The day I turned 18, my friends did the kind of thing friends will do at that age. They got me drunk, stuffed me in the back seat of a car and hit the road.

I had no idea where they were taking me. We drove over back roads and cut over to the highway. We were headed north, but navigational skills had left me.

An hour later, we drove down a road I’d never seen in a city I seldom visited. We pulled up in front of a giant, Victorian home with an ominous, black fence. Bats with raised wings loomed. Spider webs of iron stretched across the front lawn.

Recognition dawned.

It was the big man’s house. The master’s house. The King of Horror lived and worked here, beyond the great fence and blood-red walls.

As far as celebrities go, I’m hard to impress. I’m not awed by fame and the glitter of stardom tends to bore me.

Greatness is another matter.

In front of Stephen King’s house the day I turned 18, I was a mess. My mouth hung open. Wide eyes stared. I slumped in the back seat, gawking at the immense house like a child staring at a magical palace.

“Happy birthday, bro,” one of my friends said.

A bunch of them dragged me out of the car like a scarecrow. We were borderline trespassing at that point. We gaped from the side of the street as if we were outside a public monument.

My stupor gone, I began poking around the front yard, looking for a stick to take home as a souvenir. I found one that looked a bit like a skeletal finger and picked it up. Sucker would look great next to my writing desk at home.

A car pulled up next to the ghoul-haunted gate – a Mercedes, I think. A giant of a man got out of the car and approached us. A tall man with thick glasses and a goofy grin. I think I may have tried to flee at that point, but my buddies grabbed me.

Stephen King wandered over and chatted with us at the front of his house. Someone told him I was a big fan and that I’d just turned 18. King put his arm around my shoulder and said: “Good. Now you can start paying taxes like the rest of us.”

I believe I responded by saying: “Verymuchbigfanthankyou.”

I was incredibly eloquent, even as a teen.

But enough about me and my hero worship. The point I was getting around to is King’s frequent use of Lewiston as a cameo city in his fiction.

Lewiston is threaded all through King’s novels and screenplays. And why not? It’s an enchanted city in a singular, dark way. With its weird architecture, gritty streets and blocks of empty mills, it’s easy to believe in kid-eating clowns who live in the sewers.

Stare up at the immense, glowing steeples on the edge of downtown some night, and you might see flying monkeys right out of Oz swooping in crazy circles.

Lewiston is vibrant and growing in places, but tired and old in others. The mills look like abandoned castles with the dark canal as a moat. There are stretches of empty land along the river where trolls should live. There are crumbling, doomed buildings where people should not.

Long before I moved here, I thought of Lewiston as a sort of mystical place. Not gleaming and wonderful, but brooding and mysterious. I think of it as a living and breathing thing, like a coiled serpent.

Lewiston has achieved a level of notoriety well beyond the borders of the state and much of it is unwarranted. The city may not deserve its reputation as a decadent place where vice reigns and madmen commit atrocities almost routinely.

Lewiston is not the fictional town of Derry. It is not a place where heinous events are so commonplace that residents no longer notice the corruption and horror. I know this because my editors freak out over minor car crashes and purse snatchings.

But for uniqueness and character, the city is rich. For sheer personality, it ranks up there with any make-believe town, including Castle Rock.

So, now we have the TV mini-series “Kingdom Hospital.” Lewiston is home to a haunted hospital with King-inspired terror within. The faux Maine accents will be comical, but there will be screams and probably things that slither. It’s got my attention. King horror with a Lewiston backdrop. What could be better?

I’ll tell you what could be better. What those Hollywood script writers need to do is cast some local talent. A young reporter with a penchant for night roaming, say. Some over-eager lad with a hyperactive imagination.

Yeah. And I’m just the guy. I even have my lines prepared. When casting time comes, I won’t need any cue cards. I’ll just tell them, with a polished delivery: “Verymuchbigfanthankyou.”

I’ll be signing autographs later.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.