On The Mall

It's like an M.C. Escher drawing with stores in it!

The transition from Salem to Portland has been a pleasant one, but there have been plenty of culture shocks as I experience things in Portland that Salem outright lacked – viable public transportation, an abundance of locally owned restaurants, culture, Burgerville, Democrats, parks, etc. However, what has been most arresting about my time in the big city has been the malls. Oh, the fabulous, fabulous malls!

Sure, there were large spaces in Salem that could be referred to as malls. In downtown Salem we had the Salem Center, which consisted of a few large department stores joined by skybridges, along with a food court and the requisite Hot Topic and Honeybaked Ham Store, entities which are seemingly incapable of existing outside of a mall.* It was quaint, really, in a very Salem sort of way – as though some entrepreneurs had seen a mall on TV and attempted to recreate it on a smaller scale. There were overweight security guards and warring tribes of punkish 8th graders, sure, but it was more like a Hasbro mall playset than a real mall. For a long time, I thought that was what malls were like.

*Also, the Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe – I’ve seen a lot of those places in my life, and they’ve always been in malls. Why is that? If you’re going to buy a replica samurai sword, why is it that you can only do so within walking distance of an indoor fountain and an Orange Julius?

Eugene prepared me a little, but not much. Students at the University of Oregon have two options for malls – Valley River Center, a mall near the highway that is somewhat larger and somewhat classier than Salem Center, and Gateway Mall, a mall near the Interstate that has been known to cause unborn children to weep tears of blood. Valley River Center has upscale shops (like, for example, Excalibur) and wide open hallways. Gateway Mall, on the other hand, is all of the worst things that a mall can be.

Approaching the front door of Gateway Mall, one must contend with a mob of sullen faced teenagers who have come to the mall in search of something to do and found that fun is yet another product not sold there. Muscling through the crowd and entering the building, you’re assaulted by a cheap second run movie theater on the right and a food court on the left, which is dominated by a large and vaguely sinister circus type ride wherein kids are strapped into a compartment that looks like a smiling frog, hoisted up about two stories, and then jerked up and down a bit. The deeper you go into the mall the more confounding things you’ll see – a cushioned pen filled with screaming, mostly unattended toddlers, a vending machine that sells glow in the dark crosses, and a sports bar targeted at NASCAR fans. No, I’m serious – the bar is part of some chain of NASCAR oriented eateries, and what’s worse, it’s smack dab in the middle of the mall. If you can think of anything more depressing than going to the run down mall by the Interstate to get drunk and watch NASCAR, then I’m pretty sure you should go to work writing for 24.

So this was my training before I got up to Portland – quaint little malls, some better than others, some white trashier than others. However, two days ago I visited Clackamas Town Center for the first time in my life, and it rocked me in a manner best befitting a hurricane.

The Girlfriend and I have had little luck finding jobs in our immediate neighborhood, so on Friday we packed up a bunch of resumes and went to Clackamas Town Center, the nearest mall, assuming that it would be a veritable whirlpool of potential employment. I had known that Clackamas Town Center would be a bigger mall than I’d been to before, but I didn’t truly appreciate how big until I saw that the parking garage outside was taller than 90% of the buildings in Salem. Even more interesting was the fact that they even needed a parking garage, seeing as the parking lot itself was large enough to occupy two time zones.

We entered the mall at about its midsection, and when The Girlfriend explained that that the mall extended “basically forever” in either direction, I felt kind of overwhelmed by all the choices. Which way to go – left, or right? Should we start at the top and work our way down, or start at the bottom and work our way up? Did we have enough food and water for the entire trip? Was there a store where we could buy donkeys to ride from one end of the mall to the other? Imagine my shock when I found out that there was still the entire “West Village” to explore; a plaza filled with expensive restaurants and tonier stores (including – you guessed it – Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe), as well as The Promenade, another complex across the street that in and of itself is larger than Salem Center, as well as perhaps the very city of Salem.

To walk through Clackamas Town Center is to have the very spirit of capitalism knock you down with a sledgehammer and then dangle its balls in your face. There are stores on either side of the hall and kiosks in the middle of it, where employees scrape together what little remaining enthusiasm they have to anxiously ask how you’re doing and if you’d maybe like to buy a new iPod shell today. Wall space not occupied by stores is occupied instead by giant advertisements that go above and beyond the call of duty, such as the wall-spanning Aquafina ad that included an Aquafina vending machine built right into the wall, or the ad in the food court for a home remodeling superstore which included two glassed in examples of the finest bathtubs money could buy.*

*I’ve decided, by the way, that if I ever want to kill someone I’m going to stick them in one of those bathtub exhibits, trapped behind a pane of glass, forced to slowly starve to death while watching crowds of overweight children devour Carl’s Jr. a few feet away.

And the pretzels! My God, the pretzels! What is it about the mall experience that makes people crave pretzels? During my time in Clackamas Town Center I could’ve sworn I saw at least two Auntie Annie’s pretzel shops, as well as some mysterious competing pretzel shop (Creepy Uncle Monty’s, featuring their signature “Thanksgiving 1998” pretzel, which shows up late smelling like alcohol and cheap cigars). What about walking through miles of climate controlled economic splendor makes a person want a piece of dough wrapped up in a crazy way and covered in cinnamon?

Maybe it’s the screaming kids – of course, if that’s the case, then they’d do well to start selling liquor at pretzel stands.* Children truly have the run of Clackmas Town Center – they move in packs, devoid of supervision, eager to get underfoot. At one point, I rode an elevator up to the second story. When it arrived, I was all ready to leave the elevator when the doors opened and a literal tidal wave of children stormed in. As they did, several of them glared at me, as if to say “What the hell are you doing? This is our elevator.”

*Of course, at Creepy Uncle Monty’s, you can get your Thanksgiving 1998 Special with a 32-ounce Peppermint Schnapps in a commemorative Burger King cup, along with a side of Marlboros.

If any of the managers to whom I handed applications at the mall are reading this, please don’t take my cynicism toward mall culture as a sign that I’m a bad worker. All I’m saying is, if I ever go missing after my shift, check the trunk of Creepy Uncle Monty’s car.

Truman Capps could not quite bring himself to apply for a job in the food court.