Latte Da Coffeehouse

This place is gone now– but there’s an identical coffee house in its place.
Latte Da had poetry readings and other slightly crunchy cultural events. Its niche is now filled much more competantly by the nearby Zocalo Coffeehouse on Bancroft.

Yet another hella depressing (and now defunct) spot in San Leandro to awkwardly run into lame-o’s from San Leandro High.
This used to be the place where all the wannabe goths, drama kids, and fake skateboard punks would hang out while cutting class. They’d sip one large cup of coffee while trying to smoke a cigarette between the frizzy bangs of their faded kool-​aid purple and green hair and read long biographies or GED handbooks.
I once talked about nasty secretions as a result of anal sex next to the pile of game boards atop the piano, only to turn around and see my church pastor reading some mainstream non-​fiction about modern applications of Christianity (though of course my affair with that church ended soon after I gave a report on teenage anorexia in Sunday school).
Latte Da used to have a big schedule of over-​the-​hill synthesizer-​and-​sequins entertainers and hippie folksingers. It used to be kinda lively amongst the adults and the future dropouts. Then they started kicking out anyone under 16, and then they started to close at like 4 pm.
Now it’s just a derelict of a period in San Leandro when the ghetto and the elderly commiserated at nodes across the city, ushering in a new period of empty identity.