There are lots of reasons why Santa Monica, the California community where I grew up, was light on malls. For starters, there is no winter to speak of, and so no reason to congregate indoors. And we had a coastline that stretched for miles: Teenagers who wanted to gather, drink, light things on fire, and generally get out of view of their parents headed straight to the beach.
We had little use for malls.
As such, I have but a single vivid mall memory. It involves my best friend at the time—I’ll call him Randy—and a banned substance. Randy and I had recently discovered Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and, for a brief period, had adopted it as our playbook. At 17, we knew our parents would never let us retrace Thompson’s wild drive to Vegas, so we settled for the Westside Pavilion: These three sky-lit stories of glowing neon and unrestrained consumerism would be our Sand’s, our Caesar’s, our Strip.
We were standing by the escalators on the third floor when the drugs took hold. The first thing I remember seeing—really seeing—were the colors. I had never experienced colors like that. We suddenly understood their purpose, their gift. How had we missed these truths? The blues in particular were so . . . generous. And so we set out to find the deepest, most heart-bending shade of blue we could find. That was our mission. In and out of candy shoppes, shoe stores, pillow purveyors, around corners, up and down escalators, searching for the perfect whispering blue, a blue that would tell us its secrets. A blue, it turned out, that we would never find.
We got distracted.
In time—we were there for nine hours—the mall became a playground; a pinball machine; a temple; Alice’s Wonderland; the wormy, grimy center of consumerist culture; but also a place where regular Americans, toiling in the shadow of Hollywood’s Kleig-light glow, could live out their Willie Wonka dreams no matter how crass and artificially preserved they were—and there was a kind of beauty in that.
That was 37 years ago. I recently read that the Westside Pavilion is being repurposed into offices for tech companies—Google scooped up 600,000 feet of space. In LA, malls don’t sit vacant; they get facelifts. Fitting, I suppose.
Randy and I lost touch years ago—I moved East, our lives curled in different directions—and I don’t think we’ve spoken since maybe ’89. But every once in a while, I still think about him, our friendship, that day in the mall, those glorious shades of blue.
—Bill Shapiro (Former Editor-in-Chief of LIFE magazine
and the author, most recently, of What We Keep)
