It's likely that no one will ever walk drunk into the Fellowship House again.
    Yet for nearly a quarter-century, thousands staggered into the small building on Blake Street. They reeled, they stumbled, they sometimes crawled. And for the most part, they came out days later with eyes clear, pulse normal and nerves steady.
   The Fellowship House was one of the last street detox centers left in the state. The building is empty now but it's still there. It's a short, L-shaped brick building that juts across a parking lot between Blake and Bates. To me, it looks like a tail without a dog to wag it.
   Anyone who's spent significant time in Lewiston has probably seen it. An unimpressive brick building, it just looks like office space. But the business of the Fellowship House wasn't about making money. It was about saving lives. The lives of those drowning in alcohol. Desperate men and women on fire with thirst, dying by the ounce.
   Every day, besotted souls with personal terrors brewed in booze found their way to the place. Any hour of any day, the doors opened to those drunken figures so comical or repulsive to the rest of the world.
   Some were dying. Others, suicidally depressed. All of them were abused by a substance.
They came in sometimes belligerently. Many were sick, many more disoriented. They came in ill, obnoxious or intolerable to the people in their lives, if they still had people who loved them.
   The nurses descended on the new patients calmly. Vital signs were checked, questions asked. Sedatives were doled out as needed, calming the jagged nerves of those suffering the hell of alcohol withdrawal.
In some cases, the drunks suffered seizures, so severe was their dependence on the noxious liquor. They might hallucinate and scream at the invisible horrors of delirium tremens.
   Some slept for days, though it was unsettled sleep. Some ate for the first time in a week. Each night, the survivors who were sobered up enough sat huddled in the small building. Rich people and poor people. Street people and pillars of society who might never share space if it weren't for this common affliction. They chain-smoked and muttered over their woes. They cursed the substance that brought them here. They made solemn vows that this ... this was the last time the bottle would beat them down. They probably meant it every time.
   There was a counselor there who for seven years didn't touch the sauce. While he dealt with his own addiction, he helped other alcoholics. Then he slipped off the wagon. He left the Fellowship House to pursue booze dreams. He was dead within weeks. Cops found him stone dead between buildings on Blake Street, less than a block from the building where he'd once been a savior.
   There were plenty who made several trips through the Fellowship House. A couple of trips for some, well over a dozen for others. Some died before they made it back. They died out there in the drinking world and that's how they quit the booze, at last.
   Yet, for those who came staggering back for their sixth or seventh or eighth visit, the staff was no less kind. They were no less attentive to the variety of needs that come with alcohol abuse. They handed out medicine, directed Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and got the drinker back on his or her feet. Again. And again and again. It was one of those quietly effective places that set about performing the miracle of turning pickles back into cucumbers. It did so in a way that went unnoticed by the rest of the city - by those who could take their booze or leave it.
   The Fellowship House opened in 1975, closed as a detox center in 1997. Roughly 3,000 drunken souls each year filled the 15 beds inside. They came out well days later, like characters from a Dr. Suess story getting spit out the other side of a miraculous machine.
   But when it was gone, the Fellowship House went with a whimper instead of a bang. Bureacracy rolled over it as effectively as a war tank. The state didn't want to fund a street detox any longer. It became an extended shelter. Then the Fellowship House joined another group and the building became obsolete.
   Now, those wanderers looking for a lifeboat in the sea of alcohol find only an aging brick building on Blake Street. They're told to go to a nearby hospital for help if anyone is nearby to greet them. I've seen a few of those booze-beaten folks gaze off wearily into the complex maze of downtown Lewiston. They peer at the now dark building that once was alight with hope for those who lost another round. They frown at the situation and go wandering off to their liquor supply, like needy children who came home to find nobody there.
 

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter
Copyright ©2005 Lewiston Sun Journal