The gray-haired woman shuffled back and forth between the parking lot and the supermarket doors. She moved with some difficulty, yet she never paused to rest. Back and forth she went, peering into abandoned shopping carts along the way and into the shadows that formed as night deepened. “What am I going to do?” she […]
Mark LaFlamme
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Talk of the town: Boogie fever
Night fever On a rainy Friday night in Lewiston, an irritated caller reported to police that there was a disco party happening downtown. A disco party! Cops hustled over to the brick house far out on Shawmut Street but there was, like, nobody there. You dig? One bright day in the middle of the night […]
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Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
River Rescue: Trying like hell for the happy ending
The man standing high atop the banks of the roaring Androscoggin River had a lot of questions and a lot of complaints. He stood with arms crossed near the edge of Riverside Drive, his face aglow with the red emergency lights that blazed all around. He scowled and shook his head in anger and disgust. […]
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
Street Talk: The casket, the keg and Lynyrd Skynyrd
Rusty was always specific when it came to funeral planning. “Man,” he’d say, whenever the topic of mortality arose at the midnight end of a pit party — which was like, always. “When I go, screw the flowers and all of that sad stuff. Put a keg on the lower lid of my casket and […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
How about some sympathy for the column writer?
Red faced Got a message from a nice lady who enjoyed my Wednesday column “Sympathy for the Dope Sick.” Such gushing praise. It went like this: “I usually can’t even make it halfway through your columns. They’re silly, stupid and they don’t make any sense. Not good. But this one was.” Aww. I’m blushing. You […]
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
Street Talk: Sympathy for the dope sick
The aching is intense and it is everywhere. It’s there in your legs, humming like a million angry volts. It’s in your back, too, a constant band of pain you can’t put out of your mind for even a few seconds. It’s hard to say which is worse, the roaring ache in your bones or […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
The runaway hair and other capers
Tell it like it is Heard a police call the other night during which some downtown ne’er-do-well was reported to be acting strangely in the narrow dark between tenement buildings. The first cop to arrive in the area totally dispensed with the legal mumbo jumbo and tedious 10 codes and reported that the shady suspect […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
The weeping 12-year-old is fine. Probably.
It was just after midnight on a drizzling, cold and miserable Friday night in Lewiston. The call came in after a long period of silence over the police scanner. Somewhere on College Street, a boy of 11 or 12 had been spotted barefoot, coatless and weeping on a cold, wet sidewalk. There was nothing frantic […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
We're going to need a bigger boat
April showers The last time I complained about dreary, wet, gloomy, lousy, rotten, vaguely fish-smelling April weather, the day the column ran it was sunny bright and T-shirt warm. Clearly, I have powers you mortals can’t even comprehend. You don’t even know, man. So in hopes of sparking another warm, sunny weekend for us all, […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
These are the words they don't want you to read
For many years now, I’ve had great fun inserting certain words into my news stories and columns in order to make an editor’s head pop off. Great fun, I say. On a quiet day, you can actually hear the delicious sound of cranial detachment as the editor in question stumbles upon the verboten word. POP, […]