I'm a-Leavin, on a Jet Plane.

Off to Albuquerque, NM, for the weekend to peddle and eat some really, really, absurdly hot food with my friend and mentor John Hard of CaJohn's Fiery Foods. This guy, for no other reason than our shared love of the habenero, which he discovered while I was his waiter at Noodles in Columbus, Oh., has agreed to fly me two-thirds of the way across the country with food, drink, shelter, and pay--so I can do three days of work for him of a sort I enjoy doing anyway at a trade show. When I figured his overall cost in the enterprise, I realized that's like lawyer money. Wow, everyone should have friends like this. I will be sure to bring back lots of cheeseball alien trinkets, which are no doubt in heavy circulation, as I will be a mere (by desert standards) 200 miles from Roswell, the principal attraction (besides questionably legal immigrant labor opportunities) in the state.

All blame/credit for my bizzare predilection toward all things chile is owed to my mother (God bless her) who, being a good German girl, never kept anything in the house fiercer than ground black pepper (and that we had to add ourselves). Like most Northern European-derived cuisine, her meals were laden with butter and oil and a bit wanting in the herb and spice scheme o' things. Don't mistake me; I like a good meatloaf (and she makes a damn fine meatloaf) or pot roast as well as the next guy. I just felt somehow I was well, missing something those hearty-meal childhood years. So by adolescence I was, against her fervent protests, dousing everything she cooked with enough black pepper to hide its original form. Matters just grew worse in college, where I got a job in a wing joint and worked my way through the chain-of-command of heat levels on the sauces. But I wasn't done there, oh no.

There is something that non-hot food junkies fail to understand as they watch me and my ilk wince in pain as we scarf down blazing wings and molten bowls of chili, indigestion be damned: hot food, by which I mean really hot food, not your run-of-the-mill Mexican or General Tso's chicken, affects the same stimulus/reward areas of the brain as narcotics and sex (or so I hear; I'm not a researcher). Eating painfully hot things leaves one feeling euphoric and serene, if a bit runny nosed, and inclined toward the lavoratory the following day. It's typically a poor trade for the uninitiated, as the tears streaming down one's face and plaintive gasping for water (which does no good whatsoever) normally are too dear a price for the ensuing rush of endorphins. But that's the special thing about being a chile-head: building a tolerance to the pain allows us a dining experience most people can only imagine. I've never heard of a burger and fries making one feel...elevated.

So, following the wing training, I eventually got to the source: the habenero pepper itself. Just manually handle enough of them (and, stemming multiple cases of them in the early days of freelancing for John, I certainly did), and your hands start to burn, in a way that soap and water can do nothing to alleviate. Further, there are levels: there is the standard green habenero, which is plenty God-awful hot in its own right; its cousin the still-worse chocolate hab (for its brown color, not its taste); and finally the diabolically evil red savina hab. The Incans (or Aztecs, I can never remember) used to eat green habeneros raw before going into battle; it filled them with madness and bloodlust. But the latter two hadn't been cross-bred into being yet, and it's a damn good thing for the invading Spaniards they hadn't. If such had been the case, all an Incan tribal general would have needed to say to his troops is "there's cool water on the other side of the Conquistadors," and the history of the Americas might be very different indeed.

Now, I occasionally hear an astute response to these narratives. It goes something like this: "Ha! I've busted you out! This is actually some sort of tough-guy male-bonding ritual that you pass off as epicureanism!" (or something like that). To which I respond, "Well I'm glad you're here to tell us these things. Chewie!! Take the professor into the back and plug 'im into the hyperdrive!" Oh, wait, that was Han Solo. I say something far less eloquent like "duh." Anyone that denies the macho-juvenile culture of the hot sauce world harbors acute and internalized delusions. But, at the end of the day, our geeky little hobby is much more benign to society than, say, rolling drunks or driving way too fast. Our adrenaline motives are the same, sure, but our collateral damage is zero--like Trekkies, except we can still make fun of Trekkies.

So I'm in training tonight, having baked chicken with a chipotle and chocolate hab sauce with some veggies covered in dried savina dust. One shouldn't go into battle unprepared. A little luck, and I may return from the trip with a Spaniard's head to put next to the Roswell junk.