Wild Fire

Given a list of choices, like the salad dressing inventory in a restaurant, I invariably opt for either the first option or the last, which has nothing to do with the dressing itself and everything to do with those two being the only selections my brain will have managed to retain. When the waiter begins rattling through the choices in rapid-fire monotone, I’ll immediately lock on to the first – the last is recalled because it’s freshest in my mind – but the middle of the set tends to swirl together in a nameless sea of ambiguity. I’ll wind up with something like crème de rhubarb and spend the next 10 minutes choking back bile and fawning over the much better choices of everyone else in my group.

So last night when I ordered my chicken wing flavor, despite there being a half dozen or more appealing options, the two I was left with were wild fire and teriyaki. If this were San Antonio I might have harbored reservations about the wild fire, but in pizza places around Boston hot doesn’t usually get much beyond Tabasco Sauce. So I decided on that.

“Are you sure?” asked the man taking my order over the phone.

I paused. “I… uh, think so…?” I replied cautiously, suddenly not so sure at all. How often do you order food and have the restaurant worker openly question your selection?

“Oookay!” he said in a singsong tone, the way people do while meaning to imply, Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

“Wait, should I not get… that flavor?”

“No, you should.”

“Is it too hot?”

“Not for me.”

“What about for other people?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“Well that’s not really an option,” I pointed out, trying to be polite but angrily thinking that this was a stupid conversation to be having with someone taking your food order at a pizza joint. Was he being purposely vague?

He told me, “It’s just… not everyone gets it.”

I honestly wasn’t sure if he meant this as, “not everyone orders it” or “not everyone understands it” – like how an elitist friend is always telling me that I might listen to jazz, but I don’t get jazz. The latter seemed sort of silly, seeing that we were talking about chicken wings, but judging from our liaison so far I wasn’t about to put it past him. I asked, “Because it’s too spicy?”

“Well, it is spicy,” he unhelpfully said. I wanted to tell him that I was clued in to at least some spice from its name wild fire. I also sort of wanted to punch him in the face.

I was pretty hungry by the time my wild fire chicken wings arrived. Unwrapping them in the office, I wolfed down two immediately. In retrospect, this was a very bad idea.

It was really only a bit prickly at first, with my mouth heating up little by little. By the time I started in on my third wing, the heat had quickly accelerated to full tilt. My mouth, lips, tongue, and throat ascended into a raging inferno of unbelievably scalding, fiery hell. It felt like I was eating chicken-flavored lava directly from a volcano. My tongue had surely disintegrated. With a yelp I chugged down some diet soda, which turned out to be like attempting to put out a blazing fire with gasoline. Desperate, I began sweating profusely, wiping my tongue with a wad of napkins as tears streamed down my face and I writhed in agony.

Gobs of wild fire sauce splattering my boss’s keyboard, I charged into the bathroom, tripping in the process, and jammed my head beneath the sink faucet. I wrenched the knob and let cold water bathe my blazing tongue. I had to stay like that, because every time I removed my mouth from the faucet, the eighteen-alarm firestorm roared back to life.

No doubt this was my comeuppance from earlier in the night. Thinking it would be funny and extremely mature, I froze a coworker’s sneakers in the freezer. As the clap of his frozen solid feet echoed throughout the hall as he gingerly left work, yours truly howling with laughter, he promised retribution. Turns out karma took care of it for him.