If you’ve spent any time chopping up chiles you’re probably more than familiar with the nifty effect thre residue has when transferred from your fingers to other body parts. Like your eyes or – if you drink lots of coffee while cooking and have to pee after slicing hot peppers – your testicles. It tingles. It irritates. It stings, then burns and sends you screeching across the kitchen trying to turn the blowtorch off your eyes and get the molten lead off your nuts…

   That magic comes form the nasty little chemical capsaicin – C₁₈H₂₇NO_3,  for those who like to talk in letters and subscripts – contained largely in the seed and pith of chiles. The fun heat it brings to our mouths in food becomes a horror when applied to other mucous membranes or sensitive swaths of skin.  What is one to do? Well, you could keep your fingers out of your eyes and off your privates, dummy. You could wear gloves when preparing chiles but that’s something that this dummy here has never done. So you just need to get your paws clean before they wander off to different regions of your anatomy.

   Soap is the obvious choice but it turns out to be a weak one. The pernicious capsaicin lingers after several scrubs with ordinary hand soap. Liquid dish soap does a better job but you really need something acidic to get the crap off your fingers. Rubbing your hands with a lemon or lime slice seems to be the best trick I’ve learned. And vinegar comes in handy when you’re out of citrus. Windex works too and leaves you crystal clear, streak-free thumbs.

   There you have it, problem solved. Unless, of course, that chile essence winds up somewhere it really shouldn’t go…

   Since he could stand up on a chair, my boy Jack has always loved cooking with me. By two he even knew the difference among peppers – loved to snack on red bells, was always willing to take a nibble off the end of a jalapeño and that the tiny little Thai chiles Dad likes are better just for looking at.  He was also decent at paying attention to warnings, as much as any tyke can be. He wouldn’t touch pans on the stove – as long as I was there to remind him. But the only way a toddler finally gets the distinction between the heat he can feel in the air and an actually burn is to try picking a blueberry pancake right off the skillet. You gotta stay close to the action when your kids are in the kitchen.

   So one swell spring day at our apartment in Somerville I was making a tomatillo salsa while Jacko trotted bare-assed around the joint (He was 2½ and potty training). He pushed a chair over to the counter to watch the process.

“Are those chiles, Daddy?”

“Yep, they are Bub – they’re Serrano chiles”

“Ohhh. Schwanno chiles are hot.”

   See? He got it. I was done chopping them so I went to the fridge for a lemon – had to get the residue off just in case there was some bum wiping to be done soon. In the meantime Jack started playing with the pile of chiles.

“Whoa, Jacko! Be careful now, pal. Do not touch your eyes or your nuts – the chile juice will burn them. I’ll clean your hands in just a sec…”

   He stood there pondering the possible painful effects his fingers had acquired as I rubbed a lemon chunk over my hands. Perched on a chair with nothing but his favorite shark t-shirt I chuckled inside, Boy wouldn’t it suck if he put his fingers in his ass…

   Which, naturally, he did.  Whether he’d taken some extrasensory cue from me or just had a sudden insistent itch I was frozen in terror over what he did nimbly and quickly. His left hand reached back to pull one cheek aside while he dug his right index finger into his poop-chute.  Oh my fucking lord, we’re in goddamned trouble now. I was in a deep panic over what to do before it hit him. It took a few seconds for his expression to go from puzzled to deeply anguished. The screaming started and I had new, challenging mission in my life as a parent. I had to quell the flames in his ass and I had to do it in a hurry.

   I rinsed my hands fast and looked at the lemon. No freaking way. If things got bad I’d have a tough enough time explaining chiles in my kid’s bum to an EMT, let alone a big squeeze of citric acid in there. What the hell was I going to do? Take him outside and put a hose in his rectum? His face had gone purple in agony while I raced into his room looking for some sort of balm. Diaper rash cream? Probably do very little. Vaseline? Probably make it worse. There didn’t seem to be anything with hydrocortisone in it – not that I knew that a steroid cream would help. Boy was I ever fucked and my son was feeling the same way a hundred times over. And then I spotted something…Baby Anbesol. Teething ointment! I could numb his little pucker until the residue  was taken care of by his body.

 Lemons for your hands. Windex for your balls. Water, or saline solution, for the eyes. And always keep a tube of Anbesol around just in case a Habanero winds up in somebody’s ass. Because you never know….