The Waiting Room

A man gave me a story to write, but, first, you have to wait.

I am very impatient. But I am expert at waiting. I wait in order not to confront my impatience. Plots are about withholding, making impatient people wait. If you are no longer waiting, you do not love a plot.

Time makes impatient people wise, however. They do not wait for what will not happen. I am time-wise. I will never be a lingerie model. I will never be a rock star. I do not wait for those futures to happen.

Woody Allen wrote that "Most of life is just showing up." That's pretty good. But I think that most of life is waiting. I note, for example, that I spend an inordinate amount of time in waiting rooms.

If I did not show up, if I did not wait, these ob-gyns and car mechanics and orthodontists would bill me by the hour. They have signs announcing this. While they blast their talk shows at me, bliss me out with their lude music, seduce my prurient side with their celebrity magazines, they apparently do not think that I should be billing them for my waiting time.

I am prompt. Punctiliously prompt to a peccadillo of a quarter hour early. They are running an hour late. There I sit. Do I rant? Do I rave? Do I charge by the billable minute? No. Why? Because beyond the waiting room is the non-waiting room.

The dentist: In Alexandria the dentist has his chalky, stubby, rubbery latex fingers in your mouth. He says, "Dentistry is a sexual metaphor." His chubby, stubbled cheek is a coarse inch, half-inch from your mouth. You can smell his lunch on his breath; it isn't pleasant.

"Ung," you gurgle with a mouthful of fingers.

"Think about it," he says. "You insert this into that. The mouth, the fingers as metaphor. It's very intimate. An invasion. Think about it."

When one has a mouthful of someone's sausage-stuffed condom fingers, when one has someone drilling and filling, when one can't swallow or breathe and is paying a zillion dollars for the privilege, sexual metaphors are decidedly what one does not want to think about. Sexual metaphors are, in fact, the furthest thing from one's mind. When one is trying to keep a gazillion appliances in one's mouth and divert one's nostrils away from old salami breath, one does not feel sexy at all. Under the best of circumstances, one does not find rape metaphors sexy, and these are not the best of circumstances. One is instead trying to suppress chilling memories of Marathon Man. One is not thinking sexily about Nazi dentists with delusions about their patients' digit envy. One is, rather, waiting, waiting for the rinse and spit and bolt from the chair, flash of the checkbook, and mad dash through the waiting room out onto the street again, safe and longing to breathe free.

The podiatrist: The podiatrist is wearing a scary, white lab coat and is brandishing surgically sharp tools around your feet, cutting and trimming corns, dead flesh while you neurally cringe, waiting for the slash. He is chatty. Chatty men with sharp instruments make you nervous.

"What do you do for a living?" he asks.

"I am a writer."

"Oh boy, do I have a story for you."

You know with a dead certainty that a man who trims bunions for a living does not have a story for you. But what can you do? One is not rude to a man who is armed to the teeth with blades, who wears a white coat, and has a tray table arsenal beside him. So you do not sigh. You glaze your eyes while he tells an interminable story about a trick toe. And it isn't even that tricky a toe; Mr. Ed could at least talk. You long for the...