Ciss-Boom-Bar!

“I’m what you call a regular here,” blurted Chris Roth above the band. “I don’t pay cover, and I don’t wait in line.”

He didn’t turn 21 before starting to frequent his favorite bar, either.

“I’ve been coming here since I was 19--on a fake ID--and you can quote me,” Roth said.

Scores of Cal State Fullerton students such as Roth hang out at Fullerton’s Off Campus Pub. It’s their bar away from home, their bigger, louder, younger Cheers, just as “O’s” is for Chapman University students.

“You never hear anybody say O’Hara’s,” the full name of the taproom, said Chapman sophomore Sara Elizalde.

Some students get wistful or look aghast when asked where they party. Too much homework. No time, what with school and work.

But many more spend off-time each week among schoolmates, gravitating to the corner bar, coffeehouse or dance club, to talk shop (or anything but), catch the game, shoot pool, hit or be hit upon, or drink or dance academic cares away.

The lawn at Hope University has to be Orange County’s most unorthodox college hangout, but a crew of the school’s predominantly Christian population amasses there at least once a week after a Tuesday night worship hour, some relieving tension with talk until 3 a.m.

“Our [personal] life doesn’t even start until 11 p.m.,” said senior Mimi Lee.

Here’s where many of Orange County’s collegians head when the need for R&R; is too strong to ignore.

OFF CAMPUS PUB, FULLERTON:

A banner tacked above the dance floor reads “Welcome Back CSUF.” The team smiles in a photo from 1995, when the school won the College World Series, seem to shout “Titans rule!”

“That’s my buddy, Kevin the deejay,” pointed out senior Roth, one of the those, present and past, who help the Off Campus Pub earn its name, especially on Thursdays, when most collegians start the weekend.

“Seventy percent [of our clientele] is from Cal State Fullerton,” said bouncer Jason Duffaut, a Titan himself.

The imposing, sporty bar just across Nutwood Avenue from campus opened three years ago. It took its name from the school’s on-campus Pub, where students also congregate.

With music blasting and $1.50 beers ubiquitous, the boozing and cruising builds on Thursdays until elbow room evaporates. Jeans are tighter and voices louder than they need to be--it’s a scene that not everybody loves.

“Students need a place, like, where they can talk about issues [without shouting] above the loud music,” said Chris Long, an English major on his fourth beer. “Issues like politics, art--everything except for consumerism and all the things that are the plague of our society.” (“It’s called the library,” quipped friend Jadie Kadletz.)

Still, despite the occasional complaint, most are happy to have a watering hole nearby that supplies the school with a critical sense of community, said marketing major Scott Bergstein.

Only about 2% of the school’s 24,000 students live on campus, Bergstein said, while its fraternities and sororities suffer from lack of participation because so many students work.

So the Off Campus Pub “is the only place students can relate to with a school spirit,” he said.

O’HARA’S, ORANGE:

Just try to find anybody at O’Hara’s on a Thursday night who’s not a Chapman Panther. The scruffy, brick-lined bar has been a school institution for the 25 years since it opened, according to management and just about anybody else you ask.

“We still get some alumni who have been coming in since that first year,” said bartender Freda Easton.

Proximity is part of the draw.

“You can walk home drunk” instead of risking a DUI, said one regular who preferred anonymity.

A dozen fresh-faced students presided over a wooden table freighted with beer mugs and cheap aluminum ashtrays in the belly of the narrow saloon the other night. The cast changed frequently, as new arrivals slapped backs and plopped down and other friends took off.

As conversation careened from new jobs to condoms, the friends belted such kick-back anthems as Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” singing in unison along with the deejay’s selected cuts.

With about one-sixth the number of students as CSUF, and nearly a fourth of them living on campus, Chapman has a more closely knit student body. Several fraternity brothers wore identical white T-shirts bearing their house’s letters, something unseen at the Off Campus Pub.

“Friends of friends are just the same as friends,” said Elizalde, a business communications major who lives in the school’s dorms.

“It may not be the [fanciest] of bars,” she said, “but whatever goes on during the week, we can let it go. The point is we’re all together. We go out dancing, too, but you can’t talk as much.”

THE LAWN

Hope International U., Fullerton

Hope students “take it outside” when Dorm Devo, a worship hour held Tuesday nights in the men’s dorm, breaks at 11. That’s when quiet time begins and men and women are no longer permitted in each other’s quarters.

Bars and most dance clubs are out for Hope students because most don’t drink, and, by 11 p.m., many coffeehouses are closed.

That makes the lawn area outside the dorms, where nearly a third of the school’s 1,093 students live, “totally convenient,” said Leisel Clifford, a 17-year-old freshman.

“We just stand around and talk,” said Lee as about 100 students gathered recently beneath a full moon. Others sat to rap or study in clumps along a concrete walkway connecting the dorms with the school’s main buildings. Crickets and giggles were background music.

“We could be studying in our caves, but we’re out here instead,” said Cameron Smith, a youth ministry major, 22.

How late do people stay?

“It depends on how boring the day was,” said Peter Stanislow, playing bet-less five-card stud with Tanya Myers. “Sometimes till 3 in the morning.”

METROPOLIS

Irvine

Be caught dead at Metropolis? Helloooo . . .

Some UC Irvine students contend that the crowd at Metropolis, across the street from UCI in the University Center shopping center, is too young and that everybody tries so hard to be unique that they all wind up looking the same. They say they prefer the L.A. underground or bars for thirtysomethings in Newport Beach.

Yet, on a recent night before the fall semester resumed, Anteaters ravaged Metropolis’ dance floor.

“People say they don’t go,” said UCI senior Sasha Strauss, “but they do.”

Especially on Tuesdays. The recent raging crowd did tilt young--it’s an 18-and-over night--but no one balked at admitting school affiliation or admiration for one of Orange County’s most enduring urban-hip dance venues.

“This is the hottest place, it’s da bomb!” said senior Chris Brown, a member of the Anteaters volleyball team. “I come to get my groove on. There’s a lot of good-looking girls.”

With some 14,300 undergrads, only a third of them living on-campus, UCI, like Cal State Fullerton, lacks a certain fraternal intimacy. But when hundreds of bodies start writhing to the same, thudding beat beneath lights too low to permit self-consciousness, the 5-year-old Metropolis works its glue.

“You can all come together and just dance,” said theater major Charity Cescolini.