The Screaming Room

Follow me....

2006-03-28T13:50:00.000-05:00

To http://marklaflamme.wordpress.com/

The end of the world as we know it

2006-03-25T23:10:00.000-05:00

Welcome Street Talkers. If any of you are left roaming the charred ruins of the Lost Sole, you can find safety and comfort here. All that is left of our old home is a mushroom cloud over a blackened pit in the earth. They blew us up, man. Blew us to smithereens.

For fear that no one will find this place, I'll keep it short. But should one of you wander by, drop a line and we'll get things started. There is much to discuss. There is rebuilding. There is repopulating our society. There is seeking retribution of the loathsome one who caused this apocalypse. Yes, there is much to discuss.

I've gotta get moving. There are noises outside and you can't trust that everyone is friendly around here. It's a savage new world we exist in. We've got to be careful.

The Hills Have Yawns

2006-03-18T16:48:00.000-05:00

A family stranded in the desert, surrounded by cannibalistic mutants left over from the Atomic Age. Spooky desert nights and hideous things that lurk in the dark. The claustrophobic confines of a mobile home in dramatic contrast with the vastness of the New Mexico desert. These are the makings of one hell of a chilling movie.

Unfortunately, the hills may have eyes, but the biggest challenge for you will be keeping your own open while this predictable yawner rolls on for two hours. It's not that the movie is bad. It's just no friggin' good. If you've seen just a few classic horror movies in your time, you will predict each new scene before it arrives. This is a formulated script written according to a tired cinematic playbook.

Sometimes glaringly, sometimes not, Hills is a composite of several older movies. The theme and many of the scenes flagrantly rip off the more disturbing "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." The setting is reminiscent of a lesser known but infinitely creepier movie titled "Race With the Devil" from the 1970's. Save your $7.50, skip this one, and rent one of those earlier flicks. Or get your hands on an episode of the X-Files called "Home." In one hour, the X-Files creators deftly present a truly unnerving look at genetic freaks and the disturbing dynamics of their society. You will remember it a long time. With "The Hills Have Eyes," you will forget the movie and all of the characters ten minutes after you walk out of the theater.

Like the original 1977 version, Hills of 2006 tries to sneak in a few political messages about the consequences of government testing in the Cold War era. Politics and horror sometimes pair up well, but not here. The message is as weak as the back story of the atomic freaks, whom you never get to know very well. Should we sympathize with them at all? Feel guilty about our own history as Americans? Nah, screw 'em. Pitchfork right between the eyes!

A few saving graces: pay close attention the role of the father in the movie. Roughly twenty minutes in, I recognized his voice. It's Ted Levine, the troubling, twisted serial killer Jaime Gumb from "Silence of the Lambs." Sadly, he doesn't plant anyone in a deep hole and insist that they rub the lotion on it's skin.

Also, there is some superb acting in the movie. None by a star listed in the credits, however. The only award caliber dramatics in this clunker comes from a German Shepherd, whom the producers do not use nearly enough.

"The Hills Have Eyes" has roughly 30 minutes of fun in the form of gratuitous violence and a fair share of gore. If you're hankering for an old-fashioned stake burning, you will find one here. Otherwise, the reality of the Atomic Age is far scarier than anything shown in this movie. In fact, the biggest failure of all in this film is that they show too much. They should have stuck with the strange noises from the desert night and left the rest to the imagination.

Life, at last

2006-03-10T01:21:00.000-05:00

Imagine my surprise. I was about to switch off the evening news when Flamette said: "You might want to keep that on. They've been teasing to a story about water discovered somewhere in the solar system."

Many of you know me well. But not that well. Few of you know how passionate I am about all things cosmic. The discovery of liquid water anywhere in the universe would cause me to take off my pants, light firecrackers, and then quickly realize the dangers associated with lighting firecrackers without pants on.

Why was this not the lead story on CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, FBI, PDQ, WTF and all the affiliated stations when NASA pointed announced their possible find? Why is it not on the front page of the paper today? Liquid water found on another planet or moon will almost certainly indicate life other than us in our solar system. If alternative life is found in this puny little solar system, then it almost certainly abounds throughout the universe.

Imagine it. We are not alone. The world is full of beings and creatures we have not even imagined. Everything you thought you knew about life, death, religion or science is about to change. Is there a God? Did he create it all, or just us? And if you believe in God, do you believe in multiple gods, one for each population of critters throughout all of space? Explain here in 100 words or less.

It's a joyous thing to imagine that, within our lifetimes, scientists might come forth with conclusive evidence that life exists out there. That the stars aren't just twinkling, dead things to be admired by poets and lovers. I've made arrangements to live 900 years just to be sure I'll be around for that day. But I wonder if it will be front page news, even then. LIFE DISCOVERED ON TITAN on page A-17. VICE PRESIDENT SHOOTS SEAHAWKS MASCOT IN FACE on A-1.

I'm a total science geek. I'll admit that now. Just the hint of this possible news from NASA provoked me in a way nothing in sports, politics, music or Hollywood ever could. Maybe water. Maybe life.

Possible water found on one of Saturn's moons is huuuuuuge news, people. Join me. Take your pants off. Light some firecrackers. Get some bandages and have your wife drive you to the emergency room. Apply balm as needed.

Brushes with greatness

2006-03-08T21:45:00.000-05:00

My brother still talks about the time he ran into former Gov. Michael Dukakis in downtown Boston. This brush with greatness was so profound, he alerted friends he had not seen or spoken to in years. He told the story with wild gesticulations, even if he happened to be on the phone.

As time went by, more details clung to the story like lint to a new sweater. Minute details of the conversation were recalled and shared. My brother told of meeting the one-time presidential candidate as though the two of them were old friends who had met for many drinks.

The poor, wide-eyed schlep. It was the same when we met John Travolta back in the '70s. And when we met Donny Most from "Happy Days" fame. It was life-changing fate for my brother when we got a few minutes to talk to Ron Palillo, the wormy guy who played Horshack on "Welcome Back, Kotter."

And when relief-pitching great Dennis Eckersley nearly mowed my brother and me down outside Fenway Park, well ... that's a story to be unleashed at just the right moment of a party.

My brother will tell complete strangers about the impromptu conversation we had with the Eck. I'll nod a lot and back up his every word. But what I remember most about the incident was that the hurler was running across the street toward the ballpark and almost ran right over us. I remember the conversation going like this:

Eckersley: "Sorry about that, guys."

Us: "Quite all right."

Celebrities don't do much for me. If the stars in the Hollywood tabloids jumped from the pages in a grocery store line, I would have no other reaction than to check to see if they had 10 items or less. No, really.

OK, I'll admit it. There are a few megastars who might make me stutter. I'd probably stammer a bit if I came face-to-face with Robert DeNiro, because I'd be trying to muster the courage to call him Bob. Martin Scorsese might set me back a few minutes, but I'd regain my voice soon enough. These are just people. They get colds, dandruff, skin eruptions and embarrassing stomach disorders just like everyone else. No reason to fan yourself and swoon.

I know what you're thinking: that I'm lying because you recall the piece I wrote about my first meeting with Stephen King. You remember that I described the first word I uttered to the great one as something like: "verymuchbigfanthankyou."

I will ask you to stop your snickering. It was a big moment for me. It's one thing to run into simple celebrity. Greatness is a different matter altogether.

So you can imagine my distress when I was asked to sign a copy of my novel for Mr. King. You can imagine the word-evaporating horror at trying to muster just a few simple lines to impress a longtime hero.

Not that the big man was anywhere in sight, mind you. No, I was at the Book Burrow in Auburn and the owner of the place asked for the signature so she could send King a copy later. I'm not telling you what I wrote, because I know how you are.

I've decided there are two kinds of people: those who regard the famous as godlike creatures worthy of all the hysteria, and those who have deduced that even the most esteemed celebrities are still made of flesh and bone. I am of the latter group, those temporary lapses notwithstanding.

And yet, I'm willing to wager that even the steeliest, most cynical people have one or two heroes capable of striking them dumb. If you're an airline buff, it might be Chuck Yeager. If you're a geek, it's probably Bill Gates. If you golf more than twice a week and wish you could do it more, an introduction to Tiger Woods might give you goose bumps.

My brother is easy. Michael Dukakis made his day, and how many people can say that? Frankly, I'm glad it wasn't Bruce Springsteen or Joe Torre he encountered that sunny, warm day in Boston. Either of those guys might have done him in for good.

Video killed the radio star

2006-02-22T14:08:00.000-05:00

I have no idea if this will work. Last week, I was asked to do a radio inverview with our local CNN affiliate. Flattering. But here's my problem. I write because I don't like to speak much. When speaking in a formal way, I tend to carry on with the speed of a bullet train. I proceed in a blur of words. There are no stops and starts to my speech, just one long sentence that might go on for minutes. Those of you who have suffered through conversation with me tend to just nod and pretend you understand completely. I know it, man.

Here is the first part of the radio interview, which ran yesterday and this morning. The only question you will have at the end of it is: what?

Lewiston: Life on the streets

2006-02-20T22:40:00.000-05:00

The name's LaFlamme. Mark LaFlamme. I have two shots in me. One is lead, the other, bourbon. Yeah, that's me. I'm a crime reporter. It says so on my door.

For no good reason, I've decided to keep a nightly record of the action on the crime beat. Maybe there will be great big lessons to be gleaned from the mischief and mayhem in downtown Lewiston, Maine. Maybe it will be just an excuse for me to post some of the ugly photos I tend to get down in the hood.

Lewiston, in case you wonder, is the substance abuse capital of the state. Crack and booze is what we like, though there are pockets of heroin and meth.

Lewiston is also the most racially diverse city and arguably, home to some of the dumbest crooks. Not everything I see out there warrants a story in the pages of the Sun Journal. Some of it belongs in the funny papers.

Today is Monday, Feb. 20. It's 17 damn degrees outside.

A four-year-old boy was killed today after flames spread through an apartment house in downtown Lewiston. Many others were trapped on upper floors. Rescues were dramatic.

A story like that tends to galvanize this city. It's what people are talking about in corner stores. Even punks on the street acknowledge the gravity of such a thing. They stand around the burned house looking solemn for a few minutes before getting back to the tough poses a few blocks away.

The newspaper reporters and the TV crews scramble to get an edge. We look for grieving relatives, survivors with stories to tell, any angle that will put us a nose ahead of the competition. It's journalism at its finest, and its ugliest.

By the time it was over, we had two solid stories and a sidebar ready for tomorrow's paper. I was done wrapping up loose ends early in the evening and I began scrounging for other news. Among the most reliable facts about the news business is this: no matter how big or how tragic the day's news has been, it won't stop other news from happening.

Sadly, there were few diversions out in the hood as the night progressed. Just for kicks, I responded to a few scanner calls that sounded as though they might provide entertainment.

"Units, respond to Oak and Union for a report of 15-20 males with a stick and threatening to beat another person with it."

You just can't go wrong with a stick beating. There's just something very tribal about a group of screaming men battering at another with a fence post or club. There's also something very piñata about it, but I'll spare you that image.

Anyway, on Oak Street, there was some variation of the report that came over the scanner. I found eight or nine guys getting patted down by cops. Most of them wore those gigantic, puffy coats that remind me of cheesy spacemen in the old 50's movies. One skinny kid wore his hat sideways and his pants low on his hips. All of them white, early 20's. A big yawn.

The stick, incidentally, was about four feet long and very thin. It was also very pristine and very delicate looking, something that probably supported a paper sign stating "keep off the grass" or "Willie Winkle for Mayor." Sucker looked like it would break the first time it was brought down on someone's skull.

A kid dies in an early morning fire at a downtown apartment house. Men go after a foe with a stick. Otherwise, Lewiston yawns in the 17 degree cold.

The end

2006-02-17T14:15:00.000-05:00

It was around four in the morning when I finished my first novel in 2004. The sun wasn't up yet and the world was quiet. I put up a hand for a high five, but there was no skin there to slap. Not a word from the ghoul on the bookshelf. Nothing from the plastic rats or the looming skeleton in a corner. I went out to the porch for a cigarette. I tried to high five a tendril of smoke, but it broke apart and drifted away into the morning dark.

My second novel, finished last spring, was wrapped up after midnight on a Sunday. I made some calls, but there was nobody home. Still nothing from the props around my writing room. Still nothing from a circle of cigarette smoke.

I wrote the final lines in my latest book early Monday morning. It was 2:49 a.m. This time, I didn't even try. I wrote "the end," took pains to save the sucker, and stepped outside.

Lonely is the completion of a novel for one who keeps strange hours. I am new enough at this to get wildly excited at the very end. The thrill when it's over is part relief, part amazement and a touch of melancholy. All those characters you created will now get ripped through a printer, tucked into a box and left in a sort of suspended reality while you mull the project for weeks or months. Suddenly, the good guys and bad guys you've been hanging out with every night are off to another dimension.

Worumbo, The Pink Room and now Delirium Tremens. Three novels that were finished without drama in abject solitude. Clearly what I need is a tradition. A bottle kept tucked in a drawer to be opened only in these profound moments. A fine cigar. A hooker, whatever. Something to mark the moment. Something to count on when the words are on the page and the story has rounded to completion.

Someone loan me a tradition. Or at the completion of the next novel, I'll run naked through the streets screaming absurdities. No one wants that, man. No one.

Pictures of you

2006-02-09T14:59:00.000-05:00

It is fitting that the blog is where I will expose virulent corruption in the medical field. This is the big one, people. This effects each and every one of us. I'm blowing this story wide open.

Doctors and dentists are secretly compiling photos of your brain, inner organs, teeth and bones to give to underworld operatives who are creating a race of super people to take over the world. Proof of this is slim, but the circumstantial evidence is everywhere. Think about it, please. When is the last time you were able to coax an x-ray -- those very personal photos of your innermost self -- from a physician?

You can't do it. Ask, and the doctors will get all weird about it. I know, because just today, I tried to get x-rays of my brain from the doctor who has them. They get all weird about it. They pull the photos close to themselves and assume a defensive posture. "You can't have these. They're mine. Go away. Go AWAY!" Reach for the x-rays and the doctor will try to bite you. Freaks.

Truth is, I initially just wanted the photos to post here on the blog, for your disgust and amusement. God knows what might appear in a close up snapshot of my brain. Can they tell by examining the slices if you have frequent, dirty thoughts? Does your brain store copies of all lurid images it has entertained, like the cache in a computer? I'm getting freaked out. Let's pretend I never said anything. No, I never brought up the subject at all.

www.marklaflamme.com

BIG ACTION TODAY!

2006-02-08T14:25:00.000-05:00

A great man once said: "some days, it don't pay to get outta bed."

That man was Foghorn Leghorn. A person could conduct his entire life upon the wisdom of that wise rooster.

But the point is this: bad things happen when I get out of bed early. Unequipped to deal with the brightness and clamor of morning, I run into obstacles everywhere.

It was midweek, and I awoke to the girlish screeching of the alarm clock at 9 a.m. Unspeakable. But I was out of bed within minutes and fully dressed not long after. It was a January miracle.

The reason for this uncharacteristic rising was a hunch. I had a good feeling there might be big action downtown and I wanted to be there. I had already alerted my editors that huge news was imminent.

"Huge news is imminent," I told them, standing in a defensive posture and protecting my gallon jug of coffee from their talons.

At the paper, we have what is called (I have no idea why) a daily budget. On the budget go items that will appear in tomorrow's paper. With assurances from me that huge news was imminent, a notation was made at the top of the budget.

BIG ACTION TODAY! LAFLAMME WILL COVER!

And so I wandered out into the frothing world of a Lewiston morning. I parked my car discreetly on Park Street so I could watch the cops and anyone else that wandered in or out of the station.

It's always a funny thing when I get to surveilling the police department. Unsure of what I'm looking for, I lunge at everything that moves. A cruiser pulls out of the compound, I give chase, like a dog after a cat.

But you can't drive with utter freedom in the morning like you can at night. The roads are clogged. People stop for red lights. It's like skating on a rink with too many people jammed onto the ice. You never get a chance to open up and fly.

Many minutes and miles later, I learn that the officer was sent to a loud stereo complaint. I lob a few lines of profanity and return to my perch on Park Street. And wait. And wait. And get distracted by street noise.

"I am not going to take this anymore! You need to change your ways, buddy bone!"

What's this? Marital discord? An argument between drug peddler and a troublesome customer? I creep from my car to check it out.

None of the above. A cranky dad yelling at his 2-year-old. There goes that Father of the Year award. I return to the car and wait. And also, wait.

It's hard to lurk in daylight. I'm slumped in my car, peering over the top of the steering wheel and thinking I'm blending right in. A police cruiser rolls up next to my car and a cop is grinning at me. A familiar face strolls out of Speakers with a warm sandwich, looks at me, rolls his eyes.

In the morning I'm vulnerable, like an overturned turtle. Without the protection of darkness, I might as well have a spotlight on me as I wait. And wait. And besides that, wait.

Long story short: nothing happens. No big arrest, no huge news. The loud stereo complaint was the highlight of the morning. The following day, I'm at it again.

"Huge news is imminent," I tell the editors, approaching their webs with caution.

The item on the budget said something like: "Action today? LaFlamme will cover?"

And the next day, way down on the page, in parenthesis: "LaFlamme blithering about huge news again. Assigning weather story, instead."

So, I've stopped talking about it. Huge news? What huge news? Because I know better now. I learned from the sage Foghorn Leghorn, who once quipped: "That boy keeps talking, he's gonna get his tongue sunburned."

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.

Everything I know, I learned in a puddle of beer

2006-02-04T02:18:00.000-05:00

The party was in the basement of a frat house and it was raucous. By the shank of the evening, I was weaving back and forth and sporting a dopey grin. At the pinnacle of this finesse, I prepared to lay a killer line on a pretty sorority girl. In doing so, I leaned against a wall that wasn't there and landed in a gutter filled with vile water.

High times at the University of Maine at Orono. I have many stories filled with such lowlights from UMO and yet I was never a student there. I never went to college at all.

Here, some of you will fold up the paper in disgust and cast it aside. How can you respect a writer who never received formal schooling? There are such people and they are aghast when I tell them. I have no degree. They never gave out diplomas for the kind of education I sought as a young wanderer.

I used to be ashamed of it. I used to mumble, "Yeah, I went to college." And I did. For about two days at the university in Augusta. And my, how I hated it, sitting in deep classrooms trying to learn about matters I had no real interest in. It took two days for me to realize that my attendance there was a joke. What did I want to be, anyway? An astronomer? A truck driver? The guy who puts the "inspected by No. 9" tickets in shirt pockets?

No idea. So I quit school and I roamed. I hitchhiked a bit and drank with people beneath bridges. Not a noble education, but I wouldn't exchange any of it for a B.A. in this or an M.A. in that. I'm not ashamed of it anymore. These days, I tend to wander around the newsroom declaring: "I ain't got no book learning."

A friend from the old days visited the newsroom not long ago. We talked about the business and how I had managed to evolve since the rowdy days of my youth. He finally asked where I went to college. I told him I hadn't. And he asked the question. How the hell can a person become a reporter without a degree?

It half amuses, half irritates me. Some of the best reporters I know barely graduated from high school. Some of the worst I've worked with had master's degrees in journalism. They had great theoretical knowledge, but ask them to respond to a scanner call and write about it on deadline.

Part of me wishes I had gone to college. Part of me also wishes I had joined the military. But I didn't do either. I wandered.

Back at UMO, I did most of my fraternizing with a group of my brother's friends. They were journalism majors, wide-eyed with expectations and plans for the great stories they would write. They planned to lay bare the inequities of society. Me, I pumped gas five days a week and cooked hot dogs on the weekends.

A few years ago, I got together with the same group on a beach in New Jersey. One owned a restaurant. A few had gone into sales. One was a welder. Happy, successful men, yet none of them had written a single word of news since collecting their diplomas and tossing their mortar boards into the air. I told them war stories from the news trenches and we mused over the irony.

Back in the day, a girlfriend who had a B.A., an M.A., and some other initials I forget, advised me that I'd never get near a newsroom without a college diploma. No way, no how.

The sad fact is, for a time I believed her. I spent a lot of nights staring up at the newspaper building in Waterville, imagining the news machine inside and wishing I could be part of it. And you wonder how many others are shuffling around with their heads down, convinced that without a nod from a college or university, they can never do what they feel created to do.

All some people have is what they have learned through the hard knocks they have taken. Down-and-out addicts have risen from the dust to do great things with knowledge that has been beaten into them. Seasoned criminals walk from prisons and turn their agony into gold.

I don't push a lifestyle of restlessness and hedonism as a means of education. I recommend higher education to anyone who asks about it. With a degree, doors will open quicker. Paychecks will likely be fatter.

But there's something to be said about embracing the experiences you do have, even if they were painful and ugly. There is a certain shabby nobility in the feisty mutt in a roomful of purebreds. There is something to be said for the person who has clawed his way into the kingdom rather than entering with the key of higher education.

Of course, I'm only raving, provoked to memory by an old friend aghast that I was never formally schooled. In the long run, I still have no book learning. And I'm still the guy who fell in the swill.

Amazing live sea monkeys

2006-01-30T13:29:00.000-05:00

I'll never forget the day of the slaughter. Hundreds were killed. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. The village doctor was among the dead. The horror. The horror. I was only five or six years old, but I understood how great a tragedy had befallen the young community. There were no survivors.

Like the rest of you, I had sea monkeys when I was a boy. *sniff* I loved those little guys. I watched them grow from gritty flakes in a paper pouch to full grown sea critters. Remember the pictures on the box? The sea monkeys had big eyes and crowns on top of their heads. There were little boy monkeys and little girls. There were mothers, fathers and family friends. They interacted like people and lived in a giant castle. There was a time when I wanted to be a sea monkey.

And then it happened. I rushed home from school to visit my ever growing family. I searched for the tank in which they lived and found it in the kitchen. It had been washed and rinsed and dried. There were no signs of little Jim Bob and Ella May and sweet Sally Sue. The babysitter, a woman of 245 who had dyed black hair and bright red lipstick, had found them on the window in my bedroom. Believing she had stumbled upon a bowl full of brackish, bug infested water, she dumped them down the toilet and gave it a flush. I need... I need just a minute.

Chances are good that the sea monkeys survived. They probably grew to massive size feeding on the nutrient rich waste in the sewers. I'll bet they went after Mrs. Gilbert one night. I'll bet they slithered up her stairs and stole into her bedroom, dragging her screaming from her bed with those long, pink tentacles...

I'm getting freaked out. What the hell was my point? Oh, yes. My point. Sea monkeys are creepy little life forms, especially as portrayed in advertising. It's amazing no one has taken up the concept as a basis for a novel or horror flick. The creative child ads random products to his sea monkey water and the results are terrifying. Or a lonely professor falls in love with one of his sea monkeys and endeavors a find a way to join her. Great opportunity for a sea monkey sex scene.

But I've said too much already.

Lies and damned lies

2006-01-25T12:42:00.000-05:00

I'd been on the run a long time and I knew the cops were at my heels. They missed me by seconds over in Fresno. I caught the squawking of their scanners as they came up the stairs and I beat feet through a window and onto a fire escape. A big bull of a cop was waiting for me on the ground and we fought. He had me in a chokehold and I felt my freedom slipping away, along with my wind. But I came around after a few seconds and beat him down. When I left the musclehead, he was writhing in a mound of trash.

Those were hot, desperate times over on the West Coast. Everywhere I turned, those gumshoes were right behind me. I caught a train for Chicago and laid low there for a while. Then some U.S. marshals sniffed me out of the rathole flat I was living in and a whole squadron of them swooped in. I duked it out with another gorilla and managed to escape, this time through a dumbwaiter.

It's all hazy. The strip joint mix-up in Manhattan, the meth lab down in Baltimore, the brothel in Tennessee. I was using a lot then and the memories are fuzzy, like a blown-out photograph on a computer monitor. Running from The Man, fighting with The Man, knocking The Man down and beating feet.

Yeah, I was on the run a long time and I saw some crazy stuff. I was just a kid, but I was faster, meaner and slicker than the rest. I hear someone wrote a folk song about me in Tucson. In the Midwest they named a tornado in my honor. That's me, all right. Powerful, unpredictable and enigmatic.

Great stories I could tell for a lifetime. Too bad none of them are true. I just felt like going James Frey for a while. I felt like recreating my youth in hopes that people would believe it and find me heroic. Hey, feel free to send me money if my story has moved you.

I don't mean to get down on Frey and his struggle with booze and drugs. I think it's admirable that he conquered his addictions through sheer will and that he chose to write about his travails. What irks me is that he invented a majority of his experiences and then asked his reading public to believe it without question. One gets the feeling that Frey sat through a few group therapy sessions and felt inadequate for the tales he had to tell.

Which is fine. When one guy starts talking big, the guy next to him will start talking bigger. It's what we do. We are hardwired by evolution to build tales as high as they will go when we are in the company of our peers.

The problem I have with Frey is that he presents his struggles as mightier than those of the the next alcoholic or the next addict. He asks that you believe his battle was more valiant and harder fought.

He scrapped with cops. He served long prison stretches. He threw down with every officer and lost a girl while he was in the slammer. He suffered through a double root canal without anesthesia, stared down a Mafioso and established himself as the toughest hombre in rehab. He lost a girlfriend to a train wreck and spent his young years drinking away her memory.

At an AA meeting, it would make a great drunkalogue. Few people would bother to check the facts. But, sell a few million copies of a book and people will rightfully begin asking questions. They will find the police reports that reveal only minor arrests. They will find officer statements describing you as polite and cooperative, instead of combative and powerful. They will check prison records and find that you were never there. They will learn that the young lady killed by the train was never your girlfriend, and that you were never the neighborhood ruffian.

And so as the lies stack up, we start to wonder if Frey's sins of hyperbole are equal to or greater than those of someone like Jayson Blair. Blair fabricated news stories and hornswoggled those who trusted him. Frey deceived people who needed to believe the most - the suicidal drinkers and ragged-edge druggers who were inspired by his story. When they learned about his deceits, they might have felt they had been betrayed yet again, that there was one more entity in which they could not believe.

Mothers of rowdy children might claw your eyes out if you utter a word of criticism about Frey's book. Because they want to believe that even bad kids are essentially good, and that change is always possible. And while that may be true, Jim Frey should not be the symbol of the transformation.

Jayson Blair, Jim Frey. Two men who concocted clever mixtures of fact and lies and hoped they would ring true. Two men who fooled their audience for a time and then were called on it. A word of advice for them both: If you want to make things up, write fiction. People may still condemn your work. But at least they can't call you a liar.

Reporter looking for cryptic banter

2006-01-23T03:18:00.000-05:00

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime. And Mark LaFlamme, who whines about it incessantly. These are their stories.

CHING CHING.

So, I'm pretty sure I need a partner. It's not that I'm overworked. I spend more time trolling than a bass fisherman or an out-of-stater looking for a prostitute in downtown Lewiston.

The problem is that I don't have enough banter in my professional life. I have thoughts. Deep thoughts.

Fresh from the streets, popping like an overloaded Pez dispenser, I'll spring to my wife's desk on the other side of the newsroom.

"Somewhere in the distance," I'll say to her in my most dramatic tone, "a dog barked."

My sweet wife looks at me with those pretty, brown eyes and says nothing. The silence is enough. The brown-eyed silence says: "I married an idiot."

So I bounce as if on a pogo stick to the copy desk. There I find editors hanging from their desks like bats in a cave.

"It was a night just like this," I inform them with just the right tone of ominous foreboding.

The editors look at me with those small, black eyes and then consult each other with beeps and chirps. Protecting the queen is what they're doing. And then one of the worker editors is enlisted to advise me on the remark.

"Do you need something to do, Mark? Or shall we devour you and feed the remains to our young?"

The bane of banter

Cops are no better. Cops worry constantly about banter because it might get inserted into a news story. Cops need to think about what their chief thinks of their demeanor in the 'hood. So when I lunge at a cop with one of my profound observations ("The beasts are loose in Bethlehem tonight, wouldn't you say, officer? Eh? Eh?") they think heavily before responding.

"There is the possibility," a cop might say, "that perpetrators will commit misdemeanors or felonies this evening. That's affirmative."

Criminals get all itchy when you try to banter with them. You just want to yack about the nature of the city and they get all squirrelly about it. You unleash a few lines of fresh banter and to their delicate, crook ears, it sounds like trouble. They think you're wired and start patting you down, right there on Park Street. They look over one shoulder, then the other, and flee in an all-out sprint. It really kills the banter mood.

I've got nobody. I need a Lenny Brisco-type partner. Someone who will understand my non sequiturs. Someone who will scowl when I scowl and spit when I spit. Someone who will address me by my last name only.

"The one-eyed monkey barks at midnight."

Spit.

"You got that right, LaFlamme. It is wise to know the difference between a hornet and a bee."

"Hear that."

"Damn straight, LaFlamme."

Spit. Spit.

The shadows know

On a few occasions, I've had people shadow me on the job. These were young people fooled into believing my occupation is exciting. I like having them along. They bring to the job scene a great deal of enthusiasm. For about six hours. At which point, they realize that nothing ever happens and the reporter they happen to be riding with is a big dork who speaks in riddles. I always try to use these people as banter partners.

"This is the big one," I'll say, ear cocked to the scanner. "Get ready to roll."

A barking dog complaint rolls across the airwaves.

"Sir, I'd like to call my mom," says the pimply, Lenny Brisco washout.

So, I need a partner. No journalism skills are needed. Hell, I don't have any of those, myself. All I'm looking for is someone who can keep up verbally. At those times when I don't make sense (estimated by my colleagues at 94 percent), you would just nod, spit and say something equally inane.

"The lunatics are in the hall."

"Hear that, LaFlamme. The paper holds their folded faces to the floor."

"And every day, the paper boy brings more."

"Yeah, LaFlamme. Yeah."

Spit.

Hostel

2006-01-16T23:20:00.000-05:00

The movie world is full of countless flicks that will make you jump, scream and maybe hurl your popcorn across the cinema. Boogeymen creep from closets. Lunatics are killed but keep getting up. Tiny dolls with knives menace entire communties. Most people enjoy a harmless fright. It's all good once the credits roll and the theater is lighted again.

Hostel is not a harmless fright. It's bleak, bloody and bold and suited only for those who like to wander to the really dark places. It's a gloomy, hard tale every bit as traumatizing to the intellect as it is repulsive to the eye.

In short, I freaking love this movie. And it all starts with lively music and naked people. For the first 45 minutes, I wanted to be a reckless teen again. I wanted to get myself a passport and backpack and prepare to tramp all over Europe. I wanted to wander with my friends and experience the liberal offerings of those far flung countries. I wanted to indulge in all the vice so vividly advertised in the opening scenes of the movie.

By the time it was done, I had endeavored never to leave the safety of the United States. Nossir. I'll burn the passport, drop the backpack in a river and stay right here where 911 is always a finger's length away.

Much fuss is made about the graphic violence in "Hostel." It's certainly graphic and violent as they come. Yet, it's not the blood and gore, drills and saws that will leave you unsettled. More disturbing is the concept at the very heart of the tale. The idea that Americans abroad could be snared into a sinister underworld and then sold to wealthy sadists to do with as they will. What gnaws at you is how handily such a business could operate.

There's a scene midway through the film where a young man awakes with a hood over his face and only a small hole to see through. His feet are bound to the floor. His hands are bound behind him. He is a prisoner in a dark, dingy roomand the horrible truth of his situation becomes abundantly clear soon enough.

The movie works because it plants you in that very chair. You feel the rising desperation as it becomes evident what your role is here. You are a plaything for a madman who has paid good money to satisfy all the depraved longings in his sick heart. At his disposal is a nauseating variety of tools. There are drills and blades, saws and hammers, needles and scalpels. All the things that have scared you since your first visit to the dentist or doctor are right here and there will be no anesthesia.

Yeah, it's pretty damn jolting when the first young man gets a drill bit sunk into his thigh. But more revolting is the notion that this is the only beginning. Because a person who pays enormously for such nasty pleasure is surely not going to be quick about it. You feel the grinding and growing horror of the victim's plight. Screaming will get them nowhere. This is a place designed specifically for screams. There will be no human rights groups stopping by. There will be no U.S. led rescue operation at the last minute. This is a place with a name like Ardvarkia, or Ohyuckia. The safety of home is a long ways off and the people back there are blissfully unaware of this strange country and of the terrors therein.

Sure, in-your-face images of dismember legs and hanging eyeballs will ruin your popcorn. But it's the heavy feeling of isolation and helplessness that will cloud the rest of your day.

There are plenty of people who refuse to see this flick. If they are timid about unrestrained nastiness, I don't blame them. Don't blame them at all. But if you're even mildly curious about the movie, I say go. Go spend a couple hours with Tarantio and Eli Roth, and you'll feel a little better about missing those overseas trips when you were a cocky college kid. You never go the high times in Barcelona, it's true. But at least you have all your fingers and you never had an eyeball dangling against your cheek.

If you still get a giddy delight watching the ear scene in "Reservoir Dog," go see this movie. Just cut your date some slack if he or she starts squeezing your hand with bone crushing might. It's only human to recoil against atrocities committed against humans. And a story that can reach a person on that primitive level is a success. I give "Hostel" two thumbs up to go with the three or floor laying on the floor.

Desperado

2006-01-11T22:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I fancy myself a gunslinger. I don't carry a sidearm and the last time I rode a horse, I fell off. Still, there are times when I fancy the storefronts are saloons and the downtown streets are gritty with Old West grime.

I imagine I hear clink, clink, clink with each step down these dusty roads. I fancy it's tumbleweed and not snow blowing across my path. My eyes scan shadows in all directions lest a rival lunge from the darkness to settle an old score. Not tonight, my friend. You don't want to become another notch in the carved-up grip of my gun.

Clink, clink, clink.

The police are a posse of lawmen called to this one-horse town to put things right. Crooks are outlaws with mugs posted in every two-bit town from hear to Reno. Train robbers, most of them. An ornery, slippery lot.

The corner stores are barber shops where you can get a shave and a haircut for a nickel. City buildings are houses of ill repute where you'll find women in frilly dresses with names like Lulu and Clementine. And there, dark and vacant on Lisbon Street, are the five and dime, the blacksmith shop, the undertakers place and the benzinery, all left empty when the gold rush was over and the town was left behind.

Clink, clink, clink. I haven't seen hide nor hair of Old Red Nose Nollie since the day of the poker cheat when he beat the devil around the stump. Still, I keep a hand on the butt of my revolver just in case. Because Red Nose Nollie is a lot like a rattlesnake. He can have his fangs in you before you even know he's there. He'll dry-gulch a man as soon as look at him.

But I'm feeling ace-high tonight. Lewiston is my frontier. I've got no one to ride the river with, but that's alright. I'm between hay and grass and I'm heeled. I've got no difficulty but to wait for someone to kick up a row somewhere and give me a time.

Clink, clink, clink.

It's the boots. Definitely the boots. Every winter I slip them on and it's like sliding into grand delusion. I don't walk toward the scene of the crime, I swagger. I don't simply stick a cigarette in my mouth and light it up. I do it with theatrical, gunslinger ease.

"Pardon, lawman. You reckon you'll corral that curly wolf tonight and put him at the end of the hemp?"

"Yep. Simone pure. That codger is as full as a tick by now, I reckon."

So what if I have no notion of what any of that means. So what if the officers are giving me strange looks and whispering into their radios. Lewiston is a lonely, cold place on a January night. If your beat is mischief after dark, you need a little delusion to get you through. Who wants to be a mere crime reporter when you can be Lascivious LaFlamme, feared and famed?

But the gunslinger fancy is short-lived, like most daydreams. Some idjit drives by in a sagging Plymouth with rap music shaking its frame. A cab driver lays on his horn because I have swaggered in front of him. The cell phone buzzes at my hip and for a horrible moment, I believe it is Red Nose Nollie with his poisonous rattle.

Reality crashes in as it always does. The boots are just boots again, footwear manufactured at one of the Lewiston mills along the canal. The stores sell cigarettes at five bucks a pack and lottery tickets are sold through electronic machines. Lawmen have cruisers instead of steeds and there are computers mounted on dashboards.

Lewiston is a cold and well-lit city again rather than an old frontier. But I like to think the city has an Old West mentality. There are outlaws and posses. There is cussing and more than a fair share of carousing. There are those who still come here to strike it rich or go belly up. Lewiston is a city with a gunslinger spirit.

But the fantasy is gone like smoke from the barrel of a Smith & Wesson. The only things strapped to my hip are the phone and the scanner. No six-shooter in battered leather holster. No shave and a haircut for a bit.

It's all for the best, really. Put a cowboy hat on me and I'll disappear. I bluff poorly at card tables. And if I haven't mentioned it already, I'll mention it now: The last time I rode a horse, I fell off.

That's about the long and short of it, I reckon.

Lessons of the dangling foot

2006-01-10T23:09:00.000-05:00

I might someday be very wealthy and able to afford the most cutting edge security system on the market. I might have cameras with infrared technology scanning every inch of my property. I might have an armed response system ready to rain bullets should my perimeter be breached. I might have fierce dogs on alert and a .45 beneath my pillow.

It won't matter. None of it will matter. I still won't be able to sleep with my foot dangling over the edge of the bed.

You may snigger all you'd like. Because the older and wiser I get, the more convinced I become that letting your foot dangle is a very bad idea. I'm not talking about a fanged creature with hot breath living under the bed. I don't fear a low growl and then the clamp of mandibles upon my ankle. No sir. What I fear is much more subtle.

In the quiet and peace of night, with muscles relaxing and sleep upon my eyes, the thing I dread most is a simple touch. A light caress from beyond the edge of the bed. Just a tweak, a tickle, a cool hand brushing over my heel.

Because in that moment, it will become absolutely clear that the horrors conceived of in childhood exist, after all. They exist in the physical world where you live.

With that soft touch of the dangling foot, the security and sanity of adulthood is gone. You can no longer cling to the old belief that irrational fears are only products of an overstimulated imagination. You can no longer rely on the mantra that says the only thing to fear is fear itself.

Monsters, ha! The monsters will eat you and be done with it. Your terror, though gory, will be brief. The cool touch of the dangling foot spells a lifetime of horror -- the horror that comes when a person is forced to believe the unbelievable. There might be something hideous hiding in the closet, after all. Maybe the devil really is the source of the creeking sounds from the attic. Maybe the dead do rise and they might be waiting in your basement this very moment.

You don't want something pinching your toes in the night because that pinch will confirm it all. That quick and playful squeeze will present an absolute promise that you should fear the world and fear it plenty. You can get up, turn on all the lights and arm yourself with a canon, if you want to. Surround yourself with friends and make them poke under the bed for you. It won't matter. Because there is always tomorrow night and the night after that. There is always the basement and the attic and sooner or later you'll be alone again. Sooner or later you have to sleep. And now the thing under the bed knows you are aware of it.

It all sounds very hysterical, I know. I manage it well, and without medication. I do breathing exercises. I drink a lot. Mostly though, I make damn sure my foot never dangles over the side of the bed. You should do the same.

Catch a killer

2006-01-09T14:01:00.000-05:00

Slowly, slowly, catch a killer. Slowly. Slowly. Catch a killer.

She used to say it to me all the time. She'd creep up behind me at my desk and whisper it in my ear. She'd call me on the weekend and repeat the ominous mantra. Sometimes, she'd send the simple yet startling words in an e-mail.

Her name was Sharon Santus and she was the leader of the justice team at a newspaper in Virginia. She was compelled to repeat this hypnotic phrase because I had a glaring habit of rushing headlong into a murder investigation.

It was a personal flaw long before I went into the news business. When a person is killed and the slaying is shrouded in mystery, I can't wait for the truth to be revealed. I want to know whodunit, how they dunit and why as soon as I can. I want to unravel it all like a knot no one else can manage.

Most people know that I'm short on patience. When the virtue was being doled out, I was prowling the fishing docks of Newport News, asking about a man I was sure had committed an atrocious act.

It was the nasty cane killing back in 2000. An elderly woman had been beaten with her walking stick and left on the floor of her apartment. I had been assigned to the case and within a few days, I was sure I knew the identity of the fiend. Absolutely sure of it. I wanted to prove it, alert the police, and write a long, breathless story for the reading public. I wanted to explain away all the elaborate, nebulous riddles that had so confounded the entire population.
"Slowly, slowly," Sharon would tell me, catching me by the arm before I went bolting out the newsroom door for the fourth time in an hour. "Catch a killer."
She was right, of course. One loquacious witness or a single, tasty clue does not mark the resolution of a crime. Tenacity is an admirable quality in a sleuth, but so is restraint. These days, I have a new boss with equal wisdom advising me against working in haste.
Yet, I don't believe I'm alone in wanting to race to the facts sometimes. Most cops will tell you they'd like to have all the pieces gathered up and the big crime puzzle solved by the end of the day. Wrap it up, book the culprit and hand him over to the courts.

The average person reading the headlines over coffee tends to prefer a quick resolution, too. In national crime stories and local ones, they scan the pages or television channels in search of new developments, no matter how wee those developments might be.

Family members ache a little more each day that passes without answers. Killers have left their loved ones dead on city streets, in the woods or in shallow graves. Nobody can tell them why.

Since 1971 in Maine, nearly 100 murders have gone unsolved. One that haunts me is that of Dorothy Milliken, bludgeoned to death outside a Lisbon Street laundromat in 1976. Milliken's daughter, 30 years older now, wonders every day if the killer will be found.

But not all of these haunting crimes are 30 years old. There was Butch Weed in 2003 in Wilton. Eighty-year-old Helen Caron, killed when an apartment building was burned down in Lewiston in 2001. Crystal Perry, stabbed in her Bridgton home in 1994. And of course, James Vining and John Graffam just a month ago. More killings, few explanations.

I've been particularly involved lately in the Vining and Graffam investigation. I speak to sad friends or family members and try to eke out clues. More than once, I've been convinced I was onto something. More than once, I've been disappointed with what I'd found. Because I was working with a sweaty desperation to grasp the answers that have eluded the sharpest minds in the state.

Unsolved murders haunt not only those directly involved with the deceased, they haunt entire communities. Somewhere among us walks a person with the derangement to take a life and the cunning to hide his or her sins.

Somewhere on the downtown streets, I might have handed a cigarette to the very hands that killed those two men and left their bodies out by the railroad tracks. You might have handed the killer change during a transaction at the bank.

I'd like to suggest that there is a way out of this for all of us. The killers who walk among us do not need to live with the white-knuckle burden of their crimes. Contact me and confess. Call and admit your crimes and you can be led smoothly to the fate you have wrought. No more living in fear of discovery, no more emotional crippling of your neighbors.

Slowly, slowly, catch a killer. It's a fine sentiment for someone brooding over the complexity of a case. But there is an equally good catch phrase for those who have created all the pain and turmoil: "Confession is good for the soul."

Welcome to my Nightmare

2005-12-31T09:56:00.000-05:00

When I was a boy, maybe six years old, I dreamed there was a head under my bed. The head wasn't doing much. It just sat there in the dark, with the dirty socks and dust bunnies, and spoke to me whenever I passed.

In the dream, nobody believed it when I told them there was a head under my bed. Later, my babysitter came into my room (her name was Mrs. Gilbert and she had dyed black hair and bright red lipstick), and leaned under the bed to look. The head under the bed stole the head of Mrs. Gilbert and then it went on babbling from down there in the dark.

I wrote a story about the dream years later. In a fit of creativity, I titled it: "The Head Under the Bed." I don't know where I come up with this stuff.

When I was a teen, around the time I started drinking, smoking and doing that other great teen stuff, I had a dream about a nun. I had been swimming at Rice's Rips in Waterville and drifted too close to the waterfall. There's a 30 foot drop there and I plunged over it to the rocks below. When I opened my eyes, badly injured from the fall, a nun was standing in the water 30 feet above me. She was smiling wickedly and beckoning me forth with her hand. It was a horrifying site and in that moment, I knew I was dreaming but could not wake up. I struggled against the dream for what felt like days (it was in fact, more likely seconds) until I managed to force my eyes open with Herculean effort. The dream haunted me the rest of the day and I feared sleep for nights after.

Nightmares are crazy. So horrifying and crippling, they are also intensely personal. Try explaining one to another person and you sound like a child describing a comical boogey that lives in the closet. Bad dreams cannot be precisely recreated in the real world.

It would take a very long time for me to jot down the bad dreams I've had. There was one where I came into possession of a weird pair of glasses that afforded me a view into hell. There was another stunner where I walked passed a cemetery and heard the voices of the dead in my head. Both of those later became works of fiction, but again: bad dreams lose the true impact of their fangs and claws in the light of consciousness. Which by all reasoning is a good thing.

This morning, I'm up uncharacteristically early because I snapped awake at 6:34 a.m., chilled and near paralyzed by a nightmare. I stumbled from bed and came out here to write about it. By the time I was done, 2,000 words were on the page and it's a nail-biter. What are the chances this will morph into my next novel? Ask me in eight weeks.

With all of this morbid rambling in mind, the topic for today is bad dreams. Lay down on the couch and tell me all about them. I'm here for you. I can help. And if I can't, at least I can steal your thoughts and write stories about of them.

Happy New Year, freaks.

The King of cool

2005-12-30T02:35:00.000-05:00

So, it was four in the morning and I found myself deeply engrossed in an episode of Happy Days. I don't recall what was happening, exactly. Some poorly dressed goons were after Ritchie and it looked like the wholesome lad was about to get his ass kicked. And then, in a dramatic turn of events involving the gum snapping thugs the regulars at Arnolds, Fonzie stepped in to save the day in some fashion that had nothing to do with fighting skills or finesse. It involved some cheesy lines and then Fonzie was combing his hair.

It was then, staring numbly at the screen as the studio audience launched into applause, that the ugly truth presented itself. When you get right down to it, Fonzie wasn't cool.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking it's sacrilege to say such a thing and I should be banished to the land of Laverne & Shirley. But come on, people. Try to think back. Fonzie was the guy who wore that leather coat at the beach and that's not to mention the socks. Fonzie was the guy who tried real hard to talk with those tough, Italian inflections but sounded more like he was suffering a mental disturbance. Fonzie spent his entire day playing with a jukebox or hanging out on Mrs. C's couch. Fonzie carried a comb in his back pocket and said: "ayyyyyyy" when he got his hair parted just right.

These days, people who do these things are not feared and lionized. Especially in the men's room. Somehow, Fonzie became the epitomal face of cool and we've all just accepted it. All these years we've accepted it and it's just plain wrong.

As usual, it falls to me to right this decades old error.

So, I got around to pondering who the real cool guys are, from the real world or the world of make believe. And when I get around to pondering, I basically just hound everyone I see until I get an answer. The answers were predictable but not quite right:

James Dean? Sure the girls loved him and he died young, which is kind of cool for a Hollywood icon. But he always played spleeny teenagers and he couldn't drive a cool car.

Elvis Presley? Big argument to be made there. But with all his stardom, with all his great music and that really bitching sneer, Elvis died on the toilet. The rules of coolness forbid that specifically.

Clint Eastwood blew it by doing "Bridges of Madison County." Marlon Brandon blew it in various ways. Modern sports stars are disqualified because they have overblown salaries and no sense of loyalty. I was ruled out early on.

So after subjecting the quandary to scientific experimentation and rigid tests, I came up with an unassailable conclusion: The paragon of cool is Stephen King. Hands down. He's the rock 'n roll star of the literary world. He's absolutely dominated his field for three decades. He is adored by men and women, young and old.

Normally smug publishers and hotshot movie producers fawn over him. "Yes sir, Mr. King. Whatever you'd like, Mr. King." He jams with a band just for kicks, as if terrorizing the world isn't enough. Best of all, King plays God and gets paid hugely for it. He creates worlds populated by characters who have no choice but to do his bidding. Cool characters, sad characters. Elegant convicts and clowns that swallow children whole. King wiped out 99 percent of the world's population and sprung vampires on Maine. Kinda makes Fonzie's trick with the jukebox kinda weenie, doesn't it?

You may argue all you want and suggest your own champions of cool. But I expect you to adjust your posters and lunch boxes accordingly. Out with Fonzie, in with King.

Pretty in Pink

2005-12-17T22:53:00.000-05:00

By Daniel Hartill, Staff Writer
Saturday, December 17,2005

Reporter Mark LaFlamme has his first novel published, "The Pink Room."

LEWISTON - Writer Mark LaFlamme sat on the couch of his home office and fidgeted beneath a poster of "Night of the Living Dead."

"You're going to out me, aren't you?" he asked, perched on the edge of his seat.

The veteran Sun Journal reporter wants people to know about his first published novel, a horror story titled "The Pink Room." That's why he agreed to the interview.

He doesn't want people to know his age.

"I've been lying about my age since I was 27," he said. His knees bounced in place. His eyes scanned the familiar room, as if searching for a place to hide.

"I didn't realize how hard this was," LaFlamme said of his first interview as subject rather than writer.

It's likely to be the first of many.

LaFlamme's novel is scheduled to arrive in local stores this week. Several Internet booksellers have begun peddling the story, and the author is already scheduling signings.

"The Pink Room" tells the story of a world-class physicist who retreats to Aroostook County where he builds a house in the woods. There, he hopes to bring his daughter back to life using a theoretical arm of quantum physics known as string theory.

The result is a bit of Stephen Hawking and a lot of Stephen King.

"I don't think I could avoid reminding people of King," said LaFlamme, a lifelong fan. However, he figures he owes more to Edgar Allen Poe.

"Everything he loved died," LaFlamme said. "I think what appealed to me was his rejection of the finality of death."

He was 6 or 7 years old when he discovered the author of "The Raven."

"I was a normal kid, but I had a creepy side," said LaFlamme, who grew up in Waterville. When his mom gave him a record album of Poe readings titled "Ghost Stories," he was hooked.

"I'd go in my room, turn out the lights and listen over and over," he said.

Soon he was writing his own short stories. By the time he was 12 or 13, he was composing long horror tales on a battered electric typewriter.

He sent a few off to magazines as he grew older. Some were published, but he cared little whether anyone read them.

"They were for me," he said. "I showed them to my mom or friends."

But the fiction never quite took. When he finished high school, he worked lots of different jobs, eventually landing at the Sun Journal. He was 27.

His job: covering the sometimes graphic crimes of Lewiston-Auburn.

It somehow meshed with his interest in horror.

"Mark's got a sick mind," said Dave Griffiths, a former Sun Journal editor. "It's a good kind of sick, though."

Both his home office and his newsroom desk are decorated with assorted haunted-house paraphernalia: fake rats, severed heads and limbs, witches and photos of Poe.

None of it is mean-spirited, though.

"It's how he handles the pressure of daily journalism," Griffiths said.

LaFlamme has done a lot of it.

A search of the newspaper's archives finds 3,800 stories by LaFlamme. Of those, "murder" is mentioned 200 times and "fire" shows up 777 times. He also writes a regular column and hosts a blog on the newspaper's Web site.

All of that experience informs the mayhem of LaFlamme's fiction.

Griffiths, who was one of the first people to read "The Pink Room," said the reporting has given LaFlamme's work enormous discipline

"Journalism is a great training ground for any kind of writing," he said. "You can't ramble on and on."

It has helped the content, too. LaFlamme has been to plenty of crime scenes, knows lots of cops and has interviewed FBI agents.

All appear in "The Pink Room."

He wrote it over six or eight weeks, pounding out 2,000 words a night after returning home from his beat. He finished the book one morning this spring at 4 a.m.

"I wanted to have a party and celebrate," he said. His wife, Corey, was sleeping. So were his neighbors.

"Instead, I went to bed," he said.

Perhaps middle age has set in.

He's 38.

A very LaFlamme Christmas

2005-12-15T14:45:00.000-05:00

We've all heard the Christmas story about the man who tried to surprise his family by coming down the chimney dressed as Santa. Such a nice idea. They found the body weeks later when it began to smell. The man had broken his neck on the slide down the chute and became lodged in there. Such a warm story. It's my favorite of the Yuletime season.

We all know that every day is Halloween in LaFlamme Land. Here's another nice story that plays on that theme.

NEW YORK (AP) - It's usually easy to tell where a person stands in the culture wars, but whose side is someone on when his Christmas decor is a blood-spattered Santa Claus holding a severed head?
Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos decked the front of their Manhattan mansion this year with a scene that includes a knife-wielding 5-foot-tall St. Nick and a tree full of decapitated Barbie dolls. Hidden partly behind a tree, the merry old elf grasps a disembodied doll's head with fake blood streaming from its eye sockets.
In a telephone interview Wednesday, Krupnik explained that his family thought it would be a fun way to make a comment about the commercialization and secularization of Christmas.
"It is a religious holiday, but they have turned it into a business. And it shouldn't be," he said. "We didn't put it up to offend anybody. It was just something that came out of our imagination."
More than a few people passing by the brownstone were a little puzzled about the message behind the massacre. There were a few signs the macabre theme is a year-round thing - the facade of the building was covered with leering gargoyles. A statue of Death, hooded and grim-looking, stood outside.
Peter Nardoza, 81, of Manhattan, shook his head and chuckled.
"Sick, sick, sick," he said. "What kind of a world is this that we live in?"
Ronnie Santiago, a deliveryman on his route, speculated that something bad must have happened once to the homeowner at Christmas. A few spectators wondered whether the campy gore would bother children.
The family is far from the only one making an editorial comment this year on how Americans celebrate Christmas, although it may be the only one doing it by depicting Santa Claus as a killer.
Pope Benedict XVI complained this week that Christmas festivities have been "subjected to a sort of commercial pollution." Christian conservatives have launched campaigns to reintroduce a religious component to Christmastime decor in schools and public squares, chiding even President Bush this year for sending out cards wishing supporters a happy "holiday season."
But despite the home's gruesome exterior, some visitors appreciated it.
Bucky Turco, 31, of Manhattan, said the display captured how he felt when watching someone costumed as SpongeBob SquarePants promote products at Rockefeller Center.
"This is brilliant," said Turco.
Walter Garofalo, a musician from Brooklyn who wandered by wearing a black bandanna covered in skulls, was awe-struck.
"I wonder if these people would let me use this as our next album cover," he said. "It's perfect!"

Mandibles of death

2005-12-14T14:25:00.000-05:00

They say the creature stands nearly as tall as a man. It has fangs like daggers and eyes that will stop your heart. When the beast screams, the heartiest of men will freeze in their tracks and whimper like children. It's too late to scream, though. The creature is fantastically fast and astoundingly agile. Above all, it is hungry. No one and nothing is safe from it's mandibles of death.

I really miss that ferocious, dog-eating monster. Last summer, I got weeks worth of stories from it and I wanted more.

People everywhere were reporting their sightings to me: "I saw the beast crouched next to a road in Poland. It was hunched like a gargoyle and it looked like something that would bite your arms off and then go looking for the rest of your family."

"I saw that monstrosity in my back field out in Greene just a week ago. I once rassled a black bear just for sport, sonny, but I'll tell you right now... One sight of that maneater and I wet myself like tot."

"I saw it. You bet I did. It was out along the power lines along Old Greene Road and it looked mean as anything. Meaner then my missus, even. I ain't ashamed to admit I got to drinking."

Nearly two dozen people called or wrote to report their sightings. They swore something strange and terrible lived among us.

Skeptics chortled and said with lofty conviction that they knew exactly what it was that so spooked normally sane men and women. And on and on it went. I milked it for all it was worth, went searching for the killer and tried to milk it some more.

Then it was winter and there was nothing further. Surely, I thought. Surely it is only dormant for the season. The beast will be back come summer and I'll plan my days and nights around it.

But no. Like criminals who get caught too soon, the fanged, fabled fur ball faded into obscurity and never returned. Flea bag. But I miss him so.

In case you missed it last summer, here is a recap.

***

The scream that pierced the night was so chilling, the woman almost immediately sold her home and never went back. She doesn't like to talk about it much. Who wants to talk about a beast that doesn't belong in this world? Who would believe a story about a creature with cold, shining eyes and a fanged mouth curled in an evil, animal grin?

It could be in your backyard this very moment. It might be growling low in its throat, staring through your window with cunning and hunger.

Or it could be just a raccoon looking for your scraps. Who knows? Not me.

A couple of weeks ago, a Doberman pinscher was mauled by something nobody has been able to identify. It's surely not a wolverine, say the wildlife experts. We don't have them here. It's probably a fisher, the same experts say. Those buggers can be pretty mean.

A fisher? Ha! So say more than a half-dozen people who have contacted me. "There's been talk of a strange animal out here for years," said Steve Theberge, who lives in the Wales area. "They say it stands about 4 feet tall. I hear it's a pretty strange-looking creature."

Theberge is not making this up. His father-in-law has seen the creature. His son has seen it and his wife had an up-close look six years ago.

"This thing, it just hopped over the road and then it stood there," said Brenda Theberge. "It was tan and gray and it had these weird eyes. It was sunset and those eyes were just glowing."

It had the physical characteristics of a hyena, she said. It stood maybe 4 feet tall and it stared with those glowing eyes in a most menacing way. It was almost hairless.

"It was definitely scary to look at," Brenda said. "It was like the size of a pony."

For all his fascination with the creature, Steve has never seen it himself. But he says he was treated to the chilling scream of the beast just a short time ago. It sounded like a baby at first, then the creature began to growl and it was like no sound Theberge had ever heard.

Shortly after hearing the spine-tingling scream, Steve found tracks through dirt and mud in his yard. The tracks were bigger than his hand and bore the imprints of three claws.

"I've spent a lot of time in the Maine woods," Theberge said. "I've never seen a track like that."

When confronted with something that seems alien in the familiar surroundings of our homes, a primitive chill crawls up the spine. As evolved humans, we are at once terrified and fascinated by the unknown. We are a superior species, we reason, and thus we have control over our wildlife.

So when Leo Michaud reported that something had crept from the woods behind his Wales home and killed his Doberman pinscher, wildlife experts nodded knowingly. It was a fisher, they said. A small but vicious animal with a nasty reputation in the Maine woods. It was certainly not some exotic beast that crept down from the mountains.

Calls and letters about the mystery creature have been coming in since a story about the Doberman appeared in the paper. Almost nobody believes the ferocious, but relatively wee fisher, is responsible for the attack. The mystery creature of the Wales woods is the No. 1 suspect.

I know what you're thinking. You live in Lewiston where the only wildlife to be seen is in the downtown area, right? You scoff. You mock. You laugh until coffee comes out your nose and hum the theme from "Deliverance."

Don't get too comfortable just yet, naysayer. A letter-writer named Jamie Tapley tells me he has twice seen a large, fearsome creature in his Sabattus Road yard. He reported the sighting and a Maine Game Warden called him back. The Warden's guess? It was a fisher.

"I researched fishers online and this thing is bigger than a fisher," Jamie said. "This thing is nearly as tall as my collie."

Earlier this week, I was talking to Animal Control Officer Wendell Strout about a completely unrelated matter. I happened to mention what I was hearing about this mystery creature. Strout turned quiet a moment. As it happened, he had received a call earlier that day from a woman on Old Greene Road in Lewiston. The woman had seen a strange creature near the power lines by her home. The critter was at least 18 inches high with a long tail and she wanted to know what it was.

"She drew me a picture," Strout said. "It didn't look like anything I've seen before."

The number of reports alone is enough evidence for me. I'm thinking I should take a week off, pitch my tent in the Wales woods and wait for an encounter with this mystery beast. Sooner or later, it would find me. If the creature were really mean, I might not be back. But I'm pretty sure I know what it would say in a news story about the tragedy.

"It looks like LaFlamme was eaten," said wildlife experts. "It was probably a fisher."

Please feed dog

2005-12-10T02:09:00.000-05:00

Avert your eyes if depictions of grim death disturb you. Look away if images of loneliness, pain and despair offend your delicate sensibilities. The following is the paradigmatic face of suffering.

Or maybe it's a perverse hoax. I really can't tell you. I can affirm that the dog shown here is as dead as anything I have seen. I can vow that the sign next to him is completely genuine and that the photos are untouched. Beyond that, you're on your own.

We came upon the dog while driving out of the expanse of Area 51 in the Nevada desert. It lay beneath a stop sign just before the highway leading away from the compound. The corpse was lashed to the signpost with a coil of wire. Tufts of fur clung to the bleached bones and the dead beast smiled that rictus smile of death.

The circumstances in display the photos tell an unsettling story. A small, domestic animal bound to a pole on a very short leash, left alone under baking, desert sun and exposed to frigid desert nights. How long the animal could have survived like that is anybody's guess. You can only trust that it was a miserable, painful and horrifying crawl to the end. You can almost hear the agonized beast's frantic whimpers floating across the desert.
Or maybe the pooch was hit by a car on Route 375 and left beside the road. Some yucksters may have discovered the corpse weeks later while taking a leak during a drunken ride through the desert. This wits could have created the sign with a magic marker and assembled the grim scene in seconds. You can see this group wetting their pants in merriment as they envision the horror on faces of tourists.

Too close to call, I'd say. I'll leave it up to you. The PLEASE FEED DOG spectacle of March, 2005. Authentic horror? Or grisly stunt?

Dancin' with myself

2005-12-08T04:12:00.000-05:00

Sun Journal reporter Mark LaFlamme recently sat down with author Mark LaFlamme for a discussion about his new novel "The Pink Room." The interview alternated between friendly and antagonistic as the journalist pressed the novelist for answers about his book. The following is the result of the exchange.

Q: It's been said that you sleep until 1 p.m. each afternoon and then work the night beat at the paper. Tell me, where does this leave time for writing fiction?

A: That's a very good question, Mark. I write just about all of my fiction between midnight and roughly four in the morning. When I'm working on a novel, I write at least 2,000 words a night, no matter what. I often write more, but I won't leave the computer until I have at least 2,000 words of fresh copy. One time, I did a word count and found that I was eight words short of that goal. I had to go back and pound out eight new words just to maintain that discipline.

Q: What were the words?

A: "They found the severed limb the following day." Actually, I just made that up. But I may use it in future work.

Q: Considering the themes you write about in works of fiction, do you ever scare yourself?

A: Why, yes. Yes, I do. When I write, I'm surrounded by various ghouls and goblins I keep in my room. When I'm creating a particularly spooky scene in a story, I fancy I've seen one or more of them moving in on me from the corner of my eye. I also have my back facing the door, which was just really bad planning. On occasion, I'll wheel around in my chair, absolutely convinced that someone has crept in behind me. Sometimes, I need to go outside and shake it off.

Q: Not the bravest guy in the world, are you Mark?

A: Not when it comes to the world of the supernatural. At least I don't wet the bed.

Q: I heard you've written hundreds of short stories since you were a kid. Where do you get your ideas.

A: I'm glad you asked that, Mark. I understand most writers hate that question. Stephen King has a stock answer in which he quips that all his ideas come from a warehouse in Cleveland or something. Me, I've been dying for someone to ask.

Q: So, will you answer the question?

A: Right. I absolutely cannot go to sleep each night unless a mental movie is playing in my head. I call it my cerebral cinema. I need to have a story line going and characters to act them out as I'm drifting off. Usually, it's just a very simple scene to start with and the story develops as I go to sleep. I don't remember a time when I approached sleep without that happening in my mind.

Q: Is that how the idea for the Pink Room was conceived?

A: It is. I was trying to fall asleep one night when I conjured the image of a man walking down a very dark road at night. Just a man strolling into nothing, content and at ease. In my cerebral cinema, a car rolled to a stop beside him and a man spoke from inside. He said: "We understand you've been inside the house. We'd like to talk to you about that."

At the time, I was reading a lot of Discover magazines and books about quantum mechanics. The concept of string theory very naturally wormed its way into my mental storyline. A night or two later, I had most of the plot worked out. A night after that, I started writing "The Pink Room."

Q: How long did it take you to complete the novel?

A: Around six weeks for the first draft. At 2,000 words or so a day, that brought me up to roughly 85,000 words, a fair sized novel. But that's just plodding right through the story at a sprinters pace. After that, I had to go back and rewrite some really horrible sections, tweak a little, add elements of foreshadowing, etc. That takes longer and it's not as much fun.

Q: Is "The Pink Room" your first novel?

A: No. My first novel is tentatively titled: "Worumbo." It may eventually take on the title: "The Screaming Room." It's about government experiments with mind control at an abandoned Maine mill and a young newspaper reporter with blossoming psychic abilities. It was a blast to write. The story takes place in a city between Lewiston and Lisbon.

Q: You are aware that there is no city located there, are you not?

A: I am aware of that, Mark. But in my world, there is a rather large city called Myrtle right outside Lewiston. A lot of nasty things happen there.

Q: Will "The Pink Room" be your last novel.

A: Not a chance. I'm about to start a third. It will be about a man who nearly derails a presidential campaign by digging up his dead wife, or about a man who sees dead people every time he detoxes from alcohol.

Q: You're a strange person, Mr. LaFlamme. Did you have any friends at all when you were growing up?

A: I had lots of friends and many girlfriends, Mark. I was a normal kid in every way. Except I thought a lot about dead things at night. But hell, we all did that, right?

Q: Is "The Pink Room" just a long winded version of the Street Talk column?

A: No. I love writing the column but there are definite limits to what I can involve there. The same narrative voice might be present in the novel, but otherwise it's entirely different. The gloves are off when I create fiction. Things are described as I imagine them. There is no point where I have to rein myself in and say: "Okay. That's not appropriate for the readership." The landscape of the story is filled with violence and cruelty. Some of it is graphic. There might even be a nasty word or two in "The Pink Room."

Q: That's about all the questions I have for you. If I could just ask one more?

A: Shoot.

Q: Who's that coming in through the door behind you?

A: What... I can't... Who... I don't like you very much, Mark.

www.marklaflamme.com

To Clyde, with love

2005-12-07T00:54:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Clyde, for that deep and provocative message. You know? It reminds that no matter how provincial and personal my opinions seem to be, there is always someone out there who gets me. Clyde, in that one word you summed up the exact message I was trying to convey. You look, but you also see. I appreciate your candor and your scrutiny. I also appreciate that you might be the only person who has seen this blog. Please come back, Clyde? Won't you please come back?

The concept jars lose an unsettling thought. When does writing for an audience of zero become akin to schizophrenia? At what point will I be talking to myself and settling comfortably into that relationship? What if I start posting responses to my own blogs but don't realize I'm doing it? I might have back and forth exchanges with a man named Lou or a young lady named Sandy Sue. I might get into heated arguments with identities created by myself in a fugue state. Frankly, I'm looking forward to it.

Many people read my Street Talk blog which can be found here. Maintaining that daily dialogue is easy because we have established a known environment, like a bar will establish a regular clientele. In here, there has been no give and take on which to mold such an environment. That is, at the bar known as The Screaming Room, nobody has placed an order or even asked for directions. In here it's just me and a bunch of figurative taps I can't get a drop of beer out of. An empty bar, a silent blog and the blossoming stage of schizophrenia.

Please come back, Clyde. Won't you please come back?

Words in a crack pipe

2005-12-02T05:30:00.000-05:00

It's happening again.
Hello. My name is Mark LaFlamme. I cover crime for the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine where I write news stories about the evil that men do. I also write a weekly column for the newspaper. I also maintain a daily blog on their website. At home, I write short stories. Hundreds of short stories. In the past year, I've written two novels. I have started a website on which to compile all this information. I try to write new stuff for it constantly. And now, another blog.

I think I might have a real problem. Words have become more than a mere avocation. It has become like a substance to which I am addicted. All my hours are filled with words, which fly from my finger tips after brewing and forming inside my head. Like a man addicted to the pipe, my fingers are sometimes blackened by newsprint or the keyboards. Soon I'll be shivering outside the 7-Eleven, hitting up good people like your for spare words... really, man. Anything you can spare.

Of course, there's also a good chance that I'm raving. I rave quite often, which is why I have a column and a blog. And that leads me to the big question here: what madness will fill this new space? Over what shall I rave?

I have no idea, frankly. It could become one of those highbrow places where we babble about the art of writing and the richness of literature. Bring your own flavored coffee and delicate wines I could never afford. Me, I'm a beer man.

It could be a place where lunacy reigns, like the news blog where I tend to talk a lot about monkey nipples, horse semen and nasty outhouse mishaps. The truth is, I don't know. I just know the world is full of words. I just hope somebody will be here to read mine and maybe set the tone with their own. And if you, stranger, happen to be the first, thanks for stopping by. I was jonesing, man. Jonesing real bad.