One
That winter, when I finished grad school and had no money at all, I took a job as a packer at a dental lab. I was young and married and had two babies to support. I was not desperate, I just needed money. I had student loans haunting me and all the same, I remained optimistic. My wife knew me on many levels, from deli clerk, to cashier, to substitute teacher. This however, was a new level. I had never been a dental packer before and with my degree, I did not have to be one, and that is why I did it.
Out of all the jobs I had worked, people seemed the most impressed with this one. At church service when I said: “I am a dental technician,” they would raise their eyebrows and nod in approval. Of course no one truly knew that I was a dental packer who scraped by on minimum wage. All the same, I worked with teeth and did my best to appear professional.
“You work at a dental office?” they would ask.
“Dental laboratory,” I would reply. “There’s a big difference, and if you don’t work in the
field, you wouldn’t know. There’s all kinds of things that go into that side of the business.”
“What things?”
“We do all the work.”
“And the dentists?”
“They make bad impressions.”
“Impressions?”
“Yeah, that’s how you tell a good doc from a bad doc. The good ones make good
impressions.”
“And then?”
“We fabricate the crown if the impression is good.”
“How do you make a good impression?” They’d ask.
“On the job training, it’s a skill. Not everyone can do it.”
“Are you guys hiring?”
At which point I would look sad with my lips curled and say: “There are levels to
becoming a tech. You have to start in the shipping room as a packer. Once you’re miserable
enough, you move up.”
“I’m miserable just from hearing the job description,” they would say.
“Pray for me, brothers,” I would say.
Two
Millionaires owned the lab. An older married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson had become entrepreneurs with their dental business. They lived on Todt Hill, the highest natural point of Staten Island, and the five boroughs, and the highest elevation on the entire Atlantic coastal plain from Florida to Cape Cod. Mr. Johnson oversaw cases for quality check in his big square glasses frames, while Mrs. Johnson handled payroll for all of us employees. Mr. Johnson showed tough love, and when he got mad at technicians for not reading what was written on RX’s, everyone in the lab could hear Mr. Johnson’s temper. His screams were a hot tea kettle and I was glad Mr. Johnson had never screamed at me that way. Mrs. Johnson was not as loud as her husband, however, she was much more intimidating. She was a witch that could cast a spell on you, and turn you to stone with her sharp eyes. If you were on your phone, she knew. If you were taking too long on your unpaid breaks, she knew. If you did not wear the uniformed scrubs, she knew. She thought she knew everything.
One time, Mrs. Johnson stared and yelled at me for being on my phone while I was reading back a list to print FedEx labels for the outgoing shipments. She thought I was doing something else on my phone and asked Gomez to spy on me. Richard Gomez, a Puerto Rican man, was as old as the scratched up wallpaper at the lab. The viejo had dedicated his good years of life to the laboratory.
“Boss lady says you’re screwing around,” Gomez said.
“But I’m printing labels,” I said.
“She wanted me to look at your screen and tell her what I saw,” Gomez said. “But between you and me, Maestro, I don’t care if you’re staring at tits on your phone.”
“I don’t do that,” I said.
“I’m not looking for a confession, that’s between you and God. I’m jumping as high as
Mrs. Johnson wants me to.”
“Well I’m not doing anything wrong,” I said, opening Instagram, looking for memes to
make me feel better.
“I believe you, kid. But you’re rubbing the Johnsons the wrong way,” Gomez said.
I stayed quiet, thinking how absurd my job was, and continued doom scrolling on Instagram. I wondered how Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Johnson dealt with each other daily. Did they love each other? Or was everything in the name of business? They both annoyed me, like an overbearing mother and father disciplining their troubled teenager.
The lab was on the first floor of a corporate building, bordering a gynecologist and a community college. The lobby of the lab had a water fountain that reminded me of Mami’s mop bucket when she used too much bleach. There was cream wallpaper all over the lobby of the lab, which you had to be careful with or else Mr. Johnson would get mad. Another feature of the lab was that the water cooler inside of the Johnson’s office was off limits to staff. We had to drink tap water while the admin got to drink the good water. Gomez didn’t drink from the water cooler, he said he didn’t want to get mixed in politics.
There was the removable dentures department, the ceramic department, the digital department, and my department, the shipping room. The shipping room had case pans on the walls like bookshelves in a library. Each case pan had a four digit sticker on the face of the pan, which if you stared at all day, would hurt your eyes. I looked at some of these case pan numbers, 1994, the year I was born, 2005, when I graduated elementary school, and 2050, a year that I hoped I would not be working in this damned place any longer. The production of teeth at the lab was high and to manage the cases, Gomez quality checked every crown, bridge, and denture before I shipped them.
I believed things were good in life, renting my own basement apartment, a caring wife, two crying babies, a used car, a job, and the thirst for more. Having these things and my youth ahead of me made me have pena for Gomez—he had been working at the dental lab twenty five years and had the color of each tooth shade memorized in his head, as his own life had changed shades. All he had to show for his years in the workforce was a white lab coat and a hunched back from sitting over his bench, working on the art of teeth over his years. He was well over sixty five and limped with each step he took.
My first day as a packer, while I wrapped stone models in bubble wrap and tied them with a rubber band, Gomez was watching me from across the counter. He had passed me stacks and stacks of cases to wrap and pack after he checked and invoiced them, and when I believed I was getting a smooth rhythm for things, I poured all of the contents from a blue case pan into an open lab bag, and the most important component of the case, the black capsule which secured the fabricated crown, did not make it inside the bag. I dropped a capsule which housed a ceramic crown, hitting the floor and bouncing all over the place like a Freshmint Tic Tac missing your mouth. We looked all over the maldito shipping room for the crown. Behind the shredder, under the trash bin, below the blue cabinets. We scratched the hair on our heads. The white ceramic crown had vanished before my eyes. I thought this a good thing, an act that showed I was not a robot after all, but a human being.
Three
Gomez pulled me aside and I followed him out of the shipping room. He guided me to
the loading dock of the corporate building and pulled out a vape pen and inhaled the pen until he began coughing violently.
“First things first,” he said, catching his breath, “You gotta loosen up, you’re too stiff.”
I listened to what he had to say.
“Imma tell you a few things,” he said, blowing clouds of cotton candy smoke in my face, “to get you by.”
I nodded, and he passed me his vape.
“These people, the Johnsons, they’re loaded,” he said.
“Loaded off drugs?”
“Off of your hard work and sweat,” he said. “If you drop a crown, break a denture, it doesn’t matter, Maestro. No one is losing a meal. You get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Gimme back my pen, you’re chiefing. And another thing. Lunchtime is your time. Take your time, for the love of God, kid. This place will run with or without us, so better off taking your time.”
I liked Gomez, even if he was pussywhipped by the Johnsons. Maybe he had no choice.
“And what about the missing crown?” I asked.
“Forget the damn crown,” Gomez said. “They’ll remake it, big deal.”
“I thought you were going to yell at me back here.”
“I ain’t your boss.”
“How long have you worked here?” I asked.
“Twenty six years at the end of winter,” he said, spitting and coughing.
“Did you always want to be a dental tech?”
“My life was set after the Job Corps.”
“Like the peace corps?”
“Hell no.”
“They sound the same.”
“I was a legend back then,” he said, passing me his vape. “I got kicked out of every high school in New York when I was a teenager. They shipped me to the Job Corps in Kentucky. That’s where they trained me to work with teeth.”
“You learned the trade at a juvenile center?”
“Damn straight,” he said.
“Isn’t Kentucky racist?”
“Most of America still is,” he said. “First night on the bus ride to the center, the bus driver told us to shut the fuck up if we didn’t wanna die. The streets was all dark except for fire burning in the distance. We drove through an organized KKK meeting, and held our breaths as the bus climbed the hill of the street. Once we got to the top of the hill, we could see the pointed white masks shadowed by their flames. The bus driver floored the gas as we went down the hill, and we didn’t look back.”
“You get a GED or something from that place?”
“I got kicked out from there too. Started a riot started in the mess hall. No one forgets my name in Kentucky. I was a badass.”
“You still are,” I said.
“Don’t gas me up, Maestro.”
“You never got your high school degree or your GED?”
“Nah,” he said.
“And you’re a master dental technician,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“That is badass,” I said.
“Hit this and shut up,” he said.
I took some more hits from Gomez’s vape.
“I can help you,” I said.
“Help me how?” he asked.
“I can help you get your GED.”
“Pff,” he coughed, “I’m too old for that shit.”
“You’re never too old for education.”
“You gonna teach me?”
“I’ll tutor you,” I said. “If you want.”
“What’s the catch?” he asked.
“You help me around the lab.”
“I already am,” he said.
“Por supuesto,” I said.
“Que pasa, gueys?” Dario said.
Dario was a Hondoran dental tech who worked off the books for the Johnsons for the last ten years.
“Pasame el lapiz,” he said.
Gomez passed him the vape.
“Today’s Mrs. Johnson’s birthday,” he said. “Están cantando happy birthday right now, and they got a pastel from Mother Mousse.”
“Damn we missed the cake,” Gomez said.
“They asked for you,” Dario said.
“Damn,” I said.
“They never celebrate our birthdays, pínche gringos. They only celebrate their birthdays and always give us the leftovers. I want a glazed chocolate donut, but they’re always gone by the time Mr. Johnson gives us the box in the morning. We’re not animals, we’re people,” Dario said.
Four
When we got back inside the lab, I squeezed into a pair of blue nitrile gloves; I needed large ones, these were medium. It was all the lab had in stock. I tied a plastic white apron around my waist, and completed the uniform with a blue disposable mask, tying the white loops around my ears.
After a month, I didn’t have to think about what to wear each day. The lab made those kinds of things simple. My wife told me it was important to keep a positive outlook on things, no matter how rough the waters.
In those days I had an attention to detail like no other pendejo in the lab, heck, in the world, barraged with daily incoming and outgoing dental crowns and dentures and custom trays and bite blocks and more things that required my undivided care, should God grace me with caring about such trivial things in life. I read the names of the patients on the case pans enthusiastically, calling out the best names to Gomez, who would sometimes chuckle. I chuckled too y la vieja bruja Mrs. Johnson would scold us across the hallway, saying “no laughing allowed, get back to work!” And we weren’t sure if she was joking or not but all the same we cut that shit and became robots on a mechanical car assembly line whenever she reprimanded us.
“Wanda Dickerson,” I said.
“Good one,” Gomez said, catching his breath over what was hard to distinguish between a laugh and a cough.
“Daphne Cummings,” I said.
“Oh god I’m gonna cry,” he said.
“I’m already crying,” I said. “Here comes your bestie.”
“HIPAA violation,” he said.
We laughed until Mrs. Johnson put us in our place, respectfully. I tended to my work, stretching out a long piece of bubble wrap, placing an upper and lower model at either end, and rolling it like sushi. I held a rubber band around two of my fingers, tying the bubble-wrapped model; there was no way, por el nombre de mi madre, that this product was breaking throughout its shipment route, I had never been more sure of anything my entire life, if I had failed as a husband, father and writer, por lo menos, I was a good wrapper of dental products and somehow I believed I was making a difference, doing a good thing, a service for someone who would be relieved their fake teeth didn’t break. Thinking about those things, I began wrapping these stone models, capsuling these ceramic crowns as if they were my own.
“Come to the back room,” Gomez said. “I want to show you some things.”
I followed him.
The back room was where all of the technicians worked behind their benches, some with Bunsen burners and others without. Other benches had grinding machines mounted and this was the bench where Gomez led me. Most of the technicians were from Latin America and Korea. They greeted me in Spanish as we squeezed by their work stations to our bench. The back was also very hot, I don’t know how these technicians bore with the heat all day, I was close to ripping my clothes off that winter. Gomez had an upper yellow cast model in his hand which he was pressing against the grinder.
“I’m going to teach you how to make bite blocks,” Gomez said.
I leaned into the grinding machine’s loud buzzing as the bench vibrated. Gomez began trimming the upper yellow cast model. He pushed the arch’s excess stone trim against the grinding machine until it was rounded to the way that he saw fit.
“How do you know how far to trim the model?” I asked.
“I just feel it,” he said.
A true art form.
“Feel it?”
“Yeah,” he said, as though things were that simple. “Twenty-two milliliters upper, eighteen milliliters lower.”
He passed me the lower yellow cast model and put his hand over mine and moved it so that I was trimming the model under his guidance. I knew if I was trying this on my own or didn’t have Gomez’s hand as a guard, I’d trim my fingers. I tried paying attention to what I was doing. I wasn’t sure what Gomez was doing at all, or how he had these measurements memorized in head, and all the same, I gave him my undivided attention. I admired him, and saw him as a mentor I never had; he took the time to show me how things got done. When someone teaches you, they become family. Gomez and I were connected, and I’d never admit any of this to him, I knew he would laugh me off with violent coughs, and so I kept these thoughts to myself. He turned on the Bunsen burner and held a sheet of pink wax over the blue flame dancing side to side to the rhythm of other techs’ grinding machines and air duster blow guns coiled like electric blue vipers.
The smell of the acrylic dentures curing in a bath of lukewarm water made me dizzy. In an effort to retain a few of my brain cells, I hit Gomez with some GED tips.
“They’re going to ask you to write an essay,” I said.
“I’m not good with writing,” he said.
“You’ll need at least five paragraphs,” I said.
“I’ll never get that shit.”
“An introduction, three bodies, and a conclusion.”
Gomez remained quiet, working with his hands over the bench. He placed the heated wax sheet over the trimmed stone model until the impression became a pink molding. He heated another wax sheet over the Bunsen burner and began rolling the sheet like a fruit roll-up at which point he curved the roll into an arch and mounted it to the model, creating a thick occlusal rim layer, like a mouthguard for boxers.
“It all starts with a good impression,” he said.
“A good impression,” I said.
This was Gomez at his peak. He might not ever get his GED, and as I watched his artistry, I began to understand why he never got one in the first place. I didn’t push the subject any longer. There, in that moment, I began thinking I can’t end up like Gomez, working for people who only care about themselves without any regard for the human behind the production.
“Maestro, come to the front, they need you,” Mrs. Johnson said.
“That’s your queue, kid,” Gomez said.
“Yeah,” I said.
That was as far as I got trained as a technician, and it was about the only lesson I needed to confirm that I had to get out of this God forsaken place. I believed the lesson was all Gomez needed to confirm he wasn’t interested in taking any tests at his age. The shipping room was overloaded with invoiced cases ready to be packed and wrapped and sent out for shipment. I began gathering bubble wrap and rubber bands and got to work, standing behind the counter in the shipping department, where Mrs. Johnson believed I belonged. I tried looking for God or a sign from Jesucristo or at least something spiritual in the details of finished dentures and ceramic crowns and found nothing.
Five
When I came to the reality that I was a dental packer, and nothing more, I got sad. I lasted six months at the laboratory before I decided to not show up to work one day, and then I never returned.
Two years later, when I was dressed in a tie and pointed shoes, I was using the public restroom in the building where the lab was. I was standing next to Gomez, pissing in the urinal.
“Small world,” Gomez said.
“Small right?” I asked.
“Small,” he said.
“Yours is small too,” I said.
We bursted into laughter. I thought he might not recognize me, and felt I should have gone inside one of the bathroom stalls, this way no one would have seen me.
“Diablo, Maestro, I miss your smart ass.”
“I miss you too, Gómez.”
I finished up and began washing my hands under the sink. I scrubbed under my fingernails and was thorough but quick. There was a leather couch in the bathroom, which I could not understand, and Gomez sat down and stared at me in his white lab coat. I wanted to leave the bathroom and Gomez, and I believed I didn’t owe anyone an explanation or apology for going MIA.
“I teach English at a community college upstairs.”
“I’m happy for you, Maestro.”
“Did you ever pass your GED?” I asked.
“I never needed that shit,” he said, coughing his brains out.
“I’m happy for you, Gomez.”
“Wait here, I’ve got something for you.”
I sat down impatiently on the leather couch in the bathroom. Gomez returned with pink bite blocks sealed in a denture pack. He was a good mentor, and didn’t deserve the short end of the stick on account of my disappearance, and all the same I smiled.
“The case we worked on,” he said.
“Never got delivered?” I asked.
“Patient died,” he said.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Take it,” he said.
“A good impression,” I said.
“Ya tu sabes,” he said.
I reluctantly accepted the dental product and let out a breath of fresh air when I exited the bathroom, taking a mental note to never use the first floor bathroom again, and why should I? There were fully functioning facilities upstairs.
“A Good Impression” was the first-place winner in Brooklyn Review’s 2023 Short Story Contest.
About the Author
Daniel Barrios (he/him) is a Dominican/Puerto Rican writer living in New York City. He received a 2024 fellowship from the Periplus Collective. He is a recent MFA graduate from Southern New Hampshire University’s low residency Mountainview program, and he has been awarded residencies through Under the Volcano in Tepoztlan, Mexico, Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. You can find his words in Querencia Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Assignment Magazine Online. You can find him on IG and Twitter (X) @pastelesaregood.