how i got my silver tooth
by kyle françois
The downspout pulled right off the house. The summer night was nearly over. The Cubs were playing the best baseball they’d ever played. Right after my foot caught the cinderblock, the downspout pulled off the house. Just right off the house. I was smiling as I fell headlong to the ground: the whimsy of the thin metal pipe, the late summer night, the bottle of wine I already drank. The Cubs were playing good baseball. Real good ball. The Chicago Cubs were playing good ball. I had to pee and didn’t go inside to the restroom because country kids don’t rest.
Dylan was with me and Luther was on his way over. There wasn’t as much blood as one would think, I had the larger pieces of teeth in my hand but I knew that some fragments were still on the porch. I didn’t know if it hurt because I wasn’t feeling any pain. I turned my head from the kitchen sink, “I have to go to fucking grad school like this.”
In that moment Luther walked in. He was wearing a full on velour jumpsuit, forest green. His face grew gigantic mutton-chops. He weighed three-hundred and seventy-five pounds. When my mouth quit bleeding I took a toot Luther offered. There wasn’t a piece of furniture in the house. I was staying there temporarily before I moved. The kitchen had handsome tile and vast wooden shelving with twenty-five house plants. We all stood in the kitchen around the island and drank beer. My tongue caught the sharp parts of my teeth when I talked. And I liked to talk. In between an additional toot, Luther offered advice, Tell people you play semi-pro hockey.
The three of us went out to the porch and smoked cigarettes. The backyard was enclosed by rows of hardwoods and the pale moon created long shadows that reached to our feet. Luther was technically our manager and his presence provided some sense of authority. He told me about his hockey days, he played on the intramural team when he first moved to Iowa City, he was the goalie, he knew all the spots in the early nineties, he never complained, he told me red onions led to hangovers, he traded his el Camino for a Jeep (I thought a goddamn shame), he smoked another Camel Light, he opened another beer, he told me that people leave Iowa City only to find their way back, he had a profound appreciation for freaks, he never took no shit from nobody, he followed the Eagles and lived to see a championship, he showed up to the holiday party an hour late with four women, a fresh haircut, and new digs, he bullied the bullies, he said Neil Young was the most American singer-songwriter, he said strike two, atta boy, go and get em—he was large and in charge my guy, my guy, my guy.
He’d verbalize a soda order to the Gas Station fast. He ran the pizza spot and we got free soda and we gave ‘em slices for soda. It was a classic deal. The staff got slices; we got soda. Slices and soda baby. Slices and soda. I loved the interaction when gas station staff came in for slices.
“Take a look—”
“Slices?”
“Anything you want. How many?”
“Could I have those two sausages, a cheese, maybe a pep?”
“Of course—absolutely.”
Luther Nash died in 2020. The last time I saw him was in 2018—I was walking across the street to buy CDs. I’d moved out of Iowa City and was living in the suburbs of DC, something I didn’t necessarily decide to do myself, and Iowa was less recognizable. But I recognized Luther across the street, he was holding a comically small gift bag and I extended a hand. We exchanged pleasantries, I was driving to Chicago and so was Luther. His niece was in the City. You never know when it’s the last time you talk to somebody. We’d talked for hours. . Shifts on Mondays when the only thing you do is talk. Shifts at Jazz Fest when he’d work the shop and I’d work the tent, overlapping for a smoke or a quick beer at Joe’s Place. Shifts were he’d play the Mountain Goats all afternoon and into the night and would literally hit every lyric—pointing at you from across the shop, eyes nearly closed, acting his inner choir kid: And the Chicago Cubs will beat every team in the league/And the Tampa Bay Bucs will make it all the way through January/And I will love you again/I will love you like I used to/I will love you again.
Shifts in the service industry create strong relationships. You get slammed, or stuck in the weeds, and the only people that know that trauma are the people right next to you, the people you snap at or cry with or joke on. Workers often lack foresight, and mistake these relationships as opportunities to get laid. And they forget they gotta go back to work and then work is all weird. There are eight-thousand seven-hundred and sixty hours in a year, and I worked for the pizza spot in Iowa City for five years. As Americans, we spend a lot of time at work and then a lot of time drinking with people we work with. As much as we try to avoid it, as cliché or trite or overused the metaphor seems, the people we work with become family because Pam marries Jim and Angela marries Dwight and Michael turns out to be a lovable goofy-ass Dad that has somehow profoundly touched every character even if all his previous transgressions, the racism and misogyny, have to be overlooked. But maybe it isn’t a metaphor, maybe we become family with whom we work because we’re meaning making animals, and even if you take one family away we find another to replace it. Maybe I’m saying this because I have a staggering number of friends I’ve met in the industry and I don’t want my relationships to be founded on dumb luck, or simply who was hired around the same time as I was hired.
Max Johnson, my friend and former co-worker, also died in 2020.Max on March 18th. Luther seven months later on October 4th—a day before what would have been Max’s thirtieth birthday. During my time in Iowa City, I worked with Luther and Max at the same pizza shop. To call and connect with the same small group of mourning friends during a seven month stint during a pandemic was not easy. We couldn’t touch each other, we couldn’t have shots to evil, we couldn’t talk for hours and unlock that shared memory that could only come unearthed by brutal raw emotional energy. For Max, I stood in front of my laptop and eighteen people were locked in little boxes on my slightly larger box. We said we’d have an in person memorial in the future but I wasn’t so certain a future like that existed. I told my friends that Max and I had a bit of a rivalry at first, because of something stupid, but I remember exactly what it was. He was one of three editors at the undergraduate literary journal at Iowa, something that is so pointless and hysterical to type now, and he didn’t want to publish my short story. He also kept a few friends I found annoying, something so pointless and hysterical now. Max and I began to work together around 2012, and quickly became close. He would laugh at me, but his laugh was so good.
“Hey Kyle…”
“What’s up Cheesecake?”
“Goodwill wants the clearance rack back.”
He loved it. Max threw his head back laughing—I shook my own head and then laughed too. I Laughed at being laughed at. When you are twenty-two and tell people you are a writer with a straight face it’s tough to be laughed at. But his laugh was so good. Ask around Iowa City people will tell you. Ask around Chicago people will tell you. Ask around any old haunt he spent a significant amount of time. Ask Helen at George’s. (Max had her name tattooed on his arm with a heart around it, she covered her face when he first showed her, but she gave him a shot.) I text a friend, don’t think just answer first thing that comes to mind when I say Max Johnson? The friend’s answer: glasses and infectious laugh.
Max would laugh. Unlike the last time I spoke to Luther, I can’t remember the last time I talked to Max. During my years in grad school, I moved back to Chicago for the summers to work and write. I wrote at the café Max managed and he fed me espresso until he got off work and we’d go have beer and bourbon at the taco place that pretended to be a honky tonk joint but was actually just a place for rich people. We weren’t rich but the bartenders weren’t either and they loved Max and played John Prine. We’d walk in with coffee for the staff and ten dollar bills. That’d be good for as much as we wanted. The ten was mainly for the tip.
I remember a Chicago afternoon, seventy-five and sunny with a wind that couldn’t decide what it wanted to do, Max wore his shirt that said: sad song in white on black, I was on a little amphetamine and had burnt out my energies for writing. It was probably two-thirty in the afternoon, but when the café needs attention at five in the morning, two thirty in the afternoon feels like eight in the evening. The topic of discussion was the hero’s journey. I detest Joesph Campbell. Or I thought I did, and Max could tell that I thought I detested Campbell; I told him that all of Campbell’s blowhard shit was handled better by Beckett in The Unnamable. I said: Beckett said, You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.
And I told Max, That’s the hero’s journey as far as I’m concerned. Maybe a bit abbreviated, but that’s all of it. Max was hunched over the bar and was holding his head in a way that made him look like his intensity of thinking actually hurt him, he’d take off his glasses, rub his face, put the glasses back on, rub his balding head, lean farther onto the bar, lean back, cross and uncross his legs quickly, and then ultimately…laugh, point to our shots, look me in the eye, and say: To evil.
There’s a bar eight hours North of Iowa City that you have to take a ferry to. You drive for eight hours, make as few stops as possible, and wait in line for the ferry. Someone with a clipboard tells you the time for the next ferry, and then you drive yourself from road to boat. A real transition. You were grinding on the road all day and grinding your teeth the whole time, thinking about that first beer at the bar on the island in Lake Superior, you didn’t get that proper beer at the lunch spot because you were still three hours away, or maybe you had two proper beers at the lunch spot, because the Wisconsin service team was overwhelmed by a table of twenty-five public school teachers, and you got buzzed. Either way, waiting in line for that ferry that takes you to Tom’s Burned Down Café, gets you all giddy. And on finding the perfect lake, Sigurd Olson said:
Always before me was the ideal, a place not only remote, not only of great beauty, but possessed of an intangible quality and spirit that typified to me all of the unbroken north beyond all roads.
This is where I imagine Max and Luther. Not in heaven, not in hell, not in limbo.
At Tom’s Burned Down Café. Tom’s son runs around the bar hollering—all of eight years old—If you’re gonna be stupid you gotta be tough. If you’re gonna be stupid you gotta be tough. The night could last forever. If I could sit there with Max and Luther, I’d leave Chicago right now and deal with the four-hundred and sixty-seven miles. For a Spotted Cow and a shot—to look at the lake and smoke—I’d drive to live in the simplest pleasures and dwell on the simple pleasures. A hot slice. A cold soda. The simple pleasure of good, fast, conversation. It’s obvious there are things that last, and things that come and go.
When people read my writing they think I’m being coy—probably because I title essays wild things like, HOW I GOT MY SILVER TOOTH, when I don’t actually have a silver tooth. Yet. My teeth broke out of my mouth in Iowa City. And the fake ones were put in in Virginia and one of the fake ones came uncemented, in Chicago, a couple months ago after biting into a crispy pork rind. Luckily it was the implant—the only tooth that’s an actual and true foreigner to my mouth. The one that sits next to the two big front teeth and is a socket and bolt in my upper jaw—the porcelain veneer is cosmetic.
I don’t have a silver tooth, yet, just a gap,a hole in my smile that I left in Iowa City,I know I gotta get it fixed but I’m dependent on a failing American healthcare system. Like Max was. Like Luther was. Like we all are. All of us that go into the fake Honky Tonks to drink for cheap. I don’t have the intellectual capacity to write essays about the hows and whys the American healthcare system has fucked us all but I’ve experienced it. I’m working as Manager at a Pizza Spot now. With a Master’s Degree and a holy smile behind a mask. I told everyone in the shop my first day; Max and Luther give me pizza energy. When I get my silver tooth—when my new healthcare hits and sweet, sweet, dental insurance hits—I’ll take my stimulus check to the best dentists in Gold Coast and ask for a silver tooth. A marketing strategy. Everyone wants to hear stories from the guy with silver teeth—and I’ll tell ‘em stories about Max and Luther.
**in memoriam—Max Johnson and Luther Nash
“My goal is absolute rest and endless night. Bard of the mad pleasures of wine and opium, I thirst for nothing but a liqueur unknown on earth which even the celestial pharmacy could not provide me. A liqueur containing neither vitality, nor death, nor excitation, nor nothingness. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then to sleep more, this is today my one and only pledge. An infamous and disgusting pledge, but a sincere one.”
—Charles Baudelaire, Preface to Les Fluers du Mal
kyle françois is working on his first book of essays and lives in Chicago.