Last night I had dinner with my agent, Joel.  Having dinner with your agent is a very LA thing to do, but I assure you, this was unlike most agent-client dinners.  First and foremost, we did not speak about business or “the business” at all, since there is no business to speak of.  Right now, I have about as much of a chance of getting an endorsement deal with Summer’s Eve than I do of getting a development deal with a network (and probably more desire to nail down the Summer’s Eve gig than the sitcom deal).  So no bidness with the agent at this dinner.    

 

(Just kidding, sitcom development deal givers!  I work for cheap, so that email address is jason_at_jasonmulgrew.com!  Also willing to take random household trinkets in exchange for cash!  And I can be zany in a family-friendly sense and won’t write any dialogue liberally using the word “cockblood” this time!  Thanks for your consideration!)    

 

Second, this “business” dinner was different because my agent is my friend.  I mean, though we started with an agent-client relationship, we have since grown into gen-u-ine friends.  “C’mon, dude,” you’re probably thinking, “the guy’s an agent, so of course he’s going to make like he’s your best bud.  I’ve seen ‘Entourage’.  Agents are schmoozers.”  Yes, that’s true – many agents are schmoozers.  But here’s the thing: many agents are schmoozers because their clients make them and their agency a lot of money (see: “Entourage” example).  I have been with my agent since December of 2004, only ten short months after I started this here blog, and I promise you that the money I’ve made him and his agency (UTA) is far, far less than the money he’s spent on me by taking me out to dinner and getting me boozed and once paying for something that he said was an STD test but was really some middle-aged guy taking pictures of me while I did jumping jacks without my pants on (I’m not sure if he expensed this, as I personally saw him hand the doctor/gentleman cash – I think there was also some sort of awkward high five involved, but I was pretty drugged up at the time).  As a matter of fact, if Joel and UTA are not actually in the red for having me as a client, I would estimate that Joel has made approximately 13 cents an hour over the past three and a half years as my agent.  Which is good hourly wage for most inmates, but not so good for most individuals with liberty.   

 

So we went to this place called Rock Sugar in the Century City mall, which is located close to both our offices.  It’s from the geniuses behind the Cheesecake Factory (I mean, have you tried their fried mac and cheese balls?), but it’s some sort of pan-Asian type place, which is fine with me, since I still long for Sea Thai in NYC (which I will destroy at approximately 7pm on Thursday, July 10, when I’m back in the city – God help those little Thai party boy/girls).    

 

Anyway, one of the appetizers we got at Rock Sugar was these little short ribs, maybe slightly larger than my thumb.  I picked one up and threw it back, apparently forgetting that ribs have bones in them.  But, averting a crisis (and my possible death), I caught myself before the rib was jettisoned down my throat, removed the small bone from it, and repeated the throwing back process, sans bone.  Delicious. 

 

After a few of those (ok, only when there were none left), I started sucking the little stuck strands of stray meat out of my teeth.  This sounds like a gross process, but I was discreet; it wasn’t like I was half-sitting/half-standing at the table, panting, and sucking my teeth so hard that I threw my head back over and over again.  Real gentleman-like, I cleaned my teeth with my tongue.  Delicious.

 

And then I realized something strange: didn’t I have more teeth than this?  You know, back there, right side, upper row of teeth?  Was I…missing one? 

 

Sure as shit, I was.  Because there was now a fairly sizeable hole in my mouth where a tooth was previously, I surmised that I did, in fact, loose a tooth.  I looked down at my plate, at the small bones of the spare ribs, and it wasn’t there.  I fished around in my mouth, and it wasn’t there, hiding in some dark crevice.  Stranger, I wasn’t bleeding or in any pain.  Stranger still, even when I (gently) bit on that first bone, it was on the side of my mouth opposite the missing tooth.  This tooth had apparently had enough, said its goodbyes, and went gently into that good night, without nary a fight nor whimper.   

 

Joel was amazed by this, and more than a little disgusted, but I carried on through the dinner unperturbed.  As I said, there was no pain or blood, so as long as I chewed on the left side of my mouth, I was fine.  We enjoyed the rest of the dinner and by the time I fell asleep that night and had grown tired of playing with the hole in my gum, I had pretty much forgotten about the lost tooth. 

 

Fast forward to today: I’m sitting on the toilet, reading an article from the NY Times about a federal agent impersonator during my afternoon defecation (I read the Sports Guy’s latest during my morning defecation).  It was a good poop: solid and hard, but not difficult to pass; my urine in the bowl a bright yellow-gold-green Colorado sunset color due to my multivitamin and omega-3 pills.  I wiped a few times and, satisfied that I had met my standard quota of 80% clean, stood up and pulled my pants up.  As I zipped up, I turned to admire my handiwork when I saw what looked like a piece of corn in the poo.  I thought, ”I haven’t eaten corn lately.”  And then it hit me:     

 

I pooped the tooth.

 

Sure as shit (literally), what was before me, nestled snuggly in my otherwise unspectacular lil’ monkey tail, was not a piece of corn or any vegetable, but the tooth that I had lost, swallowed, digested and now, finally, gloriously, excreted.

 

I pooped the tooth. 

 

I pooped the fucking tooth. 

 

As you can imagine, my first impulse was to take a picture.  To this end, I did not flush, leaving the poo in the bowl, thinking that I could quickly wash my hands and return to the scene with my cell phone, and no one would be the wiser.  However, while washing my hands, I realized: I’m at work, I just shit a tooth, and I’m leaving the shit in the toilet bowl so I can take a picture of it?  Really?  This is not exactly something that you want coming up in the annual review (“Well Jason, you prepared a number of successful pitches for the firm, but there was that one time in July when Mr. Smith caught you taking a picture of your feces…”).  Dejected, I returned to the toilet bowl, gave the tooth-poo one last look, and flushed.  It was a bittersweet moment, but truly there was no other way.  There was just no other way.

 

I’ve done a lot in my (almost) 29 years, but now I can finally say it: there has been human teeth in my feces.  I have shit teeth.  I have actually shit teeth.  Finally, gloriously, I am a Man.

 

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I’m going to try to post a something, even if it’s a little something, every day in July (that is, every day in July that I’m not on vacation).  Blogging is unlike riding a bicycle or sex, activities one can never forget how to do (and in my case, still require help from my uncle to last longer than a few seconds and most of the time result in a skinned knee and some sobbing).  Instead, it must be regularly practiced, lest one lose his or her touch completely.  These two months have been transitional, busy, discombobulating, saying goodbye in May and settling in in June.  So now I gotta get back on the wagon. 

 

We’ll see how this works out.