Pilgrimage to Mallden : Contemplating Humanity in the Suburban Habitat

When I wrote the following I lived alone in Mallden, a few stores south of ToyTowne, in a house that I had built myself from a Presto Log Cabin Kit. I lived there one year and a month. At present I am a catalogue shopper again.

The mass of men lead lives of ambling desperation accompanied by Muzak. Or by some glad-handed salesman at a Wurlitzer. My neighbors pass my cabin in an endless stream of T-shirts, funny hats and unruly hair. They pause to check a sale price, coo at a caged puppy, consume overpriced potato skins. They pay me little mind. I join them for a while, shopping for garden tools at Hardware World, but soon must return to my cabin to hoe the beans I have planted in the last patch of solid earth left amid the Mexican tile, plastic and fiberglass.

Mallden is tribute to post-modern excess, an air-conditioned “shopping environment” with 87 stores, 16 restaurants, 12 theaters, a fountain, and one resident shopper in his cabin.

I went to the mall because I wished to live materially, to face the essential facts of purchase, the need to buy that fuels our economy, and the struggle for doodads and gewgaws that defines our lives; so that I could later say that I had conquered shopping, had faced down consumerism and not merely browsed. For most men, it seems to me, are indifferent toward our material existence. They wander these aisles as if detached, letting their wives, daughters, lovers lead them from the pants to the dress shirts and back, while they cast an involved glance only at the stacked TVs, hoping to catch a baseball score. I wanted more from life. I wanted to know the mall as well as my own home, to live there, and having lived, to publish my account in one of the glossy, oversized mags that adorn the shelves of the Book Nook. One with a celebrity on the cover. Susan Sarandon, say.

Our life is frittered away by detail. How many a shopper have I seen enter Mallden with a determined look, vowing to buy a mere shower curtain or a pair of jogging shoes, only to have his resolve weakened by a window display of Springsteen albums and end up, hours later, mindlessly munching a chili dog and staring at the flowing waters of the fountain? I say let your shopping be for two or three items, not a hundred, and keep a list, a calculator and a small box of clipped coupons. Instead of a double burger, buy a plain. Instead of a quad, buy a stereo (but with Dolby). Make things simpler! Make things simpler! And when they are simple, buy them. On credit, if you are not already over-extended.

There are nowadays practitioners of shopping but few shoppers. For to be a shopper is not merely to buy, but to live, from sale to sale, a life of credit, debt, partial payment and bankruptcy. It is to solve all problems through a trip to the mall, to conquer depression with a new outfit, despair with appliances, loneliness with CDs.

Men and women, girls and boys, dropped into my cabin. They inquired of my health, my frame of mind, if I knew of a sale on sheets. I let them fill my room with their bulky bags and sent them on their way with little advice other than where they might find a cheap percale.

Every morning before the doors opened I bathed in the central fountain, and every night when all were gone I jogged laps, from ToyTowne to the Stuff Shoppe and back. Thus did the long summer pass. The days grew short. The winter approached. Football games came on the tubes at Video Village. The pumpkins appeared in Greetings, Etc. Then the turkeys. Finally came the full blaze of winter decor, the tinsel and lights, the calendars in the bookstore, the plastic reindeer, and then another cabin on the far end of the mall. This one was smaller than mine, fronted by a white picket fence, graced by a huge pine growing straight from the concrete, and curiously covered with an indoor variety of snow. A neighbor soon took up residence there, one who wore a red suit and had perky female friends. But he was busy all day with children and he left at night, so I never got to know him.

And soon after these signs appeared came the men bundled in sweaters, the women in fake furs, the children all puffing in from the wet, stomping their feet, wiping their noses and setting off in search of the goods. Winter had come to Mallden. It was October.

My journal has this to say of winter: Today, a Monday, normally quiet in Mallden but now teeming with guests, their arms full of treasures, their cheeks full of treats from Chuckie’s Nut Barn. My cabin was so filled by the curious, asking where they might buy such a cabin, did it come with a guarantee, and what about the layaway, that I took refuge. I walked out of the mall and into the gray symmetry of the parking lot. There I stood on the edge of the wilderness and gazed into civilization. Cartloads of mall goods flowed past me into station wagons and out to the world beyond. Thus it seems my Mallden wares are shared with the humble shoppers of lands I will never see, of Glendale and Anaheim and the far-off San Berdoo. I drink deeply from the same well as the Shriner in Temple City. I share the same digital readouts as the golf pro in Mission Viejo. The Republican and I are united by a common debt. As one we add to the trade deficit.

I journey back inside and a tumult greets me. A shoplifter has been caught.

Following the exchange of those goods poorly chosen or ill-fitting came the rest of winter, brave and lonely in the mall. Spring came haltingly. The shoppers trickled in at first, but soon the crowds returned. Stores opened their doors wide, grand openings appeared, and spring, Spring! came to Mallden. Lots of cleaning products, mine for a song.

I ventured out to shop in the spring air. But I found that I had had my fill of shopping and would fain be finished with my experiment. And so I packed my things and prepared to leave Mallden. I bid farewell to cabin, shopper, clerk. I took my valises, a Styrofoam cup and a flyer from a new fried-dough eatery. I walked one last time through Mallden, then wound my way past the 12-cinema ticket booth and into the world outside.

We are at great pains to prove ourselves worthy through our purchases, yet our purchases themselves are worthy of respect. I know many a man who has placed a portion of his possessions in mini-storage, only to go out and buy the same ice-cream maker, the same Lil’ Boy cooler, yes, the same NFL coasters again, forgetting that he already owned a set. How many humidifiers can a man use? I say we must shop with care, letting only the best pull the plastic from our wallets, as the Yuppies of gentrified countries do. Buy your lamps, your lawn chairs, your high-powered rifles so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your purchase with satisfaction.

The shopping world is full of endless novelty. Who knows but what a trinket, once though useless, might be taken up by a skillful marketer, mentioned on “Oprah!” and so become the season’s craze. Consider the Cabbage Patch Doll.