Serving the smelly poor: a luxury one should embrace - Cover Story

I recently read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and what struck the deepest chord wasn't Ivan's fierce hatred of evil, or Alyosha's unflagging goodness, or the cruel death of little Ilusha. No, the passage where I really thought, "That's me" was spoken by an acquaintance of Father Zossima's, a doctor, "a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever""

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.

I experienced this precise reaction myself when a fellow parishioner recently interrupted my pre-Mass prayer for the prisoners on death row by asking me to move so he could reach his seat. The nerve, bothering me, when there were other, empty pews! The crass insensibility, the swinish lack of consideration, the vulgar, ill-bred boor! I could almost have killed him.

That is why, one morning a week, I work on Skid Row, at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker soup kitchen: not because I love mankind so much, but because I don't. Everything about it goes against my grain: it's not the work itself I mind, but teamwork, taking directions, small talk with strangers, the whole unfamiliar situation in which I'm expected, on some level, to "perform."

That's how I felt at first anyway. The fact is I didn't quite know what to expect and that always makes me nervous. I'd read Dorothy Day's Loaves and Fishes, but I had no idea what Catholic Workers were like in the flesh. Would they reject me since I still paid income tax, I wondered, or despise me because I owned a car? I mentally spruced up my spiritual curriculum vitae - which consists of about two lines - just in case somebody asked, and imagined long, desultory conversations over the stove. What happened instead was I got a big, open-armed welcome and in about two minutes they had me buttering bread and chopping celery so fast my head swam.

Getting personal information out of them at all was like pulling hen's teeth. I once asked Jeff, a twenty-five year veteran of the Worker, how he was doing. "Everything's going great!" he said, "can't complain, same old-same old." The next day I read in their newspaper, the Catholic Agitator, that he'd just finished a three-week fast in federal prison after having been arrested for cutting the fence at a Nevada nuclear testing site.

The kitchen itself is light and airy and Catherine, Jeff's wife and another twenty-five year member, has transformed the courtyard into a gracious garden bower that would put the Junior League to shame. There are picnic tables shaded by flowering trees, a gently splashing fountain, a huge bird-cage of warbling parakeets. I soon figured out that Catholic Workers were way too busy serving the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and caring for the dying in hospice - all in re turn for a weekly allowance of ten dollars apiece - to care whether I'd pulled up in a Rolls-Royce or walked.

My main job is serving salad, one long-handled serving spoonful per plate, and it's amazing how many variations on this simple theme our guests, as we call them, manage to come up with. One likes it dry from the top of the tub, one runny from the bottom, they want it with extra tomatoes, no cabbage, on a separate Plate, mixed with the beans, an extra serving, an extra-small serving. "Special orders don't upset US!" I exclaim, and Bob, a fellow volunteer who dishes up beans, murmurs, "Funny, I always heard beggar couldn't be choosers...."

Once the line starts rolling at 9:30 in the morning, a raucous pageant begins, the contestants as different as snowflakes. It's a jubilee, for instance, of hair: masses of hair clotted like the roots of potbound plants, snake-thick dreadlocks, flaming hennaed aureolas, hair the texture of fiberglass insulation, hair with swirls and dips and glides enough to ski on, an Afro rioting two feet off its owners head with a little white hankie draped on top, like a napkin on a bowl of fruit. There are fingernails as ridged and irregular as oyster shells, nails as thick and horny as the hooves on a horse; teeth like cracked corn, curved like tusks, long as piano keys, and lower gums with only two teeth left, one at each end, like goal posts. A tattoo in spidery cursive script trailing across the side of a man's neck, reads, "I'm your puppet," and other of naked women and Madonnas, are so inexpertly done they look like they were outlined with icepicks.

I worked in a law office for four years without ever making direct eye contact with a co-worker. Here at the kitchen, they let me look at them and, across the pot of beans, the bin of salad, the basket of bread, I let them look at me. In the course of a morning, I look into hundreds of pairs of eyes, say they, what's up, garbanzos today! There you go, careful now, it's hot! Good morning! What's so fucking good about it? some of them ask.

A sort of hypnotic rhythm sets in as the cardboard plates, white as hosts, are passed hand over hand, one by one, minute after minute for two-and-a-half hours as the line keeps coming on strong. By 11 o'clock, our backs ache from standing in one spot on the concrete floor. "Cripples for Christ!" I joke, with a nudge to Bob. "He keeps me runnin'!" Bob replies. Me, too, I think, though I'm not quite sure where.

For a while, I reveled in the starry-eyed realization that we weren't serving the poor, they were serving us! And while that is true on some level - in the sense that we, the servers, "get" something out of our work - the fact is that nothing could be clearer than that we are serving them and that most of them couldn't serve us even if they wanted to, and it's a pretty good bet they don't. We have relatively pleasing personalities, clothes that fit, sound teeth. Our fingernails are clipped, our hair is cut, our zippers zip. We have things to put on a resume and we have all our limbs. We wear both shoes.

What perhaps sheds more light than trying to figure out who is serving whom, is to recognize that we are all, in our own ways, looking for help. It may be simplistic to say that they are asking for food for their bodies, while we are seeking food for our souls. But to gloss over the distinction is to deny the difference between poverty - the grinding, crushing kind of poverty, imposed by our collective greed, that condemns people to expend every ounce of physical and psyhic energy on locating the basic necessities of life - and the "voluntary" poverty espoused by Dorothy Day, ironically a kind of luxury open only to those for whom those basic necessities, by the grace of God, have already been fulfilled.

One woman's shirt is so lowcut her nipples show; the next is swaddled in blankets, her feet wrapped in filthy strips of unraveling cloth, like the shoes a mummy would wear. A T-shirt reads "At my age, sex is the last thing on my mind. It's the first thing, too." One man in particular looked "normal," until I saw him featured in a newspaper article about welfare cuts and discovered he is schizophrenic and has fourteen dollars a month in spending money, most of which goes for soap to assuage a disorder that compels him to obsessively launder his clothes.

Some of them never shut up and some of them won't talk at all. Some of them sing, some of them read, some say, "Lord be saved!" The part I like best is that some of them stink, and not the polite sweat you or I might work up after a brisk jog, either: these are the kind of unequivocal smells that conjure up caves and swamps and outdoor latrines. Some of them have breath like the ripe, moldy air from unplugged refrigerators, across the counter drift odors, penetrating as menthol, that should be emanating from the undersides of wide, scrofulous wings instead of the shirts of human beings.

But while it looks to be clear that our side is a blessing, and theirs is a curse, sometimes you have to wonder. I think of the snowy-white shirts my boss used to wear - his tailor came to the office every so often to fit him - with a raised white monogram over the breast pocket, thick, starched cuffs and heavy gold cuff links of crossed golf clubs, his small plump hands, smooth as a girl's, the nails protected with a gloss of clear polish. At least I think those were his hands: the be spoke shirts and the manicured hands, the silk ties and Italian loafers and the Infiniti - or was it a Lexus? - blend together with all the other hundred-dollar haircuts and Bally briefcases and Mont Blanc pens of all the other indistinguishable lawyers, the indistinguishable eyes with all the warmth of a combination lock, the sweat bred out of their pores until they smelled as bland and inoffensive as a plastic credit card.

That job constituted a kind of death that was as terrifying, in its way, as the prospect of starvation, and it is a measure of my own cowardice to say that quitting it - giving up the money - was the bravest thing I've ever done. My faith is so puny I imagined ending up a bag lady, one of those people I can love from a distance, out of pity, but after an hour bore and annoy me: one of those people on whose plate, come Thursday morning, I heap a mound of salad.

"But what can be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?" asks Dostoevsky's doctor.

"No. It is enough that you are distressed. Do what you can and it will be reckoned unto you," replies Father Zossima.

What I do now is teeter between two worlds. I quit the job, but I kept my mutual funds. I do freelance work for a "public interest" lawyer, but it's still litigation, and in many ways as lying and corrupt as corporate work. It's relatively easy to love political prisoners; it's easy, even, to love their torturers from my sterile, safe remove. But what I really need to do is learn to love the people I see each day: my husband, the man who asks me to move while I'm praying, that ex-boss with his ritzy cufflinks who, when he said I wore my heart on my sleeve, meant it as a slur.

Of my own accord, I cannot stop judging and compartmentalizing and comparing. It seems impossible that I will ever go from where I am now to where I want to be, just as it seems impossible - the attempt a kind of folly - to staunch the flow of these hungry mouths that will only wake up hungry again tomorrow, hungry forever, legions of hungry mouths and broken bodies and diseased minds and tortured souls on the march, in every state in this country, in every country of the globe. Still, do what you can, the priest says. What I can do is write and help to feed this particular line, ever-advancing, as alive and irrepressible as yeast. I keep peering into their eyes, looking for answers.

I haven't gotten any yet; I only know that Christ is here. I am here not because it will make a difference, but because it very well may not. I am here because Christ said, as you have done unto the least of these brothers of mine, so have you done unto me. I am here because every so often, beneath the white plates, one of my fingers touches one of theirs.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Commonweal Foundation
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