Tag Archives: shopping malls

Non-fiction

Malls

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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.

Fiction

Latchkey

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I’ve always been somewhat of a loner, whether on purpose or by accident. It started when I was younger. I moved around a lot. I was born in California and lived there for one year, then moved to Kentucky and lived there for two years, then to Florida and lived there for another two years, then to Pennsylvania and lived there for five years, then back to Florida for three years before I moved back to California. If you add it up, it equals thirteen years. By the eighth grade, I’d lived in six cities, and that isn’t counting the many homes I moved into in those cities, so I never felt a firm grounding and never built solid friendships.

I would play alone in the backyard with a tennis ball or a football or a frisbee when my parents were at work. Most days after school, I wouldn’t have a sitter. I played imaginary baseball against a wall by throwing a tennis ball at a chalked-up strike zone beneath a steel pipe. If the ball hit the pipe, it would either fly through the air or roll across the lawn. I would field it and throw it at a tree for a first baseman to call it an out. This helped me practice for Little League because my father wasn’t around.

I also spent time alone in my bedroom, listening to cassettes and playing with action figures, pretending, pretending, pretending. Or Mom would let me roam the mall alone when she was shopping for clothes. I would lose myself in the record store for the cassettes with the coolest covers. If I was with someone, it would’ve been the same thing. They would’ve wanted to go to the arcade. And I did have friends who went to the mall with me. They would get bored in the record store, and I would want to stay in there.

“I’ll meet you at the arcade,” I would say.

And they would be there for a while.

I remember in the eighth grade, my friend Jonathan and I went to the mall, and an adult started following us. We hid in the racks of a Macy’s so the man wouldn’t find us, unsure what he was capable of. The only danger at the mall was the threat of being abducted, but I usually didn’t worry about that. I was too engrossed in the cassettes.

It wasn’t as much about the music but more about the album covers. I remember I bought every tape by Iron Maiden because the album covers were so sweet. The music wasn’t all that special. The same went with AC/DC. Their music was okay, but their album covers allured me. I bought all their cassettes with the allowance my mother gave me. She would get upset because I was wasting money on those stupid cassettes rather than saving up for something better. I didn’t know what she meant by “better.” She never told me. I don’t think she knew either. But I bought what I wanted to buy, and I would listen to those cassettes every day after school. They wouldn’t allow me to bring my Walkman onto the campus.

I still consider myself a latchkey child. The only difference is that I’m an adult who comes home to an empty apartment and gets lost in his own world. I haven’t changed much since adolescence, and that’s fine. In my view, most people don’t. I run into old friends, and they’re the same. They were latchkey children, too. We were fortunate. Who wanted to come home from school to the same old parents every day? No privacy. I needed that solitude after dealing with kids and teachers all morning.