Yesterday was a mall day for me. Hold your sniggers, please. We all have them. I don’t care how “green” you are or wish to be, how committed to local products and services, how opposed to mass consumerism, how righteous in your avoidance of Recognizable Brands. Like hangnails and nosebleeds, nobody gets through life without an occasional visit to the mall. Indeed, such visits are closely akin to hangnails and nosebleeds, as follows: 1) they’re not such a goddamned big deal, so quit whining and get over it; 2) still, you have lost some precious part(s) of your corporeal (or spiritual) being, and so can be forgiven for feeling a little blue in the aftermath, and 3) if the hangnails, nosebleeds or visits persist, and/or if worse you find yourself secretly enjoying them, you have the warning signs of a much more serious and perhaps fatal condition for which you ought to seek professional help at the first opportunity. I feel pretty safe on the last score, although damn I remember some epic nosebleeds as a child; scarlet gushers from a busted tap that terrified my parents and delighted my siblings. But not in years, now. I think my cuticles are no worse off than the next guy’s. And my shopping trip really was no fun at all.
I did my mall business in Delaware. I’m here on a family vacation involving in-laws and a beach house. It’s an annual event for me. I believe I’ve had but one summer in which I didn’t go to Delaware since the early 1980s. I’ve walked, jogged and driven all over its freeways and toll roads, its byways and cornfields, its sandy strands and fetid canals, its backwaters and beaches. But until yesterday I hadn’t visited its malls. Do you know much about Delaware? I didn’t think so. Unless you’re a native or denizen of the Chesapeake Bay, there really isn’t much reason to know anything about the state beyond its capital, and that only to impress your trivia buddies. It’s almost entirely rural except for Dover and its airbase, and a few towns sprinkled around like a cheapskate’s chocolate sprinkles on a plain vanilla cookie. They raise chickens here, and grow vegetables and cranberries, and the beaches provide vacation spots for millions of visitors from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and sometimes (though rarely) points beyond. (Seldom as far as Seattle.) That’s about it. But all these activities require the presence of people, and as we all know, an awful lot of people get nosebleeds every day like to shop. Thus, malls.
It’s flat here. The only elevations significantly above sea level are osprey nests, suspension bridges and the upper decks of the tonier “cottages,” if such a word can be—and it is, actually—applied to three thousand square-foot mansions with as many bedrooms as my house has drawers. Most of the state’s perimeter is sea or bay shore, which gives way to countless acres of marshland, much of which was diked, drained and dammed long ago to make way for fields and farms. And malls. Some are crumbling and decrepit, while others are quite new. Whatever their age, they’re big. Very big. We think we’ve got big malls in and around Seattle—Southcenter, Northgate, Alderwood, even Bellisfair up north, and so on. They are but overgrown convenience stores next to the sprawling monsters of mallness one encounters on, say, a drive up or down Route 1. With essentially unlimited room to expand, the malls hereabouts have no need to cluster a bunch of stores around a central court, walkway or other “feature” in the usual risible effort to (re)create an ersatz “village square” environment. They tend instead to the horizontal, with parking lots the size of Midwestern counties. My visit(s) yesterday were by way of an errand, one of those occasional bumps in the Vacation Road that involves a long, uninformed, wandering search for something one could find in ten minutes at home but is maddeningly elusive even with the help of the interwebs; an old-school experience, I guess it would be called, in which one simply must hunt for the object of one’s desires in real time, via car, traveling from likely suspect to likely suspect with no real hope of success yet nothing better to do than sit on the beach and get skin cancer. For what it’s worth my search eventually and to my surprise was successful, though the hunt took the better part of seven hours, door-to-malls-to-door. I had a lot of malls to visit.
Route 1 is a busy highway during the summer months. It’s gridlock on the weekends, as you can imagine, but even mid-week it can be a waking nightmare.
I had it fairly easy for a while until I had to get back onto the highway from a set-back mall complex in the small town of Smyrna. Though most of the coastal malls are visible from the big road, they tend to be recessed a good distance—as much as a quarter mile—from the traffic, with labyrinthine turn lanes and access roads connecting them to the ribbon of tractor trailers and SUVs that speeds by; skinny limbs and capillaries carrying a vital life-force into the retail extremities, but loathe to allow its natural return to the principal veins and arteries. Ninety-eight percent of the mall stores are the usual suspects; the ubiquitous chains and franchises that so completely have doused the last sputtering sparks of creativity, integrity and value in the retail universe. As if (and possibly literally) by fiat there is a Wal-Mart every fifteen miles or so, and a Home Depot, and its make-believe competitor Lowes, and of course a Macys, a Sears, a Costco, a Radio Shack, a Godfather’s Pizza; you know them as well as I—the reigning hangnails and nosebleeds of post-modern commerce. At each mall the large flagship stores bookend an unbroken string of lesser brethren; plate glass forward, dumpsters behind, side-by side like cars on a mile-long train. Once in their asphalt realm, it is very, very difficult to turn back and regain the highway. This road dead-ends at a Burger King dumpster; that one delivers a driver precisely to the very parking lot, even the same space, he or she was trying to escape. I passed a couple of cars yesterday whose occupants, glimpsed fleetingly through tinted windows upon which they beat their sorry heads arhythmically, clearly had been trying for days or even weeks to leave the self-same malls I too was attempting to flee. I made it out and back to the highway, and if the journey involved a couple of bumps over berms and maybe one trip the wrong way down a one-way access road, there’s no reason to tell my mother-in-law, whose borrowed car I was driving.
I worked in a mall once, a long time ago. It was the summer after my senior year in high school. A friend got me the part-time job. He was employed there as well, and thought it would be good fun for us to work side-by-side as early morning janitors in a department store called “Lazarus.” Why, by the way, in our regressive, pop-Christian culture, do we not tap the Bible more often for its rich store of wonderful monikers when it comes time to name our commercial enterprises? The best ones are found in the Old Testament, of course. A hair salon called Esau’s? A butcher’s shop called Cain’s? Perhaps Zipporah, a fabric store? Pest control by Baal-zebub? Maybe Jeroboam, your tax advisors? Who would dare not to shop at a hardware store called Yahweh’s? Alas I digress. Ours was a New Testament employer, in any case; the high-end garment and gewgaw dealer in that part of the state. We were hired not by the store but by a maintenance services contractor, and our job was to have the place spic and span each morning for it’s 9:30 a.m. opening. That meant being at work by 4:30. I would make the coffee and Bill would pick me up in his Dad’s immaculate Oldsmobile. Bill Senior was a union honcho, and the car, which smelled strongly of graft and dirty politics, had a loaded handgun in the glove box. (Having mentioned this, have no fear—this is a blog not a short story, so the gun need not be fired before its end.) The mall was called “Northland.” It was pretty new at the time, and like every other mall in existence back then it claimed to be the first in America, a dubious distinction one would think, but this was a different era. Bill and I arrived at the parking lot in stygian silence, sliding in alongside the pickups and rattletraps of our hapless coworkers. There we would sip our scalding Joe and wait for our boss to arrive. We could not enter the building without his key, and the night crew, which had attended to the heavier and dirtier maintenance tasks—painting, moving and actually fixing things—could not leave. They would stand trapped behind the wide, locked door of the loading dock, beating on the galvanized steel and hollering for release, as many of them had day jobs waiting.
I don’t recall the boss’s actual name, but we referred to him out of earshot as Shithead. He was always late, sometimes by as much as an hour. He’d arrive in his own good time, generally with a buddy in the front seat, from whatever mischief or festivities had kept them up all night. Shithead drove a beat-up Buick as long as a short city block; a car that seemed to creep rather than roll into the lot at last, its headlights dim and dirty, its engine growling in misery. Shithead was a prodigious boozer, and always had a quart bottle of Seagram’s Seven in hand when he arrived. Whether dregs or freshly opened he and his buddy would finish it, taking their own sweet time, passing a fat joint all the while. We’d be out of the car by then, standing on the dock with the other janitors, shouting back and forth with the graveyard shift guys, who by this time would be frantic and furious in their imprisonment. We’d watch the red ember of the doobie pass back and forth between the men behind their filthy windshield, then the bottle, and often we could hear their radio blaring Motown, though their window remained closed even if the night was warm. Eventually Shithead would roll out of the Buick and smash the empty bottle onto the asphalt, then make his way to the dock. He was a pudgy, repulsive toad of a man, staggering, slobbering and mean as a weasel. His fire-red eyes would be narrowed to slits, and he stank so badly that we could smell him the instant that he shoved open his creaky car door. He wouldn’t say a word as he unlocked the metal gate and the prisoners spilled out, silent now as well, for no one ever, ever, ever crossed words with Shithead. I had a sick sense that someone once tried, and whatever ugliness was provoked had become unspoken legend. Everything about the man told you, with no need of speech, that he would not hesitate to maim or kill you for no reason should you be in his vicinity when the urge struck him. Thankfully he would disappear instantly once we were inside. I never knew where he went. His buddy slept in the car until we were done.
Bill’s and my job was vacuuming. The store was big, as department stores must be, and we’d split into crews by floor, wheeling our equipment out of a cramped closet and calculating how much time we had to get finished, depending on how tardy Shithead had been that day, and thus the speed at which we would need to work to make it seem as though we’d done a passable job, though I don’t recall anyone ever assessing our work. The only rule Shithead enforced was one possibly imposed by Lazarus management, though it may simply have been a personal quirk of his. In either case it was hard and fast: Under no circumstances were we to allow the employees of the store to see us at work, or indeed to spy us at all. The place was to be clean by nine o’clock when the floor managers and sales clerks began to arrive, and we were to hustle our vacuum cleaners back to the store room invisibly, whether that meant taking the escalator, the elevator or a back stair case that supposedly served as a fire escape. The only words I recall ever leaving the boss’s gap-toothed mouth were uttered on the rare occasion when a store worker would arrive unexpectedly, threatening detection and whatever dire consequence might follow. Then Shithead, with some weird sixth sense doubtless developed in one or more state penitentiaries, would materialize in front of us, reeking and unsteady, and mutter “les go dis way,” leading us circuitously through racks and behind displays and eventually to a service door where we would vanish from the apprising eyes of the regular employees, stash our gear and go home.
I learned three valuable lessons about work that summer. My only prior experiences as a paid employee had been playing gigs, mowing lawns for neighbors and, occasionally on Saturdays, assembling two-way radios for a friendly uncle who owned an electronics business. He was nice to me, paid me minimum wage and sometimes bought me donuts on the way to the shop. This was a Real Job for Strangers, albeit horrible ones, and I was determined to Make a Good Impression. On my first day, I vacuumed myself into a bit of a panic. I’d been assigned one-half of the first floor, which was Ladies’ Wear. I worked as quickly as I could, dragging my asthmatic machine around by its accordion hose, learning the locations of the most efficient outlets for its thirty-foot power cord. I glanced at a wall clock a couple of hours into the shift and realized that there was no way I could be finished by nine. Just then Bill appeared, checking in on my first day and laughing uproariously at my methods. It seemed I was, um, overdoing it, specifically vacuuming not only around but beneath the display racks of dresses, skirts and underthings. “You’ll never finish like that,” he giggled. Then how--? I didn’t need to ask. Taking the hose from me he proceeded to “show me how it’s done.” This involved his simply moving up and down the aisles at a brisk amble, pushing the vacuum wand before him like a shopping cart. When he came upon floor debris—torn tags, wadded tissues, bits of broken plastic hanger—rather than pick them up as I’d been doing and put them in the plastic bag that hung from the handle of the machine, he’d deftly kick them out of sight under the racks, without breaking stride. In this manner he finished the area on which I’d spent the last two hours in about forty seconds. He handed me the hose. “See?” I saw. And, I learned my First Lesson about the life of the working man, i.e. that far from being frowned upon it is in fact expected that a fellow will do the bare minimum of a semblance of a job in order to keep the boss man off his back, and get through the day with as little sweat as possible. It’s a reality to which I’ve never easily cottoned, often to my derision and detriment. Throughout my wage earning years I have been accused of “going the extra mile” (that’s the nicest characterization), or more often insisting on the “last one percent,” when much less trouble is all that is required to get by—even in myriad circumstances where I believed the officially-sanctioned effort (sometimes by time or budget constraints, more often by the culture of the particular workplace) to be miles shy of I would consider to be bare competence. There are two sharp edges to this sword, as most of my professional life has been spent attempting to repair or undo the misfortunes engendered by half-assed attitudes and sloppily cut corners, thus imparting a sub-lesson, though one harder learned, which is that one perpetuates the work at hand by doing it less than well, another assumption that’s never sat well in my apparently overly-fastidious Catholic schoolboy conscience. But when in Rome, or Lazarus, and so on. By the end of the summer I was marvelously adept at cleaning entire departments—Lingerie, Junior Miss, Formalwear—simply by glancing at them as I passed by, the footsteps of a sales clerk thudding somewhere on the dirty carpet behind me. Les go dis way.
One memorable morning I came face-to-face without warning with what I imagined to be imminent dismissal, followed by pummeling, knifing or whatever other punishment Shitface might see fit to perpetrate upon my sorry high-school self. To my shock and dismay, as I rounded a corner in the Fragrance department, dragging my vacuum behind me, I heard a male voice summon me into a tiny office the door to which theretofore always had been closed and presumably locked. For a moment I stood shell-shocked. It was only a couple of minutes after six a.m., far too soon to be playing cat-and-mouse with the quality. Nervously I peeked around the doorframe, only to see a manager, in early for lord knew what reason (embezzlement? homelessness? an inability to tell time?) standing behind his desk, his face screwed into an unconvincing semblance of imperious authority. “Get these here, boy,” he said to me, pointing to the carpeted office floor, on which were littered thousands of tiny, round, hole-punch “chads”—though the word wouldn’t be common for another twenty-five years—that were the obvious result of his time-passing creation of the crude paper doilies that covered his desk. He held a hole punch in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. I can see him in my mind’s eye as clearly as though it was yesterday. His hair was black and greasy, swept back off his narrow forehead. The skin around his slack mouth was as pockmarked as a moon. He wore thick glasses, a thin moustache, a pale yellow button-down shirt and maroon, polyester pants with a white, faux-leather belt. (This was 1974 remember. His outfit, tragically, was not all that unusual among mid-management types.) Trying desperately not to make eye contact, so as not to laugh, spit, gag, puke or punch his oily face, all of which seemed reasonable or even necessary reactions, I quickly ran the floor tool over the rug, sucking up the evidence of his idling and exiting the office like Jack out of his box. Thankfully Shithead was nowhere in site as usual, and of course I told no one about my verboten little detour. Thus I learned Lesson Two: You have to do what they tell you to do, no matter what, if you want to get paid.
My next lesson came toward the end of the summer, as the last dog days of August heralded the coming return to school. We were instructed to vacuum the dressing rooms as well as the showroom, though we seldom bothered. This particular day I’d done such a good imitation of Bill with the vacuum that I had a half-hour to kill before our shift ended, so I ventured into the ladies’ dressing rooms in the Comfy ‘n’ Casual section. They were filthy, which of course was largely my fault for having ignored them since June. I tidied up, tossing hangers, boxes, tissue paper and miscellaneous trash into my hanging plastic bag. On a bench in one of the rooms, I picked up a McDonald’s bag that had an unexpected weight. Assuming it to be a discarded Big Mac, I peeked inside on a whim, only to find a large, chocolate-colored human turd. In that instant I was struck by the lightning bolt of Lesson Three: no matter how badly you think your job sucks, just wait until tomorrow, and it likely will be worse.
I’ve been pondering my Lazarus experience, and my subsequent decades of gainful work, quite a bit this summer. I have for some time now, through no design of my own, been effectively unemployed for the first time since graduating from college. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that as the country and the economy struggle still, two decades nigh, to squirm out from under the jack boot of Reagonomics and all of the misery it has caused, my long-time field of self-employment has morphed beyond recognition from the circumstances that allowed me to pay my mortgage and buy decent beer until fairly recently. The work, in other words, has changed; vanished, dried up and gone generally vamoose, and as something of a tangential player at the best of times, I can be counted among the inevitable casualties of its transformation.
It’s a squirmy predicament in which I find myself. It is axiomatic that an out-of-work Caucasian American man with as much gray hair as I have is approximately as employable as a butterfly is submersible, regardless of, and often because of, his skills and experience. My most trusted peers and coworkers over the years typically have been several years my senior, and thus for the most part are in the process either of winding down their careers or (in too many cases) of dying. Some long-standing clients have simply gone the Bill route with their the career hoses, cruising the aisles with a wink and a whistle, kicking pesky problems out of sight as they go. For a host of reasons, then, the professional relationships I’ve forged are blinking out like fireflies at dawn. Hiring decisions at companies large and small tend increasingly to be made by managers younger than I, often much younger, and the last thing they want lurking the hallways is some old guy who asks hard questions, doesn’t like leaving jobs half-done and might know more about their business than they do. So it’s a weird new world for me. I spend my mornings going through the motions of looking for work—contacting colleagues and acquaintances (thus garnering alarmingly few responses, let alone leads), filling out applications, scouring the on-line classifieds; all the pointless, pro forma busywork of the unemployed. Afternoons I spend emptying savings accounts, dodging creditors and looking around my house for things to sell. Of course I’m not alone. Unemployment is the new black, after all, and things promise to get much worse before they get better, as American economic policy even as I write is being hijacked by home-grown Congressional terrorists bent on punishing the despised electorate indefinitely for having the gall to put a literate man of color in the Oval Office. Meanwhile said man of color swings so far to the right that the Gipper himself seems a socialist by comparison, yet still cannot appease his new chest-thumping bosses, who play him like a squeaky fiddle while Rome burns. One cannot live indefinitely without income of course, so as I wander hat-in-hand past the shuttered windows of my few remaining prospects, I try to imagine what “lifestyle” changes are in store. I cannot imagine them in any detail, which probably is a good thing.
I kind of miss Shithead. I can’t help but think that I went astray in my work ethic way back then, when I quit the janitor business and went off naively in search of education, expansion, enlightenment and all the other anathema of the century towards which I was rushing, eyes wide shut. In the years since I’ve never been a boss, praise god, and indeed seldom even have had one, at least not of the Shithead variety. But there was something plain and simple about the model he presented: he hates you, you hate him, you do your work begrudgingly, he hands you a check even more begrudgingly, and thus the wheels of commerce turn. There’s no turning back the clock, of course. I couldn’t qualify today for the job I had when I was seventeen. I’d be dubbed “overqualified,” and passed over for a younger, more malleable man. But I wonder if there’s not some needle of hope to be found in the haystack of nostalgia for those simpler times. The Northland mall is dead now. I saw it a couple of years ago on one of my rare trips back to Buckeyeland. It sits shuttered and abandoned, a hulking, decaying monument to failure on a busy Columbus road—too big even to tear down it simply sits, the asphalt cracks in its parking lot sprouting small, spindly trees. Facing the road, covered in warping plywood, its letters and logo long-since stripped away but leaving their Cheshire cat image high on its cement front wall, is my old first locus of labor:
And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes…
Nah, I’m not ready to quit, not yet. But I reckon I’m in the market for a miracle.
Maybe a trip to the mall?
