Teeth

It was mid-June, and the annual army of spindly Canadian Soldiers had come to clog up the screen windows of every lake-front home. I, too, was frenzied by summer’s arrival. For a week, the sky had been stuck in a glorious oscillation of peach haze and silky blue, and school had let out. As the solstice neared, due to our lucky position in the Eastern time zone, the sun did not set until ten in the evening. Anthony and I hadn’t seen one another in three days because of his wisdom teeth removal, and he had been under the watchful eye of his mother for once, which only added to my anticipation. Two days after his procedure, he had agreed to meet me at the hippie tree, the local teenagers’ hideaway that rested on a cliff at the lakefront.  

He had introduced me to this spot, a place where stoners and skaters came to light fires and take artsy pictures, last month. It felt like an undeserved rite of passage to be brought there by him, a true veteran. I often felt like an outsider among his friends, and I couldn’t ignore how he had only shown it to me in private. I’d needed him as a guide, to both the underbelly of our wholesome suburbs, and to the tree itself. It was difficult for me to reach. I wasn’t entirely sure why I wanted to go there in the first place. Perhaps because it was, for so long, out of view. 

The lakefront was consumed by the forest, as though mother nature could not decide if Bay Village should be claimed by the beach or the trees. The fine, brown sand materialized mere feet from the woods’ edge to meet the shallow green-grey water of Lake Erie. The tree was defiantly isolated from Huntington Beach (a name that always made me laugh, as though we were in Southern California) and the Bay Village Yacht Club, which was just a boat launch at the end of a sloping gravel driveway, nestled in the thick woods.  

We couldn’t park at the Yacht Club, so we had to park at the main beach and trek down to the Yacht Club drive, which was always closed by a single iron vehicle gate, complete with a rusted “no trespassing” sign. The driveway curved as it sloped down to the waterfront. In the summer, when the leaves were tender and full of life, all you could see was the shaded gravel and the mouth of the forest.  

 It was dusk when he met me by the gate, where I’d waited insecurely in front of passing traffic for ten minutes. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and black work pants, along with his black and tan skater shoes. Everything was dark and billowy on him, always. There was no other way for clothes to look on him, really. His worn canvas backpack hung off one shoulder. The unnatural highlights of his fringe were mussed, and his cheeks were double their usual size. His big brown eyes were tired and void of light, and even from several feet away, I could see clearly that he was in pain.  

I rushed to hug him, ravenous to be reunited. He angled his body away, staving me off. I frowned and backed up, a bruise of rejection forming somewhere in my gut. I should have been used to it by now. He used a shaking hand to cover his mouth. I could sense that he was embarrassed about the swelling in his face, but I found it endearing. For once, he looked young, even though he was only eighteen. I gently moved his hand away to peer directly up at his face and grin. He couldn’t return the expression back, only a grimace.  

“It hurts so fucking bad,” he stated, shaking his head. He moved towards the gate and gingerly raised one long leg over it, then the other. I remembered that just a year prior, he had placed at a regional track meet for running hurdles. A part of me wished that he was still in sports, that he had something to do that made him feel proud.  

“How was it?” I asked, waiting for him to offer me a hand in stepping over the gate.  

He shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged. I struggled over the rusted iron myself.  

“It didn’t hurt then. But I could feel them pulling the teeth out, which was gross.”

 My head whipped up to face him as I straddled the metal. “You were awake?”

 He shrugged, finally extending me an arm. I gratefully took it and made it to the other side. Both of us were now fully shrouded in tree shadows, which were growing longer and longer in the fading rose light of the world. The clearing smelled like damp earth and fresh water. 

“It’s expensive to be put under,” he stated, unbothered.   

I thought about my older sister, who had her wisdom teeth removed the previous summer. My mother had instructed me to arrange couch cushions against her velvet headboard, to ensure that she would stay propped up and comfortable when we brought her home from the clinic. When she did come home, she was barely lucid from the remaining anesthesia lingering in her veins, her mouth stuffed with red-tinged gauze. She slept for hours and promptly began a round of opioids, which gave her double vision and nausea, but made her laugh at everything I said.  

“Look,” Anthony said, reaching into his left back pocket. He opened his spindly hand. In the center of his palm was a small plastic bag containing four molars, the roots of which were stained brown with his dried blood.  

I shrieked and recoiled. He held his hand farther out to me and laughed stiffly, then groaned and cradled his cheek.  

“Why do you have those?” I asked, aghast.  

“I asked for them.”  

We approached the end of the gravel driveway, which gave way to the basin that was the Yacht Club: a dusty turnaround, the boat launch (no more than four posts, a wooden shingled roof, and a concrete slope into the lake), and two wooden picnic tables. As usual, no one was there. Come to think of it, I never saw anyone at the Yacht Club for its intended purpose.  

To get to the hippie tree, one must make an abrupt turn once they reach the end of the driveway and climb up a small, rocky hill. The hill reminded me of something from the Old Testament–dry sandstone void of vegetation, the perfect place for Noah to stand and warn humanity of the floods, perhaps. We actually weren’t far from my old Catholic school. I remembered coming to Huntington Beach on the last day of eighth grade, and the popular girls stripped down to their neon Nike bras and splashed their not-yet-women bodies in the water. Nonchalant yet shrieking, trying to be oblivious to our male classmates who watched hungrily from the shore. I stood, arms folded and looking on, hating them and wishing I could join, too. It wouldn’t be right if I did. An unspoken rule.

Once over the hill, one could glimpse the tree—a gnarled, short-trunked tree with low, horizontal-reaching branches ideal for sitting on. It was a mystical looking thing, carved with the names of people living and possibly dead. I wondered if I pressed my ear to one of its hollows, I could hear glimpses of every past gathering. At the base of the tree was a makeshift campfire, merely a kiss of scorched earth and the white bones of burnt kindling left behind from the last party. There was litter, too, which I despised. The red plastic shank of a Ring Pop, purple and white Swisher wrappers, and empty cans of Twisted Tea, scattered by the last batch of adolescent revelers. I wanted to gather the garbage up but didn’t want to touch where anyone else’s mouths had been. The small encampment faced the lake, which today sparkled sapphire and gold in the dying sunlight.

 I busied myself with climbing the tree while Anthony sat on a bleached log and rummaged through his backpack. 

“I need to smoke,” he murmured.  

“Can you?” I asked, “With the wounds?”  

He shrugged. “I didn’t ask.” 

I didn’t know if he meant me, or the doctors.  I watched him procure a test tube, stolen from his high school’s chem lab, stopped with a cork. He graduated a few weeks ago, so the tube would never be returned. From it, he shook out a modest dose of weed that looked stringier than his usual supply. He packed a bowl, turning his body away from me and gazed out at the water.  

“Didn’t they give you pain killers?” I asked him gently, kicking my feet against nothing in midair, catching a glimpse at my dirty toes in my Birkenstocks. My nails were polished with chipped, grape-soda purple paint. “That’s what they gave my sister.”  

He shot me a look, the kind that told me I had said something ignorant. I heard gulls cry out above us, and the tepid thrusts of lake water against eroding land below. Milky smoke escaped his lips, then up into his beaked nose.  “My mom took all the Vicodin for herself,” he said. “None left over for me.”  

He turned away from me again, made uneasy by my silence and the gaping of my mouth.  He sighed and pivoted to the water, sending smoke signals towards the horizon. 

Summer was rising, as was a feeling in me that I could not find a name for.

Photo from Google Street View – Bay Boat Club driveway, Lake Road, Bay Village, OH

Alt. images from Google: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BafTnJ5fqZEwbW3h7

Coordinates: 41.490182,-81.925421