Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this piece about a dentist who--with how his hips move with that high-octane of the New Jack era--one might call the M. C. Hammer of Dinosaur Dental, a dental practice for young kids.
Pumps and a Bump
The Sisyphus of sedation dentistry suctioned the patient’s throat, rendered once again mere object in his deep-dipping frenzy to scavenge what had led to pneumonia in others before her. Thoroughness was less his retributive care for a moral agent he had wronged than his way to express that he was done for good now with such wronging (“No more. This’s the last damn time.”)—a promise he had broken too many times.
Not one shot less than all that made the mouth butcher a blowlegged blue had filled the cavity, the least prized but the least damning of the three under his fingers—fingers whose stink of her translated, to no small part of him, as asking for it. And yet he needed to suction it all as if he had not just seconds before risked family and reputation, license and freedom, to fill it up: right leg high like M.C. Hammer’s dog, knee higher—for someone his age—than a Pentecostal miracle; hands overlapped, bottom lip bitten in menace, as if he were air humping to the New Jack of a 90s nightclub; otherwise-arthritic hips, too high energy to be called anything but “violent” (even if abstracted from the World-All and set against pure white), pumping and pumping with the footing-loss frustration of a horse (speed far from the kiddie ditty “one pump, two pump, three pump four”) until at a depth of reckless greed, grooving and grinding at a Slow Jamz tempo, those white hips rolled with that feeling-himself femininity of a man teasing his own nipples, rolled with that gayness of any good lover who savors instead of gobbles—romance whispers included (“Lil fuckin Sleeping Beauty, huh?”).
Was something in him looking to get caught precisely because he had broken the promise again and again, enough times that the Serenity Prayer had swelled into a lifesaver neither silly nor even optional? The child’s tousled hair and dreamy groans, her nasal hood all out of whack like she had just been face fucked by a full-grown man who could give a flying fuck in his rage against having been born, the breathy sighs of his halitosis swirling in the air with the chlorinated gaminess of his climax—he was not dumb. No effort, even if successful in snuffing out all the data visible to courts, could ever cover the rank vibe of predation that his assistant would walk into any second, heels clicking back from a decoy errand for gauze in the supply closet (“Just check the overstock. Top left, I think. Thanks Debbie.”).
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
