Dennis the Security Guard

“Don’t forget the kernel between your central and lateral incisors for God’s sake!”

This is an exclamation that usually doesn’t come from the mouth of a sane human being. Sure, there is the 0.001% chance that it could be shouted by a pushy dentist with poor bedside manners or a parent with an unusual amount of orthodontic knowledge – or, hey, it could be a mashed-potato hybrid of both!

But this exclamation didn’t come from any sane human being. No, this came from the chapped and pimpled mouth of our protagonist, Dennis DeJonker the security guard. And right now, Dennis wasn’t watching CCTV footage at work; he was watching surveillance at home. Channeling five different feeds, he was transfixed by people – females specifically – brushing and flossing their teeth.

“Movie night,” he scoffed. “Popcorn is gingivitis’ greatest ally!”

Kind of a strange cat, right? You see, before Dennis was Dennis the security guard, he had been Dennis the dental student – both, equally intolerable. Knee-deep (or should I say, ‘mouth-deep’?) in dental school, Dennis had satiated his fever for floss, his temper for tooth-ery, by being in and out of labs, lectures, and patient’s gaping wide gullets. Sure, Dennis was not the comeliest of his gender, with his caved back, rodent teeth, and extremely overactive sebum glands doing him no favors, but he was relatively intelligent, being accepted into Rutgers School of Dental Medicine and passing each quiz, exam, or ability to irritate his professors with flying colors.

But Dennis was weird, too, you know? And unfortunately, that weirdness caught up to him. In all actuality, that was why he was expelled – because of his weirdness. Still, how could you be expelled for being weird? You’d need to be an A-level oddity for that.  

Well, as you can see from Dennis’ current preoccupation, he met that security clearance. Dennis had been expelled from Rutgers for… stealing teeth.

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Now, of course, he didn’t just simply take a pair of dental forceps and rip out teeth from unsuspecting pedestrians that had the misfortune of walking past him. Such brutishness insulted his sensibilities. No, Dennis stole teeth while shadowing with an orthodontist named Dr. Heber. While Dr. Heber was freaked out enough by the obscene delight Dennis seemed to have while watching root canals and wisdom teeth extractions, it was only when the orthodontist started noticing less and less teeth to dispose of to the hazardous waste container that he grew suspicious.

The situation, however, understandably escalated when Dennis came into the office wearing a necklace of all the cavity-ed and rotting teeth he had stolen.

“Vat the hell are you doing?” Dr. Heber said in his thick German-ish accent. (No one knew where he came from, and his staff members were too afraid to ask.)

“Why,” Dennis said with a wave of his hand, “displaying the most toothsome fashion that a first, second, and third molar can afford!”

His eyes – and that little vein on his neck – bulging, Dr. Heber looked like he had witnessed every trauma-inducing stimuli a human being could experience all at once. “Get out!” he screamed. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

And so, Dennis was shooed away – shooed away from Dr. Heber’s office and soon the entire dentistry department of Rutgers University. Now living in his mother’s basement (Dennis never really minded being a cliché), he worked as a security guard at the two-and-a-half-star Chuck E. Cheese on Mowry School Road, one of the few mouse-made establishments left in Newark. And while some might think this job would be as cool as the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” franchise lets on, Dennis could only wish for such glamors as being chased around by a six- to ten-foot animatronic.

Instead, Dennis spent his days chasing booger-infested, sugar-crazed offspring in a mono-contaminated entertainment center for 12 hours a day. His mornings, afternoons, and evenings consisted of either preventing a child from gagging herself with an alley bowling ball or stopping a toddler from suckling on every console game’s handle in the establishment.

His life now an excruciating cluster of pain, pining, and frequent strep throat infections, Dennis still wove his dreams with dental floss.

So, one day, he decided to do something about it: If he couldn’t be a dentist, he could at least be a dental enthusiast. How, you may ask? By the exceedingly rational action of placing cameras in all of his loved ones’ bathrooms, so he could watch them brush, floss, and rinse.

Mother, aunts, or grandmother, it didn’t matter. They would all be monitored, cataloged and critiqued – all within his handy-dandy notebook marked, “The Feminine Dental Habits, Diagrams, and Degradation of the DeJonker Family and Other Most Interesting Oral Histories of 2022-2024.”

And while his distinct fixation with female orals may seem like a symptom of deviancy, Dennis explained his preoccupation with archiving oral records by gender in the opening pages of his notebook: “Because I want to.”

From how many milliseconds each molar was brushed to the percent increase of stains on the front incisors, Dennis was almost pedantic in his mouthy findings. Even so, it brought Dennis joy – a joy he should’ve kept to himself but instead decided to announce during every imaginable family function.  

“Grandma CeCe, why aren’t you using the PreviDent 5000 I gave you last Christmas? You can’t afford to lose any more teeth, you know!”

“Mom, what did I tell you? You’re supposed to drink a glass of water after taking coffee, tea, or wine. There’s no excuse to have George Washington’s denticles!”

“Auntie Vera, the floss you are using is vastly inferior to the Reach Pop dental floss. Sure, you have to pay a few dollars more, but a gum infection costs thousands!”

Such declarations and interrogations caused eyebrows and other mammalian hairs of his female family members to raise. How could Dennis possibly have gained access to their nighttime routines? But when they posed this question to Dennis, he always responded with, “The tooth fairy works in mysterious ways,” winking in such a way that made even his closest cousins gag inwardly.

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After a year of enduring such behavior, the women of the family created a support chat group called, “Living with Dennis.”

Within this chat, Dennis’ mother, still reeling from the “George Washington’s denticles” comment, texted, “I wonder if he has some sort of way of peeking into our bathrooms?”

“The little creep probably does,” Auntie Vera texted.

“Vera, that’s my son.” Still, the amount of information Dennis knew about their oral lives was impressive, his mother thought. She figured a quick snoop or two into his son’s room wouldn’t hurt anyone since he was away at work.

Creeping downstairs to her son’s basement abode like a proper Nosferatu, she was overwhelmed with the smell of stinking underwear and moldy pineapple pizza (perhaps Dennis’ greatest sin of all). Opening his laptop, she was ready to turn spy-coder extraordinaire, a cut-above mom-detective. And in true mom fashion, she did this – by clicking on random apps in his File Explorer. But it turned out that she didn’t have to do much sleuthing when a non-password protected computer had an app called “Spy4U” on it. 

Upon clicking on the poorly designed app logo (Sir Chuck E. didn’t pay Dennis enough for high-quality spyware), boxes with familiar bathrooms appeared before her, with Grandma Cece – from the sounds of it – having particular trouble in hers. Pulling a mouth-sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a bark, Dennis’ mother whipped her phone out and told the DeJonker ladies: “HE IS TAPING US ALL! THAT’S HOW HE KNOWS!”

A few minutes later, Auntie Vera texted, “Where?”

“CHECK YOUR BATHROOMS!”

Grandma CeCe, however, was still busy with other bathroom business (and in great quantities, too), so she’d check the group chat later – if she could find where “that Apple thing” was on her phone. 

And so, each woman of the DeJonker family discovered a black circular dot placed right at their individual heights behind the mirror’s edge.

“What do we do?” Auntie Vera asked.  

But just as Dennis’ mother was about to answer, Grandma CeCe chimed in with a “foiund ikt!”

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Later that day, Dennis abided by his usual dinner-time routine which was composed of the following: 1. eating a slab of Chuck E. Cheese pizza while watching oral surgery on YouTube; 2. eating another slab of Chuck E. Cheese pizza while bathing; 3. brushing, flossing, and rinsing for 21.3 minutes (yes, you read that correctly); and 4. hunkering down to some good old dental surveillance with a notebook in hand.

Upon completing steps three out of four, Dennis opened the spyware on his laptop only to spot a phenomenon as rare as having tooth dysplasia from congenital erythropoietic porphyria itself: All of his female family members were brushing their teeth at the same time.

“A marvel! A true wonder of the world!” Dennis exclaimed. “I have to write this down!” He stumbled over the towers of pizza boxes, research manuals, and tooth fairy doujinshis to grab his notebook and little blue ballpoint pen.

But just as he opened a fresh page from his journal, all of the women on the CCTV turned their faces directly to the camera.

“Wha-?” he said before the DeJonker ladies removed the cameras that had caused them so much trouble and flushed them down the toilet. Well, all of the women except for Grandma CeCe, who was so close to the camera that all that could be seen was her two very hairy nostrils.

“No, NO!” he yelled, bursting from his chair only to collapse on his knees. “No.”

And as the harmonized flushing faded, the only thing that could be heard was not Dennis’ internal monologue, nor the garbled sound of a signal lost; it was Grandma CeCe speaking into the camera, saying, “Siri, play that jazz music again.”