The Trials and Traumas of Gusman McTooth

I am never listening to my dentist again

My online purchase history paints an embarrassing picture. Not because I’m getting anything problematic or illegal, but because I never buy anything cool. No impulse-purchased jet skis. No ear piercing kits. No video games or hand-held lasers. In the month of February, I purchased a microfibre cloth, a new pair of custom arch supportive thongs, a clip-on warm-LED reading light for travel (I’m not going travelling), and a toothbrush. More on the toothbrush shortly. 

When I make an online purchase I like to use a fake identity. I think I first started doing this as a weird anti-fraud technique, but now I do it for a very different kind of protection. Buying a posturepedic, top-of-the range memory foam pillow for myself is dweeby, but buying it for Gustav McSoreneck is fun! Silly! And immensely and uniquely thrilling, since there is no rush quite like pretending to be a different person.

Through my many aliases I have discovered that all online purchase embarrassment can be displaced onto other (made up) people. It was Angus McBooks buying all those P. G. Wodehouse novels. A pair of aerodynamic chromium sports sunglasses weren’t delivered to me, but to someone called Gussy McGoggles. As far as the Shaver Shop is concerned, that precision ear and nose hair trimmer was for Augustus McSnips. You get the idea. 

But you can never really escape your lie—anyone who’s ever ordered coffee under a fake name will tell you that. One day, eventually, a colleague is going to ask you, loudly, and in front of everyone, why your oat iced latte says “Raúl” on the lid. My online purchase comeuppance came in the form of an expensive white whale deluxe special edition dentist-revered superpowered electric toothbrush that I found for 75% of the recommended retail price. Who could resist a deal like that? Certainly not… Gusman McTooth.

The McTooth is in the pudding

Australia Post text to say my parcel is “on its way”—this phrasing for a moment conjured images of an anthropomorphic toothbrush waddling through the streets of Newtown. Be still my beating heart. Ever since I’d placed the order my teeth have felt dirty. My manual analogue disgusting plastic toothbrush is like a relic from some bygone era of oral hygiene, as if I’d been brushing my teeth with a clay pot. I am ready for 21st century tooth care. Goodbye gum disease. Hello whites so pearly I have to keep my mouth closed around Oyster farmers. I wait pretty much all morning with my ear pressed against the door, rushing out onto the porch at the faintest pound of postman feet. But there’s nothing. Not for an hour. Then two. Then came the dreaded text: Your delivery is at NEWTOWN POST SHOP. Please bring ID.

Uh oh.

I can’t get to the post office before 4:30 p.m. Neither could a bunch of other people, it turns out. The post office is one of very few remaining institutions that closes at exactly 5, and the line of weird, twitchy, and grotesque parcel picker-uppers is snaking out the door. There’s poorly dressed slobs, there's a suit wearing gentleman with a sour wafting odour. There’s a man so ancient I think he might turn to ash before he gets his go. There’s women with haircuts that are illegal in this country. There’s a twenty-something whose eyes are so unable to be prised away from her gold-encrusted phone that she absently walks into back of the suit guy on at least two occasions. Where do these people go when they’re not in the post office? And why do they have so much mail?

It’s my turn at 4:51 p.m. By this point my teeth are on all kinds of edges. My barcode is scanned, my parcel is retrieved, and I am asked for ID. It is only when I pull up my digital licence that I realise I haven’t updated my residential address since moving house in November. This amounts to problem number one. Problem number two is that my name is not, in any verifiable legal way, Gusman McTooth.

The post office clerk is apathetic to the point of hostility—if you think it’s impossible to be both of those things at once you should go to the post office some time. She looks at the label and then at me and then at my licence and then back at the label.  

‘Is this your name?’ she asks.

‘No, but—’

‘Is this the address on your licence?’

‘Not technically, but—’

‘Then I can’t give you this package.’

Post office pressure is not like other pressures—the line is quite literally breathing down my neck, the doors are sentient and eager to close, the clerk holding my package has a glare so icy it might set me on fire. I garble an explanation about my online alter egos. When that doesn’t work I start frantically pointing to the common syllables between the label and my licence. She is unmoved.

‘It’s a toothbrush!’ I plead. ‘The package, it’s a toothbrush. You can open it up and see.’

I am told in the voice of bureaucratic death that it would be very illegal to open the parcel. I say that I agree in a broad civic sense, but that this particular parcel happens to for sure be a toothbrush. Her mouth says, ‘No.’ Her eyes say, ‘Nice try, punk.’ I am told to leave and try again another day.

You can’t handle the McTooth!

I retreat. Regroup. Ride my bike home empty handed, thinking of all of the documents I could and should have used to prove that the package was mine: rental agreements, order invoices, this blog (Speaks to character, Your Honour). It takes no more than thirty seconds to update the residential address on my licence, by the way, and requires zero legal proof. The next day I return to the NEWTOWN POST SHOP and through some unfortunate cosmic queue coincidence, I am called over to the same postal employee as before. It’s like a fever dream version of deja vu. Barcode. Scan. Parcel. ID? 

‘Here you go,’ I say, all smiles, thinking, in fact, about how much more SEARING and POWERFUL my smile will be in but a few short moments.

‘You’re back?’

‘You bet!

‘You updated your address, I see.’

‘Without a doubt!’

‘And who is Gusman McTooth?’

Well, isn’t that the $200 (down from $750) question. Who is anyone? What is a name but a whisper in the wind. I weigh my options and all of them feel heavy and difficult to bear. There’s a ringing in my ear. My mouth is opening and closing but no sound is coming out. 

Eventually, through the fog, I manage to say, ‘He’s my housemate.’ A baldfaced lie. Perjury. The clerk grunts, checks some boxes on her computer.

‘Gusman McTooth is your housemate?’

‘Mm.’

‘And what is your name?’ she asks. Now she’s all smiles. I don’t like it. 

‘Angus Macdonald?’ I say, like it’s a question.

I am grunted at again. I am asked for a signature. I am, at last, let go.

The McTooth will set you free

When I take the toothbrush out of its box, there’s an instructional pamphlet on how to install a bluetooth-connected app. The toothbrush says “Hello” and asks me to pick a language. All things considered, I go with English. There are eight different brushing modes, including something called Daily Clean Extra Strong, which has a little emoji of a steroidically healthy tooth with a blue plus on it. Say less.

Before putting any expensive, high-powered machinery in your mouth, it is best practice to give it a go at arm's length. I slap some Colgate Sensitive on the bristles and start her up.

Imagine a suped-up lawn mower possessed by the ghost of an angry dad—it is but for the grace of the god of teeth that the thing doesn’t rip my arm clean out of its socket. Colgate Sensitive is whisked, whipped in a 360 degree, high velocity splatter, including a blob that strikes my right eye and nearly explodes my cornea. I battle against the wind turbine formed by the spinning bristles and press down the power button. Relief. The G-Forces disperse. Then the digital LED screen on the brush’s handle has the audacity to resolve into a cartoon sad face. I have disappointed it. I have brought great shame to my family. 

After a few days of wrestling with the alarmingly sentient toothbrush, I discover that a cartoon happy face costs two and a half minutes of thorough, electrified, jumbo jet brushing. My grip strength has tripled. There are gaps between my teeth I didn’t know I had. Little flecks of plaque, so afraid of being eviscerated, now take a running leap right out of my mouth whenever I rev the toothbrush’s engine. My smile is so clean and so bright I have to be careful not to shoot it into the eyes of pilots, for fear of bringing down a plane. 

‘Oh, Mr Mctooth,’ I say to my mouth’s reflection, each and every day, through my polarised sports sunglasses. ‘You beautiful shining bastard you.’