What shall I put on my business card?

One of the things I’ve always dined out on is my teeth. I could fuck with them, nay be fucked into them. My breath is like rose water or lavender. A cool Alpine spearmint. Pine cones in an Albertan forest. Indiana’s early morning dew. An apple tree overhanging a rustic outhouse in the Uzbek Urals. The Shinkansen pulling out of Morioka. The spaces between each husk are so damn regular you’d need a Geiger counter to gauge disparity. I scrape my tongue every morning with alacrity and voraciousness. With a cleaver I work up each coating of rusty gunk which I inspect before lopping off into the sink with a flick of my forefinger. When I was young I had more work than Joan Rivers. I had the old teeth out before the new ones had time to so much as think about sprouting. So many local anaesthetics my lips left my body. The dentist tugged around in there like a boy in a sand pit. Like a cat in a litter tray. On came the braces and the headgear and you have not seen a jawline so straight and smooth since they built the Great Wall. My fitted rubber mould I did not take off until my late 30’s. The top teeth are shimmering ice caps or finely cut pieces of white cards and the bottom are the visible bowling pins from a head-on perspective, imploring the smooth resinous ball to strike them. Visualise it rolling. And floss goes in like knife through butter. The wide floss or the regular string or the coiled interdent brushes which I never use more than once. And you can imagine the compliments. Every day a gawp, a stare, the hoi-polloi literally dazzled by God’s whiteness.

But yesterday my world was torn apart. I caught the new Listerine advert. Brushing your teeth, it turns out, only targets a quarter of the mouth. Listerine targets virtually the whole of it killing 97% of the germs and gives plaque a kick below the gum-line. Obviously, it’s not that I’ve never heard of Listerine, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not that I’ve never used it. I might even have a half empty bottle in my cabinet. That’s not that the point. The point is I’d never taken it seriously. How could I have been so fucking stupid? I cried when I heard it. I was, so ashamed. So disgusted that I had gone around thinking I had the best teeth, that my regime was unparalleled and there it turns out I was ignoring 75% of the mouth. How old am I now? How many years? I want to apologise to all the people I exuded a false sense of self-confidence to in regards to my teeth. I am humbled. I am sorry. I should thank be thankful to Listerine. But how long will it take to achieve parity with the other mouths. How will I define myself now? More importantly, what shall I put on my business card?