Friday night I saw “Master and Commander with The Man of Many Nicknames, Lumpy J. Pauly Monaco Onion The Crusher. This is a movie made for a big screen, so we went to the googleplex in the tritondous Buy Yourself a Lifestyle Mall. Before the film we had dinner at Chammps or Champps or ChAmPPs or what the hell ever. We decided it hardly mattered where we ate, since there is probably one subterranean kitchen serving all the mall restaurants. “There must be an abandoned missile silo down there full of garlic mashed potatoes.”
We were led to our table by a 16-year old belly button merchant who asked if this was our first visit, like we were touring the goddamn Louvre or something. Our waitress asked us too, but I cut her off in mid-spiel to ask a question. Uncle Lumpy and I had been looking around the crowded bar area since we arrived, and we were both wondering the same thing: Who the hell are these people? They didn’t look like they were there to shop. Many of them seemed to know each other. Is it possible there is a Mall Scene? Our waitress confirmed that they do in fact have regulars. She said she had tended bar in other places “”Real places? I asked, and she knew what I meant” and was as surprised as we were. Some of the regulars are people who work in the mall, but others are people who just come to the mall to hang out at night.
Did you get that? They just come to the mall to hang out at night. At first I was flabbergasted. We live in an area that has three more-or-less vital downtowns, with bars and restaurants and coffee shops and music clubs and galleries and people out strolling and eating ice cream and doing all that other stuff the various downtown commissions want you to believe goes on. But then I realized a couple of things. I love hotels. I love airports. I love the feeling of being anonymous in an anonymous place. And dammit, I love buying stuff. Maybe I really want to hang out at the mall, too. Maybe I’m finally reacting against 20-plus years of feeling I had to be different: not listen to the same radio stations or wear the same clothes or live in cookie-cutter suburbia. I’m no longer a squirrely 19-year old in a thrift store overcoat. Most of my clothes come from Eddie Bauer or Old Navy as it is, and the color of my living room is straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. Maybe this is what I’m secretly longing to do: stop fighting it and immerse myself fully and completely in the American shopper’s paradise. Embrace it. Pull it around me like a fake Navajo blanket. Become a born-again Consumerist.
It would be so easy. I could sell my house in Chapel Hill and buy one of the new condos near the mall. I could get a job at Brookstone. I could date women from the makeup counter at Nordstrom. I could have lunch at Bear Rock Café and dinner at California Pizza Kitchen “or Big Bowl for birthdays and anniversaries”. One day I would be manager, and Brittany and I could finally afford to marry “we’ll register at Restoration Hardware” and have kids, and let them run and play in the piazza in front of Organized Living, and watch them grow from Baby Gap to Gap Kids to Gap. It would be so simple, and once I’d cut myself off completely from my old life and my old friends, so comfortable.
But then we saw the movie and now I want to be an 18th-century sea captain.