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Mitch McGee can tell a story.

He’ll roll out some jaw-dropping detail about a person he’s worked with, and then he’ll let out this loud, long hiccup cackle that Brother Theodore used to hate.

He heard that at Missionaries of the Holy Family, a Catholic religious order in St. Louis he attended for six years back in the ’80s.

He quit the order. But he didn’t quit his cackle. And he cackles often.

Like when he worked as a case manager at Triad Health Project and met a man in his 50s. The man was HIV-positive, and he believed he was an ancient warlock casting spells.

The man was homeless, too. For 12 years.

McGee helped him get an apartment.

Then, he’ll talk about the manipulative prostitute, a mother of two. He met her in his new gig as the coordinator for one of Guilford County’s newest programs — helping the chronically homeless find housing.

“I thought you were supposed to be a man of God!” she blurted out once.

“Dammit, darlin’,” McGee said to himself. “How long have you been saving that one up?”

McGee helped her, too. She’s now off the street, in an apartment. She says she wants to become a “respected, productive citizen of the community.”

McGee, 51, has all kinds of stories like that. They are his clients, the toughest of the tough.

He’s tough, too. He’ll listen to them berate and badger him. Then, he’d yell right back and say with acid still dripping in his voice,

“OK, why is it my problem when you made a bad choice?”

But they all bonded with McGee. And McGee bonded with them. He’s exhaustive in his work, spending weeks, months, years at a time to help them get their life stable and trauma-free.

He’s had the experience. McGee has worked from here to St. Louis with the most troubled among us: the homeless, the addicted, the tormented, and the mentally handicapped. And he’s been doing it for 25 years.

Ask McGee why, and he’ll talk about Dorothy Day. She fought for social justice and spent her life housing the homeless, feeding the hungry and trying to build a better world.

But prod McGee a little more, and he’ll quote a line from the comedy, “Laverne & Shirley” — “I know, I’m sick,” he’ll say, laughing — and bring out his personal experience of being an outcast.

McGee is gay. He grew up in small-town Minnesota; his high school graduating class numbered 65. He was one of five children, second to the oldest. His father, a truck mechanic with an eighth-grade education, was an alcoholic.

McGee learned early about the dark side of addiction. He also learned early about how to hide. Since he was a kid, he knew he was gay, and he constantly heard being gay was wrong. And what did he do?

Go celibate, go Catholic and go do something for the greater good.

He did. He joined the Missionaries of the Holy Family and graduated from St. Louis University with a degree in theology and a minor in philosophy.

But he felt he needed to do more, like work in a soup-line, help fellow outcasts like himself and practice what Dorothy Day preached: “We are our brothers’ keepers.”

He has. For a quarter-century.

Now he’s a Quaker, living openly as a gay man, with the same partner for 10 years. And yes, he still has that loud, long hiccup cackle that’ll clear any room.

This work, with the most troubled, is his ministry.

He won’t tell you that. His friends will. They’ll talk about that time three years ago, when McGee held the hand of a woman dying of AIDS. She was so weak she could barely hold a pen.

So, McGee held it for her. Together, they signed a custodial agreement to help protect her four children. And as tears rolled down his face, he told her in a voice, cackle-free, whisper-soft: “Don’t worry. The kids will be OK.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com