The young man in the shopping cart appeared to be comfortably asleep. He had a big puffy coat for a pillow and his legs hung neatly over the side. He was parked just outside the door at T. Woody’s bar in the Concourse, where even curious alley cats paid him no attention.

I made a quick notation in my notebook and moved on.

It was Waterville in the early 1990s. I used to walk around the city, observing things in and around the downtown until morning came to shoo away the night.

A drunk couple having a shrieking argument outside The Chez, their 1980s-leftover hair bouncing up and down to punctuate their arguments.

A muttering man with a screwdriver, carving his initials into a telephone pole in front of The Bob-In on Temple Street.

A weird coupling beneath the Two-Cent Bridge that I still don’t fully understand all these years later.

Waterville had character back in the day, but only small doses of it. It had a share of crime, too, but it was predictable crime — stuff you’d yawn over while reading the details in the Morning Sentinel.

Then I moved to Lewiston and people said, “Hoo, baby. You don’t want to be walking around Loyston like you do around here. You got real freaks down there in Loyston. That place is crazy, yo.”

In 1994, they were absolutely right. The only thing predictable about Lewiston in the mid-1990s is that you couldn’t predict a thing. Everything that happened in the city back then happened loud.

Teenagers slashing the throat of a cab driver. Young people in poorly organized gangs, breaking into the homes of the elderly and tying them to chairs. A wandering serial killer prowling the motels in search of new victims.

You had Dominican drug dealers gone wild, bullets flying at all hours and home invasions practically by the hour. Everything that happened in this beleaguered city seemed like made-for-TV drama — and my, how people talked.

Not just local people, either. Lewiston’s reputation spanned the country, thanks in part to a national media that at times seemed fascinated by our singular brand of mayhem. If someone were to mention heinous crime in Maine, the natural assumption was that it happened in Lewiston. And most of the time, that was right on the money.

It was all happening here, you know.

Now, deep into the new millennium, that reputation remains, but by and large, it’s backed by nothing at all. Lewiston, in comparison to the old days, is a sleepy little hamlet, still rich in character but running low on drama. If you want city drama in Maine these days, you’ll have a better chance of finding it in Waterville.

Oh, the irony.

Last week, several people sent me links to a story about a pair of women who held a knife to a man’s throat while they ransacked his apartment in search of drugs. The story came complete with a photograph of a bloodied woman heaped in the corner of a cinder-block room.

It’s classic crime drama and it happened in Waterville. It happened, in fact, inside the apartment house that once served as my home base as I wandered the city in search of things with which to fill my notebook.

Waterville has really stepped up its game. It took a little longer than Lewiston to discover crack cocaine, but once it did, that city on the Kennebec River found those rocks tasty. Now it has discovered heroin, too, and methamphetamine and all the things associated with the dope trade: massage parlors, prostitution, home invasions and unpredictable forms of made-for-TV drama.

Is Waterville the new Lewiston? Could be. It will take a few years to see if the nasty reputation migrates north. Down here, police and city leaders will be happy to take credit for the lifting of the Lewiston curse. And maybe they did have something to do with it.

Me, I’ll associate the exorcism of those Lewiston demons with the turnpike people — the very day they changed our exit number from 13 to something less ominous, Lewiston became a kinder, gentler city, while the place I used to call home began running wild.

Oh, the irony.

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