NIGHT LIFE

Alex Coolman

Even from the parking lot, I could hear a band playing inside Club Mesa.

Something was horribly wrong.

I was supposed to go check out the spoken word event the Costa Mesa club

holds on Wednesday evenings. I was supposed to bring back a heart-rending

story about the terrifying phenomenon known as the open mike.

Here I was, all dressed down in T-shirt and grubby slacks, the better to

fit in with the punker wordsmiths I expected to encounter. I had a surly

grimace creeping across my face and a pronounced slouch to my posture. If

crowds of grunge poets were holding up the bar, I would be totally

incognito.

But a band was playing. And not even a particularly great band. Three

guys were huddled up on the stage, their backs turned to the meager

audience. They were churning through a set that consisted mostly of

arrhythmic noodling, with occasional passages of moderately competent

strumming.

Not only was I not seeing any spoken word action, I hadn’t even brought

my earplugs. Tinnitus, here I came!

But all was not lost, necessarily. The crowd checking out the band looked

suspiciously arty. One guy was wearing a tie. Various nervous and

troubled-looking women were scattered around the room, clutching thick

books of what were almost certainly erotic sonnets or depressive

limericks. With any luck, the three rockers might eventually be persuaded

to relinquish the spotlight in favor of these West Side scribblers.

Which is what happened. The band mercifully called it a night and the

poetic floodgates were opened. Maybe it was just the can of beer I’d been

served, but the night was starting to seem entertaining.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,

and that basically sums up my feelings about the aesthetic merits of the

average open mike event. They’re fine as therapy for the people who

participate in them; they’re agony for anyone who isn’t also on the

literary 12-step program.

The catch with Club Mesa, though, is that the crowd at the bar is a lot

meaner and more entertaining than the excessively generous cafe-dwellers

who are typically the audience for a reading. At Club Mesa, if bad poetry

starts springing, the bruisers and skinheads start heckling. And that’s

when the fun begins.

Take the woman named Leotha, who steps up to Club Mesa’s mike on a

regular basis: she’s charismatic and funny, and she writes about sex

quite a bit -- a gambit that goes over big with the peanut gallery.

One of the guys sprawled on the floor occasionally decided it was

necessary to start applauding in the middle of poems or to slur “Let’s go

play pool” to a friend, who was himself slumped across several chairs.

All of which seemed like an appropriate response to what was being said:

when the person on the stage is mumbling things like “This cross I bear

has become burdensome ...” it’s time to talk a little trash.

Fortunately, a lot of what gets read at Club Mesa is of a respectable

quality. If it’s not life-changing material, it’s at least engaging and

occasionally funny. One of the women who had looked so promisingly

neurotic got up and read a story about buying a man at a discount store

-- a story that managed to draw chuckles even from the beefy dudes with

the chain wallets and the tattoos.

Best of all, the reading started off with a poem by a guy named “Phil

Dog,” who is apparently a poetic type trapped inside the body of a

rocker.

After giving a few of the requisite shout-outs from the stage to his

various homies -- “Don’t drink all my beer, dog!” -- Phil launched

laughingly into what was unquestionably the grimmest selection of the

evening.

“So I woke up this morning with anger,” he said, chuckling conspicuously.

Phil Dog then proceeded to rant about suicide, running through the

various methods one might choose to carry out that act -- all the while

working very hard to keep up the pretense that the poem was a sort of

wacky joke.

Phil Dog’s friends, who could barely contain their hilarity, obviously

weren’t particularly concerned that there might be some sort of emotional

turmoil behind all that talk of death and destruction.

In a way, it was a refreshingly callous response to an open mike reading,

the kind of response that the boozy crowd and the bar setting encourages.

Club Mesa isn’t the right venue for sensitive analysis of psychological

bruises anyway; it’s the kind of place you hang out if you already know

you’re bruised and you feel like consorting with the others among the

wounded.

It’s this general attitude -- an awareness that screwed-up people don’t

really heal themselves through poetry -- that makes Club Mesa’s open mike

fun to witness. At the end of the night, the neurotic women are still

neurotic, and the beefy drunks are still sucking down beer. It’s

thoroughly unhealthy, and it’s fine entertainment.

FYI

WHAT: Open mike night at Club Mesa

WHERE: 843 West 19th St., Costa Mesa

WHEN: 9 to 11 p.m. Wednesdays

HOW MUCH: Free

PHONE: (949) 642-8448