My parents and I went to a family dental practice for the entire time we lived in Rochester. I remember the patriarch of the family telling his dental assistant to, “get this kid to shut up,” during a painful filling when I was a kid. Years later I would receive a nasty note from his daughter, herself now the main dentist in the practice, threatening legal action if I didn’t continue the installment payments on my recently deceased father’s extensive dental work.

Dentists, man, does anyone like those people?

Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors. Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. Sadistic purveyors of pain they are. Teeth have to be proof of evolution because I can’t believe in a God that would put a nerve in each of the thirty-two white things that we use to chew.

I’ve had two root canals and countless fillings. I’ve been told that I have nice teeth which only makes me think, “Well who the hell were you just looking at?” I’m a coffee drinker and former smoker of British extraction. My teeth are okay, I guess, but only if you’re grading on a curve.

Dentists call the bottom row of my teeth crowded. I call them crooked and I would hate me if I were a dental hygienist.

“You should really focus on this area when you brush,” they always tell me, wiping the sweat from their brow as they scrape.

No shit, I think. “I do,” I say.

I grab the arm rests in the chair, white knuckling it. Or I clasp my own hands together. My body stiffens.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you don’t want any numbing gel or anything?”

“I’m good.”

“Okay…”

Apparently if your gums are healthy, a cleaning isn’t supposed to hurt at all. That has to be a lie. Scraping at the inside of your mouth with a small metal hook against flesh should hurt. Steve Martin. Laurence Olivier. Your judgement of a reasonable pain threshold his way off.

This is on my mind because I went to the dentist today and, ironically, despite everything I’ve just written, it was great. My dental hygienist is really nice, she does a good job and it only hurt as much as it had to. After it was over, the dentist came in to check me out. She found a cavity in the back that didn’t show up on the X-Ray.

“It shouldn’t take long, you want to take care of that now?”

“Uh… sure?”

My dentist just put on some gloves, didn’t put anything over her dress, and just drilled right there. No Novocain. No nothing. It took her five minutes, which I thought was badass.

The sound of the drilling in my head sounded like workers tearing up a road (much like the cleaning sounded like the scrape of shovel against ice after a blizzard) but other than that it was pretty painless.

My friend said that when he took his daughter to the dentist for the first time, they had cartoons on and everything was focused on making her feel happy and at home. It appears modern dentists are trying to train children not to fear them. Good strategy. I mean, I applaud anything warmer than “get this kid to shut up.”