Kickin It Old School

People occasionally ask me if I played sports as a child or when I was in school. The honest answer is “no, I hung out at the mall”. It's just a coincidence that the movie Mallrats was filmed in my home state of NJ, I wouldn't quite put us in that category. However, we spent a LOT of time there. Once we were old enough to have drivers licenses, we would head there for lunch and mow down on some Nathans french fries or bacon double cheese burgers at Burger King or Roy Rogers. We would eat then I would spend the remainder of our lunch period making “ketchup art” while Justin's mom watched on in disgust.
After school, Corky would pick us up in the beater and we'd all head to the mall to 'hang out'. I don't remember if there was any shopping taking place at the mall during these excursions. I do, however, remember spending a lot of time in “Time Out”, the arcade. There, we would hang out with the guys who worked there, Troy and his brother Robert. In retrospect, these guys were probably in their mid 20s and had less than no business chatting it up with 16 year old girls. At the time of course this wasn't of concern to us, although I know at some point Troy had my phone number and maybe now I should be concerned. I know there was some sort of shooting game I was fond of but I don't remember playing many games at the arcade.
The other thing we liked to do when we could separate from the boys, was pick a spot where we were perched just above Zachary's clothing store. The girls would stand guard on the second floor and look down at the store on the 1st floor just waiting for Ken to need to straighten or restock some clothes at the front. At this moment we would all sigh and say things like “oh my god, there he is”. There's only so many times you can walk through a men's clothing store and not buy anything before you look suspicious. After a while we were in the store enough where we became friendly with Ken, and Karen is friends with him to this day. He was mighty hot for our young eyes, we weren't imagining things.
Another thing that took place at the mall were the YRP meetings. This was a 'gang' of sorts that my white boy guy friends decided to create. I think YRP stood for “Young and Ruthless Posse”. Considering most of the group was out of high school and from the most suburban suburbia you can find, I would say they were neither young nor particularly ruthless. But they would hold meetings where the girls weren't allowed. I couldn't imagine what they could possibly be talking about during these meetings that would be so confidential. But it gave us time to go stalk Ken, so we didn't mind.
I do recall that there were a few ruthless folk in this... posse. We had some 'friends' in the Newark area like Rashawn and Jamal (and maybe Freddy although I never wanted to imagine the guy I liked would participate in shady activity – this issue carries over to my adult life) . They would take the bus up to 'our' mall and hang out with us, while we were naïve to the fact that their girlfriends wanted to pop caps in our asses for talking to them. I remember a party in Chris Montero's basement where Jamals' girlfriend, Lori (weighing in at a good 250 to my 115) stared me down while contemplating charging and Jamal stood in front of me and said, “Um, just don't move” and likely saved my life from her jealous rampage. Good times. One day I was sent a link to some sort of NJ crime website where I could look people up online and see what sort of crimes they'd been charged with. Of course the only people I could think of to check on were this crew, all had been in lock down at least once, mostly for selling drugs or aggravated assault or the like.
This might not sound interesting to the average person reading this, but if you knew where we grew up, you might be surprised. Let's just say it was completely inappropriate that I knew all the words (and still do) to Big Daddy Kane's “Pimpin Ain't Easy” at 15. Not appropriate for a white girl from the suburbs. Not at all. And the thing was we weren't trying to be anything we weren't... this is the music I genuinely liked. Mike Platt would tape Yo MTV Raps and we would go over his place and analyze the new EPMD or BDP video like it was a sporting event.
I'd like to publicly thank the male portion of my friends during this time for looking at a bunch of pristine, virginal, naïve girls and not ruining us with your alcohol and drug use. It was years before any of us realized what was going on behind closed doors with you boys and I think it's very rare that the guys in a crew don't do their best to entice the girls with peer pressure into partaking in whatever dastardly deeds they are involved in. I'm not sure why you chose to handle things this way, but to this day when I hear about someone doing cocaine or a similar recreational drug I'm fairly appalled. I just wasn't exposed to those things (Aside from in Dean's basement when Mike Ikem was setting 45s on fire and frisbee-ing them across the room on an acid trip of some sort. That was the first time I saw people doing cocaine and really never cared to see it again. Dean is no longer with us, btw). And I'm thankful for that.
So no, I never played a sport (aside from my 7 months taking Tae Kwon Do with the boys), I was a mallrat. All that time there... and I think we all all turned out ok. Wouldn't you say?