I once walked into a dermatologist’s office with a nasty, unnatural-colored inflammation around my fingertips. Right off, I thought it was leprosy.

The doctor looked at it in a cursory way, not too interested, and said, “You’re either a baker or a bartender, right?”

I thought, am I at the right address? Did I walk into some psychic scam artist’s den?

“Yeah, I’m a bartender, but I always wanted to be a baker. How did you know?”

“You generally only see these kinds of funguses in professions like these, where the hands are kept moist for hours at a time, either in ice or a sink, or, say, bread dough.”

I was treated successfully. It cleared up. But it made me wonder why I blurted out, “I always wanted to be a baker.” As I thought about it, I realized it was true. As a kid in a loud and brawling Italian household, it seemed that my Aunt Louise was consistently mellow. She baked, from morning until night, kneading and rolling and folding ravioli, filling cannolis and making fragrant loaves of golden bread the size of baseball bats that appeared from her ovens in an assembly-line parade of life affirmation.

Of course, had I confessed my secret ambition to this occupation to my brothers or cousins, I would have been pounded.

Everyone has had the experience of walking into a bakery, say, in the morning — but it doesn’t matter what time of day — and filling one’s nostrils with a smell comparable to few other things, like the sea, or a woman, an infant, rich earth after a rain, or certain fleshy blossoms.

This happened to me recently while seeking out the best bakeries in San Diego. It wasn’t until I entered Devany’s on Felspar in Pacific Beach that I was flooded with that Proustian, childhood sense of warmth, well-being, and, of course, hunger.

I bought some rolls, which were exquisite — not croissants or raspberry-macadamia, low-fat, high-fiber, gluten-free, non-lactose, Amaretto yuppie puffs. These were just rolls. Bread. Good for sandwiches or dinner. The same dough as their hamburger rolls. If my mother ever baked or cooked anything, I’d say they were just like Mom used to make.

I wanted to do it. Just try out. See if after a single shift — no pay, of course — if they would let me bake something. Maybe consider me as a possible employee; bakery material, as it were. Few things I could think of would be more noble: an ancient heritage, a tradition, an art.

I called Michelle, who does most of the cake decorations (complex and beautiful) and asked her if I might try my hand at the work of baking (not decorating) just to see if I had any aptitude. Michelle’s a cheerful woman and she did not hesitate. “Sure,” she said. “You probably want to work with the men in the back at night. Come on by Thursday morning about 1:30, and they’ll get you started. Ask for my dad, Mike.”

This was great, but 1:30 in the morning? That’s the middle of the goddamn night. Well, I had to ask myself, when do you suppose this stuff gets done?

Mike is a graceful, quiet man, 62 years old, who works at a steady rhythm pouring huge, 100-pound bags of flour into a Hobart mixer, which looks like some Victorian torture device. That is, it is a vat from which a descending screw or churning, evil-looking metal spiral moves slowly in a sure, steady spin that mixes the flour and water in large quantities. It seems fraught with a kind of menace I can’t quite put my finger on. Mike speaks in a low voice while he works.

“My dad started this bakery in 1938. He went off to the war and started it up again in 1946.”

“Here, in Pacific Beach?”

“Yes. We were on Ingraham, then Garnet Street. We moved to Pacific Plaza and then we moved here. I’ve been a baker my whole life. I started when I was ten.”

“What did you do in here at ten years old?”

“They had me washing pans and trays to start off, and then gradually I learned everything else.”

Mike performs every aspect of production and administration at Devany’s — everything except cake decoration, although he knows how to rotate and frost a wedding cake very well. He demonstrates, miming the actions on the rotating dish, and it reminds me of a careful and fastidious potter at a wheel creating art as well as craft.

To refer to the cake decoration of Mike’s daughter’s as art is not just promotional hyperbole. Her work was recently on display at the David Zapf Gallery on Kettner Boulevard. It’s the first time that gallery has included baked goods as visual art.

After demonstrating the simple cardboard, plastic, and aluminum-foil-covered decorating wheel, Mike is back at his energetic, deliberate pace, preparing dough for bread loaves, dinner rolls, hamburger buns. As he works, he introduces me to his “crew,” David Miller, Glenn (just Glenn), and Caleb Diaz. The three other nocturnal battersmiths work at a distance from each other, at their own stations: muffin preparation, for example; the rotating “reel oven”; and the Danish roller and cutting table. None of them is engaged in any conversation across the bakery, such as, “Hey! How about those Chargers?” or “How’s the wife and kids?” Each seems to be in a separate world rotating around the single star, Mike, for the combined purpose of production against the clock.

At 8:00 a.m., hungry, hurried business men and women, shop clerks, students, young mothers, surfers, elderly, longtime customers in the habit of making Devany’s a morning stop will all come through the front door with definite carbohydrate and/or fructose needs that must be met. At first, I think the chatterless work atmosphere is due to Mike’s — “the boss’s” — presence, but this is not the case. The quiet, the relative solitude and repetitive cycle of production are important to these men. The nature of their tasks and the lack of necessity for social interaction are two moving parts that drive them more than the wage involved.

One thing is conspicuous by its absence. Recipes. No one in the mini-pastry factory is consulting measurement lists or wall posters indicating quantities of sugar or butter to be used. Not a single cookbook is in evidence, and yet an impressive variety of products is being prepared here. From breadloaves to “diplomat pudding” (a classic bread pudding made with leftover Danish dough) to carrot cake and blueberry muffins, walnut loaves, bran muffins, and numerous types of cookies.

I ask Mike about this and he says, “Oh, we have recipes around here somewhere.” He guides me to a chest of drawers near the mixer and pulls one out. He rifles through some yellowed pages, some typewritten with inked notes, but most in cramped handwriting. These pages were written long ago and resemble some unearthed ancient manuscripts with a fine silting of dough like exotic desert sand or temple dust. “We never really look at these,” he says. “We’ve got the recipes up here.” He taps his head.

Another absent item occurs to me. No donuts. “Everybody’s on this health kick, I guess,” Mike says. “Besides, we can’t compete with Vons or Ralphs as far as donuts.”

“This health thing is going to blow over,” I assure him.

“Maybe,” he says. But he might also be thinking that Vons and Ralphs aren’t going anywhere.

Mike suggests I talk with Glenn, a tall man with a mustache unfolding what looks like a beige blanket — Danish dough that had been “put up” the night before. He’s worked at Devany’s “on and off for 20 years. Mike’s hired me several times.” Glenn is fortyish; he came to San Diego to “be in the sun,” and worked in a 7-Eleven before being hired by Mike Devany for the first time.

“Well,” I suggest to the laconic baker, “this must be a lot easier than dealing with wackos at 7-Eleven in the middle of the night. I mean, you probably don’t get many wackos in here at 2:00 in the morning, other than me.”

“That’s a fact,” he says. I give him my spiel about the ancient art he is a part of, the tradition, the history nearly as old as mankind and fire, the nobility of baking grain into sustenance. “It’s a job” is all he says, adding, “but, yeah, it may be the second-oldest profession.” As the night wears on, it is evident that it’s more than clock-punching and assembly-line monotony. Glenn enjoys his work at a level you don’t see at the DMV — or 7-Eleven. It is in his hands and the relaxed but focused posture and easy movements that you see it.

Glenn has flattened the sheet of Danish dough and folded it several times. These will become “snail,” “pretzel,” and “pocket” Danish. He sets the sweetened dough on a conveyor belt and then dusts the surface of the belt with dry flour. He unfolds the layers until it is the size of a small-area carpet. He turns on the conveyor belt, and the swatch of “set up” firm batter advances toward the automatic roller that flattens and thins it further. “You see something you’ve started that goes to completion,” he says. “You can see how much you’ve progressed over the course of a shift. It may not be like American television — 30-second satisfaction, you know — but you get a sense of accomplishment that you can see.”

“Are these really the best Danish in town?” I just want to hear what he says. A Danish, I figure, is a Danish. Maybe I’m testing his espirit de corps or the extent of his public-relations sensibilities. Glenn just shrugs. I don’t get the impression he cares that much what I think. He’s been the “Danish guy” at Devany’s for the better part of two decades and does not appear in a hurry to prove anything. “You compare product with price,” he says simply. “We’re not gonna be beat.”

The baker takes the newly flattened dough, now twice the size of that original area carpet, and lays it out on an adjoining table. He sprinkles water on its surface with his fingers. He then produces a bizarre device: a half-dozen circular pizza slicers on a collapsible frame. He extends the frame and plays the rotating blades over the dough, neatly carving squares to be filled with fistfuls of blueberry, cherry, cream cheese, etc. “This will make about 70 Danish,” he says. He strips away excess dough and tosses it into a bucket where it will be recycled into bear claws or “diplomat pudding.”

It looks easy enough, though I’m not paying close attention. I am studying the plastic canisters of spices to my right: anise, nutmeg, cinnamon, tartar. They are well-handled with floury fingerprints and peeling masking tape identifying the contents. “You wanna try it?” Glenn asks.

“What? Oh, sure.” I take the slicer gizmo and play it over the dough, trying to distribute pressure equally to all the blades. What I accomplish resembles some seriously botched incisions by a drunken surgeon on, say, a wide area of flesh on the back of a fat guy. “Sorry,” I say to Glenn.

“No problem,” he tells me and balls up the odd-shaped bits, then tosses them into the bucket for re-rolling.

“I don’t think I have what it takes,” I tell him.

“Hell, sure you do. Try it again.”

I do it again and this time I manage to get a lot of actual squares the right size. The remaining dough is an acceptable amount, though more than Glenn leaves behind. Now it’s time to fill the squares with fruit filling. Glenn demonstrates the technique.

He grabs a fistful of the gooey fruit in his left hand, squeezes his fingers gently over the individual square. With his right forefinger he makes a swiping motion over his left fist, launching a glob of the stuff onto the center of a single square. He shakes the excess from his left hand over a plastic barrel full of the gelatinous fruit, reaches back in for another handful, and repeats the motion over the next square and the next. This is done with quick, practiced efficiency; he has a tray of filled Danish squares in under a minute. He then folds the four corners of the individual pastries to meet in the middle. This gesture is also done with a factor of zero wasted motion. He invites me to go to work on the next tray.

I reach into the plastic vat of blueberry, and the sensation is both sensually pleasing and vaguely disgusting. Of course, I grab too much, squeeze my fist too hard, and launch enough blueberry filling over the tray to cover several potential Danish with erratic amounts of fruit and mostly in the wrong places; that is, in the corners that should remain fruit-free for adhesion purposes while baking.

“Sorry, man,” I say to Glenn.

“That’s all right. Here, let me show you again.”

He repeats the procedure effortlessly. “Just a medium fistful. Squeeze gently, then a quick knife kind of motion with your right finger.”

“Right, right.” I have a go at another tray while Glenn tries to salvage the mess I’ve made of the previous one. I do a little better, but in terms of fluidity of motion and cost-time effectiveness, I suck.

“How’s he doing with the Danishes, Glenn?” Mike is smiling in our direction as he continues filling the mixer with flour.

“I don’t know, Mike. I think he’s trying to make pies over here.”

I demonstrate an equal amount of skill and raw aptitude folding the edges of the dough, first wetting them with a little water as Glenn had shown me. I feel I have created some interesting shapes. Perhaps I have innovated previously unimagined configurations for the traditional breakfast treat; dimensions that might appeal to, say, the punk community or the blind.

I bow out of the Danish-production process so that Glenn can get some actual work done. It is Friday morning, “the heaviest day,” and 68 to 70 pans of Danish alone, each containing at least a dozen items, must be ready by opening time. Aside from that, Glenn must “set up” dough for the next day, brush it with “egg wash,” and arrange it in the freezer for a repetition of the entire process over the course of the weekend.

I talk to Mike a little more about when he first started at ten, washing pans. “That’s how everybody starts out.” I do not volunteer to wash pans. He tells me he gets his flour from a distributor in Lakeside; he gestures at a row of 20-gallon drums. I turn to Caleb, who is making bread loaves and placing them in the reel oven. He tells me he’s been working there for four years, and that’s the end of the interview with Caleb. The man is into baking bread, period.

It is clear that my audition as a baker has pretty much failed, and the best I can do is stay out of everyone’s way. I walk over to the south wall of the production area and study pictures of Vince Gill (Michelle’s heartthrob) and the yellowed and taped cartoons that hang next to them. One is of a woman standing across the counter from a baker in a shop. The woman is saying, “How much are these rolls?” The baker says, “Thirty cents each.” The woman asks, “Would they be good for making hamburgers?” Baker: “They would.” Woman: “Could I put ham and cheese on them?” Baker: “You could.” Woman: “Could I put orange marmalade on them?” Baker: “Madam, as long as you pull the shades you can do anything you want with them.”

I then studied the “Wedding Cake Information” and discovered one could order white, chocolate, marble, lemon, or spice cake with fillings of apricot, cherry, lemon, raspberry, strawberry, custard, rum custard, buttercream, chocolate buttercream, chocolate fudge, or mocha buttercream. Also German chocolate cake or carrot cake with cream cheese filling. You can get anything from a 6˝ cake to 18˝, serve as many as 275 people, and pay anywhere from $49.95 to $329.95. Whipped cream is extra; from $8.00 to $45.00. These prices strike me as pretty good, though I don’t really know. When I got married I was working in a restaurant in Manhattan where the small reception was held and the cake was on the boss. (It was, by the way, in the shape of a guitar, but with the dimensions of a ukulele and baked by our sweet, flaming chef — a guy named Jeff who once chased me with a cleaver after I used his omelet pan to cook a burger.)

The next member of the crew is David Miller, who has only worked a few months at Devany’s but has been a professional for 28 years, most recently in Monticello, New York, at Rosen’s Deli and Bakery. He admits that the smell in here still gets to him from time to time. I ask him about this; I am going nuts over here with the smell from the oven. I want to be the first person to buy a Danish, a bread roll, anything.

David tells me, “I came out here to retire and couldn’t stand it. I saw Mike’s ad in the paper and came in. I was impressed that people came from miles around for the pastries here. I came here myself for a couple of years before I started working here. It’s great to work in a place where everybody wants what you have. This place has a good reputation.”

David is making pecan rolls and bran muffins using an interesting technique. He’s coated the inside of the muffin trays with butter and then, with two fingers, swipes a blob of batter up against a single corner of each muffin cup. How these mutate in the oven into perfectly formed mushroom shapes...you got me.

“My father was a baker for 60 years,” says David. “My grandfather was a baker. This [profession] goes way back to the time someone first discovered what you could do with grain.” He is now brushing banana bread loaves with egg wash, a solution of eggs, salt, and water. “It gives it a nice shiny gleam.”

“Do you ever bake at home,” I ask him.

“Oh, yeah.”

“So, it’s not like you’re sick of it by the time you get out of here?”

“No. Every time you bake it’s something different. There are so many factors. The weather affects things, the kind of mood you’re in affects things, the kind of products you buy. Like, if you get some lousy flour or yeast, it’s going to be a different experience. No two days are the same.”

“I would imagine that once you get into it,” I’m speculating, “it’s relaxing, kind of a meditative thing.”

David nods. “They say bakers are a strange breed, and it’s very true. Most of ’em are quiet and reserved. You can’t get ’em mad, but when you do, you really gotta watch out.”

David had retired for three years and bought a sailboat. He ended up in San Diego with boat trouble. He talks about discovering Devany and their Danish. “I was moored in Coronado, and I was riding the ferry around and ended up at Devany’s one day. I love a good Danish pastry, and this is the only place I could find one. You’ve got to do it right, and it takes a lot of time. I was coming here for a few years before I started working here. Did I say that? I was so bored [in retirement] I couldn’t stand it.”

David may have been bored in retirement, but he still lives on his boat with his dog and says he’s happy now.

Glenn is still hard at work, this time on cinnamon-raisin rolls, so I don’t bug him. Mike, too, is still flailing away with flour sacks. It’s the wee hours; soon it will be dawn. I ask Mike Devany one more question. “What’s the biggest headache in the bakery business?” He pauses, trying to think of one.

“Well, trying to estimate how much to make for the next day so you’re not wasting a lot.” He says this as if it’s not exactly a migraine.

As I leave, it is still dark. Devany has weighted me down with diplomat pudding, two Danish, and four eclairs. I tell him I cannot accept them for free, but he does not accept payment. Therefore I will not be promotional about the quality of these products. I will only say they didn’t last long.