Dear Loathsome Trolls of Trident Gum,
You destroyed my life.
My name is Dr. Marvin Tandenborstel. That name may not mean much to you, but you no doubt know me as The Fifth Dentist.
I'm the guy in your advertisements of the four out of five dentists who recommend your stupid gum to patients who chew gum.
The years of hatred I received for being The Fifth Dentist destroyed my family and my career. I lost my home, my practice, and a family legacy that was passed down for generations.
This anguish has gnawed at my soul for decades, and as my life reaches its end, it's time to tell you what damage you have wrought.
I come from a long line of dentists. My brother and sister are dentists, our father was a dentist, and his father before him. And my great-great-grandfather was a barber in Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1800s. As long as he had a bottle of whiskey and two strong men, he could pull a man's tooth in less than five minutes.
But life is hard when you're a dentist's child because your "friends" hate the dentist. I'll save you the litany of bullying I faced, but I will say that children can be particularly cruel, especially when teachers happily turn a blind eye.
I was the only one who bore the brunt of this, however. My older siblings, Carter and Lilian, skated through their school years untouched. Lilian was a cheerleader, and Carter was captain of the football team starting in his sophomore year. Nobody dared touch the king and queen of the school.
Which meant the kids saved it up for little Marvin Tandenborstel. On a good day, I was simply ignored, the fifth wheel in the small group of kids who didn't tease me every chance they got. Turns out, being treasurer of the Shakespeare Club is not like being captain of the football team.
Still, I held on and completed dental school with a solid B average and wore the D.D.S. mantle like generations before me.
But rather than live in their long shadows, I moved to Northmont, Massachusetts, and opened a practice in 1972. Everything was going very well.
I was one of two dentists in town, and we became good friends. We both did fairly well and numbered ourselves among Northmont's upper crust.
Until May 16, 1974.
That's the day burned into my memory. The day I received a call from a market researcher in your employ. She was doing a survey about your blasted gum and had a few questions.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a market researcher call you? Had I known then what I know now, I would have slammed the phone down, and my life wouldn't have ended up in the toilet.
"What gum do you recommend to your patients who chew gum?"
I've pondered that moment for the last 51 years, and I still don't know why I did it. I'd had a fight with my wife that morning, your marketing demon called, and I just snapped.
"I don't!" I shouted, and I hung up.
Two words, and the damage was done. Within weeks, your stupid slogan appeared on TV and in magazines, and people wondered, "Who's the idiot?" Then, someone leaked the secret, and the families of Northmont learned the truth. It was the beginning of the end.
Long-time patients switched to my friend, saying they couldn't trust The Fifth Dentist.
My daughter was teased mercilessly in school, and it turned her away from dentistry. In the ultimate betrayal, she has become a market researcher. At best, our relationship is strained.
As my life crumbled, my so-called friend absorbed all my patients and soon became the richest man in town. The day I closed down my practice, selling to the man I now hated, my wife announced she was leaving me. Five months later, they were married.
I moved to Chicago, where I could only find work as a prison dentist. Even there, many of the prisoners refused to let me work on their teeth. Can you believe it? Murderers and rapists were too good to receive care from me! Several threatened to shank me, and I was the center of two prison riots in the 1980s.
I changed my name and became a school teacher in rural Arkansas, teaching English to a bunch of ungrateful brats who thought oral hygiene infringed on their personal freedom.
I became very strict and sent students to the office if they so much as had a single stick of gum on their person. And if any student was stupid enough to chew or carry Trident gum, I took great delight in expelling them.
I retired after 25 years of an empty and anonymous life, teaching Shakespeare to slack-jawed mouth-breathers instead of living my life's dream.
Please know that I blame you for everything. You have ruined my life, my marriage, and my career, and I hope you are run through with your namesake.
From Hell's heart, I stab at thee,
Marvin Tandborstel, D.D.S., aka The Fifth Dentist.
Photo credit: Rafael Juárez (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.