A Most Memorable Experience

You’re in a Klimt-esque floral skirt, lips alizarin crimsoned and eyelashes mars blackened. They’re mingling and juxtaposing and creating nice diagonals. They’re chuckling and chewing and Mazel Toving and doing the horah like it’s the last Bar Mitzvah on earth, carefully assembled outfits brushing the floor in a most painterly fashion.
That’s when the pain sets in.
But you’re not about to ruin this child’s day to become a man, or that woman’s chance to exclaim how much more mature you look than that summer in 1989. You’re not about to prevent someone from sipping their napthol punch or trying to pronounce ‘klezmer’.
He’s beginning to splatter cadmium onto your calmness, this violent Pollock in your mouth.
But you wait. Until you’re driving away, through the Bay Area which you have thoroughly prepared yourself to be inspired by, to voice your dental complaint. Baby Orajel helps at first; like linseed oil for tooth pain, its viscous droplets thin and allow for a glimmer of light through the dark impasto pain.
You’re going to visit the San Francisco Art Institute. You’re going to Haight-Ashbury and China Town and the Pacific and the flat valleys of Diebenkorn and Staprans. You’re going to gawk at the magnificent simplicity and the homeless faces, respectively, and you’re going to be at home artistically, free of your rigid east coast prison.
You’re not going to the emergency room.
The pain in your lower right jaw is not so bad. I know you may feel like all the teeth in that southeast hemisphere of your mouth are about to burst through your gums onto the floor of the rental van, but I’ve never heard of such a case occurring and besides, that doesn’t need to distract you; you can worry about it once you complete your allotted inspiration time.
Some negligible Advil and a few hours later you’re laying in a cold bed that hotbed of creativity, San Francisco, the sterile white light muting everything except the throbbing in your face. You think about painting, but at this point, you think you would produce something more along the lines of Kahlo, big, harsh spears jutting from your molar, than a layered, nuanced Diebenkorn.
You take some Vicodin; you stay in your hotel room, the much-awaited visual stimuli throwing parties to which you’re not invited. You return home to Baltimore, skin veridianed and eyes naples yellowed. You may have missed out on your Bay Area art lesson, but you can search endlessly for inspiration and gain nothing. It doesn’t matter how many museums you visit, how many beautiful landscapes, framed by that fuzzy van interior material, you commit to memory, how many Diebenkorns or Picassos or da Vincis you have the privilege to gawk at; it’s the unexpected root canals in life you remember most.