 "Photo: File, the battalion")
Usually, the word "free" is a very positive thing: free food, free love, free pEr.$crip-tIOn drugs. So I was very shocked to find the "free" T-shirt I had won actually came at a very high price. So shocked, in fact that I threw up from sheer indignation, although perhaps that was because I had spent the previous four hours poisoning myself.
You see, a local restaurant/laundromat offers a supposedly rewarding challenge known as "release form wings." So called because they are so spicy that the restaurant makes you sign a waiver before purchasing them. Those few brave souls who manage to eat all eight wings receive a free T-shirt, as well as a name plaque on the wall commemorating their accomplishment. At the time I was there, this challenge had only been completed by about 80 people.
Now consuming food is one of my greatest talents, so when I heard that you could win free stuff for eating it seemed perfect. I suppose I should have thought twice when the waitress brought out the complimentary barf buckets. Apparently this kind of catastrophic failure is rather common and that probably explains why we got dirty looks from the staff as soon as we ordered. "I'll go get the forms," said our waitress in tones usually reserved for phrases like "I spat in your order while you weren't looking." I swear I've never seen someone so angry to have customers. I guess they just knew what was coming.
There is a lot of fanfare that goes into ordering these wings. As soon as you order, you suddenly become the center of attention for the entire restaurant. "He's getting the release form wings!" people whisper back and forth, staring, in the same sort of way you might stare and whisper "He's got leprosy" to the people sitting next to you.
I don't think I've ever eaten any food that had more rules attached to it than these wings. The release form itself was the pretty standard "I won't sue anybody even if this product causes my brains to explode out of my eye sockets like cheap party poppers" type waiver. Once you're done signing away your soul and you firstborn child, you've still got to sit through the contest rules. First off, you aren't allowed any other food except a pitcher of water and a loaf of white sandwich bread (which come with unlimited refills.) If you throw up, you are disqualified, have to clean up the mess and judging from the looks on their faces, the staff will key your car. Furthermore, for some incomprehensible reason, you aren't allowed to take the meat off the bone with anything other than your teeth.
It takes a good half-hour before the paperwork is settled and the wings are prepared. Their actual arrival was rather anticlimactic in my case, because I couldn't actually see the wings. Everything was covered in a cup of thick, pasty sauce of a color that could be politely described as "bloody diarrheic red," (which in retrospect was an omen of things to come.)
But the real important thing is taste. Saying these wings were the spiciest food I have ever eaten doesn't do it justice. But then you would expect that. What you cannot expect is the flavor. I've eaten Cajun food so spicy it made me cry, but it still tasted good. I have no words to describe how utterly foul these wings were. Or rather, I have no printable words. If you were to remove the spiciness entirely, these wings would still be the most painful things I have ever put in my mouth (and that's including the time in seventh grade when I was dared to eat a live hermit crab.) From a flavor point of view, they might as well serve a plate of hot wings smeared with human excrement (wasn't that on an episode of fear factor?)
Fortunately, the sheer heat destroys your taste buds after the first few wings. Unfortunately, it took me an hour just to finish one. By hour two, I was less than halfway through and started to get adrenaline shakes so bad I could hardly get the food to my mouth. People would walk in for lunch and stare apprehensively as I convulsed in my seat, trying not to stab myself in the eye with a chicken bone. "Yeah," someone would explain "The epileptic guy is trying the release form wings."
Around this time people tried to give me advice. "Yeah, my ex-girlfriend tried those," said one patron, standing awkwardly at the end of my table, "she finished in 14 seconds." My mouth was incapable of articulate speech, so all I could do is cram in more hot wings and hope that I'd take him out with me when I lost my lunch.
It was hour four by the time I gummed down the eighth wing. The other people at my table had to call over the server because the only noise I could make was "ehhh..." So the end of the story is I traded seven feet of my intestines for a free T-shirt. Of course, the shirt did do a nice job of covering up the smoldering crater that was once my abdomen. The back of the shirt has a picture of a court jester and the words "I tossed the devil's salad." I have no idea that's supposed to mean. What I do know is that I tossed the devil's cookies as soon as I stepped into the parking lot and only narrowly avoided taking out an innocent pedestrian.
The next few days could best be described as "volcanic." Supposedly my name is up on the wall there, but I haven't left my ice-bath to find out.
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