Ronnie Lottz attributes his success to the firmly held belief that “everyone’s got one friend, uncle, or relative who likes hot shit.” The 31-year-old Lottz operates Cigars and Stripes in Berwyn, a funky little wood-paneled storefront that serves as a combination clubhouse, cigar shop, and hot sauce dealership, with a small motorcycle museum thrown in for good measure. Bottles of hot sauce and giardiniera line the walls, labeled with dark monikers like Sudden Death. But Lottz keeps his real prizes in “the Saucerator,” a refrigerator painted with huge flames, and he challenges customers to prove their machismo by sampling his wares. “I’ve got hot sauce that’ll make Mexicans cry!” he says, unleashing a full-throated laugh. “I got one called After Death. The sales pitch is, ‘If Satan’s dog took a shit on your lawn and had razor blades in it, it would taste like this.’ But people line up to try it and see for themselves.”
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The store’s eclectic character grows naturally out of Lottz’s lifestyle. He’s managed a Czechoslovakian wrestling duo, designed posters for local metal bands, and produced two feature-length movies with filmmaker Vito Brancato–all the while etching skulls, pot leaves, and other designs into the chrome bumpers of bikes and roadsters from all over the area. “Life is too short not to do anything you’re wanting to do,” he says. “Life’s worst enemy is the guy who gets up and does the same thing every day and eats lunch out of a bag. I say do it all. You might like doing something better, and why do something you don’t like?”
Soon Lottz was crisscrossing the south with a bizarre assortment of wrestling teams. The most prominent was a pair of Czechoslovakian brothers called the Dream Warriors, who abandoned their tour after their southern opponents started inflicting real damage on them. Next, Lottz says, he traveled the Japanese circuit with a group called the Untouchables; they quit after one member was smacked in the head with a chair and another fell in love and decided to take his sweetheart to the U.S. But while Lottz’s teams were getting killed in the ring, he was making a killing outside in the lobby.
