Standing with my portable animation studio in bags on my shoulder and at my feet, on the uptown platform at Spring Street, a woman drops something plastic that clatters on the concrete.

I watch in my memory as the dental retainer, plastic and wire, flips off the wet sink and high dives into the swirling toilet water, down and gone, forty odd years ago, up early in the still dark morning for an exam up in the Bronx, in the bathroom of the house my dead parents sold long ago.   Reflexes too slow to grab the dexterous little translucent plastic mouthpiece. My father cursed when I told him, as he often did, and no arrangement was made to pay the orthodontist, Valens, now probably wearing red or kelly green pants in Florida, or Arizona, if not a shroud, to make another retainer.  Thousands already down the drain to fix his children’s teeth, to hell with the ungrateful little fucks.  “Goddamn it!,” he said, and cursed some more.

Thus was lost the last chance to finish the work of having my crooked teeth uncrossed.  So, on the platform at Spring Street I’m feeling my teeth with my tongue, thinking that my father’s immature, yet understandable, reaction deprived me of the chance for a more even smile.  I remember very clearly the pain of trying to bite a hamburger at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike the day after the braces were tightened.  For nothing.

The lost retainer explains the uncorrected upper teeth, but what of my Frank Zappa-like lower teeth, a jumble of beige choppers?  Or my sister, also a patient of this Dr. Valens, who to this day speaks of him mockingly, sticking out her still prominent slightly bucked teeth.  Both of us still remember the smell of the orthodontist’s breath and his hairy hands.