Summer, 2010. Bangor, Maine was on its way to becoming the bath salts capital of the United States. Quite a claim to fame for a small New England city that, until then, most people in the rest of the country had either never heard of or knew only as the place where horror writer Stephen King lived inside a red Victorian house set back from the street behind a black wrought iron gate fashioned in the shape of a pair of bat wings. That summer, like many other summers before it, out of state visitors could be seen standing in front of the famous bat-wing gate, smiling for posterity into cameras while marveling at the quaint New England visage of the neighborhood around them, its relatively quiet sidewalks, the similarly upscale, but far less decorous houses inhabited by their idol's neighbors, the surprising air of solitude hovering over the one street in the entire city that would ever have any real meaning for them. No idea that, only a few blocks away from that hallowed ground, and on other unknown streets on the other side of the city, there were horrors far more menacing than anything the renowned author had ever committed to the pages of a book. Strange, unfamiliar, as yet unnamed horrors, still forming, still stirring to life in the shadowed corners of neighborhoods that would soon become as famous as the one in which Stephen King resides, but for far more nefarious reasons, because the horrors taking shape there, unlike the wrought iron bat wings adorning Mr. King's endlessly photographed gate, were real. Real enough to destroy those who encountered them, whether that encounter occurred by choice, or simply--and unfortunately--by chance.
Like most cities, Bangor, Maine is divided into two sections, not only geographically, but socially, historically, and emotionally as well. For as long as I have lived in it, which has been on and off again for the last fifty three years, the east side of Bangor has always enjoyed the reputation of playing host to the majority of the city's middle and upper middle class neighborhoods where the histories of many of the houses and buildings can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Many of the residences of the city's long dead elite still stand, their graceful, grandiose cupolas and widowwalks evoking the imagery of the days when Bangor, Maine was a major stopping point for those who made their living from the logging trade. Many of these houses face the river, which, though no longer the most vital part of the local economy, still flows like life blood past the updated landscape, its silent, innocuous presence a reminder of Bangor's once semi-glorious past.
Remnents of Bangor's past still exist on the city's west side as well. Separated by the east side by several blocks of businesses, stores, and restaurants referred to by residents as "downtown", Bangor's west side has, with the exception of a few isolated streets such as West Broadway (home of the aforementioned bat gate), always been associated with the city's more humble neighborhoods, the ones known as "working class", although, in recent years the division between "working" and "middle" class has, as in most other cities and towns across the country, become blurred by economic hardship and the erosion of the social attitudes that marked previous centuries. As a child growing up on the east side of Bangor, I, like many of my peers, considered the west side to be somewhat "foreign ground", where we might go to attend church or to visit friends and relatives, but a place that existed outside of our everyday reality of our own localized existence. One way in which we mentally separated the two sides of Bangor was by the names of their best known streets and neighborhoods.
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, we, the youthful denizens of Bangor's east side, made frequent references to "Little City", a conglomoration of streets near the interstate and the city's so-called "miracle mile" which was characterized by its large Jewish population, many members of which also happened to be the movers and shakers of the city's business community, the owners of such well-known stores as Viner's Music, Miller Drug, and ----. A few blocks over from "Little City" was a neighborhood known as "The Bangor Gardens", or, in our everyday used vernacular, "The Gardens", whose residents lived in neat, white, pastel-trimmed houses fronted by meticulously tended squares of lawn decorated with the now classic lawn ornaments of the time--plastic duck families, donkeys and carts, colored gazing balls, and, of course, pink flamingos. These were the abodes of the east side's working class, or, to appropriate a more technical term, its "high proles", who made their living as well-paid employees of one of Bangor's several factories, the most prominent of which was Striar Shoes. The men and women who kowtowed to their betters during the week, but on weekends, assumed mastery of their own unwavering fates and drove their shiny, mid-priced cars to the Chuck Wagon, Bangor's premier steakhouse, readily identifiable by the plastic steer on its roof, or to the shopping center on Broadway, where they bought new shoes for their kids (the kind that come in pairs connected by a plastic cord) and ogled the latest color TV sets, wondering which one would look best sitting opposite the La-Z-Boy armchair lounger that dominated their shag-carpeted living room.
And then there were the "tree streets", which was what we east side inhabitants called the several blocks of pavements that sliced through the main thoroughfares of Stillwater Avenue, Mt. Hope Avenue, and Garland Street. They were all grouped together, as though whoever had named them had been too unimaginative to come up with anything more than a perfunctory allusion to the ubiquitous elements of nature. Grove Street, Elm Street, Maple Street, Birch Street, Fern Street, Fruit Street, and Palm Street were the names emblazoned on the green signs which marked them as a specific neighborhood characterized by the now nearly extinct accourtements of the city's "middle class." Streets where doctors and businessmen came home at night to stylishly-attired, bouffant-sporting wives who cooked dinner on avacado-colored ranges and well-scrubbed progency whose last names were synonymous with popularity and peer acceptance in the local schools. In Bangor, in the nineteen sixties and seventies, on any given day, it was a safe bet that there was at least one house on every single tree street where a highschool cheerleader or basketball star was debating what to wear to that Friday night's dance or pondering their chances of "kifing" a bottle of Seagrams 7 or V.O. whiskey from their parents' liquor cabinet without getting caught.
On the west side of Bangor, there was a similar hiearchy of neighborhoods, but that didn't concern those of us who lived on the east side. We had our tree streets, the west side had its "number streets", starting with First Street and, with a few lapses, going all the way up to Fourteenth Street, where the elementary and junior high schools were located. Like the division between East and West Berlin, the one between the two sides of Bangor was perpetuated by an artificial sense of rivalry, yet one strong enough to elicit disparaging remarks directed toward the occasional ship jumpers who dared take up with members of the opposing side. The rancor between the Montagues and Capalets had nothing on the collective wrath visited upon the junior high school girl from the tree streets who dared offer her cherry-glossed lips to a boy from the streets identified by numbers. Until, that is...high school. Bangor has two high schools---John Bapst, which was, until recently, a parochial school, and Bangor High School, whose students streamed through its doors en masse from all four corners of the community. By the time my friends and I entered Bangor High School, the chasm between east and west was tempered by a more universal atmosphere of school spirit. That, and the even stronger sense of connection that came from the shared angst of adolescence itself. Grades, body image, and peer pressure were our concerns, and they were not indigenous to a specific side of the city. West side boys brought pot to east side parties and offered hits to all comers, east side girls sneaked out of their houses at night to let their west side boyfriends fondle their breasts in darkened living rooms while their parents danced and sipped cocktails at one another's dinner parties. By the time I graduated from high school and fled to England for a two year sabbatical from what I had come to consider the suffocating sameness of life in a small northeastern city, all that remained of the east side versus west side rivalries were the memories of having grown up with them. And much later, long after I had returned to a city where the landscape had not only changed with time, but had reinvented itself in almost every way possible, those rivalries were not only forgotten but had been forever replaced by a disconcerting alliance that came from a shadowy source far beyond Bangor's borders, but which, having come, had embedded itself so deeply into the city's fabric that it was impossible to undo the threads. The newspapers and TV reporters referred to it as "bath salts." The people who lived on the tree streets and their counterparts on the streets marked by numbers had their own name for it. They called it "monkey dust."
To be continued...
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