I’ve made some bad decisions in my life. Celebrating my love of taffy minutes after costly dental work, taunting a 6’ 4” meaty-fisted bouncer, letting the glassy-eyed older brother of a friend “cut” my hair with rusty shears. Michael Dukakis. But this one tops them all. This time I may have gone too far. I’ve just finished my first mouthful of the Inferno Challenge burger, and I can’t feel my face.
It didn’t take much for me to accept this dare. There’s a place out in Boscawen that’ll put your picture on the wall if you finish a super-spicy one-pound burger in twenty minutes. So here I am at the Smoke Shack Southern Barbeque restaurant (“Where the Swine is Fine”) with my two kids, hoping they don’t see me burst into flames. Eating a one-pound burger and fries is old hat, but what I didn’t expect was the heat. This thing is like a loaf of hot magma with cheese, and my lips are searing. My wife is here too, offering me words of encouragement like, “Take your time,” and “Just how much life insurance did you say there was?” My head’s spinning and my entire face, mouth, lips, throat and stomach are engulfed in intense heat.
When I arrived twenty minutes earlier, I scanned the Wall of Fame, confident I’d soon join the ranks of the Challenge winners, this hale band of conquerors proud in their Polaroid portraits. There’s Jumbo Ketchum next to Haley Levesque right near Nathan Small, Andy Turgeon, Jack and a nameless photo of a kid who looks like he just escaped from a Doomsday cult, stopping in for a meal en route to the deprogramming. And then there’s Mark, who owns the fastest Challenge completion, finishing this monster chili pepper-infused beast in ten minutes.
Our server, Lexi Potter-Craigue, takes my family’s order and outlines the rules. “You have to finish everything in under twenty minutes – the burger, the bun, the jalapenos and all the fries. Don’t ignore the fries. You can drink anything you want – I don’t recommend soda. Stick to water or milk. Oh, and you’re gonna be in a little bit of pain,” Lexi says as she walks back to the kitchen after telling me a woman eight months pregnant met the Challenge earlier this year. “No pressure,” my son says to me.
I follow Lexi into the kitchen, and she introduces me to Joe Carey. Joe’s been working as a chef at the Smoke Shack for two years, and he walks me through the Challenge burger recipe, taking a metal mixing bowl and showing me the four types of peppers he’ll mix into the pound of ground beef. “I don’t wear a mask when I do this, but some guys do.” As Joe pours the liquid and flakes into the bowl, the other employees make slight moves away from him. It’s never a good sign when the people entrusted to serve the food don’t want to be near the food. “Are you eating that?” another chef asks me, and I nod my head. “Opportunity of a lifetime,” he says with a wide grin.
The Scoville Scale is a universal method used to gauge a pepper’s hotness. For example, a red bell pepper in your salad has zero Scoville heat units and no rating while a police officer’s pepper spray in your face has a upwards of 2 million heat units, earning a 10 out of 10 on the heat scale.
“We start with jalapenos,” (a mere 8,000 heat units and a 4 on the scale), “followed by the habaneros and the Scotch bonnets,” (both rated 350,000 heat units and a 9 on the heat scale), “and then we add the ghost peppers,” Joe says with no emotion. The ghost pepper, or Naga Jolokia, is one of the world’s hottest peppers, earning a 1 million Scoville heat unit and a 10 rating. “Naga Jolokia!” is probably what I’ll be yelping after the first bite, based on the tingling in my nose and eyes from this concoction Joe’s now kneading through his fingers. A few moments later Joe cooks the burger alone in a skillet. “We can’t use the grille because everything else we serve today would smell like this,” he says, the burger a bubbling brick of amber and orange in the pan. The scent is overwhelming as I return to the table.
Just as my wife and kids finish their lunches, enjoying every morsel on their plates, Lexi arrives with my meal. The burger sits in the center of the plate, surrounded by a burial mound-sized heap of Cajun-seasoned French fries. Lexi brings a glass of whole milk and water as well as a small bit of ranch dressing. “Your twenty minutes starts when you start eating,” she says.I begin with three quick bites, hoping to head-fake my senses before the alarms go off. No such luck. In seconds my entire mouth is engulfed in flaming pain. I sip the milk to ward off this sensation, but it doesn’t work. Five minutes into it and I can’t talk, and any words of encouragement my family offers now sounds like Satan and his henchmen chortling in a distorted, slow-motion guffaw. Past winners – Jumbo, Jack and that kid from the cult – stare down at me impassively as I try in vain to balance fries with bites of what I’m now sure of is a special slice of hell on a bun.
My bites have turned to nibbles, and my hands and shoulders are shaking. The heat’s now deep in my stomach and even the fries, only lightly dusted in Cajun spice, hit my lips like yellow jacket stings. It’s been close to fifteen minutes when I give up. When your extremities start to tingle and your chest hurts, it’s time to reassess. “That was really sad to watch,” my daughter says, inquiring about the ice cream menu.
It’s 2 AM, more than half a day since the SS Inferno hit the rocky shoal that is my gullet, and I’m wide awake. It’s like I have the flu combined with the aftermath of a fortified wine bender. My stomach feels like a possum’s trying to mate with a Wankel rotary engine, and the noises emerging from behind my belly button sound like a family of tone-deaf tree frogs playing the Glockenspiel. Things are not good. The ghost peppers are more than haunting me - they’re mocking me for every bad decision I’ve made in my life. With every lurch my innards make, my conscience tells me to think twice the next time, to look before I lunch on something so intense.
And in the deep darkness of the pre-dawn, I vow to never make another bad decision. Except if it involves ice cream – nothing bad happens after too much ice cream.
