Hurricane Cafe 2230 Seventh Ave, 682-5858

Never closes.

I went to high school longer ago than I care to mention, long enough ago that I remember sprinting home from the school bus in gleeful expectation, rushing to turn on the TV because word was that President Reagan had been shot.

Though the Reagan presidency is now, to my utter disbelief, further away in time than the Kennedy presidency was when I was in high school, I never have cause to feel old. I can always teleport back to my high-school days at the portal in the Denny Regrade neighborhood on Seventh Avenue between Denny Way and Blanchard Street. Serve me a chocolate malt and a bacon cheeseburger at the teenage hangout Hurricane Cafe, and for me it's as if Reagan was still stockpiling nukes, union busting the air-traffic controllers, and coining phrases like "welfare queen." (Too bad Hinckley wasn't a better shot.)

Call it arrested development or extended adolescence (or a midlife crisis), but when I'm at the Hurricane--with its bank of ringing pinball machines, 24-hour service, fellow diners in black EndFest Godsmack T-shirts, and a jukebox that's likely to be playing the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" or the Doors' "The End"--it's simply impossible not to feel like the angry teenage poet laureate that I once fancied myself. Those were the days when my intellectual cohorts and I herded ourselves into booths at our high-school hangout (the Tastee Diner in Bethesda, Maryland) to order plates of gravy-doused fries while discussing Reagan budget director David Stockman's trickle-down economics and our Socialist alternative.

What makes it even easier to relive those days at Seattle's decidedly teenage-poet-laureate-friendly Hurricane Cafe--in addition to the dubious convenience of Bushonomics' uncanny resemblance to Reaganomics--is that my old high-school pal Tom lives in Seattle. Given our dangerous predisposition for nostalgia (I will always be predisposed to reminiscing about the glorious day that Amy Crabtree forgot to wear a slip in the ninth grade), the Hurricane Cafe is for Tom and me just like Gatsby's seductive green light. How's that for an appropriate high-school English simile?

On our last outing to the Hurricane, Tom ordered a perfect dinner--a side of fries and a coke ($5)--and I got a Hurricane Burger and a chocolate malt ($13.40). With the exception of the weary science-teacher-looking guy evidently on chaperone duty, straggling in after a group of about 17 kids had shambled to some booths in the back, we were undoubtedly the oldest people in the room. The booth directly across from us was jammed with four kids on each side of the table who seemed oblivious to their crowded dining conditions. Two booths down, a loner girl with bright-red punk shocks of hair was writing in her composition notebook. Two booths in the other direction, a kid in a black AC/DC tank top was doodling black-ink goth sketches.

Tom and I got down to business. Looking something like those famous action portraits of Lyndon Johnson berating his Senate-floor colleagues, all leaning and lurching and flying hands, we settled in for a manic three hours (it's impossible to stay at the Hurricane for less than three hours), covering all urgent topics. At one point, during my lecture on Black Power, I believe, I caught the eye of the artist kid in the AC/DC shirt. I thought maybe I was disturbing him. He thought he was maybe disturbing me. As it turns out, nobody was bothering nobody. We were both simply caught up in our own self-induced worlds; when we simultaneously came up for air, I think we were startled to see that someone else was equally, and as happily, lost. I got back to my lecture. He got back to his drawing.

Somehow the artistic-teen set at the Hurricane doesn't leave me feeling old or out of place. After all, while I'm at the Hurricane playing teenager, the teenagers at the Hurricane, dragging on their cigarettes, moodily sipping coffee, all seem to be playing at being grown-up.