"He's on the road behind Carrefour, you know, the one with all the brothels and speedbumps."
"It's the metal looking building right next to the wooden looking traditional massage place, you know, the one good place on that strip."
"He want you be there at 4, so you leave 3:30."
Half an hour to go about half a mile... sounds about right.
In practice, this meant having a Thai teacher write out the name in Thai, then driving up and down the street, cruising past the working girls while holding up the scrap of paper, trying to spot the right sort of curlicues and loopy whoops.
I decided on a place without tinted windows, next to a place with prices on the windows (hopefully for traditional massage).
Inside, there were half a dozen unpadded plastic benches with dogeared and outdated magazines on them, a TV playing soaps at a low volume, and a prettily bored looking receptionist sitting behind a mirrored desk.
I probably shouldn't be surprised by the universality, but there you go.
Something about the thick layer of dirty brown edging the hospital green vinyl chair from sometime before I was born turned up the fortitude tester: how long has it taken for the chair to get that dirty? What else has been sitting idle and grungy for such a duration?
When the assistant draped a threadbare and splotched robe over me, I went into the same place I go when I consider Thai refrigeration: if it were that dangerous, more people would be dead. Besides, laundry is easy to do, so it's probably been washed, it's just old. Blessedly, she tucked a bleachy-clean towel under my chin.
He was supposed to be the dentist with good English. I'm the doofus, so I couldn't say whether he was speaking Thai or Chinese, but I didn't get very much English as he started digging through my mouth.
"Hurt? Sensitive?"
"No, no, mai mai mai." I held up my partial with the missing tooth and broken clamps. It's a spidery bit of metal alloy that cost $2K 1996 dollars and was deemed "hella goth" at the time. It survived a lot, but not cooked rice noodles.
Two thousand USD scared me almost as much as stories about drills without Novocain, but as long as I have insurance I might as well get patched up, right?
"Oh, broken, no can fix. Make new. But no metal. Plastic."
"But I like the metal."
"No. Metal make teeth break. Or metal teeth break like this. Plastic more beautiful for you."
So we did the plastic cement molding and coated my face with the effluvia before giving me a single kleenex and pointing at the bitty little side basin.
"Tuesday." He pointed at the chair. "Tuesday back here."
"Tuesday, thank you." I gave a wai.
On the way out, I had to pay 1K Baht, cash.
Gulp. Don't think about what'll happen when it's time to pick up the partial.
And on Tuesday I returned to sit for an hour, listening to drilling and whimpering (really) before I went to the back to find a little plastic jobbie like the rainbow-hued retainers that decorate high school cafeteria tables, save that it was a dull, fleshy pink and had little nubbins of off-white instead of a metal band. And just like the minivan comes blazing from left field to take the chopper's place in the driveway, the "hella goth" metal plate with spiky arms that threatened to rip holes in things if the partial ever popped out of place at an inopportune time gave way to a strip of pink safety plastic.
As soon as I was in the chair, which still had dimples from the last occupant's clutching, I told myself that he just had to have changed gloves before slapping the new prosthesis in my mouth and cranking up the grinder. And I prayed he was grinding the plastic, not my enamel (he was). It took about three minutes, maybe five (seemed like an hour), and the assistant was stuffing a kleenex in my hand so I could wipe off the plastic shavings decorating my face.
The dentist held up a mirror and showed me teeth that fit perfectly snugly, with perfect coffee stains, and before I could do a doubletake, he waved me off with "sank you, sank you."
And on the way out, the prettily bored desk attendant waved me off--already paid.
And just like that, I'm done and out.
Welcome to Thailand.
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