Bartlett St.

(written in high school)

I grew up in the shell of a town called Lewiston, Maine—a once-industrial metropolis that young, working class high school graduates flocked to with quick money sparkling in their eyes. Most of these people came from rural areas and had been working all their lives. Among those, my mother, with her big, auburn, curly hair-sprayed puff blowing in the chemical smoke, went to work immediately at a factory called Falcon Shoe, and quickly became one of the best employees after her sister introduced her to amphetamines. As the country’s need for industrial labor plummeted and we moved to a love and dependency on the computer, the factories shut down and were never replaced. They now frame the polluted Androscoggin River in the downtown and watch sadly as the descendents of their once-prosperous workers stand in line for food stamps. This is the life of Lewiston, Maine.

            I inherited my mother’s blue-collar blood, despite that after my birth she and my father decided that she would professionally stay home, smoke cigarettes, and diligently watch the neighbors from outside our kitchen window. When they divorced, child support was rent money, gas money, smoke money, and the frequent fast food trip. Luxuries like new clothes were a rarity, and I quickly discovered that if I wanted things for myself I was going to have to work. When I was thirteen, I found a job as a newspaper carrier for the Sun Journal, and my assignment was Bartlett Street, a downtown street like my own, but further, much further, to where I wasn’t allowed to venture as a child.

            I fancied myself a courier, not a “papergirl”, delivering letters from long-lost sisters, husbands going off to an imaginary war, apology letters from cheating wives. Happy Birthday’s and Get Well Soon’s. Postcards from Barbados. I was the messenger. I daydreamed about my future journeys into the foggy morning light. The sky would be a romantic purple, stars still shining and reflecting off my eyes, you could see me: a young girl courier, walking through the empty streets and tossing papers from a distance—birds would swoop down from telephone wires and carry the papers in their beaks onto welcome mats, dropping them gently, as I danced along. Faint music would carry me through the downtown, the streetlights changing colors upon my passing, and after I was done, I would count my tips and smile, floating back to my apartment.

            On my first day I stepped in dog shit. I was to pick up the newspapers at Webb’s Market, a seedy corner store that I later learned to avoid lest the owner, a portly man with a thick mustache outlining his bloated, shining lips, tell me I had a fine set of breasts. My courier bag was charged to my paycheck, which had made me unhappy, and it was barely large enough to contain the sixty-or-so, heavy-as-hell Sunday papers. My assignment was Bartlett Street, maybe the worst street in the worst city in Maine. I could smell the cat piss before I even entered the street. After wiping my shit-caked shoe on the outside wall of Webb’s Market, I set out optimistically—so what if there weren’t the birds and the music and the pretty morning lights?

            Entering Bartlett Street was like falling into a nightmare, or a dreary surrealist painting. Before me was a long, dark, and wet deadscape that reeked of urine and poverty; the apartments seemed to slump down, giving up after all these years of housing druggies and prostitutes and criminals. I watched my steps for poops of any kind, avoiding beer cans and ripped garbage bags with flies and food spilling out into the sidewalk. God had thrown up on this street all of the things he wouldn’t let into heaven. And there I was.

            My first delivery was 106 Bartlett Street and the last name was Renaud. I furrowed my brows at the building in front of me; it had been completely boarded up and the screen door was torn off its hinges. I braved into the porch taking deep breaths, fearing that I may see the keeled-over, rotting corpse of an old woman who once enjoyed reading the morning newspaper.  But there was no corpse. There was, however, a sign on the door of the first apartment reading, bluntly: “PUT THE PAPER IN THE BAG!!!” And below, hanging on the knob, was a little plastic bag. I did as I was told, and hurried back to the street, clutching my courier bag. 

            I soon learned to wear headphones and turn the volume on my music as high as I could muster to avoid the terrifying sounds of the downtown: cat screeches, trashcans falling over, couples fighting, and the slurred bantering of the local drunks, stumbling back to their homes after the bars closed and cops began to linger.

            “Hey papergirl!”

            “Hey papergirl, you gotta paper?!”

            “Hey papergirl, nice titties. You wanna fuck?”

            I didn’t want to be fucked nor did I want to get into the passenger seat of the Somali man who touched my hair that winter when I broke into a run. Each month seemed to darken my eyes to the world in which I lived, to my ideas about mommies and daddies, and drugs, and the poor, and America. I wondered if inside the windows I passed there were children sleeping without blankets, if this was the only America they would come to know. I delivered the news to the people this country had forsaken, their names only known in the arrest logs or on the front page, if they finally injected too much, let baby cry for too long, or gave the ol’ wife what she really deserved.

            I woke up at three-thirty every morning for two years and soon I stopped going back to sleep when I was done my deliveries. Then I stopped sleeping altogether. A depression crept out of the downtown shadows and cloaked itself over me like a blanket. I entered high school with drooping black eyes, under a veil that dragged over everything in my path, painting the world a color I couldn’t recognize or understand but I was sure could be found on Bartlett Street. When I turned fifteen, I found a new job and I could not return to that street for a long time.

Bartlett Street is not merely a street to me now; it is an idea, a manifestation of the festering neglect of the poor within the bowels of America, a barely-thriving organism, an old, stinking drunk, catcalling girls into the morning light. It is the monster that lives not under my bed, but beyond my window, beckoning me into its cold. And if I go to Hell when I die, surely it will look like Bartlett Street, for never have I stepped on such sidewalks paved in sadness and pain. I fear for those who grow up on these streets, whose foundation is cracked and covered in cat piss, broken condoms, and needles. Bartlett Street is homage to all of those American streets, where dirty children play in the road and mothers sip their vodka through orange juice straws and fathers are out fucking other mothers on other streets and sometimes their children, too. Bartlett Street is a bastard of the once-prosperous past, the drunken ex-wife of industry, who left and took everything with it. It is a sad novel waiting to be read, a heartbreaking tragedy that industry fathered and then left, and there will always be a papergirl, marching every day past the people of Bartlett Street, who sees more truth in them than in the newspapers she carries.