My Body in Nine Parts by Raymond Federman Page B

forces, while biting a piece of Japanese chocolate, and how that molar was totally pulverized. The Japanese dentist explained that many people in Japan break their teeth because Japanese chocolate is much harder than occidental chocolate.
    This shows how much I like chocolate, but how chocolate has been detrimental to my teeth.
    But let’s return to today’s visit to the dentist.
    After the drilling, the dentist said he would be back in a short while, and he left the torture chamber.
    You know what that means when a dentist tells you, he’ll be right back. Dentists are worse than barbers when it comes to making you wait.
    The assistant also disappeared. Maybe that was all for today. But then she returned again her face masked and with rubber gloves on her hands. Oh, no! No more!
    Now it’s her hands I have in my mouth. She tells me that she is going to take an imprint of the tooth for the crown. And so I feel one of her hands entering my mouth while the other pulls it open, and she presses some kind of gooey chewy stuff around the pointed piece of tooth I have left up there. It feels like tasteless chewing gum. Then she orders me to close my mouth and bite hard on that chewing gum, and to stay like this, without moving my jaws, until I hear the little bell behind me. Then I can open my mouth.
    And she disappears again.
    So I stay like that, teeth clutched hard, for an infernal time. I am counting the seconds. Must be ten minutes already, or more, before I hear the bell go off. I open my mouth, but not without difficulty, because my lower and upper teeth feel like they’re stuck together.
    The assistant is back. She literally jumps inside my open mouth, well not all of her, otherwise I would have swallowed her, to pull out, what am I saying, to extirpate forcefully from my mouth the chewing gum which has now become like plaster, and taste like plaster, and then tapping professionally on the cheek, she says, well done .
    Oh I forgot to mention, my current dentist and her assistant are not Japanese. They are Americans. I didn’t want you to confuse them with the Japanese dentist.
    I don’t know if this well done was addressed to the courage I had shown during this torture, or if it was a self-congratulatory well done for her dirty work.
    Okay, I’ll skip the details of the rest of this dental séance, and what the dentist and his assistant did to me, and how I literally staggered out of their office, out of their torture dungeon, completely annihilated, with a piece of plaster in my mouth, and how I must now continue to survive, until the next visit, in two weeks, with that phony crown on top of my broken molar.
    An ugly crown. I just looked at it in the rear mirror of my car. That one has no character, like my real teeth. It looks false and out of place. And on top of that it’s not the same color as they others. It’s greyish. I’ll have to live with it, temporarily.
    In two weeks I will have to go back to the dentist for the final crowning. But before he can put the real crown in place, that torturer will have to remove the fake one. With his drill, of course. The poltroon that I am anticipates that dental moment, Dantesque moment, I should say, with little enthusiasm.
    I think, not to suffer in advance the pain that my brutal dentist is going to inflict on me in two weeks, I am going to examine another part of my body. My ears perhaps. Yes, maybe I’ll tell about my ears. I have been told on several occasions that they are sexy.
    Or maybe I’ll discuss my belly-button. We’ll see. I haven’t yet decided.

 
MY EARS: SUPPLEMENT #3

    I noticed the other evening while cleaning my ears with a Q-tip that my left ear is much more receptive, much more sensitive, I should say, than my right ear.
    My right ear doesn’t seem to care for anything. She barely listens most of the time. She closes herself to the exterior world. I suppose she hears interiorly, best I can