My sanctuary from home, when I was just a young buck, was the shopping mall in the eighties and nineties in the small town that I lived in. From what I can tell, they’re hardly around anymore. Where do kids wander to these days to escape? Where can they get away from their families when they’ve had enough of them? It was where I went with my friends through junior high and high school. We would spend a good hour at the record store, even when they didn’t sell records. They sold tapes and compact discs. I would usually buy a cassette for ten dollars before sales tax.

Then we would eat in the food court. The food court had a Taco Bell, a Sbarro, a Hot Dog On a Stick, a deli, and a restaurant that sold cheesesteaks. I usually ate at Taco Bell with my friend.

We would venture to a gag store with dirty gifts and spend about an hour in there, making fun of the items they sold.

The shopping mall progressed as we got older, with more restaurants to fit in there. I remember Red Robin sold hamburgers of all types, and a restaurant called Jolly Roger served old people. I imagine they served a lot of soup.

Anyway, we would spend hours in the mall, just walking around, looking for somewhere to kill time before we had to trek back home on the city bus that picked us up out front.

I can’t forget the Cinnabon across from JC Penney. I always felt like a huge glutton after eating a large cinnamon roll with icing on top of it, so I barely ate there.

Eventually they took away one of the music stores and replaced it with a video store where I could rent VHS tapes and DVDs. I never thought Netflix would arrive. It was long before it became a streaming service, and I definitely didn’t think it would come to that.

There was a movie theater right outside of the mall that my friend and I used to drive to at midnight when we were adults to watch movies on the first night when they came out. Or we would take the city bus when we were teenagers when the sun was out to watch cheap matinees. We did that trick where we would buy a ticket for a PG film but sneak into an R-rated theater when the staff wasn’t looking. That was always fun.

The bus stop was always a sketchy place for kids to hang out. One time, my friend had bought baseball cards, and we were looking at them in front of a lady who kept shifting her weight left and right on her hands, sitting on the bus bench. “My husband has every baseball card in the world,” she said. She looked as if she lived there. It was impossible to believe her.

I don’t know what I would’ve done with myself if the mall never existed–probably play basketball or baseball with other kids before dinner. But we preferred to go shopping and eat out, my friend and I. Malls were their own amusement parks in a way, without expensive admission tickets and huge rollercoasters, just the shopping aspect with stuff that wasn’t overpriced. Yeah, my friend and I would get lost in the mall.

There was one time when an adult followed us around. We couldn’t find a mall cop anywhere to help us. The weird man followed us into the music store and stared at us with his hand on his crotch. We figured there was something mentally wrong with him. He followed us to other shops, I can’t remember which ones, but somehow he disappeared as if he was never there. My friend couldn’t figure it out and neither could I, that he’d suddenly vanished. I never told my mother. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have let me go to the mall without being supervised, and I couldn’t let that happen. The mall was the one place to get away from her.