A Tale of Two Malls: At Least We'll Still Have Dildos and Plastic Vomit
Four months in a Vegas one bedroom, hiding from the inevitability of walking by my ex-wife’s apartment and being serenaded by the sounds of her having sex with… someone took its toll. I hadn’t contracted COVID yet and so it was sort of like my own self-enforced quarantine. One afternoon, walking to get my mail, I spied her with an old Chicago friend who had since moved to L.A. in the pool, humping on each other. I felt like running out in traffic to be hit by a speeding tourist. Instead, I hunkered down and rarely left the confines of the 680 feet of my place.
Then Wichita. Living with my parents in a guest room that resembles a dorm room designed by Martha Stewart and spending the few moments of outside the house taking my dad to his dialysis and going to the gym. That was most of September. So, five months in my own stew.
I can’t keep hiding from the world.
This past week I dropped dad off at his medieval torture chamber and decided to revisit places in the city I hadn’t been to in forty years or so. Old haunts. Places of import from when I was a kid. My dad, when he isn’t moaning about how much pain he’s in or how little energy he has or how humiliating it is to have been a go-to guy who can no longer drive or hear or walk, yarns on about the old days. I love his stories (even if I’ve heard some of them before).
Working at a garage in the evening and as a janitor for a local bowling alley overnight when he was in high school. The time ‘Green Teeth Jim’ accidentally lit his massive beard on fire. How his friend Wally lost his RV business due to incredibly bad investments.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time mining my recent past—a ridiculous divorce from someone you thought you knew but didn’t even a little bit will do that to you—so I decided to maybe mine some of my more distant past for a change.
In high school there were three things to do in Wichita: cruise Douglas Street at night and hang out at either of the two big malls in town. Towne West Square was newer and I can remember seeing the original Footloose there, the theaters right next to the arcade and just in front of the booming food court with Arby’s, Sabarro’s, Burger King, a chicken place, and a cookie stand. Towne East Square was older, and I had spent a summer working with a crew tarring the roof of Dillards. The Pizza Hut on the periphery where Ryan Berger and I got our asses kicked by five frat guys. The Chess King where I bought my first parachute pants. The open area in the middle where Lew Hanna and I pretended I was a Russian foreign exchange student for no reason but the stupid fun of it.
I drove out to Towne West. It was early but open. The huge mall, flanked by a Dillards and a J.C. Penney, was empty with about thirty old folks getting in their steps by walking the mall. It was dire. For every active storefront there were three empty lots. It was like a ghost town but very clean. The booming food court had all the tables and chairs set out for diners but only a coffee place and an unstaffed Mexican place still were struggling on. Every other former business was empty. I walked the perimeter. I could see what I remembered but in stark contrast to the deserted beast it had become.
The Dillards and the J.C. Penney were empty. Oddly, there were kiosks with globes filled with brightly colored bubble gum balls and I wondered how old that gum actually was like remnants of humanity discovered at the end of The Planet of the Apes (the one with Chuck Heston not Markie Mark). A Japanese massage store with chairs and massage tables and three employees sitting alone waiting for customers who weren't coming. Several art-for-sale galleries, likely paying below the asking price for space. In one of them there was an attractive female painter, furiously painting. I thought about going in but realized that A) I'd only buy something because I felt bad for her and B) she was attractive which, given my horrifically bad judgment when it comes to women, would probably not be a a disaster.
And there it was—as if I hadn’t aged a day—Spencer’s Gifts. For those uninitiated, Spencer’s Gifts is a novelty store. Crazy t-shirts, lava lamps, mugs shaped like a pair of tits, plastic vomit. When I was in high school in the ‘80s, it was Spencer’s Gifts that provided the Whoopee Cushions, the palm-sized squirt guns, and anything you could imagine covered in glitter. It was like a Nirvana for Morons.
I strolled inside. There was a kid—maybe twenty-two—folding novelty shirts with a picture of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman and the slogan “Go Fuck Yourself!” underneath—and I asked him how they could still be open with the mall as wholly corpsed out as it was.
“Oh. We get some walk up traffic in the afternoons. Spencer’s is a pretty healthy company, I mean, not here but nationwide. Pretty slow until around 5PM.”
“I remember this place from 1982. It looks almost exactly the same except for the expansive sex toy and dildo collection in the back. I don’t remember those.”
“Really? Yeah, that’s about 60% of our business now. Sex toys and music t-shirts. You saying this place has been here since 1982? Wow.”
“Hard to say if it was this specific storefront but the place was here, alright. I guess there will always be a demand for dildos and plastic dogshit.”
I left and continued walking. The surreal feeling that life had just moved on, that the world had abandoned the very hubs of activity and community that were my youth, that perhaps I was this abandoned mall, a GenX white guy with no kids, no wife, no thirty-year work anniversary with a shitty cake and plaque shuffling around this mausoleum of desolate commerce. It didn’t feel bad necessarily but it was a tilt in the planet’s gravity.
I went back to my car and decided to swing over to the other side of town to Towne East Square. What the fuck. Might as well cement my newfound obsolescence.
Towne East was as opposite as it could be. The parking lot was half full even at 11AM. There were no empty storefronts. The food court was populated with a Chinese-ish place, a Vietnamese-ish place, a Korean-ish place (all likely using the same central kitchen) as well as a Hot Potato Bar, a Starbucks, an Orange Julius, and an old man spooning roasted nuts into cups.
There were people just hanging out. With their kids, by themselves. A couple wearing matching Las Vegas sweatshirts. Heavy set women getting their nails done. Multiple shoe stores, those kiosks with iPhone cases and sketchy jewelry were everywhere. And, of course, a nearly identical Spencer’s Gifts. The mall to the east was hopping.
How? How could one mall thrive while the other, nearly identical mall die? What happened here that pushed all the business east and left the island to west desolate?
I spent some time asking locals and doing some online research. There are lots of theories about the demise of one and not the other but none definitive or conclusive. Maybe it was that the west of Wichita expanded further west and shops set up where the new developments were. Perhaps the corporation that owned both malls simply decided at least one of them should be packed and sacrificed the other. It seems that it just… happened. Slowly, over time, the traffic to Towne West dried up, businesses closed or moved further west to standalone brick and mortars, the mall to the west dwindled. None of this occurred out east.
If these malls are symbols of my earliest years as an adult, just a few years before I set out and moved to Chicago, I wonder which one holds my future? I’ve done well enough for myself but left little in terms of legacy. Am I the Deceased Mall or the One that Keeps Going? Have my prospects diminished so the only thing I can offer the world is a place for old people to walk and young people to buy a Tupac t-shirt or is the future a bit more robust and it’s just a matter of time before I thrive?
Time will tell I suppose. For the next days, I’m going to venture out to my old high school and the tiny towns of my nascent days to continue to ruminate on my stone-skipping history through the world. Kind of like my own personal Garden State without the romcom elements but with a similarly kickass soundtrack.
