COLUMN: MALLCORE w/ Ricky Allen

The mall was never just a place—it was a world. A stage. A sanctuary. A crucible for identity, capitalism, yearning. In Mallcore, guests revisit the fluorescent-lit past and present of their lives through the lens of food courts, fitting rooms, and escalators to nowhere. These are dispatches from Claire’s, from Orange Julius, from the dying JCPenney at the edge of town.

Some of us worked there. Some of us loitered there. Some of us were forever changed by the mall’s mercurial glow.

This is for the ones who got their first heartbreak outside of Border’s, who tried on new selves in the mirror of Forever XXI. This is the literature of the mall rat, the dropout, the suburban shapeshifter.

Brittany Ackerman: Was there a store you were too intimidated to go into? Why?

Ricky Allen: Spencer Gifts (now known simply as Spencer’s) was the forbidden temple within the Valencia Town Center mall. A dark, decadent portal into hell itself where debauchery and licentiousness reigned. At least that was how it was described by my parents. As an inquisitive yet repressed pastor’s kid, I had questions though. I wondered who Spencer was and what gifts he had to offer. I liked gifts. Why couldn’t I have one?

I wondered why my saintly mother described the store as “coarse jesting,” which in my mind was a fancy way of saying “funny.” I liked funny things. Could it really be so bad? I wondered if setting foot in the store would mean that like Peter, two millennia before me, I had denied Jesus Christ. Or, if not outright denial, at the very least a sin for which I would one day have to answer in front of God. Was my salvation truly at risk if I walked inside? No one could answer these questions and Spencer remained (satanically) enigmatic.

Anytime we walked by, I slowed my pace to catch a glimpse through the tinted glass, entranced by dim lighting, which seemed to at once occlude yet beckon travelers to enter. Just one glance, for the sake of the gifts, the funny gifts my parents found offensive. It never worked though. My parents always quickened their pace or moved within my line of sight and Spencer always remained behind me, never in front. Never accessible. Hell Lite^™ had to wait.

Many years later I walked into a Spencer Gifts as a free adult and laughed. What silliness! If only my parents could have foreseen that the internet would soon ruin any semblance of my innocence in far worse ways than gimmicky trinkets. We all could have enjoyed a good laugh.

When I was a teenager, Hot Topic took Spencer’s place, then at The Parks Mall in Arlington, Texas. I was obsessed with the emo/pop-punk/alternative music scene of the early-to-mid-2000s—bands like Brand New, Paramore, Thursday, Silverstein, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Yellowcard, etc.—and desperately wanted to look the part. I wanted to proverbially bathe myself in all things black: black hair, black eyeliner, black nails, black band t-shirt, black skinny jeans, maybe a black-and-white checkered belt, but definitely black-and-white checkered Vans sneakers. Black upon black because my heart was black inside and I needed to wear my heart on my sleeve. Literally. But my obsession with the music was mostly secretive. My parents considered the music and associated aesthetic to be spiritual garbage. And so, I would stand in front of Hot Topic, dreaming of taking angled mirror pictures of myself with my Samsung flip phone and posting the low-res output on my Xanga. Going to shows. Screaming along to my favorite songs and proudly representing the bands with my new shirts purchased at Hot Topic. If only.

Hot Topic was my holy grail, an experience I craved but could never have for myself. It would always be for someone else.

BA: Tell me about the mall of your youth—what did it look like, smell like, feel like?

RA: When I was 11, we moved from beautiful Southern California to humid North Texas. Air-conditioned as it was, The Parks Mall in Arlington, Texas was somehow still humid inside. Sweaty, sticky. There’s nothing like it. A mecca of consumerism drenched in assorted fragrances—here’s looking at you, Abercrombie & Fitch—and mildly wet, humid air, mixing together and infiltrating every pore. Punishment, I suppose, for living in the South.

The mall—much like the South, and Arlington specifically, which sat in the middle of the buckle of the Bible Belt—was a collector and a cultural and social flattening mechanism. It didn’t matter what you came with or without, only what you left with (especially on your way to heaven, God-willing). I remember feeling in-between spaces, not quite outside but never fully inside either. I was neither poor nor rich. Neither hot nor cold. Thoroughly middle; thoroughly lukewarm. My only possession was an insatiable desire to fit in, to be like my friends, to wear name-brand clothes and shoes, to style my hair in the latest trends, to be seen as one of them. But during my adolescence I rarely had enough spare cash to spend on anything for fun, so The Parks Mall was simply an air-conditioned hotbox filled with objects I could not purchase. At least my friends and I could walk around and kill time without getting into trouble. You know, being in the world but not of the world, or something like that.

BA: What did you hope would happen there that never did?

RA: I heard that the mall was an excellent place to make out. Or more. You had to be careful. The AMC theater attached to the mall was a safe bet: The Parks at Arlington 18. Pick a daytime showing or a late showing on a school day, where attendance would be sparse, find seats in the very back, wait for the movie to begin and then, well, go for it. The daring among us would skip the theater and make out in one of the department stores, or they’d park in the outer rim of the mall lot, turn on the AC full blast, and, well, go for it. I always wanted to see if what I’d heard was true. To go for it. It never happened and that’s my fault. You have to ask someone out first.

But it wasn’t actually about making out. It was about something more elemental, that incessant desire to be seen, heard, and known by someone else, to be with them, yours, theirs, together, one. Making out was a fortunate gift, not a guarantee. Not what I really wanted if I was honest with myself. It was always about walking hand-in-hand among a sea of nameless others. That would have been nice.

I would join the group, a mixture of singles and couples, and go see a movie at the theater, sitting in the back row, watching the couples snuggling close and doing God knows what under the shroud of darkness. They were going for it. Not me. I would continue to be thoroughly middle, lukewarm, existing in-between where I could see myself and others and they could see me, but I would never fully be with them. Or like them. A hole in my young, tender heart; desiring intimacy and too timid to ask for it.

The mall was a liminal space where youthful desires and dreams became ghostly apparitions, clamoring to become flesh but never materializing enough to be made real. I could still dream though. They couldn’t ever take that away.

Thnks fr th mmrs.

Ricky Allen is the author of Snowflake: Poems and Coyote Brush. His debut novel, Frail, was published on August 1 by Altered Press. He lives in central Oklahoma with his wife and son, and dreams of one day escaping humidity.