My Body in Nine Parts by Raymond Federman

remembrance of my left-handedness? My gaucherie , I should. Since it was certainly dumb of me to fall off a cherry tree and break my arm when I was a boy.
    [For details concerning the fall from the cherry tree see My Scars. ]
    In any case, today the dentist really hurt me. It was my second visit. Of all the doctors one has to see, the dentist is the most dreaded. Dentists cause pain.
    Actually, last week, when I went to see my dentist the day I broke the tooth, he didn’t hurt me at all. He only examined the damage, and took an x-ray of the ruins.
    After he looked at the films and showed me exactly what was left of that tooth, he proceeded to squeeze some kind of soft cement around the broken tooth that felt like rubber when my tongue touched it.
    The dentist explained that he put that rubber cover on my broken tooth so that I wouldn’t cut my tongue on the rocky debris. The next time he will cover it with a crown.
    So I spent a whole week with that caoutchouc stuff in my mouth before my second visit today.
    Well, today the dentist really hurt me, even though he put that part of my gums asleep with a shot. When his hands were not in my mouth, my tongue rubbed against the gum that was asleep and it felt as if a piece of my mouth was missing.
    Before starting his vicious work he asked me with a little cooing giggle where I would prefer to be right now.
    On the golf course, I said. Even if I thought something else. Especially since the dentist’s assistant was rather cute, and well-rounded, and she was there next to me, in her tight white uniform, ready to stick her fingers inside my mouth. She didn’t say much during the entire procedure. But the dentist didn’t stop talking.
    After he explained in technical dental terms what he was going to do me, he hiked the dentist chair all the way down so that my head was now lower than my feet, and he inserted all kinds of metallic instruments inside my mouth, while the assistant, now masked like a terrorist, pulled my jaws wide open and slid a plastic tube on one side that sucked in the water she kept pouring in on the other side with another plastic tube. It felt like I had a mini-tornado in my mouth.
    The cutie was brutal. She did her assisting with ardor and force. Meanwhile the dentist introduced another metallic object inside my mouth which I immediately recognized as a drill from past experience when my tongue touched it. My whole body tensed. And then the dentist turned on his cruel drill and started demolishing what was left of my tooth.
    Instinctively and defensively, I closed my eyes and held on tightly to the armrests of the dentist’s chair.
    At first the drilling did not hurt. It was just teasing me in apprehension of the pain to come. And the pain came when the dentist, also masked, I forgot to mention, pushed harder with his drill into the ruins of my tooth. This time it really hurt. I tried to make a little cough in my throat to indicate that maybe he should stop a moment, but the gargling going on in my mouth prevented the cough from emerging. All I got was a splash of turbulent water on my face.
    Not a moment of respite. The dentist was drilling furiously now, round and round, and up and down, and even sideways. But my molar, or what was left of it, was resisting. It was not going to let itself be annihilated without a fight.
    Not this molar. One of my favorites.
    I started counting in my head. If the dentist doesn’t stop when I get to 50, I told myself mentally, I’ll pull his drilling hand away. And I’ll do it decidedly.
    Finally, I managed to let out a little groan when the assistant pulled back her tubes a little.
    Just a bit more, the dentist said, as he pushed further into the tooth, the disappearing tooth, I should say, all the while asking me about my golf, my handicap, my social life, and at the same time inserting his own golf, his own duffer’s handicap, his own boring social life between his questions which, of