What’s on my mind? Dentists.
Perhaps you remember the horrors of the dentist’s chair in the early 1950s - the excruciating delivery of anesthetic with a blunt-tipped knitting needle plunged into a nerve; the grinding, burrowing drill with the RRRRR-WHA-WHA-RRRRR-WHA-WHA-RRRRR-WHA-WHA! vibration of a slow-w-w jackhammer.
Perhaps you remember the horrors of the dentist’s chair in the early 1950s - the excruciating delivery of anesthetic with a blunt-tipped knitting needle plunged into a nerve; the grinding, burrowing drill with the RRRRR-WHA-WHA-RRRRR-WHA-WHA-RRRRR-WHA-WHA! vibration of a slow-w-w jackhammer.
My mother took me and my younger sister by bus to visit “Dr. Allison.” Dr. Allison looked like late-1950s/early 1960s TV talk-show host Jack Paar - but with dandruff. I knew Dr. Allison had dandruff because he used to lean over my open mouth as the flakes floated down.
Dr. Allison smoked. The tips of his fingers stank and were stained deep yellow. Dr. Allison was always considerate enough to hold his lit cigaret away from my mouth as he examined my teeth with his free hand. My sister and I never said a word of this to our mother, who sat in the waiting room, puffing on her own cigaret.
I remember Dr. Allison’s assistant, Betty, for the wall of bangs curled over her forehead like a hairy kielbasa. In her day, circa-1940s, Betty probably danced a mean jitterbug. I knew little else about her, except that when Dr. Allison needed both hands to check my teeth, Betty would extract the cigaret from his yellow fingers to lay it on top of the steam cabinet where she sterilized his instruments.
I used to wonder how long Dr. Allison’s cigarette ash would grow until it finally fell to the floor. I never actually knew, because my eyes were usually screwed shut in terror shortly after Dr. Allison began attacking my teeth.
Betty had a speech impediment. While she was with Dr. Allison in the torture chamber of his dental office, she often called: “Doctaw Wallison! Doctaw Wallison!” She usually said it twice. I don’t think the cigaret and Betty’s dual utterances signaled any hanky-panky (Betty may have been a jitterbugger, but that was probably as far as her wild streak went).
Betty probably just wanted to lay Doctaw Wallison’s cigarette on the steam cabinet where its ash would triple in size.
Thanks to a steady diet of jawbreakers, my teeth were riddled with cavities. This left Doctaw Wallison no choice but to drill (RRRRR-WHA-WHA-RRRRR-WHA-WHA-RRRRR-WHA-WHA!), fill, and bill.
The drill’s vibrations always triggered a fresh cascade of dandruff. When the torture finally ended (this is the part you won’t believe, but it honestly happened), Doctaw Wallison always said he had a “little surprise” for me. After the fifth or sixth time he did this, I stopped being surprised.
The surprise was that Doctaw Wallison would reach into a cupboard to pull out a box of chocolates. Lifting the lid with a flourish, he asked: “And which chocolate would yo-o-u-u-u like?”
Naturally, I liked them all, but politely picked just one, which I popped into my mouth. This - momentarily - was the best and only thing I liked about visiting Doctaw Wallison.
The first CHOMP! told me I’d been fooled. The second told me I was a moron. The “chocolate” was rubber.
“Haw, haw, haw!” Doctaw Wallison laughed.
“Ble-e-a-ah!” I said, spitting the phony chocolate into my hand.
I remember - who could forget? - how the then-jovial Doctaw Wallison wiped the wet candy on his dental smock and replaced it in the box. Even at five years old, I wondered how many kids had chewed that same piece of rubber.
Doctaw Wallison succeeded with that stunt as often as he did because I always believed one of those “chocolates” had to be real. It never was.
Years later, quite by chance, I came across Doctaw Wallison’s obituary. Judging by the photo that accompanied it, he still looked like Jack Paar.
© Nicole Parton
