentist decided to become a Hari Krishna and sold me to another dentist who had terrible breath. After a few years of that I stopped going, and then that is when my real troubles began. I just couldn’t bring myself to go back to Dr. Horseshit breath, and then it got to be a couple of years and now I was embarrassed to go back. What were my teeth like? So I threw in the towel and went to see one of my riding buddies and we went round and round. It was just like your “multiple rounds needed” cleaning. A few years have passed and I just dropped 6K at the Perio guy next door who sliced open my gums and pasted in a human/bovine bone graft mix to regrow my jaw bone where perio disease was creating a new canyon.
That was a real experience! Shot my mouth up with so much caine I didn’t feel a thing, but my eyes were open and I could see and hear him scraping and chiseling and excavating. I am healing now, and so far I have made the commitment to brush, floss, and utilize the gum tool that always seems to push out the last ten steel cut oatmeal grains that the brush, and the floss somehow missed.
Good Luck!
I’m sweating. HR 220. Poopypants. Ouch.
I broke a tooth on the weekend. A molar. I feel your pain.
Ouch!
Awesome. I feel your pain, but I’ve got you all beat. I’m English, ’nuff said.
Ha, ha!