The Devil's Jism

“He who eats pizza for breakfast deserves the day he gets.” – Ancient Yoruba proverb (paraphrased)

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I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it before, but I’m a… Well, a connoisseur of sorts.

I know hot sauces.

So if you’ve heard someone refer to me as “Old Fire Tongue,” that is probably what they were talking about. Not whatever you were thinking.

Because ever since I was a kid, you see, I’ve drowned practically every scrap of food that has entered my mouth in some sort of hot sauce, soaked it in chili paste, boiled it in liquid fire with a habanera chaser. People talk about Tabasco, but Tabasco is just a gateway sauce, at most. Tabasco is to the hot sauce world what Spam is to the steak and lobster dinner world. My hot sauces grab Tabasco out on the playground, break its glasses, steal its lunch money, and then skin it alive and leave it hanging from the school jungle gym as a warning to others.

There are ordinary corner quick shops where you can buy Dave’s Gourmet Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce on the shelf. You can go online right now and order Dead Heat Hot Sauce – which will arrive in its very own pine box coffin with a genuine certificate of death inside. But for the real stuff – for the Platonic form of Hot-Sauce-ness – the stuff that makes all the other hot sauces look like pale shadows upon the wall of the cave – you’re going to have to dig a little deeper, Bubba.

Tracking down a True Hot Sauce… That’s an Art. One of the Ancient Arts, actually, and one for which you must seek out a Master if you want to get anywhere. There exists a network of Initiates like me, scattered around the globe, keeping an eye out at all times for new leads on old heat.

So I hope you can at least begin to appreciate the thrill I felt last week when I opened up my mail to find – hidden between the electric bill and my new issue of “Guns & Ammo” – a bottle of The Devil’s Jism. Yessir: The fabled stuff itself!

Now, The Devil’s Jism comes in a crimson bottle in the shape of an enormous cock**, except the glans has horns. They might be fangs, now that I think about it. It’s a bit unclear. But the shaft veins are emphasized, and it arrives with an eye dropper for easy application of the… of the… sauce.

So I get the bottle, and next day, I arrive at work before the sun comes up. Well, the sun was overdue to come up, actually. Sunrise was late. Legend has it that Good Helios is afraid of The Devil’s Jism and will stay below the horizon until the hornéd hot sauce bottle is safely indoors.

But when I walk into my office, it’s early. Takeout pizza box in one hand, giant crimson cock in the other, and it’s early. Yet all my employees are already there. Which is as rare as it is strange.

“Hold my calls!” I proclaim as I march my way back to my office, clearing the surface of my desk with the pizza box.

The type of pizza isn’t really pertinent to my story. When you’ve got a bottle of The Devil’s Jism in hand, buddy, whatever food you choose to put it on becomes purely incidental.

But the stuff from my desk falls into a heap on the floor, and while it is still in the act of falling, something catches my attention. It peeks its way into my peripheral vision for just a mere flicker of a nanosecond. An envelope with my name handwritten on it, and it taps at my attention for just precisely enough time to distract me from my incendiary culinary mission.

I catch the envelope in mid-air, use the horn or maybe fang of The Devil’s Jism bottle to tear the thing open, and inside, there’s a note that says this:

“Adri, I am hereby giving you one-week notice. My last day of work will be next Monday. Sincerely, Office Manager.”

This sucks. That office manager has allowed herself to be subjected to all manner of ugly and degrading humiliations that most human beings would never agree to, and... And that’s when the other envelopes catch my attention.

Twelve of them, to be exact. Twelve. Just like the number of Apostles that Jesus had… Or – perhaps more relevantly – the number of employees I have.

Or had. Or… well, just wait for it.

It is while I am reading the second resignation letter that I begin absentmindedly applying hot sauce to my pizza. Or, I’m not applying the hot sauce, really, so much as I’m coating the whole surface of the thing with The Devil’s Jism.

The realization that all of my employees have resigned hits me at the exact same moment as the facial spasms. My lips begin involuntarily flapping. Mucous squirts out of my nose and eyes. I’m pretty sure my ears bleed a little. The skin of my face feels as though it is ripping loose from my head.

It is while I am gasping for air that I notice a tiny label on the Jism eyedropper: “WARNING: DON’T EVEN THINK OF USING MORE THAN ½  A DROP OF THE DEVIL’S JISM AT A TIME!”

My former employees, huddled around my door, watch me stagger out of my office and into the restroom. One of them whispers, “Boy, she’s taking this resignation thing WAY harder than I expected!”

10 minutes soaking my head in the sink. The improvement in my condition is minimal.

I finally exit the restroom and reenter the lobby with a wad of wet paper towels covering most of my face. With my one remaining good eye, I can see that all my employees are gone except for Harry. Harry is my odd jobs man.

I say this: “Does this mean you’re not quitting, Harry?”

Harry says: “Oh. No, I quit. But I’ve been living in the back room for 2 months, and I don’t really have anywhere else to go right now.”

It’s at about this point that the rumbling, thundering, crashing sounds begin emanating from my stomach region.

So the bad news is 1) I have no more employees, and 2) my old employees mistakenly believe I was sad to see them go.

The good news is that I’ve got a lead on two more bottles of The Devil’s Jism.

So you see, this story has a happy ending after all.

 

**No, it was NOT a squeeze bottle. The fine folks over at The Devil’s Jism are consummate professionals, running a classy operation, and they’d NEVER sink to that sort of cheap stunt. You disappoint me by even wondering about such a thing.