The Fox hotel in South Brisbane has a lunchtime pizza special, I’ve had it half a dozen times, and made my way around to the ‘Johnny Cash’ pizza today.

I knew it would be spicy because of the chilli icons on the menu and the ‘QLD’s Hottest Pizza’ subtitle. I thought that was marketing hyperbole and didn’t worry too much about it. The bartender taking my order checked that I knew it was hot, performing her Responsible Service of Pizza responsibilities and fulfilling the venue’s duty of care. I got slightly concerned, but not enough to change my order.

Even if it is Queensland’s Hottest Pizza I assumed there was some linear progression in pizza spice and that it wouldn’t necessarily be much hotter than other hot pizzas. My thinking graphed:

When the server brought it out she commented that I must have a death wish. I got a little more worried.

I took the pizza to go, and ate three quarters for lunch. It was hot, but not brutally so. I could hold a conversation while I ate those slices and didn’t break out in a sweat. Three slices was my limit though, the heat was building up in my throat so I left the last piece for later.

A few hours afterwards I went back to the final slice for an afternoon snack. The cooled spices, chillies and “chef’s secret ghost pepper sauce” had matured into an ultra potent concoction, and I didn’t realize at the time but most of the topping from the third slice had slid off in the bag and doubled up on the final slice. It had become a well steeped, concentrated, hot pizza weapon.

Eating that slice was different, it didn’t just burn my mouth and throat, but the stomach itself. I left for home and walking to the bus I couldn’t quite stand up straight because it increased the burning, but it was a manageable discomfort.

When I got off the bus half an hour later things had devolved. It’s only about a five minute walk home from the bus stop but I couldn’t make it. At a vacant lot about 50 metres from home I could not go any further. All the blood had gone from my head to put out the fire in my stomach, and I was stumbling along with the posture of an osteoporotic hunchback and I had the strength of a drunk kitten. I lay down in the lot with my guts burning and went unconscious pretty much straight away.

“Actual footage”

After ten minutes I started to come to. I didn’t have the strength to open my eyes yet, but glimmers of consciousness were peeking through the mile-a-minute dreams I was having. My head was still spinning like a bouncy ball in a clothes dryer so I had a lot of trouble picking which of the constantly changing dreams had some connection to reality. After a dozen attempts to latch onto one set of pictures running through my head I woke up with a full body convulsion.

It took a few more minutes before I could move, but I was happy enough to know where I was again. I heard a couple pass by me on the footpath but I was lying with my back to them so we couldn’t see each other. I heard one ask the other ‘is he alright?’, but they didn’t stop. I didn’t have the energy to make sounds or move limbs so we parted ways.

I got up a couple of minutes later with the strength of a sober kitten, stumbling as though there were six pints, rather than four slices in me, and got home with my stomach still reeling from the right hand side of that pizza graph.

After a bath and a sleep I felt pretty good again.