habanero hopping

So I had myself a date. So what? I still had no idea how I was going to be able to go through with it. And that wasn’t my only problem. Besides How, there was still the question of Where. The last thing in the world I knew anything about was restaurants.

Enter Salty Hubbard, the sheriff of Sunville. Who is Salty Hubbard? No one really, just a dusty old-timer and the Hacienda Palms Apartments resident gadfly.

While Salty does live in the same apartment building as me, he doesn’t live on the same floor, and he’s by no means a friend of mine. Salty is like some fruit fly always buzzing around, just waiting to land on you. Like an older version of Perez Hilton. He’s one of those types who likes ambushing people, forcing them into conversation: like an old drunk in a bar. Only, instead of loitering around a saloon, he hangs out where he knows everyone has to go eventually: the mailboxes. Why they call him Salty, I’ll never know.

Like Cliff Claven before him, Salty is something right out of central casting. His real name is Arthur Hunnicutt. Unlike his hero, John Ratzenberger, however, he never was in pictures in all.

He’s also the kind of person who while not hip, is always hip to what’s going on. Salty is in the entertainment industry: he’s a ticket taker over at Grauman’s.

While Salty is usually the one doing the ambushing, believe it or not, this time I was the one seeking him out. I think he was a bit taken aback.

Why on Earth would I engage Salty in conversation? If I was going to ask out my neighbor from across the hall , I mean Fanny, I had to have some kind of idea where I would take her. TJ, it seems, was now missing in action. Sore loser.

“You mean the nurse?” said Salty.

Yes, I said. I think.

I asked him if he had any idea where I could take her. Big mistake.

“Do I ever,” he said. “It’s called Habanero Hopping, and it’s all the rage down on the Strip.”

Here we go.

According to Salty, it seems the “in thing” these days is eating hot chili peppers—just for fun. While most people are in it because they’re sadists, others do it for the simple reason that they’re just hangers-on. Most people in this world, believe it or not, are just hangers-on.

Habanero Hopping goes on in what are known as red-hot chili bars, and they’re everywhere and nowhere all along the Sunset Strip. They either have no address or no visible door at all; but Salty says he knows where they are, nonetheless.

Just like the speakeasies of the 1920s, some require you to know a password. Others are hidden in old barber shops, Laundromats. One is even behind an old hot dog stand.

“There’s this one,” said Salty, “where you walk in through the front door of an old motel. There are three doors and you have to know which one to choose.”

Like Let’s Make a Deal.

“If you choose the wrong one, the other two doors lock automatically. But if you know the right one, it opens up and lying there on a bed in a motel room is a lovely señorita. She asks you the password. If you know it, the bed moves to the side on hydraulics, revealing a stairwell going down to an underground bar.”

Seriously?

“Seriously,” said Salty. “My cousin has a friend whose brother is the maintenance man at the building where Johnny Depp lives and he overheard the doorman telling the elevator operator all about it.”

Hooray for Hollywood.

While the entrances to some clubs definitely have a more James Bond aspect to them, according to Salty, others are simply marked by the color of the door, usually red or green. Why all the subterfuge?

“Beats me,” said Salty. “There’s nothing illegal going on, maybe it’s just that it feels like there is. Maybe all those hot peppers are going straight to their heads.”

Of course, like with many so-called “cool clubs,” they all have obvious names, like Jalapeño’s, Serrano’s, and Cayenne’s. Cool doesn’t always mean creative. In fact, cool is quite often dumb. Salty says the coolest place is the one they call Scoville’s. That’s actually not a bad name, if you think about it.

So why red-hot chili bars? According to Salty, just like so many trends that begin in LA, it all got started as some kind of health kick.

“Truth is,” says Salty, “chili peppers are actually good for you. They lower your blood pressure, reduce cholesterol, even prevent heart attacks. Hell, the Mayas and Aztecs used them medicinally for thousands of years.”

It’s Aztec, you moron, not Aztecs. And Maya. Besides being annoying, Salty wasn’t very bright either.

“Did you know the Aztecs are the ones who invented popcorn?” said Salty.

I thought God invented popcorn.

“I wonder what sort of movies the Aztecs liked best,” he said.

What an idiot.

What Salty didn’t know was that eating hot chili peppers wasn’t all about health. Truth is, when people eat hot peppers they experience pain in their mouths and throats. The nervous system reacts to the pain by releasing morphine-like endorphins. You heard me right: morphine.

While Salty admits he’s never actually been inside a red-hot chili bar, he does say he knows people who have. Apparently, they decided not to tell him where they were. Need I say more?

“They say they’re harder to get into than a Duggars’ panties,” said Salty.

He went on to say that one night while cruising the Strip he saw Danny Trejo and Luiz Guzman go down this back alley. Perhaps that’s where they were going. Danny Trejo and Luiz Guzman are both well-known for their love of hot chili peppers. They are also, hands down, the two ugliest men in Hollywood.

“Habanero Hopping is a trend that’s bound to catch on,” says Salty.” “That is, unless big tobacco and the beer companies shut it down first.”

I had no idea whether Salty was just making all this shit up or not. I have to admit, when he told me about Hotspotting, I had my doubts.

According to Salty, Hotspotting is the act of touching a hot chili, then touching one’s self, either on the eyelids or the underarms, or any other sensitive part of the body, all for the desired effect of inflicting burning pain. Extreme hotspotting, well, you can only imagine where that entails touching.

I had my doubts. The Professor told me Salty once shoved a finger full of Tabasco sauce up his ass. Seems he saw on a comedy show that it makes your dick stay hard longer. Dumbass. And while all this stuff about habanero hopping was mildly amusing, it did me no good. I wasn’t asking Fanny to any hot-chili bar down on the Strip. WTF? And I wasn’t putting hot sauce up my ass.

Look, I told him. All I really need is the name of a place, somewhere I can take her to dinner.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Geez.

“Well,” he said, “there is that new French restaurant everyone’s talking about, Le Étron. How does that sound?”

It sounded great. Of course, everything sounds great in French. You could be ordering an old shoe with a dirty sock and it would sound great in French.

Truth is, he could have said KFC and that would have been fine with me. Right now, he could have said just about anything, and long as it was the last thing, and it would have been fine with me.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll never get that five minutes of my life back.

Luckily, someone else came along, and just like a good cayenne tick, Salty hopped from me to him. Now you know why I don’t pick up my mail very often. That, and the fact that germs can survive on mailed items for as long as forty-eight hours, sometimes longer.

Besides, I was getting a headache. I had no idea it was to be the first of many to come.