“Oops.”
KIM RICHARDS, THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF BEVERLY HILLS
Who among us hasn’t stress eaten a full bag of caramels during a presidential debate? I certainly have, and while I was eating during the last election, I noticed something loose in my tooth. Rather than stop chewing on the hell candy, I decided to eat more and hope the next caramels I shoved in my mouth would somehow adhere the loose item in my mouth to whatever it was loose from. The mechanics of my decision-making weren’t quite worked out, but whatevs, I’m a dummy sometimes.
“I have to go to the dentist. My tooth fell out!” I shouted at my boyfriend at 11:00 p.m.
“It’s fine, it’s just your filling.”
“But it looks just like a whole tooth!”
“It’s supposed to look like your teeth,” he said.
While he was trying to calm me down, I used my tongue to inspect the area. I took GREAT care of my chompers, save for bingeing candy when I’m emotional, and I’ve never had braces or a retainer. The one filling I did have was done at such a young age, I had forgotten it was even a thing.
My fear led me to the internet, which can be an incredibly dangerous place. I get myself into enough trouble when I’m on eBay buying Space Jam merch or looking for rare Tiny Toons Happy Meal toys from my youth, but I’m a whole other level of dangerous when I’m googling symptoms or ailments. A mere moment went by before I found myself on a message board for mouth care. Someone on the page suggested that when a filling falls out, you should wrap it up and bring it to the dentist, so I immediately put it in a tissue and took an old Xanax that I found in the medicine cabinet so I could fall asleep.
The next morning, I called my dentist and told them it was an absolute emergency (it wasn’t). Keep in mind it was fall of 2020, when COVID-19 and the election were in full swing. EMOTIONS WERE HIGH, and I hadn’t communicated much with people in person most of the year. Going to the dentist was one of the few times I left the house aside from going to the grocery store, so I put on my finest wares and made it a special event. There was a new button-down I had bought right before quarantine, so I threw that on, tossed my dead filling in my shirt pocket, gelled my hair, and pressed my pants. I looked like a million bucks.
My dentist took a quick look at my teeth and suggested refilling, without any need for my old one, so that old toothlike thing that I had wrapped in a tissue the way my grandma used to wrap a half-eaten cough drop was sitting tight in my shirt. The doc finished up the work on my mouth and I headed back home.
A few days later, I decided to run some errands. There was a tote bag of clothes that I wanted to take to the dry cleaners and some mail I had to drop at the box, so I gathered my things and left the house.
Going anywhere during the first year of the pandemic was a challenge, navigating new rules and guidelines at places you’ve been a hundred times. At the dry cleaners, they put those little feet stickers on the ground indicating where to stand in line so you would always be at least six feet away from the other customers. I hopped onto one of the stickers, behind an older woman with kind eyes and what looked like seventeen pillowcases she was having dry-cleaned and in front of an older gentleman I could tell was gay because we were in West Hollywood, and he also had a tote bag with two cartoon men kissing on it and literally said I’M A BIG GAY in bold letters. I wish I knew where he got that bag…
The woman in front of me finished up, and I started walking to the register, simultaneously pulling out my clothes to present to the cashier. As I yanked the shirts out of my bag, the old filling I had forgotten was wrapped in a tissue in one of the pockets got loose and floated to the floor of the dry cleaners. As I bent down to grab it, I saw the toothlike filling roll out of the tissue and tumble to the feet of the old man with the horny tote.
Instinctively, he picked up the filling and reached his hand out toward me as his eyes began to inspect what was now in his hands in the midst of a global pandemic.
“What’s this?” he said as his arm extended into the six-foot radius measured out for me by the dry cleaners.
“That’s my old tooth filling,” I responded.
Color immediately escaped this man’s face like Reese Witherspoon in the movie Pleasantville, as if he just saw a ghost. His hand nervously tossed my old mouthpiece into the air as he let out a scream that can only be described as a turkey running for freedom on Thanksgiving morning.
As the filling drifted in the wind, the woman that had once been in front of me in line was now dodging the loose tooth figurine like she was Keanu Reeves in The Matrix or Ghostface dodging a saucer that Anna Faris’s character threw at him in the Scary Movie scene that parodies The Matrix.
Under normal circumstances, I would’ve pushed everyone aside so I could grab the item, then put it in my pocket, run out of the establishment, and cry in the shower while listening to a Mary J. Blige ballad. But this was a pandemic. I had to keep a social distance.
The filling then hit the ground for a second time, and I got on my hands and knees, but it continued to roll away from me. I can only assume they had waxed the floors right before my visit, because that thing was moving faster than lightning. Eventually, I caught up to it and let out a sigh of relief.
“Oops. Forgot that was in my shirt pocket,” I said to the other patrons, who looked at me like I was crazed.
Since I’d already embarrassed myself, I figured I might as well get my clothes cleaned. I dragged my belongings to the register and unloaded my clothes on the counter with the dead filling tightly in my grasp so it wouldn’t do any more bouncing.
“Just the six shirts and two pairs of pants, ready by Friday would be great,” I informed the cashier.
“You don’t have any other…teeth in the pockets, do you?” she asked.
“No, just the one,” I said, “and it was just a filling.”
She handed me a receipt and I started to walk toward the door with my head down, horrified.
I glanced up at the old man. He lifted his mask and smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, he grinned just enough so I could see mouth.
“Dentures,” he said. “You’re lucky you have teeth to fill.”
Always count your blessings.