Knock Out Smile

Many of you may think life as an ex-pat in Lima, Peru is glamorous. A multi-year vacation where you indulge in sight-seeing all day, ceviche on the oceanside at night, try your tongue at a new language between, as you fill your pockets with colorful money and odd-shaped coins. Well, that’s true until your first phone is snatched or you get a notice from the Embassy regarding a Yellow Fever outbreaks. Or kidnappings. Or have to change travel plans due to terrorism warnings. Or receive a time sensitive letter from the IRS in May, with a postmark from March. Most of the time, living abroad is filled with the not-so-bloggable, vloggable, or click-to-follow-me moments, just like yours. It’s dealing with a tangle of red tape for visa renewals, transferring prescriptions from Bangkok to Barranco, or trying to find molasses. It’s mundane, or mundana, or mundono in Portuguese, or 平凡的 píngfán in Mandarin. You work all day, watch Netflix at night, smell weird things, and amass an array of intestinal parasites. Life abroad is the daily grind, but with an adapter plug. That is, until you need major dental work. Major as in getting all of one’s teeth knocked out, as I had to do. That’s when life abroad definitely departs from the travel brochure fantasy or the unbelievably boring.

Now my need for dental work isn’t a result of drinking the tap water. I need to go back about thirty years. Let’s make that sixty, way before I moved to Asia, and way, way before I moved to Peru, the land of Paddington Bear and ancient mysteries, pick-pockets and earthquakes, political demonstrations and drug smuggling– not that I’m accusing our favorite ursid of transporting cocaine in his battered suitcase.

This is way before the days of smartphones, dumb phones, flip phones, and brick phones. I got sick from playing outside back in the day when kids actually played outside—a slight case of pneumonia or something. I was given tetracycline to kill whatever it was I had. It killed it but along the way, the drug turned my teeth enamel dark and weak, allowing cavities to bore through my molars like termites,  and leave my smile the color of toenails.  Fast-forward to my twenties, when I move to Chicago, get a job as a copywriter, and make enough money to fix my smile. I found a good dentist, with an even better name, Dr. Champaign. But after my first appointment, he died of a heart attack.   

Now, I’m not implying that Dr. Champaign had a heart attack upon viewing the state of my teeth, but you never know.  His young assistant took over his practice and the custody of my teeth. His name was Dr. Jeffrey.

Over the years, my connection with Dr. Jeffrey hasn’t been limited to dental work, but how we have been mile markers for each other’s lives. We both started our careers in Chicago at the same time a kid named Mike Jordan started playing for the Bulls. We noticed when each other would put on pounds or take off pounds, had kids or didn’t have kids, celebrate anniversaries or mourn divorces, go grey or go bald, or stay at the same location in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile or move abroad.

During the years I lived in Asia, I kept in touch with Dr. Jeffrey, usually for emailing dental records to China or if I had returned to the flipside, a  stop by his office for a quick cleaning. He kept the address, the same artwork, and the same office manager, with the same spiked hair-do.

Or so I thought.

The last time I visited his office, I was in for a surprise.

“Do you think Dr. Jeffrey could squeeze me in?” I asked.

The manager put down her pen and sighed.

“Dr. Jeffrey retired.”

I smiled, well sort of, feeling as if he won the unspoken race between us, beating me to the retirement finishing line. He was probably enjoying margaritas on a yacht in Mexico, one that he was able to purchase thanks to my dental work. And what was I doing? Teaching entitled kids about dangling modifiers in the middle of nowhere China to pay for my divorce.  

“Lucky him,” I said.

“Not really,” she pushed away from her computer screen. “He started seeing double and had to give up his practice.”

A pit of shame formed where the envy once was. I didn’t know what to say.

It’s been several years since that visit. Now, my crowns are cracking, my gums sagging, and decay is infiltrating my dental work like roots in sewage lines. But luckily, I’m in a country known for medical tourism and cosmetic surgery, beauty being one of Peru’s top exports, right after bananas, avocados, bird guano and cocaine . Eye lifts, bee-sting lips, exploding busts and tummy tucks are readily available and affordable, and that’s just at the duty-free shop.

I found a good dentist, well, at least an English-speaking one. Not the lady with the dental chair in her house who let her son clean her teeth when she forgot about my appointment. This one has a real office with a real lobby. It’s about the size of an elevator, just big enough for a Bible, bowl of candy, and microwave.

I’ll call this dentist Dr. Beautiful. She could be a contestant in Miss Universe, that is, if there were competition in medical scrubs and Crocs instead of bathing suit and heels.  She works with another dentist, whom I’ll call Dr. First Runner Up. Their skin is as flawless as their English, their smiles almost blinding. They started the first appointment by making an impression of my teeth, that gagging rubbery goo now flavored like bubble gum.

I felt a bit scared as they flashed their runway teeth.

I didn’t want a perfect smile. I wanted a smile that looks like it’s been through the wringer a few times because I had been through the wringer a few times. I tried to explain, but they had no idea what  a wringer was.

“Oh, never mind,” I gurgled with that suction thing in my mouth.  “Just give me a smile that will reflect my life. Not perfect, but happy, well most of the time. One that’s able to laugh and smile at those hairless Peruvian dogs that want to bite me.” Or, when I looked in the mirror. Who is that woman? The eyes belonging on an amphibian you’d dissect in a biology class, thanks to my new prescription glasses. The hair a shade between cat-lady silver and Social Security white. I’ll stop there.

The process, which is considerably less expensive than my original procedure thirty years prior, will take considerably more time. Four visits, each the equivalent in length to a flight to a popular vacation destination. The first was Chicago to Cozumel (three hours, fifty minutes), the second, Chicago to Jamaica (four hours), and the third, Lima to Buenos Aires, four hours twenty-three minutes. And the final appointment, Lima to Detroit with a layover in Bogota.

At each appointment, the same thing would happen.  The front of my teeth would be knocked out with a mini-hammer, but only after enough Novocain to freeze my brain (try blowing your nose when you can’t feel it. It’s quite challenging). The removal of Dr. Jeffrey’s work revealed my teeth’s dark core. This allowed the beauty pageant dentists to examine them in order to make an impression for a permanent set of veneers. First check for decay, then measure, then remeasure. Then file and polish. Then photograph. The finale could be making two impressions. First, a prototype for my final teeth, and next, a temporary set that would be drilled off at my next visit, where more intricate work would be completed.

Three times I went, and three times a set of temporaries was made, each knocked out with a little hammer as the dental teams’ work continued. I would be shown color samples, like the paint chips at a Benjamin Moore from eggshell to chronic smoker.

My first set of temporaries were offensively white, too good to be true, a flashy salesman, a politician, an aging movie star selling reverse mortgages. The second set was the right color, but  were as fragile as butterfly wings. They cracked in two places while eating oatmeal—one of the only foods I can eat, along with avocados, soft-boiled eggs and cooked apples—resulting in a Sponge Bob Square Pants’ smile. The third set, which is in my mouth now, is strong and unbreakable, but the drawback is, they are the color of Kraft Mac and Cheese. Yes, orange. The blue box. I didn’t know what to say when I first saw them in the dental office, and even if I did, my mouth was too numb to blurt it out.

“Oorivle!” I whimpered as I looked in the mirror and cried.

The dentists tinkered for another hour, one with a miner’s light on her head, brushing a chemical on the teeth to soften the temporary acrylic, allowing them to change the color, reminding me of trying to melt lipsticks together and making nothing but a mess.  They managed to soften the color of the temps to a less offensive shade, that being the color of those orange crèmes in a box of chocolates that everybody squeezes but nobody eats. Yes, these temporaries are strong, still, all I can eat are avocados, eggs, cooked apples and oatmeal.

It’s going to be one more long week before my final veneers will be ready, which means my fourth all-day dental appointment That is, if there are no more strikes, earthquakes in Lima, or if the lab where my teeth are being chiseled isn’t robbed.  Who knows what else could happen.

But in all of this craziness, I wanted to write Dr. Jeffrey, to see if he remembered me, to see how he’s doing, if his life has been fulfilling. I pecked out a note, thanking him for the smile he blessed me, with even though now it was gone, cracked into a thousand pieces and replaced with mac and cheese.

I walked home from the dentist that day, on a stretch of Lima known as the Malecon to my tiny apartment in Barranco. It’s about the size of a shoebox but the doppelgänger of my original digs in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. I watched the surfers, their faces covered with zinc, their perfect bods squeezed into wetsuits. Some were waxing their boards, others lighting up some weed. I smile at nuns braving the waves while an array of gulls crack open shellfish on the rocks.

I see things not seen in travel brochures, but things that make me forget about my orange teeth, the little things  that are the vanilla scoops of life, the . They are not mundane or flavorless, even if they are not what makes up the pages of travel brochures or blog posts. They are the things that create new smiles without the help of a dentist’s little hammer. Life, wherever you live is full of knock out moments, wherever you live. Orange teeth or not.