Ghost malls

By Drake Dunaway



Welcome to The Draking Point >>, where my opinion costs 2 cents and all the outrage is manufactured in the USA!

Around the Western United States stretches a constellation of national remnants, from bygone years of our manifest destiny. Empty towns called Black Horse, Silver City, and Cerro Gordo lay still, with antique batwings doors, broken shutters, and faded tombstones tilted in the tan of evening and stretching their dark phantoms across the dust. Roads to and from the settlements extend east and west and disappear into far horizons, distant and discarded by time. The world had moved on. Many such towns were haunts for legends of the past: Billy The Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and other immortal gunslingers of a strange race beyond wayward memory. For some reason, I think of the tarnished Single Action Long Colts still kept under glass at collector's shops in Habersham, Ga. Some of these towns were simply accidental, ungoverned, and waited for the continental rail to reach them and cement their survival. Though it never did. Others began to realize that minerals were not the only source of wealth and prospected elsewhere, continuing the march of progress. I fancy that more richness was produced by our struggles and innovations to reach gold than gold's actual getting.

It seems that in any enterprise worthwhile, the destination is the journey, and vice-versa.

Last week I visited the Mall. The Mall of GA in fact. This is one of the largest shopping centers in the United States, and yet it was nearly... a ghost town. There was a wine and cigar shop that I had haunted a year ago, as well as a bookstore, and a hardware outlet near a slab creamery. Everything I had mentioned was boarded up upon my visitation. The sporting good outlet carried no handguns, and to my knowledge one of the Starbuck's Coffee stops was vacated as well (no love lost there, but man if they're hurting too!). Replacing all of these establishments were a menagerie of oddball boutiques with shoddy products seemingly handmade by local proprietors, such as an artist who would paint portraits of James Dean and Bob Marley which weren't even very good. I didn't want to purchase his work, I wanted to hang it on my fridge with a magnet. Now I'm a big supporter of cottage industry, but this is more "thatched hut" if anything. Like Cooper, I think I can smell the weather.

Whenever we watch movies like Mad Max, Water World, Army of Darkness or what have you, there is always an explanatory scene where a giant, jerry-rigged mechanical gate croaks open and leads our protagonist (let's say Bruce Campbell for kicks and giggles) into a sweltering and filthy marketplace that trades in weapons, beads, and chickens... and may accept bottlecaps as currency. A toothless merchant would boast that they had clean water and pre-war clothing, while hussies of the oldest profession would loiter with come-hither stares and utter a put-on sultriness such as "you been out in the wasteland too long sugah...you want some company?"

In spite of beating the dead horse of healthcare to no end while Americans are clamoring for jobs, continued indicators seem to spill out regarding the dwindling promise of the American Dream. Has this dream ended? I can't say. Yet the very phrase "American Dream" has seemed to vanish from our lexicon across the Anglophonic world as a pie in the sky, and it has been replaced by ramshackle utterances like "making due" and "handing the century over to China." All the while, I thought I would share a local indicator with you.

Notwithstanding the current slump, Happy Singles Awareness Day, and be sure to visit your local ghost mall on that day.

I'm sure they're just dying to see you. >>

© Drake Dunaway