Dzole, Our Champion
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. I was having seizures then. I’d get real cold and drop and then I wouldn’t remember much of it. Sometimes I’d bite my tongue. I had my first one on an active unit just after Sandy left. U4. The inmates huddled around me, and after twenty seconds of the radio on my hip being tilted past ninety degrees, the body alarm was triggered. “Can’t have you on the units,” my captain said. “Can’t get rid of you, either.” So after sixteen years working the tiers, I was reassigned to the kitchen, where the inmate workers made bologna sandwiches and BBQ rib patties.
It was dinnertime, and plating was about to begin on the waterlogged yellow food trays. I could already taste the leftovers I’d put aside. Only a few hours were between a silent basement and me. I stood off in the corner in my food-stained white button down and black-and-white checkered pants. Barker House’s first cook, long retired, chose the getup. A Vietnam vet who said he wore something similar in a breakfast hall in Chanoi.
If I were still upstairs, I’d have the inmates locking down for chow. Late in the afternoon, as another day off their sentence closed, the inmates could get excited. I always gave them a good fifteen minutes in their cells before dinner. It settled their nerves. But down here, I supervised the making of chow. My security duties were stripped. I reported to the housekeeping supervisor. He wore an ID clipped to his breast instead of a badge. If two inmates had a beef and decided to settle it in my kitchen, I couldn’t even break it up. Men—convicted of drunken driving, parole violation, loitering—wore steel mesh gloves and chopped carrots with sharp chef’s knives, the knife handles connected to a ten-inch chain looped to a ring in the countertop.
Meatloaf was on the menu, seasoned by industrial-sized seasoning packets—sacks, for lack of a better word. The salty loaf did not have the mixture of seasonings I would have used at home—dried mustard was the headliner. I used to cook dinner at home even before Sandy’s big break, as she called it. She was profiled in New Hampshire Magazine as a Remarkable Woman of 2007. The top home-seller at her agency. A recent Bay State Marathon finisher. But it wasn’t the profile that changed her. It was the attention her photo received. Sandy in a black dress, her hands on her hips, standing victorious in front of a SOLD sign. Her trainer said she looked powerful. Facebook comments from strange men: . Sandy began weighing her food on a scale before she ate it. If she wasn’t at the gym or working, she was running. I didn’t mind cooking. When Joey was really small and Sandy was a stay-at-home mom, her dinners were pre-made or pre-packaged. Hamburger Helper, or frozen fried chicken and canned green beans. But I missed
