“Mr. Tilden, go easy on the Novocain! A little too much that time.”
He bobbled my left cheek and administered a third and fourth piercing. The professor had taken the precaution of going behind my chair and using his arms to restrain me.
Now my entire face felt like a Sharpei dog’s. The only sounds I could make sounded like a drowning man. Even my tongue was numb.
“Dr. Sommerfield, what size extractor do you recommend for someone with his size mouth?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to take that remark.
The old man pointed at the tray, and Pat picked up something more suitable for cutting Romex cable than teeth extraction. He tipped my chair backwards, placed a metal suction tube in my mouth, and jammed a piece of rubber between my upper and lower jaws, so I couldn’t close my mouth.
Pat took hold of my right upper third molar with the pliers, leaned his weight into the chair and started to wiggle his right back and forth. On the fourth wiggle my head exploded in a loud “pop,” and something flew out of my mouth across the room.
"One down, three to go, Mr. Tilden.”
I noticed that the old man was drooling, either with pleasure or from booze.
Three more times I heard the popping sound, and three more times something flew halfway across the clinic room. Meanwhile the suction pump was happily removing a rainbow mixture of blood and saliva from my mouth.
“Galen, I’m going to put some special packing in the holes where your molars were. This will help to protect the openings and allow them to close over correctly.”
He returned my chair to the upright position and removed the rubber jaw stopper and suction tube. I still couldn’t talk or move my face.
Pat went over to Sommerfield and spoke to him in a low whisper. The old dentist kept staring at me and shaking his head. Then they approached me.
“Mr. Galen, I really should apologize to you. This probably would have gone easier if we had used gas. In any event, I’m going to give you some pain medication to take home. It’s a new drug called propoxyphene. It’s not a narcotic, so it shouldn’t make you sick or goofy.”
He handed me a small, brown-plastic bottle.
“Good work, Mr. Tilden. Why don’t you walk your friend home?”
Friend?
I still couldn’t talk, and I felt a bit weak, as we slowly walked back to the dorm. Along the way I had to keep spitting out the candy-cane-colored saliva that would build up in my mouth, so I could breathe without drowning. I opened the door to my room, and Pat put his hand on my shoulder.
“Thanks for doing that, Galen. I’m sorry it turned out to be more than you bargained for. Why don’t you just go lie down and rest awhile?”
Yes, I did lie down after he left. About half an hour later I sat straight up. Devils were jabbing pitchforks into both sides of my face. The Novocain had worn off, and I felt like vomiting. I grabbed the little brown bottle and lurched down the hall to the water fountain. The instructions recommended two tablets every six hours. I popped two, sucked up some water, and swallowed hard. Some old blood oozed from my mouth.
It was about twenty feet from the fountain back to my room. I started slowly to avoid jarring my head. I made it to the doorway. Then the lights went out.
I awoke to several voices.
“Is he alright?”
It was Tilden.
“Can you hear me, Mr. Galen?”
I didn’t recognize that one.
I opened my eyes. I was lying naked on a gurney, needles in both arms. I felt something tugging down below and noticed the Foley catheter tube protruding from my urethra. My chest felt like hot pokers had burned me.
They had.
The oxygen mask on my face obscured my words: “What happened?”
The ER resident said, matter-of-factly, “You died.”
Tilden pulled a sheet over me as the orderly began to wheel me from the ER to a holding room. The orderly didn’t care if I was naked as a jay bird. He just wanted to get me out of the way, so he could schmooze with the unit secretary.
I looked at Tilden, and he started to sweat.
“Honest, Galen, I didn’t know this would happen. I heard a crash in the hall, and when I came out to see what happened, I found you on the floor. You were turning blue. I pounded on your chest and yelled, until some of the other guys heard me and called the ambulance. They had to shock you. Your heart had stopped.
Okay, scratch propoxyphene from my list of party favors.
You might know it better as Darvon.
They kept me overnight for observation. Even Dave, somewhat exhausted from his afternoon athletic activities with Connie, dropped by. The bed was more comfortable than the prison-style bunk in my dorm room, so I slept fairly well.
I dreamt of Lyman … Dr. Lyman Lipschutz.
I was eleven going on twelve with all the early pubertal juices in full flow.
One Sunday I had hung around with my friends after church then ate a quick lunch. I wanted to spend the afternoon at Dr. Agnelli’s clinic. What an amazing man! He worked seven days a week. God rested on the Sabbath, but not Corrado Agnelli.
That day was quieter than usual—no one else was there. Even the nurses had enough sense to rest.
Dr. Agnelli was sipping from his cup of stale, cold coffee. I had just gotten a cold bottle of Moxie out of the refrigerator and popped off the cap. As I went to take a sip of my favorite nectar, the icy liquid hit my front teeth, and I let out a scream. My left upper bicuspid began to throb in time with my heartbeat.
The good doctor’s reflexes were super-fast. He managed to catch the bottle in mid-air, set it down, and catch me, as I started to Z-fold to the floor. He carried me in his arms to a stretcher and gently placed me on it.
I was crying from the pain. I had never felt such agony, even when I had gotten into fights and came out second best. I held the left side of my face as tightly as I could, but it didn’t help.
Dr. Agnelli carefully pulled my hand away and told me to open my mouth. The throbbing was intense, but I trusted him more than anyone except Mama and Papa. He took his light and looked inside then took a wooden tongue depressor and looked farther back. Finally he looked at me.
“Berto, I need to do something that might hurt. I’m going to tap your teeth with the stick. Is that okay with you?”
I wiped away the tears with my right forearm and nodded.
“Listen carefully. This may make the pain flare up. I know you’re a brave guy, so you can take it.”
You cannot imagine how that comment from my role model made me feel.
I nodded again and he began to tap slowly. Wise man that he was, he started on the right side and worked his way over to the left. A single contact with that bicuspid caused me to rise and clutch my face.
Dr. Agnelli went to a white-painted, metal-and-glass floor cabinet, opened it, and took out a small, dark-brown bottle. He unscrewed the stopper and removed a dropper. Then he reached for a cotton-tipped stick and put two drops of yellowish liquid on it. “Open up, Berto. This should help with the pain.”
He gently swabbed the gum at the base of the offending tooth and magically the pain disappeared. I looked at that amazing little bottle. The label said OIL OF CLOVES. From the time I got my first “little black bag” in medical school, I have made sure a bottle of that stuff was in it.
Then Dr. Agnelli did something that surprised me. He went to his telephone and dialed a number.
Strange side thought: It was later, after I had met my friend Edison in high school, that he and I dissected a phone that looked just like the one in Dr. Agnelli’s office. We had great fun that day, watching the contact points open and close like little fingers on a player piano, as we turned the dial.
Dr. Agnelli smiled as a foreign-sounding voice answered, loud enough for me to hear across the room. What intrigued me even more was his greeting.
“Shalom, Lyman!”
A laugh echoed from the other end “Have you had your bris yet, C
orrado?”
“The same day you share a ham sandwich with me, Lyman.”
Dr. Agnelli looked at me and blushed. I didn’t know what the hell the other guy was talking about, so I shrugged my shoulders, and he relaxed.
“Lyman, I have a young man here with a tooth problem. It’s no longer Shabbat, so will you see him? I can be over in ten minutes.”
“Yah, yah, bring the boy over,” the voice said.
“You feel well enough to walk a block or so, Berto?”
That magic oil was still working, so I nodded. I was getting too big to ride on his shoulders anyway—but I’ll bet even today he would have carried me if necessary.
Dr. Agnelli flipped a small sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED and hung a second one below it: BACK SHORTLY. He locked the door, and we walked slowly down the street. Dr. Agnelli could walk faster than most people run, but he didn’t want the impact of walking to jar my tooth.
We turned the block and came upon a row of brownstones with emergency fire escapes hanging from their upper floors. I noticed one of the windows had milk-white, opaque glass with black letters painted on it: LYMAN LIPSCHUTZ, D.D.S. DENTIST.
We entered the building through a wood door painted spruce green and climbed the rickety stairs to the second floor. The oak floorboards were warped and worn and in desperate need of refinishing. The only door with any light on was down the hall. The frosted glass on it carried the same message as the outside window.
Dr. Agnelli knocked then entered. I followed him into a waiting room smelling of tobacco, sweat, and long-past-rancid furniture polish. Before we could sit in one of the circa-1900, mahogany-colored, leather chairs, a gray-haired and bearded figure appeared from a door in the rear.
“Shalom, Corrado, this is the boy?”
“Yes. Lyman this is Berto Galen. Berto, this is Dr. Lyman Lipschutz. He is a wonderful dentist. He has saved my teeth many times.”
They shook hands, Dr. Agnelli towering over the other man. Even I, not quite twelve, was taller. Then Dr. Lipschutz took my hands in his, and I felt the gnarled irregularity of his bones. I also saw facial scars barely concealed by the beard and found myself wondering what the black, broadcloth suit he wore concealed. I noted his hesitant, dipping, wide-based gait, bow-legged but not from birth.
What had happened to this man?
“Come, boy, we’ll look at your teeth.”
Dr. Lipschutz led me by the hand into the back room, and Dr. Agnelli followed.
“Here, sit, boy.”
He regarded me with a lop-sided grin then said, “Yes, yes, you must be Berto. My friend Corrado has told me much about you.”
My mentor nodded. I sat in the chair.
The little dentist whirled a white sheet like a bull fighter and placed it around my chest and under my neck. He pulled a two-step ladder next to the chair and climbed up on it. Next he took my chin, said “open wide,” and peered in my mouth.
“Corrado, hand me those gloves.”
Dr. Agnelli handed him a pair of dark-brown rubber gloves, and he slipped them on.
“Tell me when it hurts.”
He stuck a gloved finger into my mouth and began to wiggle each tooth separately. As he did so, I started to tense up, as he approached the devil tooth.
“Easy, Berto, easy.”
He started to sing softly in a language I later learned was Yiddish, and suddenly I rose from the chair as THE TOOTH lit up in pain.
He turned to Corrado.
“Bad bicuspid. Good thing it is a baby tooth. Needs to come out.”
“Gas?” Dr. Agnelli asked.
“Yah.”
My mentor looked me in the eye.
“Berto, that tooth is bad. It needs to come out. That’s the bad news. The good news is you have a good tooth underneath. It’s due to grow up, just as you will, fairly soon. Will you let Dr. Lipschutz help you?”
I don’t know what dentists would have done today. I suspect that the baby tooth would not have been pulled. But then … well, that’s how it was done. At least that’s how it was done in a tenement neighborhood, where the only time one saw a dentist was after it was too late for preservation techniques.
The other thing that startles me: Today, if Dr. Agnelli had taken a child to a dentist without parental permission, he would have become lawyer bait. Back then, he was a hero, an American Mother Teresa. If a child was injured, he would fix the wound—then call the parents. In our neighborhood, there were no phones, so such a message would be sent by shank’s mare.
Dr. Agnelli looked at me again.
“Berto, Dr. Lipschutz is going to let you breathe some special air. It’s called nitrous oxide. It will make you feel funny, and you might even laugh when you breathe it. It will make you feel sleepy and you won’t feel anything when he removes your tooth. Okay?”
I was sweating in places I didn’t know could sweat, but I nodded again.
The little man stepped down off the stool and went to a wheeled gadget that held two tanks of different colors. He pulled it over, stood up on the step again, and held out a black, rubber triangle attached to two hoses connected to the tanks.
“Corrado, would you hold this to our young man’s face?”
Dr. Agnelli moved to my left side and took the mask in his hands.
“Berto, when Dr. Lipschutz turns on the tanks, I’m going to hold this to your face. I want you to take as big a breath as you can and keep breathing.”
I heard the hissing, as Dr. Lipschutz turned the knobs and eyed the pressure gauges. Dr. Agnelli held the black mask against my face, and I took a big breath. Within seconds I was floating and giggling. Then things just seemed … white.
I heard the dentist saying, “He is on full oxygen now,” and the room came back into focus. I ran my tongue over where my tooth had been and felt nothing. It was over.
I guess, by today’s standards, those two men committed malpractice and assault and battery on a minor. But back then it was a mitzvah and a life-saver for me.
I still felt a bit strange. As Dr. Lipschutz returned my chair to the sitting position, his shirtsleeve rose up, and I spied a long number tattooed in dark blue on the inside of his left forearm.
“Lyman, I’ll settle the bill with you now.”
Dr. Agnelli reached for his wallet, but my gray-haired savior shook his head and touched his friend’s shoulder.
“You owe me nothing. It is I who owe you.”
My mind was gradually coming back to earth. What a high oxygen deprivation can produce!
Then my tongue went into gear before my common sense did.
“Dr. Lipschutz, what’s that number on your arm?”
He appeared quite startled by my question. He began to shake. His arms clutched his chest and he began to rock back and forth as his face melted in tears.
Dr. Agnelli threw his arms around Dr. Lipschutz and held him to his chest. His own face creased in empathy to the dentist’s grief. I had never seen him like this. His quiet voice resonated in the stillness of the dental operatory.
“Berto, Lyman survived Auschwitz.”
Dr. Lipschutz’s voice then crooned words I did not understand.
Me hot zey in dr’erd, me vet zey iberlebn, me vet noch derlebn.
To hell with them, we will survive them, we will yet survive.
Now that scarred face and twisted mouth continued to speak, its eyes lit with fire, its voice no longer trembling. Dr. Lipschutz sang louder and louder—and then he stopped.
“No, boy, I am not crazy. You are Christian. You had your martyred Nazarene carpenter. Our murdered carpenter was my friend, Mordecai Gebirtig.”
Dr. Agnelli loosened his arms, and he shook himself like a dog shaking off rainwater. His eyes, dark brown dissolving to black, burned with a frightful intensity.
“Sit, Berto, sit.”
Dr. Agnelli nodded to me.
“Berto, hear me and learn. Someday, when you are old, you will remember Lyman, yes? You will remember my words.”
“I was not always like this, Berto. What you see, what I am now, was created by devils masquerading as men.”
His face twitched, and I held my breath, hoping he would not descend into that pit of despair as before.
“No, Berto, once I was tall, almost like Corrado.”
His mouth split into an awful grin.
“I was good looking, too, my friend, not like you.”
Dr. Agnelli chuckled, but Dr. Lipschutz’s voice quavered.
“And then my Krakow, my beautiful Krakow, was invaded by brutes.
“It was Ha-Shoah."
The Holocaust.
Juden verboten! Juden verboten!
No Jews allowed.
"Even now I can see the signs and hear the shouts."
He turned to Dr. Agnelli.
“Corrado, my friend, why do men become devils?”
He did not answer.
The dentist shook his head to cast away memories.
“I was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1910.”
I stared in disbelief. It meant that his shriveled presence was only forty-one!
Once more he grinned.
“My papa was a merchant. My mama loved my papa and raised me and my three brothers. They all went into Papa’s business.
“I was the youngest and the most spoiled, so I put on airs of being a doctor or a dentist. I actually won a scholarship to attend a prestigious dental school in Germany—and I could speak German better than any Aryan son of Herman!”
Berto's World_Stories Page 11
