Today is the nine year anniversary of getting my new dentist. I was ten years old when we switched companies. I used to be a member of Kids Dental Care. They were involved in a scam, or a laundering, or some other thing that has to do with money. They told me I had twelve cavities once. They came out to my parents in the waiting room sitting by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade game and said hello, your daughter has twelve cavities. That’s right, twelve cavities in her mouth, right this instant. We need to get them fixed today. And so I got them all fixed in one sitting. My mouth was bleeding and smelling; I had to mumble and murmur to let the dentist know the cotton swab between my teeth was soaked and red so he could put in a new one. Chowder or some other early 2000’s cartoon was playing in the background, on the TV they plastered to the ceiling above the operating chair. Maybe it was that same day that I was so scared to get my cavities filled, the nurse said she would give me a shot if I didn’t stop moving and crying. She gave me one anyways, to make me numb for their tools. My parents and I never understood how I acquired twelve cavities. I never ate any candy, and yes, sometimes I didn’t brush my teeth, but no kid ever does all the time anyways, and they never get twelve cavities filled in one sitting. It must have been a scam, my parents decided. We were only members of that company because the nurse who threatened to give me a shot was a former student of my mom and dad.
After they closed down we had to find a new dentist. My parents were already divorced by then so my dad found us one on his side of town. It was in Little Tokyo, really close to all those shops we would go to to buy plastic-wrapped stuffed animals. Like Pokemon, or Hello Kitty.
There are three or four shops in Little Tokyo all called The Jungle. One has old Nintendo video games, and another has rare Yu-Gi-Oh! cards covering every available surface in the store, even the walls. My favorite was the Godzilla shop. It wasn’t just for Godzilla; it had other collectible figures from old animes and Japanese movies made in the 90’s, but the only things I ever bought there were plastic kaijus and Godzilla vs. Someone DVDs. My new dentist was close to that store. We could have gone after every appointment if we stayed with them for more than a year.
I had sushi for the first time after my first appointment with the new dentist. It was also the first time I came out of a dentist office with good x-rays and zero cavities. They didn’t have Pac-Man or claw machines in the waiting room but at least the dentist was nice.
My cousin came that day too. Maybe today is also her new dentist anniversary. Maybe she doesn’t go there anymore either. But we got sushi together for the first time that day, and pushed our quarters into gumball machines to get cheap keychains for our DSs. She had a Winnie the Pooh keychain on hers. There was a whole gumball machine dedicated to Winnie the Pooh, and she collected them. He’d be wearing different rubber outfits, like pajamas, or a bunny suit. And it came with a little yellow string attached that would turn brown or black over the years. She collected Domo keychains too, maybe from a gumball machine right next door, and he wore dinosaur suits.
My cousin and I had matching piggy banks. Somewhere in East Los Angeles or Little Tokyo there was a store with a big glass window. We could see the piggy banks inside. Not the heavy ceramic ones, but small plastic ones with big nostrils. I got a purple one and she got a pink one. Our grandma bought them for us because they were something she could afford. That store also had toys wrapped in plastic. It was a Hispanic thing, or a Japanese-American thing, or a whatever-other-impoverished-race-was-living-in-Los-Angeles thing.
We weren’t poor. But we were Mexican. All of my grandma’s children ended up better off than she ever was. All first-gen college students. My dad got into UCLA. Some brown kid whose parents immigrated to Colorado, to California. He became a teacher. (He always knew he wanted to be one). His brother became a cop. His sister became a nurse. His other sisters did important stuff too, well-off kind of stuff. Almost all of them stayed in LA. Only my aunt Tia moved to Duarte. Housing is cheaper there. But housing is fancier there too. She had a two-story house, with a pool and a diving board in the backyard. Everybody had their own room, even the guests they never invited over. They had an aquarium, a giant dollhouse, a playstation 2, a real dining room, a flat-screen TV. My cousin kept her piggybank in her bedroom, and every time I slept over I would look at it. I would think of the time we got sushi together in Little Tokyo, got our teeth checked, got gumball machine keychains.
Rhiannon Chavez is a Los Angeles native now living in Ashland, Oregon. They enjoy walking in the forest of Lithia Park but claim nothing beats the graffiti and skyscrapers they grew up around. Rhiannon loves memorizing the galactic events of Star Wars, and using their friend’s coffee table to play Yu-Gi-Oh!. They hope to someday eat off of their poetry, but are fine holing up in someone’s attic so long as they still get to create work they love.
Main Squeeze Literary Journal 