Chemeketa Voices

Steelteeth

by Peter Starr

Mark Mollar wakes up every morning to check his teeth, and make sure they are where they should be. He fears their loss - always has. When he lost his first tooth he believed his body had begun to decay. Feeling it slowly loosen in his mouth filled him with fear. His first impulse was that he had done something wrong, something to deserve this. Maybe he had eaten too much candy, or drank too many soda pops. When it finally fell out during a game of tag, he spit the tooth into his hands in a splatter of blood, and immediately ran home screaming. He hid the tooth in a shoe box in his closet, and refused to open his mouth for what felt like days.

Mark watched as his childhood friends tied their teeth to doorknobs, slamming the door shut and squealing as the rope became slack and their teeth danced across the floor. He watched them yank and pull and twist until blood turned their white teeth pink, and a smile of victory, of development, or sometimes of horror, appeared on their faces.

Refusing to ever pull any of his baby teeth, Mark let them hang from his mouth by strands of tissue until they fell out in his sleep. He'd wake up and scramble about his bed attempting to find them, but never did. Instead, he noticed them one by one in the toilet, wrapped and packaged in human waste, processed through his body. Staring into the bowl, Mark Mollar debated fishing through his mess to pluck them free, but he never did.

Instead he waited for the next pearl to push through his gums. Eventually it would, and he'd spend hours staring into his bathroom mirror pulling the sore red flesh apart and dabbing the small pools of spit and blood with toilet paper. Every day he went to the mirror and imagined the new tooth, its angle, placement. He envisioned whether it was going to be symmetrical with its opposite, whether it would balance the rest of his teeth. What if it came in sideways? What if it was discolored, or jagged, or chipped? What if it stood out from his other teeth, or if it was larger, or smaller?

In the summer at the welding station, Mark dresses in thick Carhartt double-layer pants. On his upper body and arms he wears leather, creating a nearly impenetrable second skin to protect him from the heat of his welding torch, which burns at temperatures over three hundred degrees. On his head he wears a welding helmet over his safety glasses, shielding his eyes from the blinding white light of the torch.

Many summer days the temperature in the mill is around one hundred and twenty degrees. Within his shell of protective clothing it is much hotter. When welding, a person is required to create a flawless weld by holding his position and remaining completely still for long periods of time. For Mark, it is a test of will. Holding a weld while salty sweat drips into his eyes, while his arms burn from holding them in the same position, while sparks shower him, sometimes sneaking in underneath the hood of his welding helmet tests his mind and body. The shower of sparks seems endless at points, and the pain and stiffness unbearable.

His own odor sickens him. It fills his eye shield and seeps slowly into his mouth until he can taste the sourness. Sometimes Mark thinks that perhaps his own scent is better than the smell of the steel mill. In the mornings, the scent is almost enjoyable. All the steel covered in dew, smelling of the oils that preserve it while it waits to be fabricated into offices and churches and schools and bridges gives the mill a sense of youth and rebirth. It is the smell of a new day. It is the smell of commerce and manufacturing. However, by the end of the day the odor of the mill changes dramatically. The scent takes on the odor of coolant and chemicals, and of hot metal and gas. But these smells are not what bother Mark. It is the combined smell of the sweat of the thirty men who work in the mill that he hates. The stench of generations of manual labor smells like soil. It smells like what Mark imagines the magma that flows beneath the earth must smell like. It smells like eternity. It smells like it has every day that the mill has existed, and it smells like every day will until the doors of the mill finally shut forever.

Mark's only relief is being called away from his welding station to go out in one of the trucks to run errands and pick up gear or drop off finished pieces to the job site. It gives him a break from the heat and the stench and the backbreaking work.

What few people know about steel fabrication is that most of the work is done in a warehouse or mill then shipped in giant chunks to a construction site where the pieces are put together like a puzzle. Mark rarely sees his finished product; he never sees what he sweats and works for. Even if he does get a chance to go to the job site, he rarely views the entire structure, only progress - never conclusion. When the job ends, usually his work is quickly covered in concrete or insulation, covering any evidence that he once held pieces of that steel in his hands, that his suffering built this corner, or that support beam.

Mark dreams he loses his teeth. He dreams that he goes through the day, and one by one they loosen. He's old enough to not have baby teeth in the dream, but still young enough to not worry about losing his permanent teeth. But it is real - the dream is real, he feels it.

Mark feels his front teeth become loose. Is he at work? School? All he knows is that he can feel them loosen. He doesn't dare touch them for fear he may lose them, but his tongue brushes against one and he can feel the root slide from its casing, and the tooth falls into his mouth. Instinctively, maybe to save embarrassment, he swallows, and loses his front upper-right tooth forever in the pit of his stomach. He can feel his gums swell and seep blood. But this is just a dream, and he knows it - but it feels real. Mark feels the absence of his teeth. He slides his tongue around the vacancy in his mouth, and at first he enjoys it, but then he realizes that this hole will always be there. Mark's tooth will never come back.

Mark has always dreamed about losing his teeth. He doesn't remember what his dreams were like before he dreamt about his teeth. Mark guesses that he dreamed about the same things that other little kids dream about, like baseball and ponies and things like that, but he doesn't remember. All Mark can remember is the nightmare of teeth, every night. When his teeth finally started to fall out, Mark felt like the dreams were real.

Mark is one of the youngest people in the steel mill at age nineteen.  Most of the others he works with on the line have children, and some grandchildren.  He wonders how many false teeth he is surrounded by, and then remembering his dream erases that thought.  When he was eighteen he got his welder’s certificate so he could fill the vacancy that his father left on the line.  Since his father had worked for the mill for so long, the foreman saw no problem with his son being his replacement after an I-beam crushed his right leg in a crane accident leaving him alive, but unable to work.

Mark likes the guys who weld on either side of him.  He feels as though he fits snug directly in between them, as though he had sprouted from this spot and grown here.  To his right is Wayne, to his left is Slim.  He does not know if these are their real names, or even what their last names might be.  Mark defines them by their titles: Wayne the Welder, Slim the Cutter.

Wayne and Slim like Mark as well, largely because they liked his father.  Almost every day one of them will lean over to him and tell a joke or share some gossip, and in doing so accidentally address him by his father’s name.  “Geez, this cross-weld is a bitch, Alan,” or “Hey Al, gimme a hand with this.”

Wayne has worked at the mill for nearly forty years, and has a stuttering problem.  He wears a train engineer’s hat and blue denim overalls.  He is a black man who has two daughters.  He usually doesn’t say much on account of his speech impediment; this might be why Mark loves to work next to him.  Wayne is quick to smile and shake hands, and seldom complains or makes waves within the mill.  At lunch break, Wayne and Mark sit silently near their station and eat lunch together without saying a word.  They always eat the same thing – for Mark, tuna on white and iced tea, for Wayne, bologna and cheese and chocolate milk.

Slim is exactly that, tall and slim.  He has a gray beard with lines of brown in it, looking like something has dripped from his mouth and stained his facial hair.  Slim wears jeans and a flannel shirt that both seem to stretch to cover his entire body.  Slim has extraordinarily small eyes. They hide behind tinted safety glasses that may have been a prescription for someone else.  Slim is a pack rat.  Everyday at the end of the day Slim empties his pockets and shows Mark the contents, offering him the left-overs of his take for the day.  A couple welding rods, thirty-seven cents, a rubber band (broken), a paper clip, two Jolly Ranchers, his pocket knife, Marlboro’s, a Zippo, and several candy wrappers.  Mark grabs a cigarette and a candy almost every day.

Sometimes it seems days can go by without any of them speaking.  The only noises are the sounds of the mill: grinders grating on steel, saws buzzing through beams, drills humming through steel plates, the clanging of scrap as it crashes to the floor.  All of the men on the line work through the noise, and the heat, and the pieces of metal in their snot and spit, and the blackness around their noses and mouths, and the injuries, and the overtime, and the repetition, and the repetition.

The dream gets worse.  More teeth lost.  He can’t stop having the dream no matter how hard he tries.  Mark drinks to have dreamless sleep, but still the dream comes.  Different places – different times, same result.  In one dream he is in high school, walking through the halls pulling his own teeth out and throwing them to the ground, smashing them under his boot heel.  In another dream he is old and in a hospital. His teeth begin to drop from their places and tumble into his windpipe, nearly choking Mark to death.

Every dream is different – every result is the same.  Mark ends up losing all of his teeth in nearly every dream now.  In one dream he tries to save them, and then run home trying to shove the roots back into his skull, causing more and more blood to fall from his head.  In another dream Mark sees his mother, and she is collecting his teeth as they fall and giving him shiny quarters for each one.  She takes them and places them in a small container in the kitchen cupboard.  He believes she plans to make soup with them soon.

“Ya dreamed ya lost all yer teeth?  What the shit?”  Slim says to Mark one afternoon while they eat with Wayne.  Slim stands over Mark and Wayne and towers above them.

“Yeah … What the hell ya suppose that means, huh?”  Mark stares into his tuna salad on white, and sips his iced tea.  “I’m starting to lose sleep over this, man.  I’m afraid I’m gonna come in here and do some stupid shit like drop an I-beam on good old Wayne here.”

“Y … you … ya … you do an … and its yer ass.” 

“Hell … I don’t know what that shit means, I ain’t no Doctor Ruth.”  Slim still refuses to talk to Wayne because he’s black.  Most times when Wayne speaks, Slim stares off into space, or when Mark speaks of Wayne, Slim simply brushes the comment off and goes on talking about a previous subject.  Mark believes this is why he was placed between them, and suspects that his father may not have mediated quite as nicely as he does.

“I’m just saying, this shit is seriously bothering me.  I don’t want to screw up because I’m thinking about my teeth.  And the thing is, that’s probably the last thing I need to be worryin’ about round here.”

“I tell you what.” Slim smiles. “I’d much rather lose any of my other senses than my teeth.”

“What the fuck?”  Mark says, and Wayne has stopped eating bologna to hear Slim out.

“I’m sayin’ I’d rather have my teeth than be able to see, er smell, er hear, hell I’m half deaf already, might as well maintain my chompers.”  Slim gives a big smile and shows both Mark and Wayne his teeth.

“That makes no fucking sense, Slim,” says Mark.  “If you were blind you couldn’t work.”

“You got that shit exactly right, Mark.  Then comes the workman’s comp.  You lose some silly fuckin’ teeth, you not only gonna be eatin’ through a straw, you ain’t getting no workman’s comp.  You can still bust ass if you ain’t got no teeth, but if you blind, well, then you in fat city.”

The dreams occupy every moment that he is asleep, and now every moment he is awake.  Mark tells whoever will listen to him about the dream, and no one has any interpretation that satisfies.  He even went to the Dauphin County Public Library to look at one of those Dream Encyclopedias, but it said he wanted to have sex with his mother.  Mark knows that can’t be what it’s about. 

When Mark lays awake at night he is afraid to touch his teeth.  He is afraid he no longer knows where the dream ends and the day begins.  Every morning Mark expects to have lost teeth, but every morning when he looks in the mirror, there they are.  They stare at him.  He has stopped taking care of them, stopped brushing and flossing, knowing that they will soon fall out.

Mark has started to examine other people’s teeth, fearing those who are evidently missing them as though they possess a contagious disease.  He searches for signs of false teeth in people, viewing them as infiltrators of modern, tooth-oriented society.  He records commercials for dentures and Polident, knowing soon that he will need them.  Mark feels the loss of his teeth, even though they still cling to his gums. 

The dreams continue.  Now they include Slim and Wayne closely examining the empty spaces where his teeth once were.  Each of them holding several teeth in their hands offering them to him, but he cannot accept them.  Instead Mark gets up and goes to work worrying.

Mark begins to grind his teeth incessantly while he works.  He grinds them so hard he can hear the friction in his temples.  When he listens to other people talk he drowns their voices in the clicks and groans that his teeth make when they smash against each other.  The grinding makes him feel satisfied, like he knows his teeth are there in his mouth where they should be. 

He continues to grind his teeth for a week until he feels a tooth loosen.  What has he done?  Has he sped the process up?  Mark decides the only way to keep his teeth in his mouth is to buy a mouth guard. 

One day, on his way home from work he stops at Big Sport, and wanders through the aisles until he finds them.  He stares at the racks, the colors, and the shapes.  All of these will save teeth, he thinks to himself.  He takes one off of the shelf, a blue one, and puts it up to his nose.  He inhales deeply and smells the fresh plastic through the wrapper.  He opens the package to get a better whiff, and inhales deeply.  He smells the oils, the plastic, the wrapper, and then he puts it into his mouth.  The plastic against his teeth feels comforting and safe. 

Mark takes the mouth guard home, and follows the instructions on how to mold the mouthpiece to his teeth.  He starts a pot of water to boil the plastic piece for several minutes before he sinks his teeth into it.  He stops and wonders what it will feel like to have his teeth coated in plastic for the ninety seconds he must encase them.  What if the plastic holds tight to the tooth he has already loosened and pulls it from his skull.  The thought alone makes him cringe and throw the plastic mouth guard to the counter.  Despite this hesitation, when the water boils he throws it into the pot. 

After ninety seconds he pulls the mouthpiece out and shoves it into his mouth.  The boiling water burns him momentarily, but soon the warm plastic covers his teeth and they sink into the mouth guard.  He presses his teeth together tightly and waits, afraid to pull the plastic out of his mouth.  After a few minutes when he is sure the plastic has cooled, Mark slowly opens his mouth and pulls out the guard.  All of his teeth are still in place.

Mark looks at the impressions of his teeth in the plastic.  He measures the symmetry, looks at the angles.  He looks at his thick back teeth and examines the peaks and valleys of each miniature mountain range.  This is what it would look like if I bit another human, he thinks.  This would be the mark I would leave.  He looks at the small gaps and curves, wondering how many pounds of pressure his jaw could apply.  Could he pierce flesh?  Could he penetrate steel?

Mark picks the mouth guard back up and shoves it into his mouth, biting down hard.  He walks to the bathroom and looks into his mirror.  He smiles a big blue smile at himself, and walks into his bedroom for another night of dreams.

Mark dreams that he can’t stop biting.  He bites everything, as though he can’t help himself and believes he must sample every piece of matter he can find.  He is at home in his dream, and he chomps through the sofa.  He is back in high school chewing on the pretty girls.  He is a child and he eats his bike.  He goes to work and snaps through I-beams, and plates, and cranes, and blueprints.  Mark sees Slim and Wayne, and snaps them both in two.  He can’t stop.

Mark sees his father in this dream, standing on his own two legs at their welding station.  He opens his mouth and closes his eyes and consumes him, gnashing him between his bicuspids, and slowly beginning the digestion process.

In this dream, Mark’s teeth are strong.  His teeth shine and reflect whatever it is they are about to bite.  His mouth is huge, and so are his large reflective teeth.  He feels like a python, like he is able to separate the hinges of his own jaw and wrap his teeth around whatever he pleases.  His teeth feel like they are indestructible, and they are lodged firmly into his jaws. 

When Mark finally stops snapping them, there seems to be nothing left.  It seems as though he has bitten through everything in his life.  The only thing he seems to be left with are his teeth, reflecting all of the things they have ripped through, and all of the people in his life that he has eaten.

“Wh … wh … whatcha go … got in yer mouth, th … th … there Mark.”

Mark spits out his mouth guard and shows it to Wayne.  Slim pretends not to notice what is going on.  Today Wayne is wearing a red and white striped engineer’s hat with blue stars on the brim.  The plastic matches the blue color of the stars.  Wayne looks at Mark and a huge smile smears across his face.

“T … tee … t …”

“Yeah, Wayne,” Mark smiles back, “for my teeth.  I got it yesterday at Big Sport.  I figured, I was afraid of losing them, why not do something about it?”  Wayne keeps smiling and nods several times at Mark, as though Mark has solved a riddle they have both been working on.

“I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that in this here place.  Yer father didn’t need one of them pacifiers.”  Slim has stopped working and is looking over Mark’s shoulder at the mouth guard.

The foreman calls: “Slim, Mark, yer goin’ to the job site.” 

Mark tells Slim to head over and start loading the flat bed, he just has a little more of this weld to finish.  Slim looks at Mark as though he is not only disgusted by his new blue mouth guard, but at the fact Mark thinks he can tell him what to do.  Mark looks at Wayne, who is jealous of the fact that he and Slim get to leave the inferno, but he must stay.  Wayne looks at the ground as they walk away, and kicks at some thin ribbons of steel on the ground.  “Sorry, brother,” Mark says, pushing the blue plastic into his mouth, and he drops his hood to finish his weld. 

When the weld is finished, Mark lifts his hood and peels the leather sleeves from his arms.  He is happy to have found relief from the heat, and to be able to drop some of the many layers he wears.  Mark walks over and stands by the water fountain and watches Slim load the steel.  Two small cranes lift large steel plates, and place them on the flat bed of the diesel truck.  When they are finished Mark calls to Slim.

“Hey … You need my help?” he says and scrunches his brow in the bright sun.  Slim shakes his head no, and begins lashing down the plates with rope and a heavy steel winch. 

What happens next doesn’t surprise Mark.  It is as though he has seen this series of events one thousand times before.  Slim pushes the handle of the winch high and pulls down with all his might, squeezing the plates to the bed and pulling the rope tighter and tighter with every click.  When the handle gets past his chest, Slim puts all of his weight on top of it, and presses it to the ground between his legs.  Mark watches as Slim loses his grip on the handle, and the pressure shoots the steel rod straight upwards.  In what seems like a second, the handle is buried in Slim’s mouth.  He steps back from the winch, looking shocked and almost laughing at the chances of this happening, like he has just walked into a surprise party.  He then crumbles to the gravel of the steel mill parking lot. 

No one says anything, but the foreman, Mark, and several others run toward Slim.  When they get there they realize an ambulance must be called.  The steel handle has swung up and hit Slim squarely in the mouth.  Teeth and blood are scattered over an eight-foot radius.  Some of his front teeth have been imbedded in what is left of his lips, sticking out at strange angles.  Slim is delirious and attempts over and over to talk to Mark.  Mark thinks he is saying, “Workman’s comp,” but it comes out as blood and teeth and jawbone chunks, all over his shirt.  By this time Wayne has also arrived by Slim’s side, and Slim gives him a toothless smile.  Wayne looks at Mark, and Mark expects him to say, “Serves him right,” or “I have been waiting for this moment,” but Wayne will not speak.  Wayne will not attempt to force out a stuttered retort to Slim.  Instead he just smiles and takes Slim’s hand, waiting with Mark for the ambulance to come and take him away from the mill.

Soon the rest of the worker’s attentions have left Slim, and work resumes.  No one seems to mind the fact that Slim’s face was just smashed by a winch handle, and everyone seems to be more interested in the lunch truck that has recently arrived.  Mark stays by Slim’s side, collecting whatever teeth he can find amongst the gravel and sliding them into Slim’s shirt pocket.  “You’ll need these,” he says through the mouth guard, and Slim mumbles something back.  By the time he is loaded into the back of the ambulance, Slim is barely conscious.  Mark watches as the paramedics slam the door and start the siren, throwing gravel as they pull out of the lot.  Mark pushes his teeth deeply into the grooves of his mouth guard and thinks of the day his father was taken from the mill in an ambulance.  Now he watches Slim be taken away in the same manner, as though it is the only way to escape from the mill.

Mark turns around.  The crowd has left the lunch truck, and all of the workers sit on steel drums eating their lunches, watching Slim go away.  They eat bologna on wheat, tuna on white, ham and swiss, BLT’s, bags of chips, pickled eggs.  They eat the same thing they eat every day, and the same thing that they will eat forever.

© Peter Starr 2008

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