The World’s Hottest Pepper by Brandon Mead

When we met, Byron’s first love was cocaine. This was in a bar with more sequins on the floor than attached to the drag queens. More pool tables than places to safely set your drink. He ordered the same thing half a dozen times every night. Beer and a shot. Like in a movie when you don’t have to be specific about the brand or type. Byron was just that kind of regular. 

In a bathroom plastered with two decades worth of Pride stickers and glitter graffiti, he had the entire kit. A bill, a bag, and a boy. Because for a long time I liked that Byron was a hot Daddy who was always holding. It got me hard that he wanted me to straddle the gender-non-specific toilet and tongue the rogue white powder from his mustache. 

I loved everything about being his so much that when he decided to join AA, I went too. We did the whole thing. All the steps. The crying, the apologizing, the inventorying of every evening wasted in that club. Every shot, every beer, every bag, every late night spent rabidly fucking instead of learning about each other. 

What I know about Byron now is that he doesn’t actually know how to quit. That just because someone is getting up instead of going to bed at 5 A.M., doesn’t mean they have good intentions. What Daddy does between meetings is prune. He reads erotic literature to the little peppers he’s been growing in the backyard of the house we bought together. “Makes them spicier,” he says.

In the hours he used to be dialing up his dealer, he records videos of him eating hot chips and peanuts. As a replacement for getting high, Byron adds dark red flakes to every meal I make. Any snack that could make him cry so hard it hurts. Borderline poisoning himself to achieve painful euphoria. A direct effect of him ignoring the signals from his body telling him that what he’s consuming is dangerous, a skill he’s been perfecting for longer than he’s been what they call a “chili head.”

The community he’s part of, the type of people who put their bizarre shared misery on the internet for other people to enjoy, most are heterosexual, but all of them still want the same thing. To grow and consume the world’s hottest pepper. 

A lot of them are ex-addicts, all seeking their next fix via some new challenge. They have that in common. Where they differ is their plants.

The way a straight man names their peppers: The Carolina Reaper, The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, Pepper X. All things frightening and predatory. Stupid market-driven monikers they hope will look cool on a neon-wrapped bottle next to Sean Evans while he interviews a celebrity. The little shriveled red, orange, and yellow sacks flourishing in the space we could be using to build a pool are called things like: The Mask of Valentina, Linda Evangilista, Shady Pines. This is how a gay man names something scary or powerful. After women and woman-adjacent people he admires.

Whenever he came in from the garden, after softly reading the ladies some Anne Rice as A.N. Roquelaure novel, he’d tell me, “Linda is going to absolutely smoke ‘em this year.” 

So much of me wished she wouldn’t.

  A year sober proved that it wasn’t just the drugs. I was attracted to Byron and wanted to build a real life together. The sex was, admittedly, becoming a problem. Not the quality or the frequency. Moreso what it feels like to have a grown man drip flaming sweat into your eyes after he pops two dozen Naga Vipers. The first time we barebacked after one of his live streams, I went to the doctor convinced at least one of us had some mutant form of an STD. 

Endless blood tests and swabs later, the doctor told me the molten magma coating my insides was actually partially digested capsaicin. “It will find any hole to get out,” she said. While she suggested a milk enema and just saying “no” to spicy food, I told her, “I don’t even like Sriracha.” She said, “Imagine how his asshole must feel.”

Byron was destroying his body and bringing mine along for the ride. The exit process is bad enough, but what the phytonutrient that gives hot peppers their heat can do on the way in is bind with pain receptors in the esophagus. That burning sensation can spread to the chest and cause the kind of acid reflux that never goes away. The one night I persuaded Byron to take me to the movies instead of swallow rebranded hellfire on camera, I spent most of the film watching him shotgun a tube of cherry flavored Rolaids like SweeTarts. This was not a man refocusing his life on long-term commitments. This was a man willing to suffer for his new addiction. 

Even our brief vacations were centered around restaurants serving up burn as a flavor. Giving people t-shirts for guzzling down the sort of curry you have to sign a waiver to eat in New York City. Copying some wing challenge from Man vs. Food in California where you’re not even allowed to use a napkin. Taking me to exotic locations like South Carolina just so I can watch him absolutely house spicy tuna rolls to get his polaroid scotch-taped to crumbling brick. 

I didn’t mind his quest for glory. Even the voyeurism of him wanting to be watched by other people wasn’t my main concern. Fetish is as complex as dependency and a lot of times, it’s not always about physical reliance. It’s compulsion. Habit. Fixation. If I was going to get my husband back, I needed to get him hooked on something else.

Kink was first on the list. I took apart our guest room bed and filled the space with a sling. Bought the variety of custom sex furniture that can’t possibly double as anything else. Stocked up on lube and condoms I really hoped he would use. He ignored my new jockstraps, barely turned around to see how good my chest looked in the harness with collar and built-in restraints. While I showed him Sniffies messages and BDSM-themed AirBnBs, he texted his buddies about how Ed Currie was going to want to throat his cock after he sampled the Look How Fucking Orange You Look Girl. That Johnny Scoville’s chin braid was going to absolutely unfurl when he tasted what Daddy was about to harvest.

Maybe what my husband needed was the great outdoors. Like what you hear about all the time in recovery. How nature can help process trauma and cure disorders. Long distance hiking. Tree hugging. Horse therapy. All Byron said at the peak of Angel’s Landing, after risking our lives to climb one of the most treacherous trails in North America was, “Gotta hit the ramen joint before we fly back out of Vegas. Eight minutes, three pounds of noodles, four million units of heat. All that math equals me eating for free and forever immortalized on the Wall of Warriors!” 

I was losing him.

If there was any hope left, I had to get more serious. Since rehab, Daddy hesitated to even take Ibuprofen. He’d hack pieces of his lungs into the sink to fight a cold before considering anything with dextromethorphan or the stuff they can boil down into meth. If it was going to be pills, he wasn’t going to take them himself.

Crushing some in with dinner would have been the easiest way. With all the extracts and dehydrated seed bottles he was using like one of those parmesan cheese guns at the Olive Garden, he’d never even taste the chemicals. Depending on which over the counter box or childproof orange bottle I chose, he’d probably just assume he was sick. That maybe the spice was really getting to him. Perhaps, it was time for a break.

I pictured myself nursing him back to health, taking him to the doctor who treated me for my rectal lava injection. If I could get her on my side, have her tell him it was medically necessary to stop, we could be happy. But something sat wrong about dosing him. I didn’t want to Gypsy Rose my husband into thinking he needed medication when he didn’t. Byron had never had a problem picking up an obsession though, so maybe he just needed to be reintroduced to an old friend.

When I hung up, I knew I shouldn’t have made the call. The number shouldn’t have still been in my phone at all. But within hours, the tiny bags were in my hands and it all flooded back. I could taste everything. The shots, the beers, the sticky heat of a stranger’s facial hair in my mouth before he bent me over the only flat surface of the stall. The way my elbows and forearms would come up dusted in white powder that had blended in with the porcelain. Daddy’s spit on my wrists and fingers while he licked me clean and rubbed what was left of the sugary snow into his gums. 

In our home now, blue floral wallpaper lines the stairs to the primary bedroom. The dining area has a hutch full of antique teacups. Before we got clean, we slept on dirty couches and busted barstools. The closest we got to gardening was doing reverse cowboy on a Central Park bench. Everything in this house we’ve earned and every piece of it is delicate.

Tonight, as dusk settles in, Byron kneels in the Bermuda grass of our backyard. The sun nearly gone he wipes gloved hands on dirty jeans then cradles a paperback book. He whispers to his newly budding precious girl, “Beauty, you must learn it. You must accept and yield, and then you shall see, everything is simple.” 

So I do. I yield. I open every little bag, run it under the faucet, then roll the mushy contents in luxuriously thick paper towels. Where they land to be buried and rot under pasta boxes and chili stems, reminds me that perfection takes patience. And whether we’re digging ourselves out of an avalanche or trying to grow the world’s hottest pepper, we’ll do it together. Because my love for him is something that can’t be measured in Scovilles.