Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

Devil’s Work

179 KRISTEN KECKLER Sometimes a new job promises the same thrill of possibility as falling in love again, with someone even better, sweeter, and more suitable than your ex. Pammy Gomez’s rented kitchen was on the ground floor of an old mansion. A massage school occupied the top floors. A half-wall split the kitchen into two rooms—one for cooking, the other for assembly and packaging. As I manned the industrial deli slicer, I thought about how much I liked my new white apron. The twelve-burner stove. The two shiny silver fridges. Long aluminum prep tables. Shelves of exotic spices. A sink the size of a bathtub! I liked Pammy, too. She was built like a boxer, compact and muscular. I liked the way she seemed to bounce, to roll between heel and toe. She wore her short black hair under a ball cap—white with a black Nike swoosh—and a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her skin was naturally brown, like mine after tanning all summer. She dreamed of a world taken over by vegans, envisioned herself ruler of an extensive seitan empire. Her favorite mantra was: “Lift with your legs, not your back.” On my first day managing Pammy’s seitan business, I found myself riding shotgun in her van, my astrological chart in the console between us. We were on our way to a food fair to hand out samples of her vegetarian deli slices to college kids. Seitan (pronounced “say-tan”) is wheat meat. We passed half-frozen, glassy lakes and fields of brown tassels—remnants of corn—poking through snow. A rainbow gay pride sticker stretched the length of the van’s bumper, the only hint of color in the landscape. “I would have guessed Cancer moon ’cause you have that little worry crescent between your eyes. All Cancer moons have it,” she had said, looking at the road. My finger instinctively felt for my crease, marveling at Pammy’s almost eerie psychic ability. I wondered if she had found something in my chart that had made her hire me. Devil’s Work






















CH040.qxd 7/15/09 8:07 AM Page 179 180 KRISTEN KECKLER I had just quit the psychiatric home where I had worked for three years, giving up health insurance and all my benefits. I realized that despite my best efforts, my clients, many of them diagnosed as schizophrenic, would never get better. In care-giving professions, when the stress starts to eat the caretaker alive, we called it “burnout.” But burnout is just a nicer way to say you no longer give a shit. It’s not like I wasn’t interested in psychology, or the mind’s bent corners . I just took more pride in being known for my eggplant parmagiana than for my counseling. Eager for the more predictable world of food, I found Pammy through a mutual friend. I wanted to work with my hands instead of my heart. I wanted to create, to eventually attend the Natural Cookery School in New York City. Maybe someday even open a restaurant. Host my own cooking show on the Food Network (which I had watched obsessively at the group home.) My first morning in the kitchen, I followed Pammy around as she explained each process thoroughly. I asked a lot of questions. What’s “liquid smoke” made of? How do they separate gluten from the wheat? Bosses, like teachers, liked questions. Soon after, we started each day by filling a dozen plastic tubs with the wheat gluten, spices, and wet ingredients, each for a different flavor (Szechwan, Original, Mexican, BBQ, Cuban, Bac-Un, Pepperoni). Wearing plastic gloves, we mixed with our hands, kneading the mélange like bread dough, the spices stinging our eyes and nostrils. She told me stories about growing up in Miami, of running with the fast crowd, of drinking and drugging her life away. I imagined a lesbian West Side story, the butches defending their lipsticked femmes, wielding knives, dancing in lines. She played astrology tapes, complex readings by her friend Shara in Florida. A sextile between Mercury and Venus is a rare astrological pearl. When the planets are this close to the sun, they move closer together as well. So look forward to a new harmony between your mind and body, your ideas and actions, she told us. We listened reverently, kneading the ingredients, then weighed gobs of the sticky mixture. We cupped our hands around...