In the summer of 2005, without health insurance, a job or good sense, I found myself hopelessly indebted to a dentist.
I’d moved from Indiana to Philadelphia that January, but once there I couldn’t find work. I was living in a dingy room on the third floor of a row house a friend had bought, the price low because of the house’s state of disrepair. We got good at fixing the surface problems, painting over brown stains that indicated leaks somewhere above, that sort of thing, and letting the bigger issues go.
Which is exactly how you end up lying one morning on a mattress left by previous tenants, drunk on stolen vodka and hallucinating with a 104-degree fever that tiny spiders are descending from the ceiling to hatch eggs in your cavernous molar. I called Philly’s community clinics, but the waiting list was weeks long. I lay there for two days, moaning, before I remembered the barter section on Craigslist. It was worth a shot. I dragged myself to the computer and managed to type:
Need cavity filled. Will trade for carpentry, Web design, ditchdigging, anything. Please. I’ll be dead soon.
A dentist one county away answered within the hour. He could get me in tomorrow, he wrote, and we’d work something out. He needed some shelves hung in his garage, for starters. “For starters” might have set off alarm bells for some, but I was desperate at that point.
CONTINUE
I’d moved from Indiana to Philadelphia that January, but once there I couldn’t find work. I was living in a dingy room on the third floor of a row house a friend had bought, the price low because of the house’s state of disrepair. We got good at fixing the surface problems, painting over brown stains that indicated leaks somewhere above, that sort of thing, and letting the bigger issues go.
Which is exactly how you end up lying one morning on a mattress left by previous tenants, drunk on stolen vodka and hallucinating with a 104-degree fever that tiny spiders are descending from the ceiling to hatch eggs in your cavernous molar. I called Philly’s community clinics, but the waiting list was weeks long. I lay there for two days, moaning, before I remembered the barter section on Craigslist. It was worth a shot. I dragged myself to the computer and managed to type:
Need cavity filled. Will trade for carpentry, Web design, ditchdigging, anything. Please. I’ll be dead soon.
A dentist one county away answered within the hour. He could get me in tomorrow, he wrote, and we’d work something out. He needed some shelves hung in his garage, for starters. “For starters” might have set off alarm bells for some, but I was desperate at that point.
CONTINUE