On Eddy Street, between Larkin and Polk, in a one-room dental office above a shoe repair shop, Dr. James Reeves opens his door every Wednesday night at exactly 8 p.m. He works until the chair is empty. The earliest he has closed in nine years was 12:40 a.m. The latest was 4:18 a.m.
There is no fee. There is no insurance form. There is a clipboard at the door where you write your name (or do not), what hurts (or what is broken), and how long it has hurt. Dr. Reeves goes through the clipboard in the order people came in. He does not triage by appearance.
He is 73. He worked at San Francisco General Hospital for 32 years, the last 14 as the head of the dental clinic in the urgent care wing. He retired in 2016. He started the Wednesday night clinic six weeks later, in his old college roommate’s vacant office above the shoe repair shop. The roommate, Marvin Kong, charges him $1 a year in rent.
About 120 people a year are seen at the Wednesday clinic. Dr. Reeves keeps a tally in a green ledger on the front desk. Past the front page, every patient is named (or initialed if anonymous), with the date, the procedure, and a one-word note.
Most of his patients are people the rest of the city’s dental system does not see. Unhoused men and women from the SROs on Eddy. Restaurant workers from kitchens that close at 11. A handful of regulars from Glide Memorial up the block. A bus driver who works the 14-Mission overnight and has, in the last six years, been a Wednesday-night patient eleven times.
“A tooth is a deadline,” Dr. Reeves says. “You can ignore most pain for a long time, but a tooth, you cannot. The pain is the message. By the time the message gets through, the tooth is usually past saving. So I extract a lot of teeth. I do not love that, but extraction is what stops the message.”
In addition to extractions, he does fillings, root canals when possible, scaling, and partial dentures. He does not do crowns, implants, or anything that requires a follow-up he cannot guarantee. The materials are paid for out of his pension and a small set of donations from former colleagues at SF General. The yearly material budget for the Wednesday clinic, he says, runs around $9,200.
He works alone. There is no assistant. There is no receptionist. The only other person in the office on a Wednesday is Marvin Kong’s nephew, Jin, 24, who studies at SF State and does the night’s sterilization for $80 cash. Jin has worked there every Wednesday for two and a half years. He has missed three nights, all of them for finals.
I asked Dr. Reeves why he works alone. He said: “I have done this work for forty years. I do not need to teach anybody how to do it on a Wednesday night. I need to do it. The teaching is what I did at SF General for thirty-two years.”
Dr. Reeves had a son, Daniel, who would have been 41 this year. Daniel died of an opioid overdose at age 26 in a hotel room in Las Vegas in 2010. Dr. Reeves does not talk about it directly. He says, when pressed, that the Wednesday clinic is not for Daniel and is also not not for Daniel.
On the night I visited, in late October, fifteen people came in. The earliest was a woman named Rita who works the laundry at a hotel on Mason and was on her dinner break. The latest was a man named Gabriel who slept in the entryway downstairs the previous night and woke up to a swollen jaw. Rita got a filling. Gabriel got an extraction and a referral to the General for a follow-up that he, Dr. Reeves said quietly, would probably not keep.
At 1:14 a.m. the chair was empty. Dr. Reeves wiped down chair two with the same blue solution he has used for forty years. Jin packed the autoclave. Dr. Reeves walked the four blocks home to his apartment on Hyde. He had work in the morning at his other practice on Sutter Street, where he sees paying patients three days a week. The Wednesday clinic, he says, is the day off.
