Putting up

For something near two years I have been plodding at a luscious, stop-and-smell-the-flowers pace through the copious autobiography of the excellent Ammon Hennacy. This morning I came across an especially sparkling section of memoir-izing; this excerpt I consider a crystallization of the best of Ammon. It deals with a period of his life in which he was living and working at a Catholic Worker house located in the Bowery, New York City. This would have been the mid 1950s:

We are a paper and a movement and a house of hospitality. We are a station where folks who have lost their way stop for a time until they can decide where they want to buy a ticket to--a monastery, the Ford Foundation, a union job, the Carmelites, marriage, or lower down on skid row...

In my early days at 223 Chrystie Street... I got up at 5:00 A.M. and helped pour coffee for the line and scrubbed the slime from the hall and kitchen floor. Some men would come back as much as three times in the line. Often one drunk would preach to the men in the line, telling them that they were all no-good bums.

What kind of people come to us? All sorts of tortured souls who have no other place to go. Peter [Maurin] said that we had to put up with one another the way God puts up with us, and Dorothy [Day] said we loved God as much as we loved the person we loved the least. By this measure I am a failure, and so are the most of us. The only thing is that we have different points of touchiness and tension and different breaking points as to how much of any certain kind of misery we can take. And I suppose we get a "tolerance" toward certain irritations and and added intolerance toward others.

One kind that is especially difficult for me to take is the scrupulous, over-pious person always wanting to put a scapular on me and hovering near the holy water. They are sure to burst out in vituperation a little later. We have had some of the quiet, withdrawn scrupulous types who have generally been good workers in detailed filing, etc. But once they are presented with an emergency their frustration and hatred of life have resulted in their violently attacking whoever is in their way. Then we have the loud-mouth braggart who when drunk would upset everything by his very noise. One such person who has been here for twenty years used to exasperate me by his noise when I was trying to phone, and I said to him, "How long do I have to put up with you?"

"How long do I have to put up with you, you damn intellectual?" he replied.

This is wonderful, for the Catholic Worker is a place for derelicts, and we intellectuals talk pacifism and anarchism and go to Mass. All some of these folks want is one more drink, and in between they have to listen to us.