Attempting Normal (24 page)

So I reread “The Grains of Paradise,” by James Street. The story turns out to be about an American man on an agricultural research mission in Mexico to learn about corn. The story culminates in a pepper-eating challenge with a local landowner and grower of peppers. The story is really about class, caste, honor, country, competition, business, and politics. I assume that’s why they put the story in the book: so we could learn the power of literature to elevate and integrate layered themes into a narrative. I got none of that and I’m sure the shaking wig at the front of the class didn’t illuminate any of that, but to be fair I don’t remember either way. The point is: I thought it was a story about eating really hot peppers. As you get older and wiser everything becomes a bit more loaded with meaning and/or completely drained of it. It sort of happens simultaneously.

I think I was intrigued by a story about eating really hot peppers because I like things spicy. I like hot sauce. I’m not a fanatic about it but when I do find a good hot sauce I get excited. I don’t search for them, which I guess is the dividing line between just liking something and being obsessed. I
have
stockpiled hot sauce in my life. Sometimes the smaller distributors go out of business and you’re left hanging with the taste still in your mouth, so you had better hoard a bit if you want to get your fix. There was an amazing hot sauce called Inner Beauty with mangos and habañeros that was the shit. Gone. I held on to a bottle of that stuff for three years, doling it out sparingly. I wanted it to last forever.

I am willing to risk some discomfort for spicy food. Jalapeños destroy my stomach for a bit and cause mild to extraordinary pain when exiting my body, but I still eat them. Not as much as I used to but some part of me thinks it’s still worth it. The rest of me thinks it’s a problem. Anal pain and chaos does not equal feeling alive. I should learn and remember that, in all areas of my life.

When I travel, which is often, I try to find regional foods that I can’t get in Los Angeles. That is really just a rationalization for me to eat barbecue, biscuits, mac and cheese, and various members of the pie family whenever I find myself anywhere that could be called southern, which means, in this country, pretty much anywhere. I always ask locals where I should eat. Then I look at the review sites to see if they check out. In Nashville almost everyone told me to go to Prince’s Hot Chicken. Not necessarily because it was good but because there was nothing else like it. I was warned that it would be the hottest thing I ever put in my face.

I’m not a big fried chicken guy but I felt like everything everyone was telling me was a challenge, like they were defying me to go to Prince’s. Some fans brought a cold batch of it to the show on my first night in town. I took a couple of bites. It was so hot that after two bites I started hiccupping and I thought, “I’ve got to get this at the source, fresh out of the fryer.” But those two bites alone gave me GI tract problems the next day.

A local told me that you have to go to Prince’s late at night because it’s in “the hood” and it gets crazy at night. The place is open until 3
A.M
. When people talk about black neighborhoods like that it implies something benignly racist. When you hear “the hood” it means someplace you wouldn’t go, where you aren’t wanted, but you might be tolerated and it’s cool, there might be trouble, but it’s cool. Oh, and black people are crazy and wild and don’t live like us. Some of this is true. Some blacks don’t live like me, but then some white people don’t live like me, either. It’s called poverty. Many poor people live in broken-down communities, and in most states, certainly in the South, some black people are kept there by layers of historic segregation, racial and economic. I am not racist but I’m a nervous person. It is not ethnicity or race specific. It is a case-by-case feeling. If I am confronted by something that I don’t understand, it frightens me or makes me uncomfortable. Whether it be a person, a place, or a
thing, I get nervous. I don’t think that’s an inappropriate human reaction. Nervousness doesn’t become racism until you hear yourself saying things like “Oh, shit, there’s a lot of them.” Then you might need to check yourself and follow where that thought goes. You might be on a slippery slope.

I did find myself a little fascinated with black people in Tennessee. First I thought they have really great black people in Nashville. I saw them as closer to the source of what brought them here and the horror that defined them in this country in the beginning and now to varying degrees. Because of that in my mind they had more integrity. Then I was at a drugstore and I saw a black guy with a natural ’fro and in my recollection he had one of those fist picks in his back pocket. I thought, “That’s a classic black guy. These are classic black people here in Nashville.”

Then I thought, “Is that so different than ‘Oh, shit, there’s a lot of them’?”

I don’t spend much time in black neighborhoods.

Not unlike a lot of creative middle-class Jewish kids, many of my heroes were black. Richard Pryor changed my life. Before I saw the first
Live in Concert
film when I was in high school, at a midnight showing with my buddy Dave, I didn’t know it was possible to laugh that much. As I said before, when I first started playing guitar I became completely obsessed with learning Chuck Berry’s signature opening. It changed my life. I listen to Muddy Waters frequently and have a different experience every year or so with his music. It grows deeper for me.

I was a lost kid most of my childhood and adolescence, personality-wise. I envied black identity. I envied the honesty of black expression and community. I was always alone in my mind and I certainly grew disenchanted with the Jewish thing. Black people struck me as cool and real. I thought that black people and white people were different, but the difference filled me with awe and envy.

When I graduated from college I took a train across the country. I had decided in my head that I had to ride the rails and see America drunk from a series of sleeper cars on Amtrak. My first stop was Chicago. I didn’t really get out into the city but I did get my boots shined by a black guy in Union Station. He gave me a vague history of the station and I thought it was an amazing conversation. My next stop was Memphis. I spent two days there. I went to the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. I went to Graceland. I went to Beale Street, where I saw a real bluesman. Some guy called Slim sat on an old amp with a beat-up old guitar playing sloppy slide and singing incoherently. I thought it was genius. He said he knew from the way I was watching him that I was a guitar player and asked if I wanted to play while he went to the bathroom. I said hell yeah. There was a crowd gathered there. I sat down and tried to play but his guitar was tuned to some weird open tuning and I sounded awful. I sat there retuning his guitar so I could play it. He came back just as I’d finished playing half a song and he took the guitar back. He was pissed for a minute that I had screwed with his tuning but he retuned and kept playing. I stood there for more than an hour watching.

There was a small crowd gathered around. People were dancing a bit. Then this panicky-looking white man in a tie came barging through the crowd and walked up to Slim and said, “Slim, I need your amp.”

Slim looked confused as he stood up and the man unplugged his guitar and started to walk away with his amp. The racially mixed crowd looked confused and started to break up. I was concerned and asked Slim what was going on. He shrugged and indicated he didn’t know. So I said we should find out. So Slim and I followed the trotting man with the amp to the gate. We watched him walk into a back patio of a restaurant where there was some sort of conference going on. From outside the patio we watched
the man plug a mic into Slim’s amp and hand it to a guy standing at a podium. The man at the podium started talking and the guy who took the amp noticed me and Slim standing there. I was furious and demanded an explanation. The guy said, “You from around here?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why don’t you just mind your own business.” He looked at Slim. “I’ll take care of you.”

In retrospect I guess the guy owned the restaurant, booked it out for an event, and didn’t set up a PA. He freaked out and just took Slim’s amp because he knew Slim and he knew he could. Slim probably played around there every day and was a local fixture. The guy probably threw Slim a few bucks after I wandered away defeated. It was the attitude of the whole event that angered me. I wasn’t one of the Jews at the front of a civil rights march or trying to register black voters but, man, I wanted justice for Slim in the amp situation. The South might be desegregated but it may never be integrated. And by “the South” I mean America.

After a late show on Friday night in Nashville, I and a couple of other comics headed out to Prince’s. We drove into the parking lot of a small strip mall. Prince’s was the only storefront open. There was a three-hundred-pound man standing in front of the place wearing a tank top, smoking a cigar, and packing a sidearm. There were a few black people hanging out in front of the place. It felt like a wall of
you don’t belong here
. Maybe I was projecting that. Maybe that was a wall I was creating. I just felt like an intruder, a tourist, an outsider that they put up with because the place is famous. I was nervous.

When I walked in, it was clearly a pretty beat-up joint. There were about five booths and a monitor hanging from the ceiling that looked new. On the screen there was an advertisement for
advertising on that same screen. There was a pickup window in the back with handwritten menus pinned up around it. There were people just sitting around, not eating, and not looking like they were going to eat. They weren’t menacing, just hanging out. There was a guy on a pay phone. You hardly ever see that anymore. It was like a community clubhouse.

I felt like I was walking into another world, chaotic and dirty but clearly an institution. There were three ways to order the chicken: medium hot, hot, and extra hot. My friend Chad told me that they would not let white people order the extra hot, which of course made me want to order it more. I was told that there was no way I could handle it. I thought to myself, “What does that even mean? Do black people have special mouths and assholes?” It seemed exclusionary. Not that we didn’t deserve a little exclusion, but I was insulted. Still, I honored the myth and ordered the “hot.”

There were other white people there. There were some drunk college kids and one guy who looked like a regular and going there was the high point of his life. We waited twenty minutes before they called out my number. Chad picked up the two brown paper bags of chicken. Chad’s a good guy. He’s been through a rough divorce and his heart is heavy; he’s got a burden. That burden makes him funny. He was ecstatic to eat the chicken and to focus on the pain outside himself.

He set the bags down on the table. I pulled the wax-paper-wrapped breast out of the bag and could feel the heat on my hands. Not temperature heat but pepper heat. I was anxious about eating it. I was a little scared but I was sure I could handle it.

I took one bite of the chicken and my face started burning under my skin. My mouth was on fire. I felt like my tongue was swelling. I was sitting with five dudes who were having a conversation but the heat in my head was blurring their words. I couldn’t talk or listen. I had tunnel vision. All I was thinking was “I have
to get through this.” Is that a way to approach food?
I’ve got to get through this
.

Chad was sitting next to me. He took a bite and his face turned red and he started hiccupping. He jumped up to go get water. He said he eats this all the time but he couldn’t believe how hot it was. There was no relief from it. It was so hot it was beyond unnatural. It was unnecessary.

The guys started talking about someone getting arrested outside. I looked out the side of my eye. There was a black man being cuffed on the hood of a police car. There were guns drawn. I couldn’t look; I was just trying to get through this thing that was happening, this holocaust in my face. I could get no relief. I was completely consumed and present in this fire in my being. It was horrible but I could not stop eating it. My eyes were watering, my body was trying to reject what I was putting into it. I was in a different dimension. It was like an amazing drug. Everything in my body was elevated, numb, and burning. All of my other senses were shutting down. I couldn’t think about anything else and my whole world narrowed to the next painful bite of chicken that I seemed to have no choice but to put in my mouth. I was a gladiator of the palate. I was going to win.

When I got back to my hotel my mouth was starting to settle down. I should’ve found some ice cream but it was late and I just wanted to crash. I got into bed and made the mistake of touching my balls. This was the next level of the journey. A burning commenced that could not be washed off. I tried to frame it as a pleasurable sensation, a new thing that I needed to experience, but it didn’t work. It just gave me a flashback to a fairly traumatic event at summer camp involving cinnamon toothpicks, crying, and an embarrassing trip to the nurse.

I was lying there in bed with the burning in my groin slowly starting to fade when I was attacked from the inside by the most profound and painful stomach cramps I had ever had. I had to
curl up my body to try to ease the ache. I knew that the peppers were eating away at my stomach lining and that I would probably die of internal bleeding. I started gulping water, which worked for a minute or two. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be ironic, after all I have been through in my life, some of it in hotel rooms, to die from an overdose of hot chicken? Marc Maron found dead in hotel room. Autopsy reveals fried chicken is the culprit.”

I thought about calling a cab to take me to the emergency room. Then I thought it through. I imagined the scene: me, a white guy, shows up at an emergency room in the middle of the night clutching his stomach. The admission nurse looks up at me dismissively, a judgmental arch in her eyebrow, and says, “Prince’s?”