The Perfect Alibi

Eric K. Curtis, DDS

The emergency patient in my chair was fidgeting nervously. "I just need two things," he said as I stepped up to greet him. "First, something for the pain. And then—" He hesitated as I sat down and pulled on my gloves. "Could you write me a release for my boss?"

A note from the doctor never fails to work its magic. In fact, there is perhaps no better excuse from school or work than a visit to the dentist. As far back as the age of Shakespeare, people understood the urgency of dental demands. So Iago, the villain in Othello, concocts this convincing cover story for night-time skulking: "Being troubled with a raging tooth I could not sleep." The Bard understood that dentistry is the perfect alibi.

Three hundred years later, when the 19th century American dental surgeon Thomas Evans opened an office in Paris, local aristocrats flocked to his premises. It turns out that Evans’s popularity owed as much to his discretion as his dentures. As an excuse for discreet meetings or trysts safe from the prying eyes of the public, a toothache was irreproachable. No one would question the legitimacy of a trip to the dentist’s.

These days, as any writer knows, dentistry is still the best excuse. An American Foreign Service officer in Robert Ludlum’s spy thriller The Bourne Ultimatum needs to sneak out of his embassy for a clandestine visit with a foreign official. He is confident of the pretext that will explain his absence: "He got up from his desk and headed for the door of his office. A suddenly remembered dental appointment would suffice."

In Robert Graves’s story "In An Ancient Castle," a dental visit saves an innocent man from ruin. Sir Anderson Wigg, a local stuffed shirt in an English town, is insulted by the forthright Sergeant Harington and decides to have him fired from his job as warden of an old castle. When Sir Anderson accordingly accuses Harington of drunkenly deserting his post, a call to the local dentist clears the sergeant of any wrongdoing: "Yes of course," the dentist says, looking at his appointment book for the time when the warden was supposed to be AWOL. "I was pulling out an upper molar on the right jaw of a Mr. Harington."

With an estimated half billion trips to the dentist made by Americans each year, dentistry’s modern success as the perfect alibi lies in its power to symbolize routine. Complained humorist Erma Bombeck in Aunt Erma's Cope Book: "There [aren’t] any impulses left in the world anymore. Every Thursday, the beauty shop; every six months, the dentist..."

In the movie Only the Lonely, Chicago policeman Danny Muldoon (John Candy) offers a girl he is nervously trying to ask on a date a convenient excuse for refusing him. "I’ll make it easy on you," he says. "I’ll give you a list of reasons why you can’t go with me on Saturday. All you have to do is say yes or no...you’re having your wisdom teeth pulled!"

Indeed, the wisdom teeth alibi is airtight. Author Salman Rushdie, hiding in Britain with an Iranian death sentence on his head, described his secretive life to Newsweek. Annoyed at false reports of his enjoying a clandestine trip to Oxford University, Rushdie revealed his true whereabouts: "For years I had needed to have my lower wisdom teeth pulled...One of the most impressive of the many impressive things that the police have been able to arrange in the last year was to get me to a hospital, placed under anesthetic, have the teeth out, recover from the anesthetic and be taken out of the hospital without anybody knowing I was there. That’s what I was doing when I was supposed to be at this Oxford high table."

In 1993, Michael Jackson suddenly canceled three of his five Mexico City concerts. Amid rumors of drug addiction, Jackson aides confirmed instead the real reason for the star’s disappearance from public view: he had had an abscessed molar pulled. Yet even with the perfect alibi, an ounce of prevention would have helped poor Michael. Radio ads for Madonna, also performing in the city, urged fans to "Come see Madonna. Her teeth don't hurt."