A Place to Call Your Own

If you work long hours into the night, as I once did, sleep can be a problem. You may be tired, but you don’t want to go to bed. Even if it’s 1 or 2 in the morning. You’re still wired from work, and what you want to do is relax, listen to some music, talk a little bit. That can be difficult when your house is dark and the only noise in an otherwise silent bedroom is the creaking of your own footsteps on cold hardwood floors and the heavy breathing coming from a wife who has been asleep for hours.

So sometimes, after work, when it was well past midnight but the adrenaline in my body was surging like that of a circus performer’s, a few of us would agree to meet somewhere by the Newport Pier. Sometimes at Mutt Lynch’s. Sometimes at Blackie’s. But usually at the Blue Beet, because it was filled with college-aged students like us who, during the summer, lived and partied in crammed west Newport beach houses, and because it was the only place around the pier with live music.

We’d have a beer or two, talk about our evening, listen to reggae, and eventually head home.

But there were nights when it was too late even for the Blue Beet and that’s when we would head for Charlie’s Chili, tucking into big platters of pancakes or scrambled eggs and chorizo. The place was always filled with odd night birds, and the waitresses could be saucy and flippant--hey, you have to have a little attitude to deal with the fools and sinners hanging around the Newport Pier at 3 in the morning--but we didn’t mind. Charlie’s was warm and well-lit and always felt homey. It was just kind of our place.

Then my life changed. I found a day job, had kids, and somewhere along the line, I stopped frequenting Blackie’s and the Blue Beet and even Charlie’s. I’d pass by the eatery every now and then, thinking about the number of late nights I once spent sprawled in one of the big Naugahyde booths, swapping stories with my friends, but I never went in. I figured those days were history, and they pretty much were.

Now my son, who was part of the reason I stopped going to Charlie’s, is a Newport Beach lifeguard. Last Sunday I went with him to the pier so he could turn in some papers at lifeguard headquarters. While he was inside doing his business, I wandered around McFadden Place. Past the dory fleet where fishermen were hooking sardines onto long lines and past Blackie’s with the familiar sign reading “Glad We’re Closed.”

I thought about getting a beer at the Blue Beet, but it was too early. So I walked back to the pier and sat on one of the concrete planters in front of Charlie’s, waiting for Max.

“You ever get lunch at Charlie’s when you’re working down here?” I asked Max when he came out.

“Nope.”

“How come?”

He shrugged. “It’s just not someplace we go,” he said.

I told him Charlie’s was one of my favorite spots in Newport, a place I’d spent a lot of time at a long time ago, and offered to buy him lunch. He took me up on it.

“This place is a riot,” Max said, chuckling as we slid into an empty booth. “Has it always looked like this?”

“Actually, it looks a lot better than I remember it,” I told him. But I was lying. It looked pretty much the same. Only dated. The worn booths were the same, as was the painted sign on the window that said “All You Can Eat Chili Every Wednesday.” The waitress yelling at the guy pouring his own coffee seemed just as cranky as the ones who used to get annoyed when we asked for separate checks. I couldn’t recall the stained glass light fixtures having been there when I was younger, but the motley collection of wooden signs on one wall, all either “borrowed” or bought from other establishments (the most out-of-place being a Rotary Club sign claiming the group “Meets Here Friday 12:10”), were familiar.

The menu was the same. You could still order homemade biscuits and gravy, a tuna melt or the C.C.O.--the chili cheese omelet--which the menu still claims to be “possibly the world’s greatest.” That’s what I had. The world’s greatest chili cheese omelet. And it was good, though it seemed smaller than I remembered it.

It felt a bit odd sitting at Charlie’s with Max. I kept looking at him and seeing myself years ago, when I would come here late at night feeling so grown-up and wise though I was not much older than he is now. In a way, it was like traveling back in time to someplace that gave you mixed emotions. Like visiting the house you grew up in or going back to your grade school.

When Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again,” I think what he meant was that you can, of course, but it won’t be the way you remembered it. It will be smaller and a bit dated, and the memories you have of it will probably lose some of their luster.

As we left, walking along the boardwalk past Blackie’s and Mutt Lynch’s, I asked Max what he thought of Charlie’s. “It was OK,” he said. And then he told me about another place in the neighborhood, a little hole-in-the-wall joint where he and the other lifeguards liked to grab lunch. It was a place I’d never heard of before.

“Is it good?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “The food isn’t really great,” he said, “but we go there anyway. It’s just kind of our place, you know?”

I did know.

“I’ll take you there next time we go out to lunch,” Max said. “You’ll like it. Besides, I think I probably owe you.”

I smiled and nodded. But I was thinking how much I owed him.

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