The Gap-Toothed Grin

As a child Dale Murell was never much for oral hygiene and this was compounded by the fact that he only ate sweets and drank sugary drinks. His parents encouraged him to brush his teeth and floss but he couldn't be bothered. Soon his teeth were rotting and turning a baked brown bean color. Finally his parents took him to the dentist and were given the verdict that he had fifteen cavities. Young Dale still couldn't care a less. The dentist found it unusual that such a young boy was so unresponsive to knowing that he was on the verge of losing his teeth at such an early age. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dentist, but it just didn't matter to him if he had any teeth at all. 

​His parents were disappointed because he was actually a very handsome young teenage boy and many girls were interested in him until he flashed his yellowish brown grin. At that point they were no longer interested. Dale was also the victim of dreadfully awful bad breath due to his rotting teeth. By the time he reached the age of fifteen some of his permanent teeth had already fallen out. Many of his front teeth looked like rusted little triangles you would see on a saw blade. 

When he turned eighteen he stepped into the washroom and locked the door. He looked at himself in the mirror and agreed with all that he had a nice face. He then smiled and realized that it wasn't nice anymore. He examined his teeth up close and pulled on the ones that were hurting him. One of them simply crumbling in  between his fingers and part of another one snapped off. The rest of his teeth had gone from a brown color to a full on rotting black. He sighed heavily as his teeth were preventing him from getting a job and even the prostitutes that he was seeing would turn him down due to his breath which would seethe through the mask he was wearing.

For now he worked a graveyard shift at a toy store and only received a couple of shifts a week. He desperately wanted to fix his teeth but didn't have the money to do so. That's when he made the decision to become a gangster. He started to hang around a shopping mall chilling with some petty level drug dealers. Within a month he was dealing dope and meth and making 500 bones a week. A couple of months later he was raking in 500 a day. He kept his graveyard job as a cover. His ambition grew and soon he started to rival other dealers for their territory and bought himself a 9mm. 

Dale now had saved up enough to his get his teeth fixed. Over the next year he spent tens of thousands of dollars getting them done. Once the dentist was finished Dale looked at himself in the mirror, smiled and liked what he saw. Gone were his black teeth and no, they weren't replaced with pearly white implants but by golden teeth. He now had a twenty four carat gold smile.