Mall rats of a different stripe

Commentary: Old ways of the souk bow to glitzy U.A.E. shopping centers

When I was between 13 and 15 years old in Massachusetts, my friends and I on a Friday or Saturday night could regularly be found haunting the Fairfield Mall. We would smoke marijuana and drink pony bottles of Miller High Life in the darkened woods in back of the mall near the Westover Air Force Base, climb the low branches of trees, sing at the top of our lungs -- I can remember particularly bad renditions of Barry Manilow's "Mandy" -- and play jokes on each other.

Then, if it was still early enough, we drifted over to the mall for slices of cheese pizza with red-pepper flakes and grated Parmesan, to the T-shirt kiosk for a new Queen, Eagles or Kansas silkscreen, the head shop to check out the lava lamps, and to the games arcade to tilt pinball machines and try our hand at (drinking and) driving on what would now be rather antiquated video games. Sometimes, we would bump into some of the girls from school. Maybe one or two of us would split off with them. But generally it was just teasing and giggling, and then off we all went on our merry ways.

This was in the mid- and late 1970s. We were the precursors, I guess, of the mall-rat culture of the 1980s, which was driven by consumerism rather than boredom, and the swarming gangs that invaded North American malls in the 1990s, which led to the decline in popularity of single-edifice malls and the resurgence of strip malls, with less chance of loitering and trouble.