Going into orbit at the Saturn Cafe

I asked my companion what took him so long. He said he had to ask for a key to use the restroom. Apparently, since the last time I was at the Saturn Café up north in Santa Cruz, there had been some incident or problem concerning the restrooms. Perhaps not surprisingly, for when I was there one time several years ago, my attendant at the time couldn’t tell which restroom was for men and which was for women.
It is that kind of place.
The Saturn Café, which proudly and adamantly serves no meat and where you can order raw chocolate chip cookie dough and where a customer may well sport a sky-high mohawk as well as tattoos and piercings and I feel right at home shirtless in my hand-painted overalls, is open until 2 a.m and is the kind of place where, as happened when I was there last week, it took me almost an entire meal to realize that the couple in the next booth were two women and not two men. (At least I think you can still get raw chocolate chip cookie dough. Unfortunately, not only has the menu shrunk, the decor, like North Pacific Avenue which the restaurant is on, has gotten less funky over the years. Like all the tabletops are now the same.)
It is the kind of place where, when my companion and I arrived, a large party of what looked to be two or three families were looking over their menus and abruptly got up and left. As I heard the waiter explain to one of the waitresses, "They went out for meat." All this to a punk-rock soundtrack.
My companion kept teasing me, saying I was smitten with the waiter, that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The waiter wasn’t really my type, but I did enjoy the way he was totally out without being flaming. He had a button pinned to his little apron with a rainbow heart and saying "Support Marriage Equality." Very cute. But what I really liked - okay, maybe I was smitten! - was that he tried to understand what I was saying when I ordered. In fact, when I asked for a hot fudge sundae with coffee ice cream for dessert, he totally got it. Just like that.
(But as for liking the waiter, this was nothing. When I was last at the Saturn, the waiter was so adorable - all nerdy, with a touch of punk - that, after dinner, I went to a movie and then returned, supposedly for dessert. I’m so bad!)
The waiter was definitely not like the one a few days later in, of all places, Berkeley who just stared at me like a deer caught in the headlights when I ordered pancakes. And he certainly wasn’t like the one last year at Orphan Andy’s in the usually cool Castro who strutted around in the tightest of tight pink tee-shirts, pretended I wasn’t there and kept looking at my companion - the same one - like, "What are you doing with that?" Not "that man" or "that guy" - just "that."
That Miss Thing - he needed to get over himself and get a life!