Thumbsucker (12 page)

Munch, his girlfriend, and Donna looked thoroughly stoned as I pedaled past them on my ten-speed. They were standing around a fire pit in the Lions Park, cooking hot dogs on sticks. They jabbed them at each other
and horsed around and their hot dogs flopped off the sticks into the fire, causing hissing flare-ups of burning fat. The baby lay on its back on a picnic table, wedged between a tape deck and a six-pack.

They saw me and I was trapped. I had to stop. I steered my bike across the grass and leaned it against the table and got off.

“In the mood for a tube steak?” Munch said.

“No thanks.”

“Finest ground-up entrails money can buy.”

Donna grinned like an idiot. She was one. The baby, asleep with its arms stretched over its head, looked markedly healthier than when I’d seen it last. Its eyes were moving under their flimsy lids and when I tickled its chin it jerked and kicked, showing normal reflexes for once. I liked to think that its night away from home had startled its parents into taking care of it. I noticed it had on blue socks against the chill.

“Don’t wake him up,” the girlfriend said. “He’s fried. Just got back from his infant play-group hour.”

“Good for you. Looking after him,” I said.

“Munch is like the perfect dad now,” Donna said. I could smell her beer breath from yards away. “He bought like a dozen books on modern parenting and made an appointment with a pediatrician.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Smoke a J?”

“Not now.”

I swung my leg over my bike seat and pushed off.
Even the worst were trying to do their best today. Tomorrow or the next day they’d probably lapse, but the hope was that they’d recover and try a new thing. Nothing solved everything. Some things didn’t solve anything. You just had to treat every practice as the game.

Other people’s weaknesses and failures settled in their hearts, their minds, their consciences; mine, however, collected in my teeth. I didn’t know when the destruction started, the microscopic melting of enamel, or which of my bad habits was most to blame for it, but there was no doubt about when it crossed the line. It happened that fall at a mock United Nations when I drank from a cold carton of two percent while making a speech on behalf of Argentina. With the first chilly sip a bolt of pain forked up from my jaw behind my ears.
Everything light in the room went dark and dark objects pulsed white.

“Are you okay?” said the girl beside me, who represented Spain.

“Headache. Bad headache.”

“Want a Midol?”

“Yes.”

The pain struck again at dinner with a hot food, a grilled breast of pheasant riddled with shotgun pellets. I ran to the sink and gulped water from the tap as a kind of black executioner’s hood fell over me. I woke on the floor with Audrey kneeling close and Mike standing over me, looking miffed. He’d just returned from a trip to Michigan, where Woody Wolff had been hospitalized for liver failure and placed on a long list for a new organ. Mike couldn’t believe they were making the great man wait and had already been on the phone to Woody’s congressman.

“Where does it hurt worst?” said Audrey.

“All through my head, but starting in my cheeks.”

She opened my mouth with her fingers. “I smell it now. Wow, do I smell it.” She fanned the air between us. “Completely abscessed. You must be miserable.”

“The kid couldn’t bother to floss, and now his teeth hurt. Excuse me if I save my tears,” Mike said.

I was taken to see Perry Lyman in the morning. His office had changed since my retainer days. As his dental technician prepared a tray of instruments I surveyed the
new posters on the walls. The messages of peace and love had given way to patriotic scenes: the Stars and Stripes being planted on the moon, a row of crosses in Arlington National Cemetery, the Blue Angels flying team streaking past Mount Rushmore.

“He’ll be another minute,” the technician said. “Sit back and unwind. I’ll start you on the gas.”

“He gives patients gas now?” The technician was new. “He used to use hypnosis.”

“Out of vogue. Dentistry’s a living, changing science.”

I held the mask snug. The gas was cool and sweet. The technician told me to inhale normally but the moment she left the room I sucked and gulped. I slipped back deeper and deeper into my mind until I seemed to be sighting down a telescope with a foggy lens. When Perry Lyman walked into the room—a man I’d teased and tortured and provoked, and who had every right to hate me for it—I felt a wave of compassion and forgiveness. “Good morning. I’m glad you could see me on such short notice.”

“It wasn’t short notice,” Perry Lyman said. “Two years without a checkup or a cleaning usually tells me the patient will be back.”

He picked up my chart from his desk, which was cleaner and tidier than before. He was wearing a silver flag pin on his lab coat and seemed to have put on muscle in his shoulders.

“I owe you an apology,” I said. “My stunt at the bike race.”

“Depressing time for both of us. You’d lost your security blanket, I’d lost my marbles. Credit the Guard for turning me around. From pothead pacifist to citizen soldier.” He tilted the chair back. “Feeling any lighter?”

“Starting to. You joined the National Guard?”

“I suffered from an organic disorder, Justin. First I dealt with it medically, through drugs. Next, I realized I needed a shot of discipline.”

Perry Lyman turned a dial on the nitrous tank, then switched on the spotlight angled at my face. “Let’s see what’s doing inside the old black hole.”

The nitrous oxide acted on me like truth serum. As Perry Lyman scraped and picked, I chattered away about things I rarely spoke of: my plan to become a TV issues-analyst and stir the nation with controversial insights. My notion, inspired by a recent dream, that the original Bigfoot was a hoaxer who’d found that roaming the woods in pelts and skins was the life he’d wanted all along. I even let slip my shameful wish that Woody Wolff would never get a liver.

As I rambled, a lot was happening in my mouth. I coughed out blood clots the texture of cottage cheese and watched the water whirl them down the spit sink. I swallowed gritty bits of tooth enamel.

“We have a job ahead of us,” Perry Lyman said, cutting the gas off and raising the dental chair. “First, your
gums: they’re receding and infected. The abscessed molar needs a crown and root canal and your bottom wisdom teeth are terminal.”

The gas wore off as he spoke and left me wondering if I’d made a mistake in coming back here. Perry Lyman had already taken my thumb—what would he take next?

“That’s just the dental dimension,” he said. “Your heavy bleeding during the exam suggests malnourishment.”

“I had a bad meat experience last fall.”

“School?”

“They hate me. Impulsive and disruptive. Doesn’t work up to potential. Self-absorbed.”

“Homelife?”

“You want the whole checklist?”

“A to Z. I like to see my patients in the round.”

I ticked off the facts in the tone of a reporter. “Joel gained fifteen pounds this summer, lost ten at a tennis camp, then gained back twenty. My grandparents came for another visit last month but Mike accused Grandma of faking an asthma attack, so they left after only being there two hours. Then Mike got his crossbow and shot up the garage. He’s having business troubles. He’s building a health club but no one’s signing up and there’s a petition going around town to prevent him from selling guns, his biggest moneymaker.”

“Your mother?”

“The same.”

“What’s the same?”

“I wish I knew.”

Perry Lyman let a silence go by, then slipped a mechanical pencil from his lab coat, clicked up the lead, and faced his calendar, which was illustrated with paintings of aircraft carriers. He drew X’s through a number of squares, rubbed his chin, erased a couple, then added a few more.

“I’m blocking out a month for the whole process. But I need your commitment you’ll press on to the end; otherwise I’m wasting both our time.”

“What whole process?” I said. “To fix my teeth?”

Perry Lyman retracted the pencil lead. “If I threw the whole thing in your lap at once, you’d panic. You’d think I was overreacting. But I’m not. I’m going to do what I should have done the first time.”

I looked into his eyes for clarification.

“Treat the disease,” he told me, “not the symptoms.”

Mike dropped me off for stage one, the root canal, on his way to the airport. He was headed back to Ann Arbor to visit Wolff and help sell his house to cover medical bills. I braced myself for the usual lecture about the cost of my sloppy oral hygiene but instead Mike apologized for his recent tantrums, explaining that his old coach’s collapse had shaken his faith in human goodness.

“How is he?” I said.

“Still waiting. Something stinks. Plane crashes every
evening on the news but a man who won four Rose Bowls can’t get a liver.”

Mike pulled into the clinic’s parking lot. “About Perry Lyman—he’s been to hell and back. Listen to him. Show him some respect.”

“What happened?”

“He lost his father to Lou Gehrig’s. Then his wife left. Killer alimony. He went to a clinic in California somewhere and came back squared away. A solid citizen. He’s behind that new tax-cut petition that’s going around.”

Thanks to novocaine and extra gas, the root canal was loud but painless. The drilling and digging prevented me from speaking, but Perry Lyman kept me busy listening.

“I’ll spare you the sob story introduction—you’ve probably already heard it through the grapevine—but a couple of years ago I hit a wall. Sensitive there?”

“A little.”

“Bottom line: I reexamined everything. Values. Attitudes. Relationships. Most crucially, I went on medication. Result: I’ve become the man I always wanted to be. I fly and maintain my own small helicopter. I tutor illiterates. I go to church. The stoned neurotic on the water bed is dead and gone.”

I held up my hand to keep my mask from slipping. I wanted all the gas that I could get.

“Which brings me to a question, Justin.”

I waited.

“Have you ever suspected you’re different from other
teenagers? Not as patient. Can’t finish what you start? Terrified of being left alone but angry when you feel crowded?”

He’d nailed me. “All of it.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Perry Lyman said. “It’s mine. I saw the syndrome when you came two years ago. And what did I do? I let you go on suffering. Classic hyperactive teen, textbook attention deficit disorder, and Dr. Counterculture here tried the subconscious suggestion.”

“It worked. I stopped.”

“You switched,” said Perry Lyman. He changed his drill bit. “I want to start you on Ritalin.”

“You’re a dentist, though.”

He stepped on a pedal and revved the drill. “I like to think of myself as more than that.”

The pill was the driest thing I’d ever swallowed and seemed to absorb all the moisture in my throat during its scratchy, slow descent. I drank from the glass of juice Audrey gave me and thought about Garrett Blount from fifth grade, who’d also been diagnosed as hyperactive. Garrett had pierced his own ears with a pencil, Krazy-glued his hands to walls and blackboards, and regularly wet himself in class. I still remembered the puddles under his desk, so hot they gave off visible wisps of steam.

“They’re wrong,” I said to Audrey. “I’m normal. I’m fine.”

She answered me with a story. When I was six years
old, she said, I’d trimmed our living room carpet with pinking shears because I’d thought it was growing.

I didn’t remember this.

“Or think of when you were ten. The milk phase. You had to pour milk on everything you ate.”

I dropped my head. There was no denying the milk phase.

I was walking to school when I felt the Ritalin hit. The air seemed to thicken and mold itself against me. The sky expanded and revealed its curved shape as my peripheral vision spread and sharpened until I could almost see over my shoulders. Moments later, I noticed my stride had changed. My footsteps felt involuntary, guided, as if governed by magnets buried in the ground. To walk I just had to let myself be pulled.