Joshua Fleer
Contributing Writer
A man pauses momentarily to pick up a discarded newspaper on a table in front of Ralphs Market in Malibu. He folds it, slides it into his back pocket, and continues to amble down the sidewalk. The end of the sidewalk interrupts his slow stroll; he stops to look over the bottle return machine, turns, and pauses briefly once again. A new direction determined, he resumes his shuffle into the nearly empty parking lot.
“I’m kind of in a hurry right now,” Charlie says, hidden behind his shaggy yellow beard.
The majority of the homeless in Malibu like to keep to themselves and Charlie with his ball cap pulled low is no exception. He has no empty cup to throw coins in nor does he stretch out a hand requesting money. He even goes so far as to refuse an offer for food saying that he has just eaten a filling meal at Marmalade Café, patting his robust belly. But if the stories he tells are true, the fact that he doesn’t have a home doesn’t mean he hasn’t accomplished anything.
“I don’t know what’s going on with Charlie,” says Hollie Packman, co-founder of S.O.S. Ministries, an outreach program for the Malibu homeless. “I just don’t get the feeling that he is a drug addict or an alcohol abuser.”
Only five percent of Malibu’s homeless struggle with mental illness compared to 30-40 percent in Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles. However, Packman senses Charlie is not excluded from Malibu’s five percent. Charlie claims he’s worked in the film industry as much as the more glamorous people in Ralphs who arrive in their Mercedes and Porsches.
“I must have worked 100 shows from ’87-’92,” Charlie says.
He also claims he has worked for Disney, and says he remembers working with Tom Cruise although he cannot remember the name of the film they were in together. In a made for TV movie about JFK that recently aired on TBS, Charlie had a small part appropriately playing a homeless man sitting on a park bench. The scene lasted no more than five seconds, but make no mistake, it was Charlie.
Charlie’s story doesn’t end there. He says he lived in Malibu in the 1960s and only made it back within the last 10 years. In between he tells of his travels around the world.
“I’ve been around the world so many times it’s unbelievable,” Charlie says, “You name a country in Europe and I’ve been there.”
Reminiscing about his days working on fishing boats, he remembers visiting the Coliseum in Rome, the pyramids in Egypt, and seeing the Northern Lights in Alaska.
As the prototypical beach bum, Charlie says he has surfed many of the places he has traveled. He surfed in Europe. He surfed in Africa. He surfed in Hawaii, where, he mentions, he even took classes from the University of Hawaii to prefect his hobby.
Of all the continents Charlie recalls traveling and all the sights he remembers seeing, perhaps Pepperdine is the reason he feels so at home in Malibu. Discussing his degree in Musicology from Oxford University and BA in Mathematics from California State University Northridge, Charlie finds comfort in the collegiate atmosphere. He says he’s even thought about auditing classes at Pepperdine.
“It’s a pretty nice school,” he says. “The last time I was up there was to view the museum by that French artist, the one inspired by Danté,” Charlie says, referring to Augusté Rodin’s sculptures.
Pepperdine’s ties to Christianity also appeal to Charlie. He and some colleagues in Malibu hitch a ride to Wednesday Bible studies and attend Sunday fellowship at Camp David Gonzalez, which has prompted him to do some volunteer work. Charlie expresses his appreciation for the camp, quoting from Matthew 25, “the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats and say take your inheritance for when I was hungry you gave me food, when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink, and when I was in prison you visited me.”
“He is a little bit of an out-layer,” Packman says. “I know he doesn’t fall into the same category as most of the homeless people in Malibu.”
April 17, 2003