When you receive a story assignment titled, “Holiday Hell: A Day at Lloyd Center,” you understand what’s expected of you: Please remind all of us why the mall sucks so hard, preferably through pointed observations and with the requisite layers of sweet sarcasm and bitter irony.
When you receive a story assignment titled, “Holiday Hell: A Day at Lloyd Center,” you understand what’s expected of you: Please remind all of us why the mall sucks so hard, preferably through pointed observations and with the requisite layers of sweet sarcasm and bitter irony.
I went to Lloyd Center twice this weekend, once as a full-blown paying customer and once as an observer (an anthropologist, say), and I must admit, I am having the damndest time writing that particular article.
Oh, I know how it should go: “The lines are long, the holiday decor is cloying, it’s overrun with teenagers, the food court gave me Type 2 diabetes, Zumiez plus Hot Topic plus Pac Sun, etc., etc., grumble, grumble.” Trust me, I wanted to be able to write that article; it was so firmly in my inner Southeast, lentil-eating, bike-commuting, Pitchfork-reading wheelhouse.
But it turns out I really, really love the mall.
My first trip to the Lloyd Center, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, was spurred by a pants emergency: I was down to 1.5 pairs of functional trousers, and I needed to go to Ross, stat.
My friends Dusty and Cayle needed a few things, so we made it a group outing. (Precious, I know.) We entered the mall without that normal existential dread hanging over our heads. Yes, we had things to do and mental shopping lists to get through, but we understood that this was silly and fun.
Our first stop was the food court, which, aside from a McDonald’s Express (now faster than regular McDonald’s!), is primarily comprised of restaurants essentially offering slight tweaks on the same basic formula: some type of meat plus some type of rice/noodles plus some type of veggie plus somewhat questionable sauce. Restaurants with names like Cajun & Grill (winner of “Most Puzzling Use of an Ampersand”), Chicken Connection, Lotus Express, Medi Grill, Sakru Japan and Steamers Asian Street Bistro.
Dusty chose McDonald’s and, after a full lap around the food court, I went for Lotus Express, where Cayle was waiting in line. Having recently re-started eating meat, I decided to ease my way in to the Lotus Express experience by ordering steamed vegetables as one of my two entrees, the other being Green Bean Chicken. (Incidentally, why is it de rigueur for cheap Asian eateries to name their menu items by jamming the name of a vegetable directly next to the name of a protein without punctuation? Hey Cajun & Grill, the Green Bean Chicken needs to borrow that ampersand.)
As I ordered the steamed vegetables, the woman on duty informed me that, for some reason, my vegetable entrée would cost me an extra 50 cents. This did more than anything I could imagine to call the meat’s origins into question: How could cabbage cost more than chicken? I shrugged it off. At Lloyd Center, it’s best to think on Lloyd Center terms.
This illustrates what I love about the mall: It is the great equalizer. There’s something terrifically populist about the whole ritual, something comforting in the idea that a 17-year-old from my hometown of St. Cloud, Minn., may have just purchased a baseball cap identical to the one I just bought—that two thousand miles away that kid saw that same collection of fabric and thread and thought, at the same moment I did, that hat is so me.
We are not as unique as we think we are. This is what the mall forces us to remember.
The next day, a Sunday, I returned to Lloyd Center, notebook in hand, ready to observe. The day before, I had shopped in a very mall-like way: I bought my jeans, my baseball cap and that delicious Chinese food. Today, I was just visiting, playing the role of the interested and attuned outsider.
As I strolled through the mall, alone and without an agenda, I realized that I felt self-conscious about my messenger bag, an odd feeling to have in Portland. But Lloyd Center isn’t Portland. It’s America. It’s like every other mall in every other city. But with an ice rink.
I reverted to my default setting: I headed to the nearest bookstore. I thumbed through an essay collection I had read about in Willamette Week for a few minutes before I decided that this was a decidedly un-Lloyd Center thing to do.
I set the book down and jumped back into the fray, taking the elevator up a few levels. I went to where the action was, which, as usual, was the food court. I did a slow lap of the entire court, jotting down notes and passing silent judgment in my notebook. (One particularly pretentious entry: “The mall is an approximation of culture—a caricature
of culture.”)
At the Lotus Express a female employee was offering samples of the barbecue chicken on toothpicks. I decided that today I would only get one entrée—you know, dial it back a notch. I got the spicy beef with peppers to-go and stuffed the food into my messenger bag.
An hour later, I arrived home. I popped the food in my microwave and, while it was heating, tried to decide what it all meant: me, the Lloyd Center, mass consumerism, sustainability, the United States, the holidays, the whole damn hill of beans.
I took the steaming plate of noodles, peppers and beef out of the microwave and sat down at the kitchen table. Some friends were sitting in the living room drinking microbrews, eating food cart fare and watching soccer.
And as I sat eating my food court dinner, I started thinking about this juxtaposition. The highbrow vs. the lowbrow. Sustainable vs. Styrofoam. I started coming to wildly big-picture conclusions about what their food meant and what my food meant—about how what they were watching and drinking said about them as human beings.
I knew I was just projecting, trying to graft meaning onto a silly Sunday trip to Lloyd Center. Sometimes a plate of spicy beef with peppers is just a plate of spicy beef with peppers.
Perhaps it meant nothing. Perhaps everything. All I knew was that it sure tasted good.
