My Kind of Town: Costa Mesa

by Jim Washburn

Team Rochester was dining al fresco at the new location of the venerable Arches Restaurant. The whole world seems out of whack lately—floods, oil plumes, earthquakes—and I think it started when the Arches had to move from its original PCH location, where it had resided pretty much since man first put food in his mouth.

The afternoon was shading into evening, the sun in our eyes replaced by a nip in the breeze. Across the parking lot, a guy in dark overalls was swinging a sledgehammer at the marble face of a local bank. Whack! Whack! Echoey Whack!

A white panel truck was parked nearby, devoid of markings. A plastic “do not cross” ribbon ringed the workspace. Some other figures wandered in and out of view near the bank.

Whack! The guy took another swing at the marble. Well, everybody needs a hobby, I figured.

Others in my party speculated that we were watching one of those brazen bank robberies you sometimes read about, an opinion that seemed bolstered when the workman put down his hammer and hoisted what appeared to be a bazooka onto his left shoulder. I just figured it was a more interesting hobby. My wife actually ducked when the tube swung our way. No projectile was forthcoming, but that didn’t discourage an elderly man at a nearby table, who told us he’d been a cop in Texas, from calling the police.

Patrol cars did arrive in a timely manner—I recommend using the word “bazooka” next time you desire speedy municipal service—and it turned out there was nothing untoward going on, just one of those Erving Goffman moments. The bazooka was a pipe, and the workmen were merely doing whatever one does to bank buildings at twilight. Whack that money!

This is the third location of the Arches. It lost its historic Coast Highway home in 2007 when the landlord wouldn’t renew the lease. Now the hipster A Restaurant sits there, where in the bar they should have a plaque reading, “Jim Washburn Spent Maybe the Stupidest Night of His Life Here.”

Some of the new owners had run Aubergine restaurant on the Balboa Peninsula, and the Arches wound up in their old digs, which wasn’t a good fit. The new Arches is in a location most noted for long ago housing Feliciano’s, the nightclub-shaped mouth into which Jose Feliciano fed his fortune.

This is at the eastern end of 17th Street, which is one of the main retail drags in my town. Its easternmost three blocks are officially in Newport Beach, but we always regard the shops and restaurants there as being part of Costa Mesa. Newport, on the other hand, would just as soon there was a firewall between our burgs. Perhaps that’s why, for their three blocks of 17th, they felt compelled to change the name, twice. For two blocks it’s Westcliff Drive, then it becomes Westcliff Villas for the final one. Heading inland, a number of other streets also change names when they hit the Newport border. The property values change, too.

Next week, the FourStory website celebrates its third anniversary, and for it we’ll be discussing our homes and how on earth we manage to live in them. This week I’d like to tell you a little more about the town that’s the setting for our little jewel.

Landlocked Costa Mesa has always been the Epiphone to Newport’s Gibson, the downscale budget line for the lesser folk. This class divide exists despite considerable consanguinity. There’s a shared school and library system, plus Costa Mesa is where Newport’s kids go when they move out. Of course, the good ones return to Newport, while the undeserving of us stay here or drift off.

I moved to Costa Mesa from Newport after I fell out of college, but I’d always felt more at home here. It’s where our hippie friends lived. Hippie friends were great. You and your high school girlfriend could go to a hippie friend’s apartment, smoke his weed, play a game of chess with him, and then disappear into an unoccupied bedroom—as if that wasn’t your sole motive the whole time—leaving your hippie friend in the living room, listening to all four sides of Tales from Topographic Oceans. Sorry about that, wherever you are today, hippie friends.

Costa Mesa is where the underground record stores were, along with the indie donut shop, the guitar shop, the loamy smelling health food store, the Citroen dealer, the blues bars, the movie theaters and Crazy Ali the arc-welder.

For a while Ali drove an XKE on which he’d extended the already phallic front end to twice its normal length. He had the first closed-circuit TV camera I’d ever seen on the car, mounted on a swivel on his front bumper so he could see around corners. Later he made colossal, allegorical metal sculptures the city hated so much they fought him for years to make him remove them.

Rising rents and changing times have driven most of the funk from the town, but it’s still more fun than Newport. When we had to move last year, it was from Costa Mesa to Costa Mesa.

They don’t have motocross or rodeos in Newport Beach, but we do, at our disputed fairgrounds, where in recent years you could also see Garbage or the Black-Eyed Peas. This year, they’ve got two nights of Weird Al Yankovic. (Fair management seems to have Weird Al on the brain, and last year invested millions in a 3-D movie attraction called Weird Al’s Brain, which was of such limited appeal to fairgoers that they might have done better featuring Boxcar Willie’s Kidneys.)

We’ve got punk bars and Mexican restaurants that Mexicans eat at. There are two record shops within walking distance that deal in old vinyl. You practically need a Geiger counter to find one of them, Factory Records, which is situated in an L-shaped strip mall entirely hidden from the street. Other mystery shops there include a custom fuzztone maker, a Hawaiian shirt reseller, and a pet shampoo professional.

Factory is a hole in the wall, recently opened by David James, who a few years back owned Noise, Noise, Noise Records, one of those fabulous record shops where they could really give a shit about currying your favor. Half the times I was in there, they’d be blasting industrial noise that sounded like a gristle factory; next time in, they’re listening to Bert Jansch and Pentangle.

We live just down the block from Grant’s for Guns, where the “Back to School Sale” sign gets a chuckle from me every year. (I should mention they don’t just sell guns, but also Levi’s, rain jackets, water purification tablets, and other school essentials, though if you did have it in mind to shoot something, you could not buy a gun from nicer people.)

Cross Newport Boulevard, go another block and there’s Lions Park with a concrete jet (used to be a real retired fighter jet parked there, as I recall; probably one of the ones Bob Dornan crashed). The Lions Club has hosted an annual fish fry there for 63 years, with music, clowns and carnival rides. I’ve had the fish and I would not throw that shit at a pelican, but I still enjoy the spirit of the thing.

We used to be a pretty wild town. There was Zuver’s Gym, on a residential street, where owner Bob Zuver had a collection of giant stuff in front: the world’s biggest dumbbell, the world’s biggest telephone, etc. One of OC’s first topless clubs, the Firehouse, was on 17th street. There was a bar called Andy Capp’s, where a “dirty boogie” contest was once won by a couple copulating on a pool table. Then there was the notorious Cuckoo’s Nest, where, before the city shut it down, punks would frequently square off against cops and patrons from the adjacent hardhat bar.

There are punk clubs in town today, a fairly meaningless claim now that punk’s on Broadway. Most of the weirdness has been shaken out of the town, but it’s still cool. When we moved last year, it was to a neighborhood with older homes, and it also put us a lot closer to things we could walk to. Maybe a Parisian boulevardier has it better, but it’s fine enough for us to be able to walk our dog two blocks to a delightful café called Eat Chow, and while away a meal while the Newport Boulevard traffic does its imitation of the Seine, as Nikita rummages on the ground for remnants of the café’s truffle oil infused French fries.

There are still some good pawnshops in town, though the best things I’ve bought in them lately have been via a roundabout route. Like pawnshops everywhere now, they put their stuff on eBay, and you’ve got to bid against the world before you end up with a thing. That’s how I got my bicycle, and this is a fine town for getting around on two wheels, doing one’s little bit to not further enable oil companies. A bike puts you at just the right speed to enjoy the neighborhoods you’re passing through, and to ferret out more stuff at garage sales. I found my wife a bike at one a few weeks ago, and the week after that found some record albums still bearing the sales stickers from the hippie record store I’d run back in the 1970s.

My second guitar amp, bought back then, was a Quilter, made right here in an industrial hut in Costa Mesa. The little company made good, affordable amps, and loads of the local bands like Honk and Black Pearl used them. Rather than fade away with the macramé, the company changed with the times and today is QSC Audio, which manufactures amplifiers and speakers used in many of the world’s performance halls and movie theaters, and is one of the biggest employers in the city. Score one for the hippies.

The city’s other proud example of triumphal hippieism is radio station KOCI. It’s a low-power FM nonprofit station that caught my ear by playing tracks off grand old rock albums that I never even heard on the radio back then. At its worst, the station sometimes plays entirely too much of that smug, self-satisfied, cocaine-driven rock of the mid-’70s, and I would far prefer to never hear another Eagles song in this lifetime. At its best, though, it plays stuff that reminds one of just how much the music can mean. The best programming is during the hosted shows, one of which features Jimmy Rabbit, a grand character from the days of underground radio. All this from a tiny antenna atop a six-story building, the tallest on 17th St..

There are homeless folks who sleep in the bushes or on bus benches a block from our home. One, whom I’ve ungraciously nicknamed Mr. Manatee, has this belly that looks like a whole separate creature. I’d like to say I have an ongoing rapport with these folks, but I don’t.

Along with consistently sending nuts to represent us in Washington, we have some knuckle-draggers in local government, which is why Costa Mesa is a “rule of law” city. “Rule of law” seems to be the latest euphemism for, “Get these fucking Mexicans out of my town!” We do have an abundance of humans without portfolios on our Westside, but that’s one of the reasons why it’s the vibrant side of town, where you can buy fresh fruit and veggie juice combos with names like Vampiro.

The city’s antipathy toward the undocumented, as usual, is coming back to bite us again. One of the things Governor Schwarzenegger put on the auction block was our fairgrounds, and city plans to buy and preserve the place are being blocked in Sacramento by legislators opposed to our unwelcome mat.

That’s my town, if not always my kind of town.

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