All I wanted to do was eat my steak and three-cheese tortellini.
It was a London broil, I believe, seasoned with garlic and grilled to a just barely warm center. I imagine it was delicious. I don’t know for sure because, as it did most nights during that period, the police scanner began to howl as midnight gave way to last call.
Another brawl at another Lewiston nightclub. Fists were flying. Bodies were falling. Tasers were sparkling in so many corners of the parking lot, it looked like a Tesla experiment out there.
Noses were bloodied. Faces were clawed. Combatants were shoveled into the back of police cruisers and taken to jail to sleep it off.
It might have been The Tunnel that night, or Rock’n Robin or The Blue Elephant. I don’t recall. By that point, all of the drunken club brawls had started to look the same.
In the early part of the past decade, nightclub brawls in Lewiston was a bona fide thing, to the point where city leaders clutched at their pearls and fretted about it. Something had to be done. We couldn’t have young people pounding on each other night after night and hardworking reporters missing their dinners.
I don’t know what the city leaders did about the club fight phenomenon, but it worked like magic. Over a couple of summers, you could count on a pair of club-clearing brawls each week and then it stopped happening altogether. Peace reigned. The clubs quietly closed their doors and the drinkers found quieter things to do. Club brawls were no longer a thing.
Which really makes things easier for me at dinnertime, but now I have to watch NHL hockey to get that kind of action.
• Imagine my delight. I had just returned from a year in Virginia and got back in Lewiston, just as the rave culture was spreading like a jailhouse flu across the region.
At various locations around the area, young people with glow sticks and designer drugs were gathering to get their groove on to the pulsing beat of weird electronic music. It was far-out and groovy and I couldn’t wait to get involved in the hedonistic milieu.
On Friday nights in Lewiston, the civic center on Birch Street seemed electrified as turned-on, tuned-out ravers danced with floppy abandon under strobe lights that seemed to turn everyone into a whirling shaman. Glowing, indefatigable thrill-seekers danced and thrashed and partied with abandon as the rest of the city slept around them. There was nakedness, there was love and there was exploration.
And there was fretting.
Parents, teachers and city leaders began clutching at their pearls again like the old folks in “Dirty Dancing.” Police spokesmen with strategic frowns began talking about the many risks of the rave culture: the LSD, the mushrooms, the ecstasy. The risk of overdose, violence and unwanted pregnancy. Clearly something had to be done.
The rave culture was a rising tide one day, completely forgotten the next. Which was a real bummer for me since I’d bought that case of glow sticks and that tub of body paint.
• On a sweltering summer night in downtown Lewiston, a photographer and I hunkered down in an abandoned apartment to watch the action outside.
Young men with hard faces walked muscular dogs along the sidewalks. They threw elaborate hand signs at their cohorts, and now and then money would be exchanged for small packages of powder, rock or leaf.
They wore precise colors, sported sinister tattoos and defended their little corner of heaven like an organized army. That was the theory, anyway.
Gangs were making inroads into Lewiston, the experts cautioned us in breathless tones — ultra-violent groups of organized thugs with names like The Folk, The Latin Kings, the Crips and Bloods.
There was a period when every act of mischief and every drug deal gone bad was blamed on gangs. Home invasion in Little Canada? Gangs. Get used to it. Beat-down outside the high school? That’s gang action, bro. Before you know it, all of our young people will be swept up into it and it will be daily warfare in the hood: drive-by shootings, initiation beatings and wholesale slaughter like you read about.
Gangs, I tell you! But, nope. While we do get our share of gang bangers from along the New England crack pipeline, they’re mostly here to rest up and hide out. The last time I heard of any significant gang activity in Lewiston, I was a single man with absolutely no gray in my beard, living in an apartment over a pizza joint.
• For a period of about six months, the eclectic gang of freelance news chasers appeared to be on the cutting edge of technology. All across Lewiston, you’d see them on the streets with their fancy walkie talkies, a ragtag network of information gatherers whose sole purpose was to share information about the city’s crime and mischief.
The Walkie Talkie Club was all-inclusive. You’d see young men sprinting across Kennedy Park, radio pressed to their lips, to report the grisly details of a Knox Street apartment fire. You’d see an old woman on a bicycle racing toward Main Street to gather up news on a car wreck to be shared over the airwaves.
Teens, mothers, fathers, a few homeless men and others made up this weirdly efficient squad of street reporters who prowled the city at all hours. The only criterion for membership was something you could buy at Radio Shack for $30 or at Wal-Mart for $10.
Alas, as energetic and committed as they were, the Walkie Talkie Club’s timing couldn’t have been worse. The age of ubiquitous cellphones was upon us and social media was about to explode. Why bother screaming into a radio to share with a few when it can be jotted down and shared with the whole world through the magic of Facebook or Twitter?
Personally, I miss those folks. They made me work harder because I did NOT want some Bearcat nerd on a bicycle beating me to the crime scene.
• Panhandlers. Oh, sure we still have them. But they don’t stand around outside a store and hit you up for change anymore. Nowadays, panhandlers create fancy signs with elaborate stories and stand in one spot all day where they wait for you to hand over a buck or two. It’s like they all got together one day and agreed to try a different tactic. Pretty effective, too. I’m a sucker for a cardboard sign with a sad story.
• Splishing and splashing in the Androscoggin River. Seems like back in the day, people were always falling or jumping into the river and then needing to be plucked out. What happened to that? Did they put up a sign, a la Lake Auburn, wherein they threatened to fine, imprison and publicly humiliate anyone who so much as looked at the water wrong?
And most significant of all, general freakiness just doesn’t happen here anymore. Remember when bizarre stuff would go down in Lewiston and we’d all hide our faces in shame (tinged with a perverse sense of pride) as the national media picked up the story and made a spectacle of our dirty laundry?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — Lewiston lost its unique flavor when they changed the turnpike exit number from 13 to whatever it is now. We need to protest in the streets until they change it back.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer and definitely still a thing. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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