Pho 99

My dentist hits the button and slowly brings the chair back to vertical.

"All right," he says. "We're done. How ya doing?"

I nod, say something about being okay, all good, splendid. "Really done?" I ask. "That was..." Gross. Annoying. Disturbing. Double-gross. "...not so bad."

He smiles, turns half away from me and starts cleaning up and rearranging his instruments. "Okay," he says. "Do you smoke?"

I admit that I do.

"Don't," he informs me. "Hold off as long as you can. No pointy foods. No nachos." He continues on. The list of don'ts is brief but fairly conclusive. No booze, no hot beverages, no cigarettes — my three-legged pyramid. I will collect some more don'ts off the computer later. No spitting. No coughing. No food that isn't mushy, soft pap — so, essentially, no food.

The gut stitches he's put in me are dissolvable; I have about six days to go before they disappear. I start my internal stopwatch. One hundred and forty-four hours. Eight thousand, six hundred and forty minutes. I shake his hand. In all seriousness, he's an awesome dentist. We've done a lot of work together — me and him and my dumb, soft, Irish teeth. He's never hurt me once. I trust him so much that I don't even whine for the Oxycodone scrip.

Still, I am a bad patient. I light up a cigarette as soon as I'm out of sight of his front door, my jaw packed with bloody, salty, wet gauze. I'd been in the chair for almost three hours — I need it. I tell myself that I'll just have the one, smoking carefully, then lay off.

I light my second about twenty minutes later, having held out as long as I could. In the car, I spit out the first wad of gauze. I can feel the ends of the stitches with my tongue, like little hairs. But I have to stop: No poking at the affected area with your tongue, that was another one of the rules. I put in a fresh plug of gauze and taste blood in the back of my throat. It makes me want a steak real bad.

At home, I ration the smokes. I drink a lot of water. I manage about 24 hours of my new diet of nothing by eating just ice cream, but by the next morning, I am beginning to lose my mind. I've dreamt about food like I haven't since I was working for a living, back when I was poor and had only visions of sashimi and baklava to sustain me. For breakfast, I have water, then green tea, boiled, steeped and left to cool until it is the temperature of the blood that still seeps from the wound in my mouth that I can't stop tonguing. I want a cheeseburger. I would steal for a plate of corned beef hash and murder for a breakfast burrito. Already, I am difficult to be around because (I am told) I keep looking at people as though I'm ready to take a bite out of them, like I am mentally breaking them down into chops and loins and ribs.

It is at about the 36-hour mark that Laura comes up with the first suggestion that doesn't make me want to hit something: soup. How could soup possibly hurt you? she asks.

"Nothing hot," I tell her. "No noodles. Nothing that requires chewing. Nothing that's going to get stuck in an open wound."

But still, I'm thinking...

Forty-eight hours. Sixty. Desperate, sneaking a pierogi from the kitchen, something goes wrong. I can feel one of the stitches pop loose, a lump of puckered skin move. I panic. I don't believe in God, but I start talking to somebody — bargaining, threatening, saying, "Just let this be okay. I'll be good. Nothing but mashed potatoes and water. It's been (check watch) sixty hours and twelve minutes. Maybe I'm healed." I've known mouth pain before. Abscessed tooth, broken teeth. I've had my jaw broken (once) and dislocated (twice), and never got it properly fixed. I know from pain and know to fear it like wrath, like vengeance. I am terrified for about a half-hour, expecting the rush of lightning in my jaw, tensed up for it. Then, for another hour, I am wary. The pain doesn't come. After that, because I'm stupid, I feel impervious. Immortal.

Soup. The next day, I head to a strip mall on West Alameda, home to some of my favorite places on earth. It is old, ugly, battered and rattletrap — and I love it. I want to live here. I want to pitch a tent on the asphalt and eat shumai and cha sui bao three meals a day. And pho. Lots of pho.

Inside Pho 99, there are more fish than people — fish in tanks by the door, on the counter, by the register. This is a simple space — comfortable and open and bright, friendly but not much more than functional. People come to Pho 99 to eat, nothing more. Which is fine, because eating is exactly what's on my mind. Pretty much the only thing on my mind.