on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Who’s Your City?

Mendes lives in Arcata now.

“I love Arcata, but I find it absurd sometimes,” he says. “I was doing an open mic, when I worked at Sacred Grounds, and some kids came over, some Earth First! protesters, and said ‘Come over to the plaza for a protest.’ I told them protesting on the plaza is like mooning a proctologist.”

One day he was crossing the plaza and some Food Not Bombs kids hassled him. “I was going to get Fair Trade coffee at the Co-op — locally owned — and they stopped me and tried to give me free coffee instead. They said, ‘You’re giving money to The Man.’ And here they probably bought their coffee from some corporate place, whereas I’m supporting the local guy.

“And when I was in high school, I joined the Earth First! movement here. I’d gotten a leather jacket from my family, I think an uncle, and the people in the Earth First! movement — their dreads, their cliches — they wouldn’t accept me.”

Steve LaBelle, a 30-something with close-cropped hair, sips his beer. He says he’s lived in Arcata and Eureka but now lives in McKinleyville. “Out of the three, I prefer McKinleyville,” he says. “When I went to school here in the 1990s, Arcata was so cool. The town has changed so much. It used to be real tolerant. Now, they still think they’re tolerant, the local people, but they’re not. They’re tolerant to the Plazoids on the square … who come here all high and mighty and welch off people with jobs.

“I just…nah, I don’t want to say anymore. I don’t want to sound like a redneck.”

Still, LaBelle says he’d recommend Arcata over Eureka, for living. “My friends are from SoCal. If they were going to move up here, they’d be coming here for clean air and trees. Not Fourth and Fifth Street.”

A couple of doors down, inside Everetts Club, 5 p.m. A moldering rank of wall-mounted ungulate heads guards the cool dark, and the late afternoon regulars, an older set of retired profs, shopkeeps and self-employed types, have assembled. Linda Puzz, co-owner of Everetts, gets right to the point: “Actually, I prefer McKinleyville,” she says. “Cleaner. No homeless.” She gestures toward the shut door, beyond which sunshine blazes this summer day, gently basting numerous pods of layabouts loafing raggedly with their backpacks on the plaza’s groomed lawn. “I don’t like this crap on the plaza,” Puzz says. “It’s not the Arcata I grew up in.”

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