Night Life

Alex Coolman

Ah the predatory waters of the bar scene! Has a more treacherous and

unforgiving environment ever been the subject of a “National Geographic”

special? Has a wetsuited and goggled scientist ever flopped off a dinghy

to encounter a sight more fierce?

Naturally, I was scared as I motored my fishing boat, I mean my Toyota,

into the parking lot of Shark Club, the Costa Mesa bar and nightclub

renowned for its aquarium full of man-eating sharks and its dance floor

full of carnivorous Beautiful People. I wasn’t wearing a chain-mail

wetsuit or anything by Prada, and the possibility of being chewed up by

the social scene seemed all too likely.

Fortunately, I had persuaded intrepid Daily Pilot city editor Jenifer

Ragland to come along on the journey. Ragland, an amateur ichthyologist,

is fascinated by sharks, and was eager to see the toothy creatures

cruising around in Shark Club’s 2,000-gallon aquarium. If attacked by any

particularly vicious club-goers, I planned to throw Ragland in front of

me and run away to the car.

Shark Club just got a bunch of new computer equipment, G3 Macs and fancy

projectors to display very large images of computer screens doing very

fast Web browsing. I was wondering how all these high-tech gizmos would

be incorporated into the clubbing experience. Would people be having

“cyber sex”? Would all the drinks at the bar now be “smart drinks,”

whatever that means?

No. The scene I encountered after I dished out my $10 was less

intimidating -- and less exciting -- than I’d anticipated. There was

hardly anyone around, for one thing, and the vibe in the club felt less

like the blood-crazed feeding frenzy I had expected than some kind of

high school dance in a creatively decorated gymnasium.

Even worse, the computers were being kept locked away from the grubby

hands of people such as me. Only corporate clients attending private

parties would get a chance to see the stuff, much less use it.

And the sharks? My god, they were puny! They were the size of trout!

Ichthyologist Ragland was very disappointed by these creatures, a pair of

which were swimming to and fro in their little glassed-in world. Of

course, when you’ve seen as many sharks as Ragland has, it takes a lot to

be impressed.

The point of these creatures, though, is that they’re little fishy

metaphors. They’re references to “pool sharks” for one thing, as the club

has 24 pool tables. And they’re also symbols of the relentless,

repetitive and numbing motion of the single scene. What I meant to say

was, the cool, sexy, adventurous world of the single scene. Choose one of

the above.

At any rate, there were a couple people shaking it on the dance floor and

a couple other people wielding cues at the tables. I quickly drank a

drink and began, in fine journalistic fashion, to bother everyone I

could.

“Say there,” I said, glomming on to the nearest group, “what do you think

of all this nonsense?”

“We’re a little underdressed,” said the guy I was bothering, whose name

was Mike. “I’ve got thongs on. It doesn’t matter to me, but the doorman

made a big deal about it.”

Mike showed me his feet; he was indeed wearing flip-flops.

Encouraged by this initial bit of success, I bothered Tracy, the woman of

the group.

“I like the sharks in the tank,” she said, claiming not to mind the fact

that they were so small.

“Before I came here, I heard it was a cheesy meat market. But it’s a good

place to play pool,” Tracy said. “Maybe it’s late-night cheese.”

So far so good. Next, Ragland and I attacked a pair of dapper men who

were surveying the club from the bar.

“Abend. Wie geht’s Euch denn so?” I asked them, having read somewhere

that all the coolest night life types work bits of German into their

party chat. I had no idea what I had just said, but they seemed pretty

impressed.

“It’s a little slow,” was the response that the first guy, Robert,

offered, ignoring me and looking at Ragland. “It might have potential.”

All the rest of the conversation was completely lost to me because I

couldn’t hear it over the smash disco hits the DJ was spinning. I kept

smiling and nodding just the same as Robert and his friend, Bryant,

exchanged hilarious anecdotes with Ragland.

Later, when we had abandoned them and were searching for more people to

bother, she told me the clean parts of what they had told her.

“During happy hour is good,” she reported. “And Saturday night.

“Friday nights, it’s all techno,” she said.

Coincidentally, we had just wandered into a small room that was being

strafed with techno music by a DJ perched like a sniper up in a little

booth near the ceiling. There were only half a dozen people in the place,

but one of the women was dancing in front of a mirror so it looked like

there was one more.

Of all the people at the club that evening, this particular woman and her

mirror image were the most shark-like. There was something predatory in

the way she was ogling herself. Her weird, quasi-seductive dance reminded

me, sort of, of a hammerhead circling around a sunburned kid on an orange

Styrofoam body board just before taking a first, investigatory bite.

I tried to explain this to ichthyologist Ragland, but she, with her

scientific approach to things fish-related, could only stare at me,

puzzled. Probably, if we both had had several more drinks, the nature of

this vague connection between fish and human would have become clear.

Instead, we watched her grind and undulate, dancing the night away in

that faintly sharky way. She was weird and occasionally beautiful; she

was night life made physical. I kept waiting for her to try to bite her

own reflection.

WHAT: Shark Club

WHERE: 841 Baker St., Costa Mesa

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Wednesdays, 2 a.m. Thursdays and 3 a.m. Fridays.

7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Saturdays. Closed Sundays.

HOW MUCH: $10 cover Thursday through Saturday after 8:30 p.m.

PHONE: (714) 751-6428