Cobb's Anatomy

by Irvin S. Cobb

I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on the guitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple always wears an open front collar. I know these things, but am debarred from telling them by reason of a solemn oath. But I have not yet been able to discover why every dentist keeps a canary in his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as you settle your neck back on a head rest that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil, and just as a dentist climbs into you as far as the arm pits and begins probing at the bottom of a tooth which has roots extending back behind your ears, like an old-fashioned pair of spectacles, that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone and dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters, all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color. For that matter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although I should say from the shape of his bone as used by the canary instead of a pocket handkerchief, that he is circular and flat and stands on edge only with the utmost difficulty. If you will pardon my temporary digressions into the realm of natural history, we will now return to the main subject, which was your tooth.

The moment the muscular young man starts up his motor and gives the canary its music cue and begins pawing over his tool collection to pick out a good sharp one, you recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, and so does the tooth. Neither one of you ever felt better. The fox terrier must have killed the woodchuck and then committed suicide. You are about to mention this double tragedy and beg the young man's pardon for causing him any trouble and excuse yourself and go away, but just then he quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly seizes you by your features and undoes them. If you are where you can catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you will immediately note how much the human face divine can be made to look like an old-fashioned red brick Colonial fire place.

There are likely to be several things you would like to talk about. You are full of thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing you want to tell him you don't think the brand of soap he uses on his hands is going to agree with you at all. You probably don't care personally for the way your barber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's thumb is Peaches Melba alongside of a dentist's. Before you can say anything though he discovers a cavity or orifice of some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems to give him pleasure. Filled with intense gratification by this discovery and fired moreover by the impetuous ardor of the chase, he grabs up a crochet needle with a red hot stinger on the end of it and jabs it down your tooth to a point about opposite where your suspenders fork in the back.

You have words with him then, or at least you start to have words with him, but he puts his knee in your chest and tells you that it really doesn't hurt at all, but is only your imagination, and utters other soothing remarks of that general nature. He then exchanges the crochet needle for a kind of an instrument with a burr on the end of it. This instrument first came into use at the time of the Spanish Inquisition but has since been greatly improved on and brought right up to date. He takes this handy little utensil and proceeds to stir up your imagination some more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of his victim and comes in.

As nearly as you can gather from hearsay evidence, you not being an eye witness yourself, one of them harpoons the nerve just back of the gills with a nutpick—remember please it is your nerve that they are taking all these liberties with—and pulls it out of its retreat and the other man takes a tack hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any time he misses the nerve he hits you, so his average is still a thousand, and it is fine practice for him. A pleasant time is had by everybody present except you and the nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs around your breastbone and hangs on desperately. You perspire freely and make noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song while holding a spoonful of hot mush in his mouth.

In time becoming wearied even of these congenial diversions and tiring of the shop talk that has been going on, the second dentist returns to his original prey and the party who has you in charge tries a new experiment. He arms himself with a kind of an automatic hammering machine, somewhat similar to the steam riveter used in constructing steel office buildings, except that this one is more compact and can deliver about eighty-five more blows to the second. Thus equipped, he descends far below your high water mark and engages in aquatic sports and pastimes for a considerable period of time. It seems to you that you never saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this young man can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in life when you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that he was intended for pearl fishing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. He doesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep in your tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefs with his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time.

You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time to stop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an inside job. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is customary for you to swoon away.

On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You can distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have been left in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off of an electric fixture somewhere up stage.

All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually the dentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speech to you. He has just ascertained that what the tooth really needed was not filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filled and that is what he has been doing—filling it—but now he knows that pulling is the indicated procedure. He does not understand how a tooth that seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now pull the tooth.

He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvests small sections of the gum from time to time and occasionally he stops long enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You utter various loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he lays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth utters the death rattle and begins picking the cover-lid. And then he gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part of your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into the open panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to look at. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor.