Merry Christmas. Now Get the *BLEEP* Out of My Way.
I don't know what suicidal nerve in my body convinced me to do so, but on Saturday I tried to ascend the Sisyphusean hell that is shopping at the mall on a weekend during the holidays. Had Dante lived in modern times, such a task would have certainly earned a place as one of his nine circles of the damned, right between getting your license renewed at the department of motor vehicles and hand washing Courtney Love's laundry.
I have no one to blame but myself. After vowing to do much of my shopping over the internet, my procrastinating ways left me with only one week left to complete the chore. And when I finally went online to make my purchases, I discovered that many of the sites couldn't fulfill my orders in a timely enough manner without charging me ridiculous delivery fees. I mean, who the hell pays 30 bucks to have a Tickle-Me-Elmo doll shipped overnight? For 30 dollars it better be hand delivered by the CEO of FedEx himself, wearing a giant panda outfit and singing Jingle Bells in medieval Swedish.
To be fair, it's not the mall itself but rather the trip there that's problematic. The mind-dazzling frustration of trying to find an empty spot in an overstuffed parking lot in sub-freezing temperatures can make you want to pluck your eyeballs out with a rusty screwdriver. It's an experience that reverses millennia of carefully crafted human evolution to its most basic and feral levels: you are the predator, parking is the prey, and the lot is the jungle where you and all the other hunters roam. And like the jungle, there are no rules, there are no winners, there are only those who live and those who starve or run out of gas, whichever comes first...
And lo the angel broke the seventh seal and I saw before me the faces of the damned...
2:10 PM - Release the hounds
Before I left my house, I did everything I could to ensure that my trip would be hassle free. I prayed, uttered a Hail Mary, and ritually sacrificed a couple of chickens. Granted, the chickens were deep-fried and seasoned with the Colonel's eleven herbs and spices before I dispatched it, but it was the thought that counted.
Afterwards, I got in my car, smeared some sacrificial chicken grease on the dashboard for good luck, and drove towards the Mecca of Masochistic Materialism that is the Short Hills Mall*.
*I have been corrected several times by its devotees that the mall is actually not the Short Hills Mall, but The Mall at Short Hills--a simple semantic issue but one they seem to take very seriously. To that I say we should just rename the place for what it really is: "The Short Hills Bougie Hell Without Enough Parking." Oops, I mean "The Bougie Hell Without Enough Parking at Short Hills."
2:30 PM - The falcon doesn't hear the falconer because he's busy listening to his iPod
After nearly getting sideswiped by a mall security car as it barreled off an exit ramp, I made it inside the parking deck. I was immediately faced by what can only be described as the single greatest concentration of automobiles I have ever seen in my life. It was what an ocean would look like if it were made of cars instead of water, and I was about to drown in it.
"Crap." I muttered. "The chickens had died in vain."
When Moses stood on the shores of the Red Sea and stared across the vast waters in front of him, God rewarded his faithfulness by parting the turgid sea and allowed the Israelites to cross and escape Pharaoh’s wrath. Well, I ain't Moses. The wrath I was potentially facing was from angry friends and family if I return empty handed. And the only way all these cars were going to part for me was if I released the ebola virus inside the mall.
I started my parking hunt using the "hawk" approach. Scan the area. Dive in when you see prey. Kill. Screech. Repeat.
I weaved my way up and down through the tightly packed aisles, craning my head from side to side in search of some trace sign of a free spot. A flashing tail light, a sudden dip in the contour line of parked car behinds--any hint of an empty or emptying space.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this method, however, is the false alarm. From the inept driver who's in reverse but only because it takes him a dozen friggin' times to get his car between the lines, to the ever infuriating small car hiding between two big cars, there are always signs of a possible spot off in the distance that beckon to you like a siren's call and cause you to veer off your prescribed path. Only when you get close enough do you see the ugly ass of a Miata, smiling at you behind the shadows of an SUV. Meanwhile, another car dives into a spot that would have been yours, had you stayed on your original course.
2:50 PM - See you later alligator
The hawk approach wasn't getting me anywhere. Twenty minutes of circling netted me nothing more than a sore behind and a few dirty glares from other hunters.
I decided to switch to alligator mode: stay motionless with my jaws wide open, wait for the bewildered prey to mosey into my trap, and clamp down on it with primal fury. Problem was, several other cars seemed to have the same idea. Almost every banked aisle of parked vehicles had at least 2 spot searchers perched at the extreme ends, waiting for some shopping mall messiah in Prada to emerge from the glass door exits and lead them to the promised land.
I finally found a perch at the edge of the top level of the deck. It was quite far from the mall entrance, but I wasn't about to complain about the potential walk at that point. I was desperate and just wanted to get out of my car, even if it meant having to endure the bitter cold outside.
3:00 PM - Would you like your eggs fried or poached?
Ten minutes had passed before I saw my first vict... er... I mean shopper. A middle aged woman in a pink ski outfit and ridiculously garish sunglasses slowly made her way towards me. She was carrying an armful of Crate and Barrel bags in her right arm and adjusting the curls of her over-permed hair with her left.
I rolled down my window and waved for her attention. "Excuse me," I yelled. "Are you leaving?"
"Yes," she replied not unpolitely, "but I already promised my spot to that guy." She jacked her free hand towards her back in a hitchhiking gesture and craned her head slightly.
Behind her a blue minivan was crawling towards us like an obedient puppy. A portly man with a thick white beard sat behind the wheel wearing a faint grin across his lips, no doubt because he had found a parking spot. Two chubby young girls, presumably his granddaughters, were bouncing like heavily caffeinated rabbits in the back seat.
"Thanks anyway," was the best I could manage in my dejected state. I rolled up my window and slumped down into my car seat.
I guess I could have argued with the minivan driver for the woman's spot. After all, I had been waiting patiently for spots in my territory and he simply came along and poached it from under my nose like some savage safari raider. I was the shark and he was the parasitic remora and feasting on woman's leftovers.
But I felt the holiday spirit move me (slightly) and didn't want to ruin it. Besides, those kids in the back seat looked like they were ready to pound the living crap out of grandpa if they didn't get to Build a Bear Workshop within the next 5 minutes. That's punishment enough in my opinion.
3:10 PM - This is Thunderdome. Two car enter. One car leave.
After another 10 minutes ass-numbing goodness, a shopper appeared in my rear view mirror. A youngish woman carrying an indigo GAP bag big enough to hold several dead bodies stopped at the aft of a white Accord parked along the outer perimeter wall of the deck. She and her car were a few dozen feet from me, but still close enough for me to claim as being in my "zone of influence."
Hurriedly, I threw my transmission out of park, performed the best K turn of my life, and sped towards the impending spot. I let out a whistled cry of "Yes!" and pumped my fist in excitement.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my left eye, a black Toyota Forerunner traveling perpendicularly to my own approach vector came into focus, driven by a middle aged man with salt and pepper hair. I hoped, I prayed, he was simply making his way out of the mall, but the contemptuous flashing of his left blinker as he slowed down shattered any illusions to the contrary.
"Argh!" I yelled in disgust. "He's after my spot!"
By the time both the Forerunner and I reached engagement distance, the woman had already pulled out, turned, and driven off. From my position, I was poised to simply make a straight stab into the vacated space. The Forerunner, on the other hand, needed travel another 10 feet then make a wide left turn to take the spot. Not wanting to lose the advantage I pumped the accelerator and lunged forward like a leaping tiger going in for the kill.
Unfortunately, the other car wasn't about to concede so easily. He turned his car in a leftward arc and pointed the front left corner of his car at mine, effectively blocking me from entering the spot cleanly. His car didn't have enough clearance to make it all the way in, but his maneuver had ensured I couldn't either.
I honked my horn in protest. He honked his. This was going to be ugly.
Now I could have given up on the spot. It was the holidays, the one time of the year where you're expected to show a little bit of your softer side. But after spending a friggin hour sitting on my chaffed butt, driving around for a stupid measly plot of God-forsaken asphalt in an overpriced bougie hell hole of a mall, and letting that Wilford Brimley wanna-be and his fat ass Gummi Bear grandkids take that last spot from right under my nose, I had lost every last shred of my bloody yuletide spirit!
I was going grinch on this mofo.
"Hey, I was here first!" I shouted indignantly through my rolled down window. I threw my arm out and flailed it in his general direction.
"No you weren't," he yelled back. "I just saw you pull up a few seconds ago!"
"That's because I was turning around!" I retorted. "I was back there facing the other way...when...uh...I saw the person leave…and...." As the words trailed out of my mouth, I could taste the weakness of my argument.
"Ugh," I thought to myself. "I sound like an idiot...he's never going to buy it." I was telling the truth but I knew that if I was hearing it thrown at me I would have dismissed it as nothing more than a bunch of holiday induced malarkey.
If an argument that weak could be accepted, then Poland might as well have forgiven Germany. Steve Jobs might as well have patted Bill Gates on the back. The world might as well have thanked Canada for Celine Dion.
Thinking that I'd better cut my loses before I say anything else foolish, I hung my head, stared into the cavernous recesses of my dimly lit dashboard, dropped my right hand onto the knobbed end of my transmission, and began to put the car into R, for retreat...
"Fine," I heard him say from across the space between us. My spine arched straight and I turned to look at him. He rolled up his window, withdrew his car from the engagement zone, and sped through an adjacent valley of parked cars like hounded man.
"Yeah!" I exclaimed triumphantly. "That's right! Run ya gas guzzling yuppie!"
In the jungle, when a pride of lions hunt and kill a gazelle, the smaller lions will make way and let the stronger, bigger lions have first choice of the carcass. As I sunk the front of my car deep into the flesh of the open asphalt, I felt like a pretty big lion.
3:20 PM - What goes around comes around...and then whacks you in the ass (or Karma's a biatch)
My prize spot was about as far from the mall as you could possibly be and still be considered within the mall property. It was on the top floor of a five story deck, didn't have an overhead ceiling to provide weather shelter, and required scaling 2 flights of stairs just to reach a mall entrance.
But whether it was the blood finally returning to my butt or the fact that I had fought tooth and nail to find that spot, no other word better describes my state of being than "elated." My feet felt light, my heavy coat weighed next to nothing, and with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas Day, I literally skipped my way to the mall entrance.
Upon arrival at the glass paneled entrance to the mall, I let out a big sigh and savored the last few steps towards the door. I was finally at the end of a journey that seemed to have no end. I pulled on a brass handle and held it open for a gaggle of departing shoppers. They utter a few polite thanks at me and I respond in kind with a nod and a faint "welcome."
As I'm holding the weighty glass panel in front of my face, I see my ghosted image in its translucent sheen, superimposed upon the hustle and flow backdrop of the mall parking lot. Suddenly, I see something else in the reflection which causes me to snap my head around and stare at the prime parking spots nearest to the mall entrance. Between a green Jaguar and a blue Beamer, nestled under the protective canopy of the parking deck ceiling, and staring admonishingly like some mechanical Ghost of Christmas present, is the black Forerunner.
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Happy holidays all...
