Ghost Pepper Dash

Ghost Chili Dash
By: Jay Lebaron

It occurred to me, after my ****-stained odyssey, that if it weren’t for Dr. Daigneault none of this would have happened. I would have left class at 11:30 and walked over to the library, as planned, spending the rest of my afternoon reading my book, maybe even nursing an extra large peppermint tea. But instead that Daigneault ambushed me on the escalator carrying me from the Molson basement, setting off a chain of events that would have me cursing each of our names the rest of the day.

You see, I have a habit of over-walking my destination when I’m in awkward company. Dr. Daigneault, despite being a brilliant speaker, makes me uncomfortable one-on-one. In class, I hadn’t asked a question in weeks, nobody had; unfortunate students who raise hands invariably become the center of his tight little world. I don't like that. So after class, when I found myself standing next to him on the long, slow escalator, I cursed to myself and just hoped I’d quench his thirst for conversation quickly. Rather than be rude, I walked with him towards his office, right past the library building, chit chatting aimlessly and ever searching for my exit. When he finally left me, I figured I could take a short cut through the atrium in the Hall building instead of doubling back, picking up my tea along the way. That’s how I found myself in that unfamiliar part of the campus, where I never go, and that’s how I found the Ghost Pepper Chili Challenge.

Along the back wall of the student center, next to Java U, a small crowd had gathered around a makeshift booth. As I approached, I peered through the gaps and saw bags of potato chips and an assortment of colorful sauces, amateurishly bottled with names like “Devil Ketchup” and “Death Sauce”. Never one to turn down a free lunch, or a handful of snacks, I cut in to take a closer look. The pony-tailed hipster running the show was carefully dabbing the chips with a thin burgundy sauce.

What’s all this? I asked.

This is the Ghost Chili Challenge, he answered, still focused on his task. He laid out another small handful of kettle cooked chips onto a paper plate. As he smeared the hot sauce into the chips, he clarified the rules for me. All you have to do is eat ten chips, he said, as quickly or as slowly as you like, and if you do it you win a free bag of chips.

What’s the catch? I asked. No catch, he said.

To my surprise, despite a growing crowd, nobody had agreed to the challenge yet. People stood around shoving unwilling friends forward to volunteer, others shuffling their feet to muster the courage. Maybe it was the injury waiver that scared them, printed on pink paper and written in Comic Sans font-- Not too threatening. The form claimed that the sauce is made from Ghost Chili Peppers, direct from India, where the juice is not only used for cooking, but for pacifying pesky Indian rioters when properly weaponized. The hipster insisted that my signed consent was required before I could taste the sauce, lest I get seriously injured and sue. I couldn’t decide which cheek his tongue was stashed in, but I agreed to the terms immediately and signed the form proudly, to the delight of what had suddenly become my cheering audience.

After all, I love hot food. When I lived in Barbados a few years ago, I regularly challenged the cooks to dazzle me with Caribbean spices, but I was never too troubled by their efforts. My brother has been asking me for weeks to join him in the new hot wing contest at McKibbins Pub, if only so that our family name can be properly immortalized on the Wall of Flame. I tease my mother all the time about how her legendary chili recipe is just too bland for my palate. Just last week, I boasted to my girlfriend that I had never eaten anything that was too hot, and I wondered if I ever would.

So off I went, slowly and deliberately placing the first chip on my tongue, sauce side down, bracing myself for the pain. I had already traced the shortest route to milk, the patron saint of burnt throats, and I calculated that worse come to worse, I was only about fifty paces from the coffee shop fridge. I anticipated a mad dash through the line, tearing into a carton of strawberry milk that would deliciously coat my stomach and sooth my foolish ambitions, but my reaction to the sauce was only disappointment. It certainly was hot, I can’t deny that, but I wasn’t lying when I told my emcee that I had tasted much worse-- Pepper spray exaggerations be damned! The crowd laughed as I ravaged the plate of chips, licking the sauce from my fingers and smiling wide as I held the empty plate aloft in triumph. Their applause was followed by pushing and jostling of macho cowards, only willing to try once they saw how easily, how expertly, I had punished the Ghost Chili Challenge.

A short, stocky guy in oversized D&G sunglasses elbowed his way to the front and started grabbing wildly for the consent form, eager to upstage me. This is nothing, he said, I drink Tobasco bro! I laughed as I felt the familiar heat rising in my throat. I know how to handle my hot sauce, and while I knew this stuff was just getting started on me, I thought I would stick around for a little while and watch the show. After all, I was the champion, at least for that moment, and I fielded questions proudly from the curious crowd about how I felt and how it tasted. My face must have been beet red, my tongue numb and my brow beading, but otherwise I was no worse for wear. Gino spilled sauce on his shirt and his bald head was already dripping. I accepted my trophy bag of Miss Vickie’s and hung around until the ladies had completely lost interest in my accomplishment (which wasn’t very long), then headed over to the library as originally planned.

I was on my way over there, still basking, when I felt that first ring from my bowels that perhaps something was wrong. Not pain, not yet anyway, but enough of a warning shot that I changed course, deciding that maybe home was where I needed to be. A wonderful thing, these survival instincts. I started the short walk to my apartment but I made it less than one block when I felt it happen.

As I write this, it’s hard to really describe how it felt. It wasn’t like a punch to the stomach or anything obvious like that. I guess the best way to explain it was that I felt like I had swallowed an iron dumbbell. All of a sudden, my stomach sank right out from under me, and my legs lost their string. I swerved on the sidewalk and found myself on my hands and knees, the world spinning vertigo, my skin instantly soaked in cold, creeping sweat. I struggled to my feet and lurched a few steps over to a miraculous picnic bench outside Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. I put my head down, utterly confused, and I must have blacked out then because my next memory is being shaken awake by a young couple who seemed really concerned about me. They stared down with strange expressions as I tried to focus my thoughts on the words they were saying: Are you okay? Mister, are you alright? Do you need help? I dismissed them in the same drawl I borrow often enough when I’m drunk, foolish and utterly unconvincing. I somehow forced myself up and thanked them off hand, shuffling my way back up the street, intent on putting one foot in front of the other until I made it. The twelve blocks to my building never seemed longer than it did right then.

As I walked, I could feel the heat in my stomach warming my whole body, the juices bubbling and frothing like a chemistry experiment. I imagined my insides as a big glass beaker, its putrid contents steaming and boiling. I held myself as I staggered the next few blocks, my groans becoming increasingly audible, my agony deepening. I pictured the beaker flexing under the strain of its exploding brew, forcing my scorched lips apart. Buckling and spitting with nausea, I grabbed the brick wall and splashed the sidewalk with hot lava. I darted desperately down an alley and kept puking, each retch full of hot sauce and regret.

Finally spent, I flopped on a concrete stoop and sat there for a while, recouping. I remember thinking how foolish I had been to take the challenge on an empty stomach. As usual, I had been in a hurry that morning and didn’t bother with breakfast. Now I was really empty, or so I thought, my stomach reduced to charred lining. Vomit dried on my shirt as my jeans soaked in the damp unmentionables that coated the alley. I might have just sat there all day, wallowing in my own misery, except I began to feel another familiar sensation, one that demanded urgency, so against my own will I pulled myself to stand and hobbled back to the street, dodging piles of puke like desert mines. I needed a toilet immediately.

Again I calculated distances, this time the shortest distance to the nearest bathroom. I know downtown really well and in better circumstances I can probably guesstimate where the cleanest, safest places are to drop a load, but considering the state I was in I thought it best to go where I was certain to find an unlocked toilet. I was in no condition to shop for something classy. It was only one block over to Peel, where I could slink anonymously into the Cours Mont Royal and its porcelain oasis.

Now, I’ve done that walk many times, and I don’t mean to Peel Street. I can’t count how often I had to penguin walk through the hallway leading to my apartment, clenched tight with the spirit of an Olympian. How many times was I in the car, or on the bus, or (worse still) on an airplane when the urge seized me? I know the panic of the dash. But what’s worse than that frenzied, hopeful shuffle is the moment when you realize you won’t make it. Halfway to the doors of the mall, the floodgates opened and all hell broke loose. I don’t know if there is a more helpless feeling.

What could I do? I shouldered on, my mind adjusting priorities as I walked, accepting certain truths about my circumstances and figuring out what needed to be done. When I finally reached the doors, I was log jammed by four or five businessmen, forcing me to slow down and shove past them, knowing all the while that my cause was hopeless. I felt it sputtering out in short bursts, killing my panic and replacing it with self loathing and dread. At that moment, I remembered the last time I had **** my pants, in Mrs. Spence’s 1st grade class. I plodded in shame towards the bathroom, shirt covered in vomit, pants filthy and wet with garbage and hot diarrhea. I felt about as small at that moment as I was when I was 6 years old and paralyzed in anticipation of the ridicule and mockery of my classmates. Now I had come full circle, twenty five years later. My eyes stung with frustration. I couldn’t believe this had happened.

The next hour or so was spent in the last stall, snaked around the corner and out of sight, trying not to make a sound as I lined my underwear with rough, industrial grade toilet paper, soaking up the tawny soup while I noisily evacuated the rest of my triumph beneath me. After an eternity, and a week’s supply of paper, I emerged from the stall a defeated man. I saw my pale face in the mirror and I cursed it. I cursed the Ghost Pepper, and I cursed Dr. Daigneault too, for leading me astray. I vowed that, from that moment on, the spiciest food I’d ever eat would be raisin bread.

The rest of the walk home was uneventful. Easy, in fact. I stopped at a dep and picked up some strawberry milk, far too late to save me but still very welcome. My mind had imagined that awful hill on Aylmer tearing me apart, but I climbed it with ease and glided up the street to my building. But just as I approached my apartment door, I felt that awful kick again, and I panicked my keys into the lock and rushed to the toilet for round two.

As I sat in cathartic relief on my own bowl, finally safe and sound, I opened my eyes and saw the last few strands of toilet paper dangling from a nearly finished roll, an empty bag of Cottonelle topping the wastebasket. Utterly beaten by the Ghost Chili Challenge, I spent the rest of the day just like that, my own Rodin, in quiet contemplation of my foolish pepper ambitions.

This is my first post. Anyone who bothered to read my story-- I'd love to get some feedback.

Quite a tale of self inflicted woe by your poor protagonist. Despite the scatological detail it was a highly entertaining read. Something you might like to consider before your next post would be to allow a line space between paragraphs. It doesn't seem to matter how formatted your text is in your word processing software, the act of copy-pasting it into a forum thread completely removes it all, indents, italics bold type, the works. However, a line space survives and it makes it a hell of a lot easier for readers on the forum to read your text. I'd also recommend that you put a line space between speakers in sections of spoken dialogue when writing conversations.

An entertaining first post. Welcome to the forum.

Live and be well - H

Thanks Hawkman. I just went back and edited in some line breaks. Next time I'll figure out how to indent.

What's carrying this is the treatment of the content and the clarity of the prose. It's not bad, and certainly not bad in the way a reader would expect a story like this to be bad. It's overwritten, though, and too self-aware to allow for genuine pathos/empathy/humor to function.

Despite that, it still managed to be entertaining, and this reader is now curious to read what you will post next.








J