I don’t know if my friend Dan Curry is still making his garlic meatballs, but I hope he isn’t--and I’m sure the Environmental Protection Agency feels the same way. It’s not as if I didn’t enjoy Dan’s garlic meatballs; the problem was, Dan’s garlic meatballs weren’t garlic meatballs at all but something closer to vaguely meat-flavored garlic balls, with each ball made up of approximately three molecules of meat and the rest pure garlic. Dan didn’t whip up his signature dish any old time, but generally saved it for especially important Sunday afternoons when he and a few friends would get together to watch an especially important sporting event on TV. Of course, Dan’s definition of an especially important sporting event was a bit looser than most people’s, including everything from Super Bowls and World Series to hockey playoffs, luge finals, tractor pulls, taffy pulls, and round-robin quilting.
For a time I participated enthusiastically in these gatherings, but after a while I began to wonder if they were such a good idea. On the Monday after a meatball Sunday, I found that I often had something of a breath problem. And I don’t mean the kind of problem that responds readily to a swish of mouthwash. I mean the kind of problem that threatens to strip paint, defoliate parks, and cause canaries in the vicinity to request work in the nearest coal mine. Worse, the condition tended to linger--six months later complete strangers would still be coming up to me on the street and asking, You been watching luge finals with Dan Curry or something? Dan’s meatballs, I began to realize, had less a shelf life than a half-life, and if I hoped to have a social life, I knew I’d better cut down.
Eating garlic meatballs, of course, is not the only way the usually scentless can suddenly begin knocking their friends senseless. There are countless things--from alcohol to the common cold to more serious problems like kidney disease--that can turn even the fairest breath foul. Just what causes your own personal air quality index to move into the red zone is your business; moving it back into the green is Dr. Jon Richter’s.
Richter is a periodontist in central Philadelphia who, besides such comparatively safe D.D.S. practices as cavity filling and tooth drilling, specializes in the somewhat riskier business of breath freshening. Head of the straightforwardly named Richter Center for the Treatment of Breath Disorders, Richter has established himself as one of the country’s leading experts on breath, acting as a sort of court of last resort for people whose breath problem is severe enough to have defied traditional remedies. Interested in seeing how so unlikely a specialist plies his trade--and more than a little concerned that after years of meatball abuse I might be in need of his services myself--I decided to pay the clinic a visit.
