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A die-hard regular once nicknamed the old, white house with the red door "Grandma's House." It's the one safe place where you're always welcome.

Then again, even Grandma never welcomed 1,200 visitors a week, as does Summit Fellowship Club, the city's busiest meeting place for recovering alcoholics and addicts. So many crowd into self-help groups here that they have to park next door at Mrs. Winners and buy a biscuit to be polite.

As the county wrangles over plans for a $2.7 million, 56-bed treatment center on West Wendover that can house addicts for six months at a time, you might say the club represents the other road to recovery. It's the long-distance journeyman's road, not costing taxpayers one thin dime.

And like the worn-out vinyl furniture that at 8 a.m. is about to seat members to capacity for twin "early bird" meetings, the club is bursting at the seams, nearly to the point of turning people away.

We won't mention names — that's part of the club's allure — but these are familiar faces. They are plumbers and builders in heavy boots, salesmen, executives dressed for work, mothers and fathers.

Seven days a week, they wind up here. And if it's true that the Sunday church hour is the most segregated in the city, this hour is just the opposite.

"You've got young, old, white, black, men, women, rich, poor, and we're all there for the same thing," said Jimmy Brown, the former Buick dealer who found sobriety in 1981, the same year the club was founded.

"It's a good, quiet haven for people to get away from the worries of the day and be safe from the bogeyman."

Here, the bogeyman goes by many names — crack cocaine or OxyContin, aka "hillbilly heroin," the freebasing hangover of the 1980s, and of course, old Jim Beam.

Different symptoms, but everybody behind the red door is struggling with the same disease, standing up to the pain and stress of everyday life without the crutch of substance abuse. Many here owe their first step to residential treatment programs such as Fellowship Hall, the private Hicone Road center with a close relationship to this club. But racking up the miles along the road home — and the tokens given out at meetings for sobriety anniversaries — poses a different challenge.

"It's easy to get clean at Fellowship Hall," an addict was saying of 28-day residential treatment, "because there's not a drug dealer standing on the corner. It's when you get out that it gets hard."

He was sitting at the long kitchen table in the club, with faded Christmas decorations hanging on the walls and an unmatched assortment of coffee mugs on pegs. In the living room next door, about three dozen people sat elbow-to-elbow, talking about gratitude.

They're grateful, it turns out, for the very things they used to try to escape. A young woman who once lost custody of her children because she was too busy smoking crack. A man who lost half his survey business because he was drunk and popping pills. The son of a prominent community organizer whose descent into cocaine cost him his family.

Now, they have their lives back. And whether they live on MLK or Sunset Drive, they all speak the same language; they all hear the meaning in the silences between words.

"In 38 years of marriage, this is the first time we put up a Christmas tree," a recovering alcoholic was saying. "Last night we wrapped presents, and for the first time, we weren't drunk. This is just amazing."

This is not the stark and uncomfortable picture that 12-step programs evoke — fluorescent-lit church basements with rows of folding chairs. This feels more like somebody's den, and the members greet each other like old friends, laugh together, embrace before heading off to work. The problem is, the intimate setting is too intimate, according to the fire marshal, and ever since the club banned smoking a few years back, the three dozen weekly meetings have grown to standing-room only, even on Sundays.

So rather than turn a soul away, they called a business meeting this fall, put on a pot of coffee and took a vote. With $80,000 in the bank, the question was whether to sell the old place and try to raise enough to build a new club that won't be so crowded.

When one member half-jokingly threatened to chain himself to the red door in protest, they reached a compromise: Build a new place, but devote one room to an exact replica of the old living room.

Worn-out couches and all.

Want to help The Summit Fellowship Club expand? Contact the Building Fund, 810 Summit Ave., Greensboro, N.C., 27405.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine. ahearn@news-record.com