Night Life : Nocturnal World Has Haunts and Rhythm of Its Own

N ew Yorkers hate it here.

Three a.m. arrives and they fume, dying for the quick Nova Scotia with cream cheese on kaiser roll that isn’t there. They search desperately for an all-night take-out deli and end up dejectedly wolfing an assembly-line burrito at Naugle’s, staring out at the deserted streets and wondering what happened to those 2 million people they were dodging on the freeway a few hours ago.

The middle of the night--which is the shank of the evening in the Big Apple--is a spooky limbo in the Little Orange. The broad arterial streets, the humming business districts, the crush of cars, the foot traffic, the full parking lots, the dull throb of millions of internal combustion engines, the glow of millions of lights--all of it changes after midnight, mutating into a sleepy, separate reality.

Life as we know it ceases. Traffic dries up, doors slam and lock, lights go out, kitchens close and drowsy restaurant-goers get shooed into the parking lot. A couple of neutron bombs couldn’t do the job better: buildings remain, people disappear.

And for Orange County residents, the familiar landscape suddenly turns unfamiliar, even a bit eerie, as if it were being seen in a dream in which everything isn’t quite . . . right. It’s a kind of urban wilderness, lonely and almost otherworldly. You couldn’t find any signs of life if you stayed up and drove around all night.

Which, to one reporter and one photographer, armed with one car and one thermos of strong coffee, seemed like a gauntlet thrown. And, while it’s still true that no one is going to sing about, say, Tustin, as being the City That Never Sleeps, the all-night ramble on Sept. 29 revealed a few chinks of light showing in the late night blackness.

There are other sounds out there beside snoring.

11:30 p.m., Huntington State Beach: Huntington Beach still hums. Southbound traffic on Beach Boulevard is still puzzlingly slow and, less than a mile from the beach, the robust smell of wood burning in beach fire pits arrives on the night breeze. The traffic on Coast Highway near the pier--closed and gloomy in the wet darkness--still is lively, if uncongested. There are a few strollers around the foot of Main Street, but the days of the late-night Golden Bear rock club crowds are definitely over.

So is summer. Though the fires in the pits on the beach burn high and brightly, only small knots of people are standing around. Most have gone home.

The restaurants lining Pacific Coast Highway on the way back to Newport Beach have closed for the night. But people who are accustomed to ordering off the blackboard at 2 in the morning must be shocked to find that there is no place in the county where they can polish off a beef Wellington after midnight.

Except in Newport Beach.

12:15 a.m., the Arches Restaurant: The bar inside this venerable landmark is still crowded and noisy with chatter--expected on a Friday night--but there is eating going on, too, in the adjacent dining room, where the late-night hungry can order full meals off the complete menu until 1 a.m.

“The Arches has been here since 1922, and all people in Newport Beach, all people in Orange County, they know this place,” says maitre d’ Tony Montella in heavily accented English. “People want to have a late dinner, they come here.”

The Villa Nova restaurant across the street on the south side of Coast Highway serves late also, said Montella, but he said diners with a particular after-hours craving for flaming desserts make their way to the Arches to gobble bananas Foster, cherries jubilee and Cafe Diablo. Or, he said, they go the entire route, possibly ordering beef Wellington, rack of lamb or chateaubriand.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Montella, formerly the maitre d’ of the Palms restaurant in Los Angeles (which, he said, closed its kitchen at 10:30). “If I ate like they do, I’d be like an elephant. They gotta have a different stomach, these people.”

1:35 a.m., Balboa Pier: The early morning fishermen line the rails toward the end of the short pier, many staring silently into the dark as the salty dew forms. Most are clustered on the end, facing out to sea, trying to take advantage of the deepest water.

Few speak, until one man near the corner heaves up on his fishing pole and a starfish the size of a volleyball, snared on the hook, comes flying over the rail and falls onto the deck behind the fishermen with a dull splat. The man’s companion peers at the starfish, fascinated.

“That,” he said, “must have been painful.”

One of the last small-hours holdouts on the peninsula, the Studio Cafe at the foot of the pier, is closing down for the night and some Latin jazz musicians are packing up their gear in cars parked across the tiny street.

1:45 a.m., Balboa Theater: Around the corner at the Balboa Theater, however, the show goes on, as it has every Friday and Saturday night for exactly 14 years. It is the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the film version of the high-camp comedy-horror stage play. In its celluloid incarnation, it has become a weekly cult event, attracting mostly young audiences that participate directly in the action on the screen by shouting out lines, prompts and questions and even hurling props such as rice and shredded paper at strategic moments.

And there is a live cast, which imitates the action of the film’s characters from a stage apron directly in front of the screen.

It has all been going on at midnight screenings at the Balboa Theater since Sept. 30, 1975.

Brittany Stringfellow of Buena Park, a waitress at Disneyland, plays the cast role that mimics the character played on-screen by Susan Sarandon. It requires her to dress like a model for a Frederick’s of Hollywood ad.

“You have to have guts to do something like this,” she says, peeking out of the street door of the theater to chat before one of her last entrances on stage. “Anything (Sarandon) does up there, I do. Right now I have to go back in there and tie him up,” she said, pointing to a male cast member disappearing back into the theater.

The last minutes of the film are played out in a theater that has grown hot enough to fog the glasses of anyone coming in from the cold outside. There are perhaps 150 people in the aging seats and the floor is covered with strewn rice and torn shards of paper which, say the cast members, makes it a pretty typical Friday night.

It is about 2:20 before the last patron has left the theater and roared off up the peninsula.

2:30 a.m., Newport Pier: One of the fishermen in the nearby dory fleet has just pulled onto the beach, towing his boat behind a 4-by-4 truck. Charlie’s Chili, glowing brightly next to the pier, remains open, with perhaps a dozen sleepy-looking people staring across the tables at each other.

Both outdoors and in, the quiet of the deepening night has an effect on conversation. Without the background noise of the daytime to overcome, everyone mumbles.

2:45 a.m., the intersection of Harbor and Newport boulevards, Costa Mesa: It is almost unsettling, standing at this Y-shaped corner, staring down two of the busiest arteries in the county and seeing two long tunnels of light through the night blackness, punctuated by barely a pair of headlights. Harbor, particularly, is strange to see: an unencumbered, untrafficked, nearly arrow-straight shot all the way to Brea.

The neighborhood is not quite ready to fold up, however. Within the space of three minutes, three different white stretch limousines pass through the intersection. The last one stops at a red light and a young blond woman dressed in a white gown pops her head and torso through the open sun roof and throws her arms in the air.

“EEEYYYOOOWWW!!!!!” she shrieks in exultation, then drops back through the hole as the limo roars off toward the beach.

3:25 a.m., downtown Santa Ana: In seven hours, this entire neighborhood will swell with Saturday shoppers, but now the loudest sound is the click of one’s own heels on the pavement. Occasionally a car crawls by, seeming to be going nowhere. This is the part you see in the dream, the part that perhaps frightens you into awakening. The scene is absolutely empty and silent, making every familiar building appear to lurk, making every sight troubling somehow.

4 a.m., the Plaza, Orange: Utterly deserted. This time, however, the desolation is enjoyable, allowing us to drive around the circle three times, just for fun. Just because, at this time of day, we can.

4:20 a.m., Belisle’s Restaurant, Garden Grove: Bob Gare is dying for a beer. A policeman from Parramatta (“It means, ‘Where the eels come to rest,’ ” he says), Australia, Gare has been touring the United States for a month with friends from home and on this night the three men have gone their separate ways, “as blokes will do.” This has left Gare alone, with the prospect of returning to his motel to sleep or hunting down one of the only non-coffee shops in the area that is still open.

“If I go to bed, I won’t want to wake up,” he says. “This is the only place, but I still can’t get a beer.” He sips coffee instead.

At the counter to Gare’s left, Chris Elwell, an airport transport driver from Lawndale, is wide awake.

“This is my shift of choice,” he says. “If I’m going to drive on the roads in Southern California, I might as well have lots of room to do it.”

Still, he says, at this time of morning, “it always hits me that it’s time to eat, and there just aren’t that many places open in this area. This place is an exception. I was really surprised.”

Lorie Hall of Anaheim, the only waitress in the restaurant on this shift, said “I get travelers in here all the time and they expect there to be more places open in this area. But there’s nothing. I’ve lived here all my life and there’s nowhere to send them.”

Predictably, Belisle’s serves breakfast to a lot of police officers. Two appear to be talking shop in one corner of the dining room, chatting about the details of a trial. It turns out to be Zsa Zsa Gabor’s.

5:45 a.m., Costa Mesa Country Club: The first golfers of Saturday have arrived at the Clubhouse Cafe and have mostly ignored the morning’s special: a mushroom, sausage and Swiss cheese omelet with home fries, toast, butter and jelly for $2.95. There are about 15 of them seated at small tables in the cafe, talking golf and wolfing coffee and doughnuts. The light mist has not yet disappeared from the course and even the pro shop will not open for another 15 minutes.

But the quickening activity in the cafe seems to act like a kind of alarm clock for the day. In the east, the sky has begun to pale, and a couple of the golfers already are outside the pro shop, pacing, waiting impatiently for the moment when the starter decides that the glow has become bright enough for the players to see their drives.

Out on Harbor Boulevard, the traffic has begun to increase in volume and tempo, and the drivers’ eyes are wide and bright. The heavily lidded look of the all-night ramblers is gone, for most have rambled home by this time.

It seems like a good idea. The conversation has become monosyllabic and the coffee has run out.

But, heading for bed, it’s comforting to see your own neighborhood in the brightening dawn. It’s mostly like you left it, and hardly resembles that disturbing dream scene of what seemed like many, many hours before.

After a long night’s journey into day, it’s good to be home.