A Tale For Our Times
They called my uncle “Fast Walking Charlie”.
Fast Walking Charlie was renown at elite Westchester County Country Club golf courses from Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, to Knollwood in Elmsford, to Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Briarcliff Manor.
But Fast Walking Charlie was not walking fast to make birdie putts on those velvety smooth greens – he was carrying bags as a caddie.
Charlie’s fast walking was seen not only on the golf course, but on every road and byway between those golf courses, where he could be seen “fast walking” while carrying a 6 pack of Rheingold under his arm in a soggy brown paper bag. I can still recall the jingle:
“My beer is Rheingold the dry beer – ask for Rheingold wherever you buy beer”
Charlie would always show up late to family holiday dinners, drunk as a skunk with that same soggy six pack under his arm.
Invariably, this would trigger a severe scolding from my Mom’s sister Aunt Rosalie and her husband Uncle Steve (both righteous Salvation Army Captains) and generous compassion from my mom as she set out a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes for him and gently took his six pack away.
I never met or talked to Charlie when he wasn’t drunk out of his mind and slurring words, sometime barely able to walk.
Charlie, like my mom, was born and raised in the house we grew up in. That was common in my closely knit backwater neighborhood called “Glenville”, an unincorporated section of Greenburg NY and part of the Tarrytown school district. (We didn’t get sewers until 1970. Seeping septic tanks would run raw sewage in the streets. The “greenest” portion of our tiny backyard, where my dad planted tomatoes, was just below the leach from our septic tank).
All my neighbors knew Charlie as a boy and virtually all of the old timers said I looked like a carbon copy of him. They would regularly remind me of this fact. I had no idea what it meant, but it always made me uncomfortable, for obvious reasons.
Talk of Charlie was taboo in my family. My mother was deeply ashamed of him and her compassion towards him would trigger bitter fights with Aunt Rosalie come holiday time.
I recall one terrifying night as a young child in the early 1960’s – Charlie had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and was in critical condition in a hospital in the Bronx. Mom was really devastated. But he survived.
I didn’t learn Charlie’s story until I was 20 years old, and I didn’t hear it from my mother.
It was told to me by a peer of his, a wonderful older guy and great athlete (played baseball at Notre Dame) we had on our mens league softball team and would drink beer all night with and share stories late into the morning.
Here is Charlie’s story, which made me weep almost uncontrollably when I heard it at 5 am after a long night.
Charlie was born sometime around 1935, during the depths of the depression, to a dysfunctional family, the youngest with 2 older sisters. Charlie’s mom had been a gin runner during Prohibition and a heavy drinking party girl before that. Charlie’s dad was a radical IWW labor intellectual type who struggled to find work and raised chickens in the backyard to subsist on.
Charlie was a smart but shy kid with not many friends and somewhat of a troublemaker.
One night, when Charlie was in High School, he and some friends broke into the local hardware store. They were caught by the cops. To avoid jail time, the local judge allowed him to enlist in the Army and go fight in the Korean War.
Charlie suffered a major head wound in the Korean War and the pain killers he was prescribed made him an addict. When he returned home, he became a heroin addict and alcoholic to replace the military’s painkillers.
Of course he received no treatments for that from the VA.
It turns out that Charlie also was gay – and that’s what got him stabbed in the Bronx and shamed by the family (on top of drug and alcohol addiction).
Charlie died before 40.
Hearing this tragedy just made me weep.
And that, my friends, is the true story of Fast Walking Charlie.
Should be a John Prine song.
(and, as a friend noted, a Tom Waits song).