Working as a Key West food and cocktail waitress in the late 1970s, I learned several important life lessons. They weren’t about waitressing techniques, but they were unforgettable all the same.
Lesson 1: If your workplace is reputedly haunted and a supernatural disturbance occurs — like coins from the change jar being tossed around the room — stay calm and address the ghostly presence by name, whether you can actually see it or not.
Lesson 2: If a regular customer brings in a paper bag full of cash and absent-mindedly leaves it open on the bar, pretend it’s not there. Don’t ask about it, expect any of it as a tip or attempt to charm the customer out of a substantial percentage.
Lesson 3: If the alcoholic chef requests your help in making stuffed jalapeño poppers for happy hour, hide in the ladies’ room. Or develop a sudden emergency and leave immediately. Do not, under any circumstances, get near the chef’s jalapeños.
Unfortunately, I learned Lesson 3 the hard way. As well as getting near the jalapeños the chef was preparing, I sliced dozens of them in half so he could stuff them with cream cheese and crumbled bacon.
For some reason, the chef didn’t warn me to wear protective gloves during the task — and I was totally unaware of the power of the oil-like capsaicin that gives jalapeños their heat.
Not long afterward, while patrons gathered for their cocktails and poppers, my hands began to burn.
“Weird,” I thought as I ordered a post-shift drink, wondering if holding the ice-filled glass would ease the sensation.
It didn’t. Instead, the burning intensified until I was practically crying.
Eventually my pain-fogged brain connected it to slicing the jalapeños. I rushed back to the kitchen, figuring the chef would know how to stop it — but he had left for his own happy hour.
By then, my hands felt as if they were being forcibly held over an open flame. Desperate to end the torture, I begged for help from anyone who would listen: the bartender, an old friend’s mother, a nurse who answered the phone in the local ER.
It’s amazing how many people in Key West didn’t know how to stop a hot pepper burn — and how many remedies they proposed.
The bartender told me to immerse my hands in a bowl of ice cubes, but that didn’t help. Neither did holding them under cold running water or applying the cortisone cream recommended by the nurse.
Nor did a milk bath for my hands (which, at that point, seemed to be sizzling like bacon in a frying pan). That was suggested by my buddy’s mother, Eleanor — who we all believed knew everything — when I landed at her house, frantic and crying.
As I sobbed on Eleanor’s shoulder, my friends used her phone to call local bars, trying to track down the chef and find the cure for my pain.
Finally, someone managed to locate him and get him on the phone.
“My hands are on fire from your miserable jalapeños!” I yelped into the receiver. “How do I stop the burning?”
“Damn, girl, everybody knows that,” the chef slurred maddeningly. “Sugar water, of course!”
Thirty seconds later, Eleanor was stirring half a bag of sugar into a big bowl of water. I plunged my hands into the bowl, and the pain vanished as though someone had flipped a switch.
The relief was exquisite — so exquisite that, decades later, I still share the remedy with anybody who has an unfortunate encounter with hot peppers.
The alcoholic chef disappeared shortly after the jalapeño fiasco, but that was just a coincidence … right?
