The Father of Dental Floss

 

 

It was a time of grandeur and greed, great wealth and staggering poverty.  It was a place where pomp and ceremony flourished next to pimps and sacrilege: New Orleans, 1815, with its heavy drinking, heavy partying, and heavy petting between slave owners and nubile slave girls.  

 

Pubs.  Clubs.  Poorly lit slave quarters late at night.  Inebriated men and women, cavorting to their hearts’ content, were oblivious to the germs that were harboring in their rancid Dixie mouths.  With gingivitis, periodontitis, plaque, tooth rot, and severely infected gums, the people of New Orleans, unbeknownst to them, were being orally poisoned.   

           

One man took notice.

           

He may have entered the world a Yankee (in a town called Braintree, Vermont) but Levi Spear Parmly found success below the Mason-Dixon line.  Hailing from a long line of dental professionals, Levi kept the legacy alive by entering this dignified field.  For centuries, gums and teeth were this family’s bread and butter. 

           

Levi was a visionary, the very first to insist his patients clean their teeth with floss made of silk.  (Nylon came later.)  The floss was passed through the interstices of the teeth, between the necks and the arches of the gum, in order to dislodge food particles that were untouchable by the average toothbrush.  This procedure seemed preposterous to some.  In the early 1800s, it was highly unpopular to put anything but a toothbrush in one’s mouth, and to a few priggish, orally repressed members of the upper crust, Levi Spear Parmly was a periodontal pariah.        

           

Dental floss didn't become available to the consumer until after Levi's death.  (The first patent for floss was awarded to Johnson & Johnson in 1898; Levi died in 1859.)  Levi may not have lived to see his baby embraced by American mouths, but his heirs are fighting tooth and nail (no pun intended) to keep the name of their ancestor alive. 

Carly Spear Parmly and Pearl Spear Parmly of Poplar Bluff, Missouri are the great, great, great, great, great granddaughters of the great dentist.  Not only does Carly display chalk-white teeth and glowing gums, she stands with impeccable posture, as if she could balance a hardcover copy of A Proper Guide to the Management of the Teeth (Levi’s pioneering book of 1819) on her head while brushing and rinsing.  Her proudest achievement (with the exception of being named “Babe With Freshest Breath” at the Missouri State Fair when she was seventeen) is the extraordinary tooth museum she created in the sprawling home she shares with her short-haired, equally tooth-conscious half-sister Pearl. 

           

Wandering through this one-of-a-kind archive, visitors come across white pedestal sinks attached to small, distressed walnut tables packed with tools of the dental trade.  (A good number of the Parmly possessions are distressed.)  Every inch of the place is impressive, and Carly is terribly proud but far from satisfied.  She won’t sleep easily (in the luxurious canopy bed of lightly distressed amaretto cherry that she shares with Pearl) until the public becomes aware of her great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s contribution to medical science and fresh breath.  “He was a true pioneer who truly possessed a keen perspicacity about dentistry that few ever had, not to mention the sheer percipience of the importance of oral care to the body’s overall health."

           

Several years ago, Carly convinced her local pharmacist Frank Pergola to give her a small percentage of the profit from every package of dental floss he sold.  As part of the deal, she agreed to floss him in the privacy of the pharmacy’s back room every evening.  Because the arrangement worked out so well for both parties, Carly cultivated similar situations with pharmacists in neighboring towns.  At the end of a typical day, the woman is bleary-eyed and exhausted, but rain or shine she returns to the museum to lock up.  Closing time isn't until ten PM.  

If Carly is the self-proclaimed boss of the floss, Pearl is the wisdom tooth of the operation.  She’s the quiet one, but don’t mistake her reticence for lack of passion.  Dressed like she’s about to embark on a white water rafting expedition, this no-nonsense chick carefully checks the mouths of all museum visitors as they exit, making sure each tooth has been flossed to perfection at one of the available sinks.  Pearl has been called everything from the Tooth Nazi to a modern-day Stalin with string.  "I'm here to clean teeth, not to make lunch buddies," she barks.  Then she adds, with an air of mystery, “In space or on land, no one can hear you floss.”     

           

An expert in everything oral, Carly is a one-woman crusade to make flossing fun. And so she created flavored floss.  This tasty package is making the rounds of mouths from Seattle to Secaucus to South Beach with a variety of flavors to appeal to the hard-to-please kid as well as the fickle, fussy adult.  Take your pick: mint, apple, watermelon, citrus, salami, pistachio, grape, chocolate mousse, Chilean sea bass, whipped cream dream, French fry, beef stew, Jamaican screw, brandy, tuna and horseradish.  Carly has a message for those who refuse to floss:  "Welcome to a world of porcelain crowns, chronic pain and root canals."

           

A recent survey conducted by the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation and InStyle Magazine concluded that 48% of Americans feel guilty because they don’t regularly floss their teeth, and 94% feel even guiltier for lying to their dentists about it.  Carly has a simple message for these people:  “Stop feeling guilty,” she declares.  “Just floss, for Chrissake!”

Earlier this year, the Parmly half-sisters were stunned to hear about a radical group determined to ban dental floss from the market.  “Take it off our shelves!” they shout in unison while marching on public streets in front of pharmacies, supermarkets, dental supply stores and tackle shops.  These revolutionaries (curiously consisting of female white collar workers, and men who golf) are convinced the product contains inherent danger.  Believe it or not (and this might be hard to imagine), there have been several floss-driven escape attempts from American prisons.  A West Virginia convict traded cigarettes for floss and created a rope long enough to climb over the prison’s eighteen-foot wall.  (He was captured and sentenced to an additional five years.)  In 1988, three convicts climbed out a window of New York’s Metropolitan Correction Center and slid down six stories on a dental floss rope.  They were caught, and part of their punishment was supervised flossing twice a day in front of a panel of fellow inmates injected with laughing gas.  

           

The official spokesperson of this fervent group of anti-flossers is Mamie Flay-Sheehan of Antelope, Illinois.  “Every time I see a package of dental floss,” the divorced mother of two says, “I imagine a burly, strapping escaped convict forcing my daughter to dance for him.”    

           

Carly and Pearl don’t take the Flay-Sheehan threat very seriously.  They believe dental floss has become a staple of the American bathroom like liquid soap, menstrual cups, and Epilady hair removal products.  (Each year, more than three million miles of the stuff is sold in the U.S. alone.  That's miles.)  “We certainly won’t stop flossing because of a couple of creative convicts,” Carly says.  “We care too much about the glorious future of teeth.” 

Bio: Garrett Socol’s fiction has been published in The Barcelona Review, 3:AM Magazine, Pequin, Perigee, Paradigm, PANK, Hobart, Ghoti, Ducts, Spork, Underground Voices, JMWW Journal, Full of Crow, kill author, Emprise Review,  Metazen, nth Position, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.  His plays have been produced at the Berkshire Theatre Festival and the Pasadena Playhouse.  For 15 years, he created and produced television shows for the E! Network including “Talk Soup” and “The Gossip Show.”