Chew

When he eats, his teeth don’t mesh properly – they make you think: eww, they make you think: he has a rough tongue plagued with moss – the bacteria that will not stop smelling.  His breath smells like garlic, pork fat, cola, because he eats little more than bologna and Pepsi.  His teeth mesh so poorly that watching him chew is a train wreck; you wait for the collision, the derailment, the dentist bill.  You ask him, “wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t, I mean, if you just gave up chewing all together, because I would feel so much better if I never had to see that again, but I know you will be in my house again in a month, or perhaps six, eating a cheese cracker or a cocktail shrimp and making everyone nervous about that inevitable collision you go around smiling at everyone with as if it were some sort of Cheshire cat set you picked up on ebay - but it isn’t, it’s something that even George Washington would have thrown out.”  But there you are and you keep chewing, dodging at just the right moment, just out of the way when we all thought for sure that tooth upon tooth, or tooth upon lip was inevitable – another near miss, the fall guy of the dental world.  But the truth is, I can’t stand to watch it.  I can’t have you over to eat and I can’t come to your house and now I can’t even watch you talk because all I can do is look at those teeth and put the pieces, the tooth puzzle you call jaw lines, together in my head and suddenly, while you are busy being smug and pompous, you are being political and atheistic, I begin screaming and begging you to stop and pulling at my hair and you think it is because you have made a compelling point, that you have finally driven me over to your side out of your shear logic and superior mental acumen, but really it is my own lucid imagination hearing the terrible squeaking scrape, clatter and crash of your teeth as they finally make mal adjusted trajectories through a nacho and into one another.  I can’t watch. You should try pudding.