01 August 2003

Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week

I showed up at the White house yesterday feeling dazed and reeking of alcohol. A friend had advised me that a rinse of designer vodka could cut the germs. I complied.

The feeling of disorientation is not unusual, particularly at the White House these days. And this morning it wasn't even my fault. The sailor who had just been in my mouth had not been gentle. I spat out something unpleasant and ground out a cigarette on the pavement of Pennsylvania Avenue. As opposed to most of the Dentists I have run into, and of course you know I am talking about dentistry here, he said that smoking would not lead to the dreaded "dry socket" phenomenon. That would be a bad thing and the culmination of a very bad week. Or a very good one, depending on how you look at it. Certainly a week.

The week began with a vigorous flossing, right after the refreshing shower in which I began to compose myself for another week in the office. The Boss was on travel, a refreshing break from his ominous presence and the common wisdom in the office was that he was shopping for a new job. He had completed his mission of alienating every office in town that had anything to do with our line of work, and was ready to move on to new challenges. That meant- I thought- that I would pick up the recurring items on his calendar. I was able to check that on the little Blackberry Personal Data Assistant they issue us so that we are in constant communication. It was in the course of placing the infernal little machine on the vanity where it began to buzz with the day's accumulation of new e-mail. I ran a generous skein of floss from the little white plastic container and began to run it through the crevasses between my teeth. With a customary flourish I hit the space between the molars on the upper right side. As I ran the floss back and forth I realized there was something moving that was not the floss. I felt with my tongue and realized the filling was caught on the filament of floss and I sensed a taste of earth and decomposition.

This was not good. I ceased the vigorous motion and carefully drew the floss out sideways. I explored the area with the tip of my tongue and things seemed to be in order, except for the outside of the tooth where there was a ridge of some sort I did not recognize. I put that in the list of "things to do" for the week and visit from the Deputy Chief of Staff. He is a good guy, one of my favorites here in this strange looking-glass town. He has lost weight, bought a house and life is looking pretty good. He told me not to worry about the press release from the White House that would be out later in the day. There was going to be a re-organization in our office, I would be taken care of, and things-were-not-completely-what-they-seemed. I smiled and said I had not just fallen off the turnip truck and had stopped worrying about things like that long ago.

Which was quite true, right up until the moment the announcement appeared on my desk. With the Boss gone and our operations officer on vacation things were fairly frantic in the office, an endless stream of supplicants appearing before me seeking decisions on the small matters that keep an organization humming along. That is what I have been doing the last few months, trying to keep things moving around the Boss, for whom all matters assume mythic import, part of a titanic struggle against the forces of evil on which only he could stand. He considered an imperious denial of deadlines a viable bureaucratic stratagem.

Which it isn't, of course. And that is why they had set him free to travel and find himself a new job with a minimum of mess for the Department. I read the announcement and discovered the President was pleased to announce that a very good and wise bureaucrat was returning to the office as the Principal Deputy to the Assistant Secretary. That was a good and positive move, something to provide stability in the coming period between the regimes. The next item that the President was pleased about was the elevation of our Operations Officer from the grade of GS-15 to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary and a commensurate promotion to Senior Executive.

I thought about it for a moment. Blinked. That was my job. Then I made a decision on something and scrawled my initials on the appropriate line on a memorandum to forward to the Boss who wasn't going to read it. There were consequences to the press release. The folders would stop coming to my desk now, or flow the other way. Or something. I needed to talk to someone and didn't know who.

So Monday was a not good day. I managed to finish it feeling as numb as my tooth. At six I couldn't stand it anymore and left. I had a knot in my stomach. Had I been fired? If so, why had I been fired? That made an odd connection to the corruption that seemed to be oozing from what I was coming to regard as a defect in my upper right molar. Which had some downstream consequences. I needed to see a dentist and having been in the military since the beginning of the Carter Administration, I didn’t have one. I was at my current job on an interim, acting, basis. Technically, I am a contractor on limited appointment to the Government. With that status comes a paycheck but no benefits. No health, no dental. I needed to find a dentist in a hurry. I then remembered with relief that I am still technically on active duty with the Navy, suit and tie not withstanding. Wednesday I called the Naval Hospital and they allowed I might be able to drive the twenty miles north of town and slip into Dental Sick call, which starts at 0730, sharp. And so I found the bits of my last uniform in the closet, the one I was saving for my funeral, and put it on and drove to the hospital yesterday morning in search of relief.

Which came in a round-about way. I proved I was still technically on active duty with my Identification Card and they sat me right down to wait until a chair would open so they could check out the offending tooth. They were curious about my record, which I had dutifully copied from the yellow folder that the Navy uses. My health and dental records are technically the property of the Government, and I turned them in when I out-processed with the personnel people at Anacostia. Considering the copy to be mine, I rearranged the record topically and chronologically, separating each category with tabs and placing the x-ray films in the pocket in the front. The Doctors were quite amazed at the organization, something with which they seemed unfamiliar.

Eventually I was called in and told to sit in the chair to wait again. As I reclined, looking up at the bright light on the stainless gooseneck, I thought about the office. I had interviewed with the Department at the request of the senior leadership. I had been hired based on an interview with the Deputy Secretary, Executive Secretary and the Boss. They had promised the permanent Senior Executive billet as a condition of service, although they noted that the paperwork would take a few months to clear up. Details, they said.

It had cleared up, but now the billet was gone and a purloined e-mail from the personnel people indicated that process would have to begin again from the start. Even if it worked, it would leave me with only the health benefits of a retired officer, which is to say few and far between. They shot me up with Novocain and spent an hour of pulling and prodding, grinding and filling, the Dentist removed the dam that surrounded the molar and sighed. "It’s broken," he said, to no one in particular. "It’s going to have to come out."

I was able to speak again after an hour of grunting into the plastic. "Broken?" I said cleverly.

"Yep" he responded. "A deep crack, right to the root. Looks like the tooth died a peaceful death a long time ago." He waxed philosophical, as if talking about a co-worker who passed away. "When they are dead they get fragile. This one just snapped."

"So you are going to have to pull it?" I looked at my Rolex and saw that according to the schedule on my blackberry I was due at the White House in two hours. "Can you do it now?"

"Yep. Let me go get an extraction kit." When they are grinding and filling a tooth the process is painstaking and precise. When it comes to extraction, though, we are back in brute force territory. It took him two trips down the hall to find the right kit, but with the proper tools in hand the process took about five minutes. He wedged my jaw open and the pliers went in. Pieces of tooth, the parts he had recently been grinding and brazing, crumbled in the grip. The Novocain was wearing off and the connection of my tooth to jaw seemed quite firm. The each tug on the pliers moved my whole head. The molar was cracked in two, and the so was the extraction process. He tugged at my head and there was a palpable snap as the root left my jaw. It echoed in my head. He took the front part of the molar first and then he went back in with his Vice Grips. I felt the tug again and a second snap and the tooth was gone. Blood flooded from the gaping hole where it has resided for a half century. My curious tongue touched it and recoiled from the enormity of the crater. And my mouth was flooded with the warm metallic taste of my blood.

It is funny that there are no stitches or remedies. They gave me a wad of gauze to hold between my remaining teeth and that is how I drove back to my apartment, clenched on bloody gauze. I was talking on the cell phone to my girlfriend. She thought that some sort of disinfectant was in order and she suggested I gargle with some Gray Goose vodka to see if it would staunch the flow. My mouth still tasted of copper. I changed into a conservative suit and drove downtown. By the time I got situated in the underground garage it was time to go. I stopped by the desk, asking where everyone was, and got no good answer. We are very busy in the office. I wound up taking a cab across town and was dropped near the barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue. I smoked a cigarette, vodka and blood on my breath. I walked down the granite steps to the visitor’s kiosk and got a Mass Event Badge.

It was a mass event. When I walked up the steps to the lobby of the Old Executive Office Building I saw one of our Captains waiting there already. We spent a few moments trying to determine if we were scheduled for the same meeting. In short order we were joined by our new Deputy. In theory he had been working for me until the day before, and in theory I was now working for him. He is a nice guy, and I like him even if he might have put the knife into me. I am a real Pollyanna sometimes. The Government has its endless surprises, and flexibility is the key to indecision. Our administrative assistant had apparently entered the same meeting on all our calendars, seeing nothing unusual about all of us going to the same place via different conveyances and not mentioning it to anyone.

I ached and needed either a Motrin or a Gray Goose, this time taken internally. Or something soft to eat. The drug was long gone and my jaw was killing me. I felt like I had been hit by a shovel. I decided that our combined presence was overkill and wandered back out of the great granite wedding-cake of a building to look for some ice-cream. The downtown Washington crowd was swirling as I walked past the Blair House and up toward Farragutt Square. There were young women in halter tops and busy Office of the President types with badges on lanyards, make and female, lobbyists and lawyers. I found a soft serve ice-cream place around the corner from the Metro, near the VA headquarters. I watched the people moving purposefully on their paths through the imperial city, for this moment the most powerful on earth.

It had been quite a week. The job front looked a little dicey, but when the Navy dentist started to rock the pliers and move my head, I forgot all about it. Pain has a wonderful focusing effect. When you have your health you have the luxury of worrying about the irrelevant. I removed the old dressing from my cheeks and stuck a spoon into the cool soft ice cream. It was soothing, and when I was done I put a fresh pad over the crater in my mouth. It seemed like the bleeding was not as bad as it had been, and I assume that at some point it will stop. All I have to worry about is keeping the clotted residue in the crater and let it start to heal. Compared with uncertainly about jobs and titles, the threat of a dry socket is much more significant.

It had been a horrible, no-good, very bad week. And it wasn't over yet. But I am confident that the pain in my jaw is going to diminish. And when it does, I will worry about where, and for whom, I am going to work. I sometimes think life in this town is chasing after fleeting pleasures while waiting for more pain. But hopefully the pain is fleeting, too.