I was 14 or so, at my buddy's house, and bored. Raiding the fridge we came across his father's stash of peppers, along with one sealed in a bag that his dad said was "the hottest pepper known, in existence." To this day I don't know if it was a Ghost Pepper or not, -only that we decided that coupled with our boredom, it represented the perfect challenge.

His dad was the farthest thing from full of shit, so it was with some trepidation that we worked ourselves up to it, flipping a coin to see who would bite directly into it first. He lost, and after psyching himself up for a moment, he bit into the very tip of the pepper.

He began sweating almost immediately, and was grimacing hard while insisting it wasn't as bad as he thought through clenched teeth. I could tell he was bullshitting, but he had bitten into it and now it was my turn. What is sort of common chile knowledge to folks who love spicy food and are older than 14 years old, is that the heat only builds and increases in intensity as time goes by in the short term after consuming a hot pepper. That, and the fact that the majority of the heat is found in the seeds themselves...not the tip of the pepper where my friend bit.

So seeing him able to cope I pick up the pepper and bite half of it off. And proceed to LOSE MY FUCKING SHIT. I was howling with pain and literally slapping myself in the face. I was sputtering a deformed mumble of "MALK! MALK!" while my friend blocked the fridge to enforce our pact before biting, which was "No beverages allowed" because um...I guess we were trying to prove our manliness. Seeing me obviously overreacting as I began beating him to get at the fridge, he decided to show me what a weakling I was being by chewing up the other half of the pepper. I remember watching in horror as he literally made a show of chewing into it as he looked at me smiling. Oh god was he fucked.

In his refrigerator, there was a half gallon of milk opened, with another full gallon unopened. There was, for the roughly 3 minutes it took to consume that gallon and a half of milk, a period of relative nirvana that we attained. It was followed by hours of Hell on Earth once the milk ran out. My mouth has never known such pain.