The Ugly Truth About the Tooth Fairy
Why you should never leave a ruptured spleen under your pillow
I was first introduced to the practice of exchanging teeth for money when I was five years old. My mother promised me if I put a tooth under my pillow, a magical entity called the Tooth Fairy would visit me while I slept, leaving a dime in its place. Which, in the 1950s, was a pretty decent exchange rate.
No one really knows much about the Tooth Fairy — what religious sect she belongs to or even what she looks like. She’s not celebrated with a holiday, preferring instead to work surreptitiously on a freelance, on-call basis. There’s no clear consensus about what really happens to your teeth either, once the Tooth Fairy leaves your bedside.
By the 1980s, the value of lost teeth started to climb. Tracking the exchange rate for lost dentition, discarded baby teeth were holding fast with the consumer price index and increased to $2.00 during the previous twenty-five years.
Not to be outdone, some wealthy parents started leaving behind expensive gifts under their pillows like Pogo Sticks, electric train sets, and the keys to new BMWs — even if they wouldn’t be able to drive them for another ten years.
After I left home and got my first apartment, I was still in the dark about what the Tooth Fairy would or wouldn’t reward. I kept leaving her gifts under my pillow even though I was fairly certain there weren’t Tonsil or Adenoid Fairies. Then came the appendix that exploded after I was rushed to the ER. When I woke up in the morning, it was obvious that the Appendix Fairy hadn’t paid me a visit. There wasn’t a dime to be found — just a bloody mass of hazardous biological waste material and complaints from the neighbors about the smell.
As I started getting older, more significant body parts started failing. I continued leaving them under my pillow with written instructions in case ruptured spleens and cirrhotic livers were outside her purveyance and she needed to farm them out to her colleagues. When I lost a thumb during an industrial accident, I tucked it under my pillow and hoped for the best. My medical insurance was willing to reimburse me $1,750 for it. Surely, the Tooth Fairy could do better than that. She didn’t.
The final test came after I had both of my knees replaced with artificial titanium models. My original knees were significantly larger than a five-year-old’s bicuspid, smelled to high heaven, and made much bigger lumps under my pillow.
I surmised that being as large as they were, it might take the Tooth Fairy two trips, so I allowed her a little extra time. But, she never came.
After my fortieth birthday, I discovered that the work of the Tooth Fairy is really that of well-meaning parents, specializing in baby teeth of children between five and seven years old. She wasn’t interested in worn-out livers, cataracts, skin grafts or the plethora of discarded human tissue adults lump into the aging process. And since I live alone, it’s unlikely that my parents would sneak into my condo at night just to exchange a quarter for a ruptured spleen.
If I’d known that I only had a two-year window and twenty baby teeth to avail myself of the Tooth Fairy’s generosity, I would have voluntarily knocked out more of my teeth — even the permanent ones.
I could have used the money.
