Mall Rats 4
A New Twist on Lost Youth: The Mall Rats
By WILLIAM GLABERSON,
Published: April 5, 1992
Flesh- Kincade 6.2 Flesch Read Ease 77.0
Mall Rats 4
It was Friday night at the mall. Christine Tako, 18 years old, with her straight brown hair falling down over her shoulders, was not sure whether to let the boy with the blue eyes know how much she liked him.
The teen-agers were gathering in little groups in the food court near Time-Out, the video arcade that serves as headquarters for what regulars at the Danbury Fair Mall -- and malls everywhere -- call mall rats, adolescents who seem to live to go to the mall.
Christine Tako kept wavering[1]. She could get hurt again, the way she had in her last mall romance. But, then, there were those blue eyes.
She was sure about one thing, though. He would show up sooner or later.
"Everybody's a mall rat to an extent," she said. "It's something to do when there is nothing else to do. And there is nothing else to do."
Once, it was the malt shop or the diner. These days across the New York region, the mall is the teen-age clubhouse. Sometimes by the hundreds, adolescents meet, mill about, issue dares and join in that ancient teen-age conviction[2] that there is nothing else to do. Feeling Hollow .
Some say their time in the shadows of the mall's neon lights leaves them with a hollowness that is deeper than that of former teen-age pastimes. You sit with someone you know and you wait for something to happen, said Brian Fuda, a slight high school graduate with a mustache of fine brown hairs, who dreams of becoming an actor. "You don't become great friends," he said. "You both share that boring emptiness."
But if there is a special starkness[3] in the lives of the mall's teen-agers, it is a backdrop to all the usual themes of adolescence. The food court has seen its loves and heartbreaks. It has become the venue for timeless experiments: drugs and liquor can be had for a price.
Cars in the mall parking garage are as popular for intimate moments as they have always been. And shoplifting can be a badge of honor for those in search of a rebellious [4]image.
Here in Danbury, the tough and the timid come from quiet nearby towns like Brookfield, Bethel and Redding and from comfortable suburbs in Putnam County and northern Westchester, just over the border in New York State. "If you're not here, you're just drawn here," Brian Fuda said.
There are the teen-agers flirting with different identities. Nose rings and beepers constitute current chic.
There are the picture-perfect suburban youths who seem to have just outfitted at The Gap downstairs and who watch the rougher ones warily. Mall Rat Pack
And then there are the ones whose dress shows their pride in being called mall rats, like Chris Roman, 21, whose hair makes a statement and whose leather jacket, he said, he bought with a stolen credit card.
The afternoon before Christine Tako's night of decision, Chris Roman, known to all the mall rats as Scooby, had been sitting at that same table. He described what he called the dark side of the mall-rat world. His black hair was shoulder length but a three-inch-wide band of white skin showed above his ears where he had shaved it with a straight razor to provide a threatening "heavy metal" look.
"I've been smoking pot since I was 12," he said. "I've been drinking since I was 9. I've been hanging out at the mall since it opened." He was 16 then.
The nickname came from passing out at a party in his early teens while entangled with his host's family's dog, he said. The situation, for some reason, reminded everyone of Scooby Doo, the television cartoon canine.
That, Scooby said, was before he was jailed for car theft and before he was arrested for smoking marijuana in the parking garage. It was back, he said, before the time when he and some of the other mall rats ran what he called a "black market" in shoplifted items at the mall. Fonzi of the Food Court
Scooby's tales and his studied ability to strike a match for his Newport Light cigarettes on the smooth-as-glass surface of the food-court tables have given him a measure of Danbury Fair notoriety. Some say he is the Fonzi of the food court, their symbol of what it is to be a mall rat.
"Scoob's one of a kind," said Michelle Sell, 17, who had dated Scooby. She seemed proud that her inauguration[5] into mall-rat society had included a fling with the famous rat.
There were, she said, few rites. She got a part-time job in one of the shops that survive on hourly wage labor. Soon, she said, the mall made its bid even for her free time.
"When I'm off, I'm at home saying, 'Cool, I have a day off,' " the round-faced teen-ager said. “ I'll be watching TV and my friends call me up and say, 'Michelle, Come and hang out.’ And I say, 'Where are you?' And they say, 'I'm at the mall,' And I say, 'Oh, O.K.' So after a while, I just became a mall rat."
Scooby said he has had a string of girlfriends from the mall-rat ranks. At the table that Thursday, Jesse Amila, another young Danbury resident, said that some newcomers are drawn to veteran rats because they think they have status.
"We do have status," Scooby answered without a smile. "We own the mall. ‘ Cause we know so many people -- so many mall rats come around. The more people you know, the more status you have."
A few days after that conversation, Scooby disappeared from his table outside Time-Out. Instantly, it seemed, the mall regulars knew where he was. "When he's not in jail, he's here," said Richard N. DeMerell, one of the mall's security officers. This time, the charges had to do with credit-card theft.
"I kind of miss him," said Chris Sullivan, another regular, known as Sully around the food court.
He is a handsome 20-year-old who is never without his red baseball cap. He says he is an alcoholic, and he often comes to the mall drunk. Some of the food-court regulars say they surreptitiously add alcohol to their soft-drink cups. Sully's problems with liquor, he said, have contributed to his having been jailed 13 times.
He and Scooby, Sully said, have a lot in common. Scooby's father is a Danbury detective. Sully's is a Fairfield County deputy sheriff.
Quietly, some of the regulars said Scooby and his crew give the other loiterers[6] a bad name. Jon Bourque, who graduated from Danbury High School last year, said he did not like the name mall rat and resented the suggestion that Scooby was the leader. "Not even close," he insisted.
"I don't think there is a mall-rat king," he said. And then he pointed out that he believed he had logged as many hours as anyone outside Time-Out. "I'm here every day of the week all day," he said.
At her table in the food court that Friday before Scooby was arrested, Christine Tako, made a face at the mention of the full-timers in the food court. Rats like Scooby, she said, are friends. But not her type.
She started coming to the mall after her family moved to this corner of Connecticut in search of safety. They moved from Riverdale in the Bronx for her last year of high school after someone she had never seen before fired a shot in her direction as she walked home from school. Faithless Suitor
Her parents wanted to protect her. But there are some hurts, she learned at the mall, for which there is no protection.
Last year, in the Friday night crowd of teen-agers, she met a boy from Brookfield who always wore suits. Not your typical mall rat, she said. For a month and a half, she said, they were together.
And then, as sometimes happens, there was a new group of teen-agers from a high school a few miles into New York State who started to show up and tried to break in to the Connecticut cliques. "They wanted to be a part of it," she said.
One of them, a wiry 14-year-old girl with black hair, seemed to want very badly to be a part of it. Before long, there was talk about how she would do anything to be part of the group. And then one night, when Christine Tako was late for the mall, she said, everyone noticed how the boy in the suit and the wiry girl slipped away to the mall parking garage.
"People see two people walking out," she said, "and they go to the car and the car doesn't go anywhere. And then they come in."
By the time she got to the mall that night, the news was all over the food court. "I walked into the mall," she said, "and everybody looked at me because they knew. And once that happened, I knew everybody knew. It's an odd feeling. Everybody knows what's going on and either they tell you or they don't and it separates you from everybody."
At the table in the food court that Friday night, she remembered that she didn't cry until she got home the night she lost the boy in the suit.
And then she took a deep breath and said her best friend from Danbury High School, who scoops out ice cream at the mall's Haagen Dazs shop, had warned her that the boy with the blue eyes was the same kind. "He could ignore me or push me away," she said.
By then, there were more teen-agers filling up the tables in the food court. Someone called to her from over near Time-Out and she stood up. But just at that moment, Christine Tako said, she had decided. "I think I like him enough so I'll just go for it, I guess," she said.
It was Friday night at the mall. And she disappeared into the crowd.
Flesh- Kincade 6.2 Flesch Read Ease 77.0
Mall Rats 4
IN YOUR OWN WORDS
Think about these questions. You do not have to write answers (yet).
· How does this story compare or contrast to your own experiences.
· Is sharing a ‘boring emptiness’ part of the adolescent experience and has the mall become “the backdrop to all the usual themes of adolescence” as Glaberson suggests.
· How is dialogue used differently in Mall Rats than it was in Kaleidoscope?
· If this was your story, how might you change it?
New Words to Look for / Understanding Together· wavering
· conviction
· starkness
· rebellious
· “Fonzi”
· inauguration
· loiterers / In small groups of three or four, outline a story similar to Mall Rats”.
Writing with Illustration and Example.
Suppose you are the parent of a 12 year old, boy or girl. Write a story about why you do not what your child to ‘hang’ at the mall and become what this story calls a ‘mall rat’ OR why you are ok with your child becoming a ‘mall rat’. Be sure to give reasons for your decisions
Remember:
o You are writing from the view of the parent
o This is a descriptive short story. (Write with Illustration and Example.)
o You may include your own experiences, but, do not use real names of other people
o You may use first person but remember the focus is the child. (Do not begin the first paragraph with I)
General Things to remember when you are writing:
· Avoid sentence fragments.
· Use punctuation to help put your feelings across
· Use descriptive words
· Use your best ‘story voice’. This is your story. I want to ‘see your imagination at work’.
· Spelling and grammar will count so proof your work before handing it in.
· You are free to include any artwork, drawings, or other illustrations, but it is not required.
· Don’t forget your heading
As always, I am available if you have questions or need extra help. Just ask.
These will be collected and added to our: “Seventh grade anthology of original literature”.
Flesh- Kincade 6.2 Flesch Read Ease 77.0
[1] wavering - to become unsure or begin to change from a previous opinion
[2] conviction - a belief or opinion that is held firmly
[3] starkness -forbidding in its bareness and lack of any ornament, relieving feature, or pleasant prospect
[4] rebellious - opposing or defying authority, accepted moral codes, or social conventions
[5] inauguration - the formal act of placing somebody in an official position, especially the President of the United States, or a ceremony held for this purpose
[6] loiterers – people who to stand around without any obvious purpose