Tales of New Mexico.

Back from the long and boozy weekend at the National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show promised in Friday's post. Albuqueque is beautiful (or maybe I've just never been to that part of the country, or both). My hotel room had a direct view of the Sandias (I probably spelled that wrong) mountains, which, as one largely unexposed to mountains, being from Northern Ohio and now living on the East Coast and all, was pretty exciting for me.

The show itself was great, allowing me to ingratiate scores of brave men (and a few women) with, among other tasty and fiery concoctions, Matar los Gringos hot sauce, our company's new product for the year. It was especially rewarding to sample it those really tough dudes who just didn't think that there was anything stout enough for them. Let me explain a bit: the sauce is comprised mostly of capsaicin oil, which is the extract of the habenero, or, in short, the hottest part of the hottest pepper in the world; the color and texture is provided by chocolate habenero solids, which hardly cools it off much. The effect of eating it is peculiar, in that what starts as a mild burn in the back of the throat then builds, slowly, inexorably, horribly, into a fire that engulfs the entire tongue, gripping it in pulsating waves of heat that peak about three minutes in before tapering off over the next twenty or thirty. So the tough people would eat some sauce on a nacho, declaring, with their best poker faces, "that's not so hot," before being overwhelmed 60 seconds later and crying for fluids like little girls. I was crying right along with them--with laughter. Nothing like watching other people's foreheads break out in beads of sweat, tears occasionally running down their faces, sniffling like sick toddlers, begging for paper towels and water, to satisfy the low-rent sadist in all of us. Oddly enough, remarkably few people realize how pointless drinking water is to alleviate hot-food burns. The burn comes from oil: how well does cold water take oil off of a greasy pan? Works about as well on your tongue. Something fatty like milk or ice cream will neutralize it, and beer or liquor will act as a solvent to remove it, which is why there's a time honored association of spicy food with beer and tequila--it works.

On both Friday and Saturday, the show paid for a keg of beer to be given free to card-carrying show exhibitors to consume afterward at a local bar. All went well on Friday at The Liquid Room, but on Saturday, things went, shall we say...askew. The CaJohn's crew, along with myriad and sundry other vendors, arrived at Ned's bar on Central street, drank up the free beer in about 45 minutes and proceeded to spend hoardes of our own cash. Come ten o'clock, the bar decides that it's now a club with a dress code prohibiting ball caps and short-sleeved tees (which happened to be the show uniforms of many NFFBS people present). I'd changed clothes after the show, but the people I was with hadn't. First of all, I've never in my life been to a bar that had two different dress codes for happy hour and late night, let alone a bar that retroactively imposes rules on people who were already spending money there. I was under the impression that this was a fairly universal standard: if you get in before the band starts, you don't pay cover; and, presumably, if you get into some run-of-the-mill dive that acquires pretensions of "club" status (no DJ, band, or anything else, by the way) come ten PM, you stay and drink as long as you have money in your pocket. I guess I was wrong, as a number of us were told to leave. One of the level-headed bouncers, a ridiculous little five-foot-four, 125 lb. Mexican twerp, started exchanging words with some of us as we were on the way out. I wondered if he was naturally that bad at his job or if the cocaine I'd heard him snorting in the bathroom stall minutes earlier was fueling his aggression. Once outside, I calmly explained to him that by losing his temper in the situation he was becoming part of the problem. I've been a door guy and a bartender and know the game fairly well. He replied that he'd fix any problems. I half-laughed, half-sighed and walked away; insecure short men and narcotics just don't go together at all. Naturally, everybody else there who was going to be split from their lesser-dressed companions finished their drinks and left, so Ned's chased out hundreds of dollars in sales to be replaced by the completely imaginary line of sartorially gifted people eagerly waiting outside. Some people just don't deserve to own businesses. The CaJohn's folks, being John, his son Nate, and me went through another hundred dollars ourselves at the hotel bar that we'd have happily given to them. I doubt anyone from the convention will make the same mistake next year.

On Friday, I got in a fun conversation with Tom from England, attending the show as a journalist writing a book about various aspects of Americana, and a squat bulldog of a man named Horrible Haggis (or just Haggis, outside the show) a hot sauce artiste hailing from near Melbourne, Australia. We had a bunch of laughs, Haggis occasionally offering a crack about the royal family for Tom's edification, and all that, which Tom took like the good sport he is. It wasn't untill Sunday, the final day of the show, that John noticed the unusual hyphenated name on Tom's visitor pass, and inquired about it. The name was "Parker-Bowles," and John's question of "any relation to Camilla?" was met with "that's my mum." (Suspicious me, I looked it up upon arriving home. No lie.) We tell the boisterous Haggis who he's been maligning the royal family to, and he is, for the first time since the beginning of the whole show, totally speechless. You can't make this stuff up. In a sense, I'm glad I didn't know about Tom's parentage until it was too late to bother him about it. There are probably few things in this world as de-individualizing as being the plebian relative of someone famous. And, jackass that I am, would have, following a few drinks, have completely lost interest in Tom the journalist from England and instead began speaking to Tom the future stepson of the future King of England. I'm sure this has happened to him so many times that he makes no point whatsoever of bringing the matter up unless specifically asked. No sense becoming an unwilling component in "six degrees of seperation" if it can be avoided, I suppose.

On the whole, I found Albuquerque beutiful and pleasant, although I could never live in a city that completely shuts down on Sunday (no, not true, Circle K is open--and strange things are afoot at the Circle K). I had two flights to catch on Monday, leaving NM with a stop in Cincinatti, Oh. I was at the Albuquerque airport two hours early, and had an almost three-hour stop in Cinci, and I hate flying like hell and all Montagues, and they serve alcohol in airports and on airplanes, so I was one intoxicated little traveller by the time the cab dropped me off at my doorstep in Wilmington. I had neither the promised Spaniard's head nor alien paraphenalia, but a couple of nice pictures which I'll someday scan and post (old world camera) and the story above. I hope you enjoyed reading about it.