TEAM LAST CALL

Obviously, none of these people have ever burned the inside of their noses with a jalapeño pepper.

I should probably explain.

A few weeks ago, I was busy in the kitchen cooking dinner for my wife, which as far as you know is something I do on a regular basis. You could say that I really know my way around the kitchen. You could also say that there’s no way I could eat my body weight in Krispy Kremes. You’d be terribly wrong on both accounts.

The truth is, the minute I open a cookbook, my brain shuts down and I’m left with the mental capacity of a toddler and/or Jessica Simpson. Any recipe that involves more than one pan and five ingredients might as well be written in hieroglyphics. Or, in Jessica Simpson’s case, English.

Let me preface the rest of this story by saying that, while I have about as much competence in the kitchen as Anna Nicole Smith has at a chess match, this is a mistake that could happen to anybody. In doing my usual extensive research for this month’s article, I was appalled to discover that nowhere on a jalapeño pepper is it written that you should wear gloves when chopping them. Clearly, I am a victim here.

We journalists are the last watchdogs of society, and I am here to throw up a cautionary flag about the jalapeño pepper industry. If we allow this corporate giant to continue with such negligent behavior, we are opening the door to anarchy.

Before you know it, we’ll be living in a world without warnings, where some kind of “magic intuition” is supposed to let us know that our carry-out coffee is hot and our hairdryers should not be taken into the bathtub. And to that world I, for one, say, “No thank you!”

Sure, my wife might have offered up a few ambiguous warnings. “Honey, you should wear gloves when you’re chopping the peppers.” “Honey, you really should put on some gloves.” “Honey, you’re an idiot.”

But I made the mistake of assuming that my wife’s need to wear gloves while chopping peppers was like, say, her need to wad together an entire roll of paper towels in order to squash a spider. Because I’m so tough, I figured that the “terrible burning sensation” she was babbling about wasn’t going to be a big deal. I was wrong.

After a few minutes of dicing and slicing, I started experiencing a pain that I can only compare to shaving your entire body with a rusty straight razor and sitting down in a tub of rubbing alcohol. Not that I would know what that feels like.

I started shaking my fingers around in the air, knocking a few dishes onto the floor in the process. My eyes were tearing up a little bit, but in a totally manly way, like when your team loses the Super Bowl. The tearing up, of course, led to sniffling, and the sniffling led to me grabbing a tissue and blowing my nose, and blowing my nose led to me shoving a burning jalapeño finger right up each nostril.

My entire world was consumed by flames. If you’ve ever been walking near a fireplace and tripped and accidentally speared yourself in the nostril with a red-hot poker, then you have at least a slight idea of the pain I was experiencing. I ran to the sink and tried to invert my head under the faucet and snort water up my nose. It didn’t really help at all to dull the burning sensation, but it did almost make me drown, thereby distracting me for at least a moment from the hideous pain in my nostrils.

Then the flames came back even worse than before. “Fire!” I yelled, running in circles and fanning my nose. “Fire! I need a hospital! Get me a doctor! Fire! Call an ambulance!”

Meanwhile, my wife had entered the room to see what the commotion was. It was a relief to me just knowing that she was there for me during my time of need and would call the paramedics just as soon as she was able to stop laughing and pick herself up off the floor.

“You burnt it? Your nose? The peppers?” my wife howled, barely able to speak. “Did you? Your nose? With peppers? You did?” It wasn’t the consolation I was looking for.

Fortunately, my little Jack Russel terrier, Henry, was there to comfort me, by which I mean pee on the floor. Then he jumped up on me and tried to chew the wedding band off my finger. The one with jalapeño peppers all over it.

All of the hair on my dog’s back stood straight up. He started running around the room, grinding his face into the floor and shrieking like a piglet.

The good news is that my dog was eventually able to stop the burning in his mouth. The bad news is that he did it by climbing into the cat’s litterbox and helping himself to a deliciously soothing piece of doody. I decided to try other methods.

Methods that did not work: cramming ice chips into my nostrils; putting Aloe Vera up my nose; shooting water up my nose with a turkey baster.

Methods that did work: none. The fire burned on, constantly perpetuating itself in the coal mines of my nostrils until eventually, two days later, by the mercy of God, it slowly petered out. Sure, maybe I still haven’t recovered all of the feeling in my nostrils, and maybe I lost my sense of smell for half a month, but I survived it like a man.

Now, the second time I burned my nose with jalapeño peppers ...