Count-the-house Charlie

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online February 1970 Vol. 26 No. 9
He found his place in AA and served faithfully in his own way
HIS NAME makes him sound like a character Damon Runyon might have created, one of the Guys and Dolls gallery.

He was a fixture of the Plummer Park meeting, a Sunday-night get-together where the motion-picture folk used to assemble. The first Sunday night I got there, back in 1955, I arrived late and was fascinated by the opening speaker, who was already airborne. Trying to find a scat unobtrusively, I listened as he soared to dizzy heights of eloquence, leaving vapor trails of beauty and spiritual splendor behind him in his humility. Suddenly, he pounded the lectern and shouted, "Now this is an honest program, so I might as well come clean. Yes, I did join the program four years ago, but six months later I had a slip. I was subjected to a severe emotional shock. The woman I was living with went back to her husband."

I knew these were my people. I knew I belonged.

In this congress of kooks, Count-the-House Charlie had found his niche as self-appointed head usher. Everyone loved him. We might not have understood him, but we certainly realized that he was doing his thing. He wore dazzling checkered vests, and it was not long before I learned how he had' come by his Runyonesque moniker.

If you happened to be the speaker of the evening, there would inevitably come a time when Count-the-House Charlie would sidle up to you officiously and whisper, "Two hundred and fifty-two." Then he'd smile and walk away.

On a weeknight, you might be attending a less prestigious gathering, and our walking computer would steal up and murmur, "Thirty-two." Maybe a week later, you would be at a somewhat larger group, and Charlie's voice would be more jubilant as he made his earth-shaking announcement sotto voce: "One hundred and forty-seven!"

We all loved the numbers game as Charlie played it.

When I went back to Plummer Park to celebrate my twelfth AA birthday, I didn't see my charming friend as I surveyed the crowd, and I decided I'd inquire when the meeting was over. In the confusion, I forgot, drove thirty-five miles back home, and didn't get the information until Thursday morning.

I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang and a voice said, "Walter, this is Ray."

"What goes, Ray?" I asked him.

"Did you know that your friend Count-the-House Charlie has been sick a few months? He wants to see you."

Within minutes, I was racing over the freeways to the Motion Picture Home in San Fernando Valley to visit the ailing Charlie.

I looked down on the bed to see a terminal case of cancer, a victim who, in a day or two, would be facing the God he loved so much and served so well. The eyes were still big, still gay, still gallant. In wonder, I asked him, "Charlie. . .how long have you been on the program?"

Excitedly and with justifiable pride, he showed me the graphic answer on the table at his bedside, a handsomely crafted plaque only recently given him by one of those groups he served so unselfishly:

AWARDED TO COUNT-THE-HOUSE CHARLIE for 20 years of faithful steady service to ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS 1948-1968

Three days later he was dead, at the age of eighty-one. Almost a hundred of us gathered to do him honor at Forest Lawn. When I looked at the quiet, calm face in the casket, I thought to myself, "This guy was a saint."

Not until he was sixty-one years old did he understand clearly what God wanted him to do--but from that day twenty years before until the end, these words accurately described his life: "What a man should say, he said! What a man should do, he did! What a man should be, he was!"

Not once did I ever hear Charlie make a talk, but he will continue to educate me as long as I live.

W. O'K.,
Palos Verdes,, California