My family went to Maine when I was 17. Ostensibly it was to look at colleges. Mostly it was to go to Maine. I had a new pair of Rollerblades that didn't fit me and I wanted to be far away from my family so I rolled into town.

"Town" being New Harbor, Maine, which had a population of maybe 3,000. I found a pizza place with an extremely hot girl in her 20s wearing a Skinny Puppy shirt. I was stricken. She was not. We talked a little, but then I ended up talking to the owner of the pizza place. He was 18, which was cool, and we talked a lot about Industrial music. He had a really nice girlfriend and we basically hung out and chatted until dark. I got to meet several of the locals - there was a group of maybe five of them.

About six o'clock somebody told the owner something that worried him, but he shrugged it off, and we continued to chat, hang out and play Neo Geo for free because he had the key to the machine. I wandered across the way and bought us booze because I never got carded. Then about eight o'clock four coked-out roid-rage lobster fishermen kicked open the door (it was unlocked), grabbed the counter with the cash register on it and pulled it out of the wall/floor sending the register and computer crashing to the floor and circled around the five or so people in the room.

"Everybody get the fuck out," one of them said.

The owner looked scared shitless. His girlfriend looked worse. The other three people in the room looked down and filtered out the door.

"You need to get out of here, this isn't your problem," one of the fishermen said to me.

"Seems like you have a problem with my friend, that makes it my problem," I heard myself saying.

He looked at me for a moment and said "fine, you can stay," and then sort of stumbled through a few threats about selling drugs to his daughter and fucking up the owner and such. And then, mojo succinctly taken, they stumbled out of the business.

"Dude, thank you," the owner said to me.

"They weren't serious," I said.

"No, they were," he said, and called 911. Long story short, there isn't much to do in New Harbor Maine except drugs and all the fishermen preferred coke. This one guy's daughter was a known tweaker who had been caught by her dad with LSD. Dad didn't care so much that she was doing LSD but where it had come from, and rather than give up her dealer she'd fingered my buddy because all the lobster fishermen in town hated the 18 year old kid with a pizza business and a Neo Geo machine. The guy had served time for battery before and, at the trial six months later, ended up earning himself another 3.

I spent another week or so hanging out with them. He and his new girlfriend later drove clear from Maine to Washington to see me. He does Post Audio in New York now; we still trade emails and christmas cards.