I’m pretty sure Jim Bennett hates me. It just figures. We finally get a rock and roll city administrator and the man thinks I’m scum. I hear he’s looking into the feasibility of building a stockade to clamp me in for public ridicule.

You can’t blame him, really. For a few years now, I’ve been writing almost exclusively about the seamy side of Lewiston. Hookers here, drug dealers there. I’ve raved on about grim, downtown alleys and sinister deeds and dank places.

Lewiston through my eyes has been a nasty place of decadence and debauchery. When I go strolling, I don’t see freshly planted flowers and water from fountains gleaming in the sun. Oh, no, sir. I avert my eyes at those sites.

I see huddles of hoodlums mulling their mischief. I see crack-crazed miscreants cultivating crime. My gaze floats over the goodness and cheer of the city to embrace what is vile and ungodly.

It’s my nature, you know. I hunt for pockets of evil out of some innate fascination with darkness. With my pen, I try to cut from that darkness and make it do my bidding. It’s the dusty and dismal of Lewiston that enthralls me, not the green and grassy.

It’s no wonder Mr. Bennett would like to see me tarred and feathered and then blasted out of a cannon.

I see the two of us as characters from a comic book. He is the dashing, bold hero with the cape, the broad smile and sunshine glowing over him. I am the skulking, bat-like character who lives in a bog. Beaming Bennett rips down a tenement and puts up a fountain. Lurid LaFlamme swiftly finds filth in a nearby corridor. The battle goes on and on.

A good villain knows when he’s getting whooped, though. The hero Bennett came to town and so far, he has conquered.

Where once were high rows of buildings crawling with crime are now squat, efficient buildings brightly lit and uncontaminated. Where junkies did their junk and hookers did their hooking, now sprawls a park with benches and etched stone.

Crime has dropped as swiftly as some of the unsightly tenements I so adored. People talk about the new hockey team in town rather than new gangs of thugs from lower New England.

Bennett has seen plans through to the end and in doing so, has killed many shadows.

The hate rally in the winter of 2003, for instance. Thousands were coming to the city to spew anger and hatred. Hordes of radicals would be clustered with swarms of people of wildly opposing views. It was a showdown watched by the eye of national news.

I expected violent clashes. There would be citywide chaos and mayhem spinning out of control.

Bennett, back then, promised that with his police force, violence would not be allowed to rise. The unwanted rally would be contained and controlled. The streets of Lewiston would remain peaceful.

Nobody really believed Bold Bennett. Least of all, Lascivious LaFlamme. I was ready that morning for an eruption of calamity not unlike warfare. I put some sturdy boots on. I dressed warm and prepared for the bumps and bruises I would later wear like trophies.

What I got was an earful of screaming and near frostbite on my fingers and toes. Bennett and his army didn’t so much extinguish a fire as prevent any spark from flying at all.

The man fascinates me. He came to the city and promised big things, just like leaders before him. I snickered at his plans for gateways to the city and twirled my fingers in circles around my temples. Then bulldozers and cranes were out on Lincoln Street and buildings were falling to the Earth.

I cackled at his brainstorm to bring semi-pro hockey back to the city and then I was getting hugged by a giant Maineiac named Lewy. Suddenly, the broken-down arena that spooked me as a kid is all prettied up and has a fancy new name. Bennett keeps talking and things keep happening.

It’s not his work alone, of course. Countless others have conspired with him to cast sunlight on the city.

But Bennett’s reign in Lewiston has been marked consistently by achievement and that spells trouble for those who reign in the bleakest corners of the city. I blame him for my eventual undoing.

And now there’s talk of a grand plan to beautify all the old mill buildings around the city and fill them full of shiny, happy people. Hotels, motels, places of magic and wonder. I picture elves playing trumpets and fairies floating around toadstools.

What about the rats, I ask you? What about the spiders and shadows and cobwebs? What about those dim, dank places that have not seen light in more than a hundred years? What about the late-beat reporters who require dark places in which to lurk?

Ah, it’s over for me now. Light shines on the city more and more, and there are fewer places to hide. Van Bennett the vampire-slayer bests Count Markula in a game of good versus wretched. Oh, the scars of ancient battle! Oh, the despair!

Oh, the lower back pain from moving my coffin night after night.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.