I’m reading a book The Pink Hotel by Liska Jacobs and in between pages I’m watching an HBO series that came out 2018 Sharp Objects. Both the book and the series are suffocated with heat and languor. Both are slow paced and present a growing sense of damage of true deep violence. Both show the wide disparity between those with money and those without. Both have troubled my sleep but I keep going forward as I have been taught. I am caught up in this atmosphere of damp palm fronds and orchids and tall glasses of sweet tea dripping condensation. I’ve carried my own little cloud for the past week lost in both stories and my own.
My third appointment to the denturist this last Tuesday was more physically comfortable than the first two visits. I merely had to bite into a mold filled with warm viscous wax that filled my mouth like a terrifying tasteless pudding and hold it hold it hold it. It was over in twenty minutes. Each of the three visits have cost me over $1,000.00
The Pink Hotel takes place in a wildly imagined version of the Beverly Hills Hotel the ultra wealthy and the humans who serve them as Los Angeles burns and fires rage across the city. Much like the fall of Rome must have felt. It is the story of newlyweds but not as you might expect. The husband is vying for a job as head concierge as his wife slips quickly away from him.
Sharp Objects is about a small town in which a murder of a young girl has occurred and the reporter returning home to write the story. It takes place in the deep south unsettling hazy hot humid slow moving and beautifully filmed and acted. It is a story of violence done to girls by their families.
As the denturist was removing the warm wax plates from my mouth I finally got a good look at the first plaster cast he made of my teeth looking long sparse jagged and extremely skeletal. Imagine seeing your entire jaw and teeth ripped out sitting on a stainless steel counter ghostly white and dead. My entire secret history on display. All the fingernails I bit the shame that was forced on me because I sucked my thumb for such a good long time the damage done to my physical body by my abusive mother then the bad man who liked to hit me all the way back to my brother slamming my head into the non padded dashboard of my father’s car for no reason at all when my adult front teeth were barely grown.
We carry our deepest secret selves in our mouths. How difficult it is for mentally ill people to seek dental care. And how impossible it is to afford. How often we have to choose between having a house to live in and regular cleanings how keeping a job that barely pays rent a job that will never offer dental insurance how food and clothing and medicine always comes before dentistry. How people suffering from trauma often fear doctors and dentists because sometimes we just cannot take one more violent act against our precious bodies.
I have opened my bedroom window to the promise of late August rain. Two cats are curled on the bed with me. I pick up my newly minted dentures with their pink pink gums in mid September and my full mouth extraction is scheduled for October 15.
Thank you.
This takes my breath away. I am, like Mary and Rosemarie, glad that you have done this for yourself. I think of my Sophie and her mouth that must be forced open in order to clean, how I feel deficient somehow, when I don't take her to the dentist often enough because it's so difficult, so expensive, so traumatic. I ramble. Your story is yours, and you've told it here and we are holding it as friends, lovers, artists.
This could possibly be the most important thing you've ever done for yourself. I would tell you how much I hate the people that propagated such violence against you but that hardly begins to cover the rage I feel. My god, you are strong. You are the bravest person I know. I love you in the deepest parts of my bones.