24 hours in Bangor, Maine

Today's post is all about my recent whirlwind trip to Bangor as a featured reader at the Bangor Book Festival. Seeing as I live only an hour away from this town, I am unlikely ever to spend the night there again. However, we made the most of our opportunity. According to Tom, we did everything in Bangor that could be done, so here's the review, just in case you ever find yourself in the Queen City with 24 hours to kill.

The Bangor Book Festival mostly takes place at the public library, which is quite a nice building, though the bathrooms can be difficult to locate. Unfortunately, the poets didn't get to read at the library; we got to read at the bagel shop, which is closed every Saturday for the Sabbath (though that doesn't stop the employees from coming in to bang on the kitchen equipment). As the first reader of the morning, I merely struggled against rain noise and a cavernous echo. But subsequent readers also dealt with the Hobart mixer and what sounded like fifty galvanized trashcans being whacked against a dumpster. Nonetheless, the poets persevered; and of the 20 or so people who attended, only a few were our relatives and I heard some beautiful work. So all in all, the morning went well.

After selling a book, I tracked down Tom in the library reading room, where he was examining a photograph of Shackleton's final birthday dinner. (Did you know that Antarctic exploration requires not only stemware but also two soda siphons?) We decided to go out to lunch and accordingly stepped into what the National Weather Service had advertised as scattered showers but was turning out to be more like constant showers mixed with scattered downpours.

In addition to the book festival, Bangor was hosting Oktoberfest, which, we noticed, didn't seem to be going very well. In the roped-off side street between the "Irish" bar and the "Caribbean" bar, two vendors of something indeterminate were dejectedly folding their tents, and the only person under the jaunty Red Stripe umbrellas was a smoking bus boy. Nonetheless, we were hungry; and since almost every other restaurant in town appeared to be closed, we went into the "Caribbean" bar. Inside, the place was crowded, mostly with young men who had probably spent the morning doing bong hits in their living rooms and had now ventured out to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and argue about sunglasses. More notable were the waitresses, whom the management had forcibly dressed for Oktoberfest. All of them wore facsimiles of the Saint Pauli girl outfit, constructed of the cheapest possible material in the most lurid of colors. The women were attempting to make the best of their thigh-high ruffled white stockings and their distressing stretchy green stomachers, but their best was not good enough. It was a sad situation.

"Caribbean" turned out to mean coconut-flavored mayonnaise, which made ordering lunch difficult. Eventually we were reduced to asking for hamburgers, which we ate while speculating about the elderly man in ill-fitting velour leiderhosen who had suddenly appeared at the bar. We came to no finite conclusions.

After lunch, back outside in the rain, we toiled up the hill past the Greyhound station. What should we do next? we wondered. Ahead in the distance loomed Hollywood Slots. "Video poker?" suggested Tom, but I couldn't face the prospect. So we turned around, crossed the street, and went to the Antiques Marketplace, although it did not seem promising. From the street the store looked like one of those shoppes that features reproduction Pepsi thermometers afixed to painted pegboard. But once we were inside, we realized that our luck had turned . . . which, in Dawn-and-Tom language translates as "cheap used books and records in quantity and of an eccentric variety." After an hour or two at the Antiques Marketplace, we emerged with the following: a pocket-sized Oxford Classics edition of the poems of George Herbert, Muriel Spark's novel Reality and Dreams, Ivy Compton-Burnett's novel A Heritage and Its History; albums by Ike and Tina Turner, the Box Tops, Curtis Mayfield, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs; and a Rickey Henderson baseball card. I could have purchased a John Berryman novel about being an alcoholic, a miniscule copy of School for Scandal, and any number of Alan Trammell cards, but I refrained. Still, now you have an idea of the merchandise available.

Having killed more time than we expected, we discovered that we had now reached check-in time at our hotel. Being a featured author at the book festival meant that I got a free overnight stay at a place located conveniently next door to the "Caribbean" bar. From the outside, the inn looks like a rundown 1880s city hotel, while from the inside it looks like a rundown 1980s city hotel: khaki-colored paint, broken locks, fat TVs, no one ever at the front desk, etc. As advertised on its website, it also boasts a large art collection; and large is no exaggeration. The narrow hallway outside our room was lined shoulder to shoulder with remarkable paintings. Our favorite was undoubtedly "Electrocuted Terrier" (not its real name).

After falling into a brief doze and then telephoning home ("Mom, you should go to Hollywood Slots! They have video poker!"), we discovered that we were both suffering from the leaden after-effects of our indigestible "Caribbean" hamburgers. Exercise was called for. Therefore, we tracked down our automobile and took it bowling.

Our games followed their usual erratic trajectories; the only notable difference was that I got a strike and my bowling shoes matched my dress. Fortunately we had mysterious neighbors in lane 5: two large women, a short man with a hairy back, and a happy twenty-year-old girl who said she had never been bowling before, did not seem to know the other three people very well, and took numerous cell-phone photos of the score.

The hairy man and the happy girl were both abysmal bowlers of the bounce-the-ball-down-the-lane variety, but they were delighted to cheer on the other two, who, according to the spares and strikes flashing on their scoring screen, were named Thelma and Louise. These may or may not have been pseudonyms; all I know is that the hairy man addressed them by name without irony.

Louise was my sort of bowler: prone to getting a gutter ball followed by a spare followed by a gutter ball. Thelma, however, was serious about her game, though she had a peculiar windup. First, she perched on her toes, with the ball dangling between her knees and her back slightly hunched. After a long pause, she then began tiptoeing toward the lane, ball still dangling. Then, finally, at the last moment, she screeched to a halt at the foul line and flung the ball at the pins. The approach was remarkably successful: she was especially good at getting those buck-toothed spares. But she maintained a dour, lemon-eating look, no matter how much jollity ensued among her comrades, and she never cast an eye our way.

Two games was our boredom limit; and with the hamburgers now a distant memory, we returned to the hotel, took another nap, and then went outside to see how Oktoberfest was coming along. Now two people were smoking under the dripping Red Stripe umbrellas, a three-piece band had crammed itself against the front window of the "Caribbean" bar, and a single girl was dancing to Rolling Stones covers with an empty pint glass raised over her head and her eyes shut. We decided against investigating further and continued up the street to a "Cosmopolitan" bar, the sort with 20 German beers on tap and one of those bartenders who, when you order, tells you that what you asked for is not what you really want. Thankfully, however, the wait staff merely wore jaunty hats, not full Saint Pauli girl regalia, and the beer that we really did want was really good.

Earlier in the week, Tom had studied our options and had decided that, for dinner, the Italian restaurant owned by a man who had previously owned an Italian restaurant in New Jersey was our best hope. And indeed, if the seasoning chef had been able to stem his or her enthusiasm, we would have had a beautifully fresh and well-cooked meal. As it was, we had a salty one. But by 9:30 the restaurant was closing down for the night, Oktoberfest was petering out in the gutters, and we had no choice but to return to the hotel.

When we walked in, three people sat at the bar in the lobby. Though there were signs of an incipient band, the only action was a four-year-old girl who was running up and down the hallway. The question became: What's on TV? But no sooner did we settle ourselves in bed and discover that the answer was David Lynch's Blue Velvet than a firestorm of Willie Dixonesque blues exploded in the lobby. Peeking out the door into the haze beyond "Electrocuted Terrier," Tom reported that the place was packed. Perhaps the revelers had all entered by means of a secret underground hatch. In any case, the sound was cranked to frat-boy level--loud enough to obscure most of the Blue Velvet soundtrack, which, seeing as a David Lynch movie makes no sense anyway, was completely fine and possibly even an improvement on the original. Fortunately we didn't care about going to sleep anytime soon. And strangely, when I did fall asleep at 2 a.m. or whatever, I slept well, which never happens, even in nice quiet hotel rooms.

The next morning we rose, walked out into the perpetual rain, and returned to the bagel shop, which was now open for business. As our 24 hours in Bangor petered out, I drank weak coffee and read "Dear Abby." (What do you think? At a wake, is it good manners to allow a young niece to put stickers on grandma's corpse?) Sitting at the table behind us was a man who bore an uncanny resemblance to King Edward VII, if Edward had ever worn polar fleece and a bike helmet. He seemed to be ecstatic about his breakfast sandwich.

And thus ended our 24 hours in Bangor, Maine. All in all, we had a fine time, though I am still having dark thoughts about the man in the velour leiderhosen.