use what was it? This Hachibe. How will I feel anything with that scaly bastard when I don’t with this one that I love? He’s already sitting there with the bread in his hand, there’s always one wanting to screw me and another one waiting for me at some table. I go from bed to table and from table to bed. Blocked now I remember blocked. “Is it only with me you’re so cold?” he asked. That scaly son of a bitch. Pretentious dwarf. “It’s because I’m a virgin, dear. You must excuse me but I’m a virgin and virgins can’t get turned on like—.” Then he looked at me in his indecent way and laughed. All dental plates. Shit it isn’t just me. Even with money and everything he didn’t do too well as far as teeth go. Poor childhood poor shoulders poor hair. I am five feet ten inches tall. A model. A beautiful model. What more do you want? Bastard. Shit if this head would just leave me alone for awhile. I’d like to have a pumpkin instead of a head, a great big orange pumpkin. Happy. Toasted pumpkin seeds with salt are good for belly worms I can still taste them and that pukey medicine too. I don’t want the seeds Ma I want the story. And so at midnight the princess turned into a pumpkin. Who told me that? Not you Ma because you didn’t re-count stories you only re-counted money. The little face so penniless counting and recounting the money which was never enough for anything. “It’s not enough,” she would say. It wasn’t enough because she was a fool who didn’t charge anyone. It’s not enough it’s not enough she would repeat showing the money that wasn’t enough rolled up in her hand. But give out enough, that she did. For my taste she gave out all too much. A whole crowd of lousy bastards asking and her giving out. The most important one was Dr. Cotton.
“Max, you there? You know what my dentist’s name was? Dr. Cotton.”
Max poured whiskey into his glass. He swished it around and the whitish deposit in the bottom slowly rose.
“Cotton? Dr. Cotton?”
I clutch the glass in my hand. When Lorena shakes her crystal paperweight the snow rises so lightly. It flutters softly around and then settles on the roof, the fence, and the little girl with the red cape. Then she shakes it again. “This way I have snow all year round.” But why snow all year round? Where is there any snow here? She thinks snow is the most. She’s sickening. I crunch the ice cube between my teeth.
“Sometimes she sleeps with Donald Duck. She’s always squeezing his tummy, quack, quack. Sickening.”
I push the piece of ice against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. In reality the sky is way up there without any pain. Hell starts immediately below with its roots. So many roots twining around each other. Solidarity.
“He was forever changing the cotton in people’s cavities, weeks, months, years went by and there he was with the little bits of cotton in his tweezers, that’s why he got to be called Dr. Cotton.”
“But you have good teeth, hanh? Don’t you, Bunny?”
My beautiful. My innocent love.
“Yes.”
“So your Dr. Cotton was good.”
Oh yes. Oh he was great. He would change the cotton while the hole got bigger and bigger. I grew up in that chair with my teeth rotting and him waiting for them to rot completely and me to grow some more so he could do the bridge. A bridge for the mother and another for the daughter. Bastard. Prick. The two bridges falling down in the order they appeared on the scene. First Ma’s who went to bed with him first and then. I went walking across the bridge / It shook before my eyes / Sister the water’s made of poison / He who drinks it dies. Who drinks it dies. She used to sing to put me to sleep but in such a hurry that I would pretend I was asleep so she’d go away faster. In the movies there was always a mother singing romantically to her children who hugged their stuffed animals. Grandmothers used to tell them stories too but where my grandmother might be is something I’d like to know. I wish I had a grandmother like Mother Alix. To have a grandmother like Mother Alix is to have a kingdom.
“Can nuns be grandmothers, love? Answer me, can they?”
His back is turned toward me, he’s choosing records. How gorgeous he is naked. Shit he makes me cry from love he’s so beautiful. A sun. I think I first fell in love with his teeth, his teeth are perfect, there couldn’t be a more perfect mouth. I love you Max. I love you but in January my sweet. In January a new life. Get my feet out of the mud. You were rich once now it’s my turn may I? Next year stop. He’s scaly but filthy rich. So.
“This is my body,” he says holding the record up high. He kisses it. “This is my blood.”
“I hate God,” I say turning my face away.
Do I hate God or this music? This music. I hate this music hate it hate it hate it. Lorena has the same mania. A band of Negroes howling all day long, a hell of a howl. I hate Negroes. But Dr. Cotton was white. Blue eyes the bastard. That was his nickname but his real name? Dr. Hachibe said that we expel everything that was terrible and if that’s the case I’ll never remember his goddamn name. But I remember his nickname. What good did it do to erase the name if the scratch scratch of the fat she-rats there in the construction site is still there, day and night scratch scratch in the dark. “But don’t those fitches let anybody fleep?” yelled Téo who was toothless and pronounced certain letters with an F sound. But he would sleep. Ma too. She used to sleep real well that one. But I would lie awake thinking scratch scratch. The waiting room with the black woman, a handkerchief tied around her swollen face. The little basket of artificial flowers covered with dust. The black woman and I were the most assiduous patients with our smell of Dr. Lustosa Wax, when it hurt too much we would take the cotton out and fill up the hole with this wax that spread through our mouths with the smell of heaven. Dona Inês would talk so much about heaven heaven. I only experienced it the instant the nerve quit throbbing and went to sleep, completely waxed over. I went to sleep too. The smell of this wax mixed with the smell of creosote, they’re the two smells that pull me back into my childhood, the wax burning in the tooth and the creosote that came from the white can where Dr. Cotton would throw the used pieces of cotton. Another smell that mingles with them is the smell of piss. Real piss and not pee-pee, you hear Lorena? Pee-pee actually smells perfumy when uttered by your buttoned-up, peppermint-scented little mouth. Sen-Sen. “It refreshes one’s breath so,” she told me with her fresh breath. I chew gum to hide bad breath my gum is stronger easier ah yes I know it’s not as refined. Sen-Sen is refined. It’s not by accident that you always have one subtly melting in your mouth. So pee-pee ends up smelling like Sen-Sen but the construction site smelled like piss. Somebody who should have used Sen-Sen was Dr. Cotton, he smelled like old beer. To this day I can’t even look at beer because he would attend me after supper, the hour reserved for the most miserable patients, and at supper naturally he would swill down his half-bottle. Son of a bitch.
“I’d like to put the drill on his teeth zzzzzzzzzzzz and drill a deep hole zzzzzzzzz and cut through his gum and through his jawbone zzzzzzzzzz.”
“Hug me, Bunny, I’m cold, hug me quick because all of a sudden this is the North Pole with bears and all, I don’t want him to hug me, I want you to! Bunny, it’s great to be like this with you all friendly, I feel like crying it’s so good. Listen to this music, listen.”
So then he said he’d have to pull out the four front teeth because they were too far gone, what was the point of keeping them if they were so rotten? I started to cry and he consoled me, smoothing the napkin that he had fastened around my neck with a little chain. It was better to put in a bridge nobody would be able to tell because he’d make a perfect bridge like he had for my mother and was going to make for Téo. I dried my eyes on the napkin feeling the cold chain biting into the back of my neck, it wasn’t a chain like yours Max. Or Lorena’s with the little golden heart. That one was dark and it held a napkin that had a spot of blood in one corner.
