Hot time

Lavinia looked up from the screen of her laptop, moved her head from side to side as she rubbed it with her right hand, leaving her left hand still an inch above the keyboard, as if she intended to go on writing with it. After she had massaged her neck enough, she lowered her right hand, shifted her weight slightly, then sighed, renewed the look of concentration on her face, then continued typing, slowly, one word at a time, as if determined to finish her task. It could have been me there in Lavinia’s place, and in a way it was, because I’m doing exactly the sane thing, sitting and typing, rubbing my neck to get the kinks out. Trying to write, one word or more oftentimes than not, one letter at a time, but nonetheless with mostly a steady rhythm. Maybe she sighed because, like me, she’d rather be reading than writing, but she had to write because like me, we don’t get paid to read, only to write.

I suspect Lavinia wanted to be reading, or rather listening to, the last Stephen King audiobook, You Want it Darker, the way I wanted to be immersing myself in that very book, both of us just having finished listening to Douglas Preston’s novel Extinction. Preston’s book was quite good, although I kind of figured out where he was going with the plot partway through and really started enjoying the irony of the primitive versus the knowledgeable groups of people, quickly connecting the events with the contemporary world, and even with Gaza. However, I can’t say if Lavinia was as obsessed with the whole Gaza thing as I’ve been. What I can say is the whole indigenous group theme really resonates with me, and I’m sure it must have the same effect on her.

King’s book is a collection of short stories which make for an audiobook over twenty hours long. Both Lavinia and I love Stephen King; he’s like an old friend, an old writer friend. We read him like we know what he’s written even before we start one of his books. It’s different than Preston’s books, which is not to say the latter is inferior; he’s not. He’s just different. King is more of the home boy writer, while Preston is more worldly, even though both have ties to Maine.

Well, I could go on at length as to the similarities between King and Preston, but that would probably only be of interest to readers of a certain type of writer and perhaps to literary critics. Neither Lavinia nor I is a literary critic, but we do know a thing or two about reading, and we’re as in love with it as Borges was, and she has probably read as much of the Argentinian writer as I have. However, this story is actually not about us but is instead about Lavinia, so I ought to let her tell her own story. Although that’s the problem: she’s have trouble telling it.

“I don’t know what to write about,” muttered the woman, looking out the window yet again after hearing a particularly melodic song coming from high in an oak tree. She was now regretting her decision to sign up for a creative writing course in an effort to improve her Galician. Yet she had committed to learning more galego and had thought the month-long course, consisting of four workshops, three hours a week. The students had four weekly prompts and this week they had to write about a character with an obsession. Lavinia found the topic both silly and frightening, even though she didn’t think of herself as a person with any real obsessions. A phobia or two, perhaps, but she had nothing that impelled her to do something, unless it was reading.

Yet here she was trying to stop reading and become a writer for the weekly prompts. She didn’t have to write all that much, but it was supposed to be good. Even if she wasn’t using her own language and struggled often to express what came to her easily in English, she knew she had to keep trying.

I told you Lavinia and I had some things in common.

“Maybe I’m too embarrassed to accept the fact that I have an obsession or two just like everybody else.” Lavinia mused, stretching out the kink in her neck again, knowing it was her body’s trick to distract her.

“I guess I could write about something I like a lot, a whole lot, even if it doesn’t qualify as a true obsession. I can pretend it’s as bad as it sounds, exaggerate a bit, and that’ll be enough to satisfy the assignment.”

I told you Lavinia and I were alike in some ways and here’s one of them. I know exactly what she’s going to write about. This is her story, but I could tell it just as easily as she can, could write it just as easily. Does one of us know Galician better? Could one of us tell it better? That’s not important, but I can say you’re able to read it here in English because I translated it. It’s up to you to decide if you trust my translation, my version, or if it’s good enough.

“I can write about my fascination with hot peppers, which is close enough, because I do like them a lot.”

I recognized my inclination toward the hot, spicy, and biting at a very early age. Naturally I’m using these terms in relation to food and, in particular, to hot peppers. I blame it on two events. One was how my father used to get slim jims when we went for rides in our old car. We’d stop at general stores, gas stations, places like that, and he’d get a couple. Eventually I got curious and tried one. After that, he had to buy twice as many. They were cheap back then, and bigger. The other source of my love of hot food was different. In a trial by fire in the mouth, my father said I had to try a hot cherry pepper, the Italian pickled kind. That one was a real challenge, and it took me years to be able to eat one, but my father was dead by then. He would have been proud of me, though, I just know it.

My parents met at a square dance. My favorite song when my father called the dances was “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.” I always thought ‘hot time’ was eating a spicy meal, maybe Cajun or Creole style. I never thought anything else.

The next spicy thing I recall is tabasco sauce, which at first I didn’t know came from a place in Mexico. Tabasco is a state, not a city, and has a blend of indigenous lines. I could go on for pages, but I’ll just say that I spent a lot of time trying to tie the state to its hot sauce, but discovered the peppers were not grown in Mexico for the McIlhenny brand I knew, which was a disappointment. my Mexican friend Tino used to carry a bottle in a jacket pocket. I used to borrow it when we ran into each other in a restaurant.

Speaking of restaurants, Ray’s Bar and Barber Shop in Bailey Ave in Buffalo made the best buffalo wings in the city. From 1 to 3, I always ordered 3 for heat. Ray’s real name was Ramón.

I ultimately took an online course on hot peppers and learned ways to grow them, preserve them, cook with them. It didn’t matter that almost nobody liked hot food the was I did, and most who did were men. I had trouble getting people to eat the food I cooked. ‘Mild’ as a heat level was tasteless to me.

My garden has to have at least five kinds of hot peppers each year. I try to have at least one new kind in those five.

I like jellies and jams that have hot pepper in them. I will eat them on plain yogurt .

I have about twenty cookbooks in hot and spicy cuisine. Several are only about hot peppers. I have five or six books on capsicum.

If ordering heat on a 1 to 10 basis, I can tolerate 9 and 10 without difficulty. 

I once met the suicide taco challenge. I was a college student and was on a budget. The prize for finishing one of those beauties was that you got the second one free. It was like two for the price of one. I got a lot of free meals that way.

In any given month I probably have at least five hot sauces in my refrigerator, often from five different geographical areas or ethnic cuisines. My only dislike is a sauce with so much garlic it kills the piquant. And I do love my picante.

Black pepper shouldn’t be omitted here. It can be used abundantly to get a bit of a bite. So can white pepper like they use in Spain.

I am a failure at wine tasting, slightly better at beer, and immensely skilled at testing hot peppers. Just like there’s a whole vocabulary for wine, so too for peppers, plus I can quite accurately describe the experience with a lexicon of my own. As soon as I have two hundred terms, I’ll publish a book, and I’m almost there.

I truly dislike ornamental peppers, because I’m always dying to taste them, but what if they’re poisonous and kill me? Although there are worse ways one could die, I suppose.

When I was a little girl, I liked to draw pictures of food and houses, and food in houses, families sitting down to supper. I always drew a hot pepper of some kind on at least one plate. Mine.

I discovered piparrak in Basque settings and now that I can get them here I no longer have to travel to Euskadi to eat them. Not the same for the pementos de Padrón, the Padron peppers. I mean, I can get seeds in the US now, but the only way to get the actual peppers is to grow them yourself. I’m thinking that a great profit could be had from making Padron peppers into jam or canning them. Nobody is doing that. And there’s no confusing the taste with the shishitos. By the way, the Padron is only hot on a one-in-ten basis, maybe less. Unless, of course, they come from Murcia, and then the ratio is one in five or one in three. Hot not not authentically hot, since Padrón is nowhere near Murcia.

I have, as you might expect, a hot pepper collection. Leaving aside the actual plant with the dried pepper heads, and the musical group, I have around fifteen t-shirts with some sort of chili on them, three sweatshirts, five caps, and miscellaneous garments such as belts, handkerchiefs, and of course earrings (ten pair, as I recall). I have been lucky enough to find four salt and pepper set, a sugar bowl, two serving platters, and thirteen hand-painted tiles, all with different hot pepper designs. I have an original painting by a Guatemalan artist, one by a man from Gujarati, and my own journals and prints which occupy an entire shelf in my studio. Oh, And I shouldn’t forget the set of table mats, the paper napkins, and two sign prints from my trip to Peru.

For Latin America I have histories and dictionaries of all the geographical areas, but I haven’t done the same for Asia… yet.

This is going on far too long.

“Have I forgotten anything?” Wonder Lavinia, as she strove to account for all the peppers in her life, knowing that she had only mentioned the most obvious, had really only scratched the surface of her passion. She hadn’t mentioned the pairs of earrings, the pens for tourists, the ashtray (no, she didn’t smoke), the calendars, all years old and never to be thrown out. She’d forgotten the postcards bought but never sent and those received from friends who knew her well. She hadn’t mentioned quilting, the tablecloth, the ceramic plates from Portugal and France, the welcome mat, at a score of other hot pepper items in her life. She hadn’t revealed how she kept her eyes open in the flea market for pepper objects and often bought things such as writing ink or thread because they were a color advertised as ‘cayenne’ or ‘ají’.

I know Lavinia so well, you see, that I don’t have to read what she writes, nor am I deceived by her inference that her obsession as not an exaggerated behavior on her part but simply a creative writing prompt.

I know Lavinia so well that you will have to figure out for yourself if she was making up everything she was writing or if it was autobiographical writing. Or figure out whether Lavinia is just a character I’ve invented in order to reveal my own obsession, one that is far worse than the brief list she compiled. 

Author’s Note:

This is at least the fifth story I’ve written about hot peppers. It is most likely not the last.