Published in The Post-Star (D1)
Feb. 18, 2007
By AMANDA BENSEN
QUEENSBURY -- The mall rats are talking about the fight, and the story inflates with each telling. Although mall security guards say fists were the only weapons they saw that day, one boy claims the Chaos Crew kids showed up with an ax. Another says someone was stabbed in the hand.
"I walked out there and someone punched me right in the face," said Caitlin Koch, 16, a petite, bouncy girl from Glens Falls.
"There's always drama here," she said. "It can range from 'he or she stole something from me,' to who made out with who. Usually, it turns out somebody's lying, so most of the time I just ignore it."
Koch explained that she is one of a group of teenagers drawn to Aviation Mall because it's one of the few places they can hang out in the Glens Falls/Queensbury region. They call themselves "mall rats," and nearly every afternoon and evening at least a few can be found scurrying among the arcade, the food court, Target's Starbucks and the parking lot.
"I know it's probably not the best way to meet people and spend your time, but I like it," Koch said of the mall. Glens Falls has a youth center, she said, but she won't go there. "It sucks, it's kind of all middle-schoolers."
Like many kids in the group, Koch's favorite mall attraction is the "Dance Dance Revolution" arcade game, where players dance on the foot pads in step to fast-paced songs. It can be rhythmically and aerobically challenging.
"This is the mall rat game," declared Lee Beckwith, an almost-16-year-old boy who is at the mall most afternoons. He likes DDR and Soul Calibur, another arcade game, he said, because he's good at them.
"Most of the games that we play in here are just about trying to be better than the other people, if you want to put it bluntly," he said. "I've probably spent $500 on this machine since I started coming here last summer."
Like most of the kids, Lee walks to the mall from school or his house.
"Our parents just basically leave us to ourselves," he said, dropping three more quarters into the DDR machine. Words of affirmation flashed across the screen with every sequence of footwork he nailed: "Good! Great! Perfect!"
A pretty young redhead named Ashley Camp watched, swigging from a can of Mountain Dew. When her friend Jen Desrosiers showed up, Ashley greeted her with a loud kiss on the cheek, and whispered something in her ear.
"The father?" Ashley asked, her voice returning to normal volume. She said a guy's name.
"I know," Jen responded. "Everybody knows."
"How does everybody know?" Ashley said. "I only told three people! I guess it was the wrong three people."
She turned to Lee, whose song had just ended.
"Can you do tricks over the poles yet?" she asked.
"I can do bar hops," he said, jumping over the waist-high metal hand railings.
"Bar hops are easy," she said.
Ashley dropped out of high school after her junior year, got engaged and followed her fiancee to Louisiana. That relationship ended -- "he left me stranded," she said -- and she recently returned to Glens Falls. Now 18, she's a few months pregnant by another man, who is not her current boyfriend. She's excited about becoming a mother, but starting to wish she had made different choices.
"I wish I hadn't dropped out of school," she reflected. "I'm going to work on my GED."
'They're just kids'
At first glance, it would be tempting to write the mall rats off as little more than categories in an amateur sociologist's notebook -- rebels, slackers, freaks and geeks. But their strongest defense comes from a surprising source.
"You can't judge a book by its cover. Just because these kids are dressed different than what we would expect doesn't mean they're bad kids. I judge 'em by their actions," said Ed Rose, director of mall security.
Rose started working at the mall as a security guard 14 years ago, and oversaw a previous generation of mall rats. A pack of teenagers can scare off other mall customers, he said, but he doesn't see them as a problem.
"I hate to use that term, mall rats," Ed said. "As far as I'm concerned, they're just kids that are here at the mall more so than others."
But the absence of parental supervision can lead to trouble, he said. He's seen children as young as 7 dropped off by the vanload to spend an entire day at the mall.
"If something happens, we ask them who's in charge of them. We page that person to the office, and in walks a 10 or 11-year-old!" he said. "You leave a kid alone like that, eventually, he or she is going to hang with the wrong people and get into trouble."
Beneath the surface
The mall rats can spend hours talking about teenage dramas or the intricacies of arcade games, but barbed wire lurks beneath the conversational fluff. In the same breath as a sentence about soda -- and with equal nonchalance -- they'll mention things like pregnancy, suicide, gender identity, dropping out of school or getting in trouble with the law.
Take this exchange, for example, when a 14-year-old girl was asked if she had seen a certain friend that day:
Girl: Yeah, I saw him outside earlier when I was puking.
Reporter: Are you OK?
Girl: Yeah, I just drank a lot of shots earlier and I hadn't eaten anything, so I puked like six times.
Reporter: Why don't you eat something?
Girl: Um...I don't really eat.
A growing concern
The mall security guards aren't baby-sitters, although they feel forced into that role at times. They leave the kids alone unless they sense trouble.
One day last month, members of a Warrensburg-based group of youths called the Chaos Crew showed up to confront the Juggalos, a group of local youths who identify themselves as fans of the band Insane Clown Posse.
June MacPherson, a mall guard for 18 years, said she doesn't consider either group a full-fledged gang.
"They call themselves a gang, I call them a group of kids," she said. "And the Juggalos that I know, for the most part, are good kids who get bad publicity."
She said she hadn't heard of the Chaos Crew until recently. So far, all she knows is the members typically carry "smileys" -- bandannas with a padlock attached, which could be swung around to hit someone in a fight -- tucked into their back pocket.
"When we see that padlock, we take it," she said. "That is a weapon."
The mall guards remember the recent showdown as little more than a fistfight, although it drew a huge crowd.
"I walked out on that patio, and I think every young person who was in the mall that day was out there -- must have been 100 of them," June said.
The guards broke up the fight before it got serious, she said, but the threat of violence between the Chaos Crew and Juggalos is "a growing concern."
Another world
Some afternoons, several of the mall rats, mostly guys, move from the arcade to the Starbucks in Target, where they play a fantasy trading card game called World of Warcraft.
"Don't do it! It's social suicide!" one of the girls in a cluster of mall rats yelled to Ray D'Andrea as he walked away from the food court with Lee and a few others. The guys just smiled, and kept walking.
They spread out at their usual table, in the far corner. Among them, they had hundreds of cards, which Lee said cost about $5 a pack. He estimated that he'd spent about $55 that day on a combination of cards and arcade games.
"That was the last of my Christmas money," he said. "I'm going to get a job when I turn 16, though."
Getting a job is something many of the mall rats talk about, but few have actually done. June, the security guard, said it's a conversation she's had often with some of the older ones.
"I tell them, if you want to improve, put on some dress clothes and get a job. Get an education," she said. "Some of them just have no goals, unless it's, 'Get dinner tonight because we're hungry.'"
As the card game progressed, the players' conversation was nearly incomprehensible to an outsider, loaded with terms like "Onyxia," "the Horde," and "the Alliance."
"I could use more protectors," someone said, referring to a certain type of card.
"Who couldn't use more protectors?" Lee responded.
'Lost children'
A few days after announcing her pregnancy to her friends, Ashley was back at the mall, talking about plans to shop for baby clothes and showing off her still-tiny stomach. She shared a rapidly dwindling bag of Doritos with a friend, as a way of complying with the mall's rule that food court seats are reserved for customers who actually have food.
Security guard June MacPherson eyed the youths from beneath the broad brim of her hat, as if aware that their Dorito defense was crumbling. When she finally approached, however, it wasn't to shoo them away from the table. Instead, she leaned in close to Ashley, speaking quietly but firmly:
"Did you lie to me earlier?" she asked.
June was living up to her nickname among the guards as "the mom of the mall." Ashley suddenly looked a decade younger. "Uh oh, I'm in troub - le," she muttered, getting up and following June over to a spot beside a trash can, out of earshot.
She returned a minute later, looking shaken.
"What did she say?" her friend asked.
"She said, 'Are you pregnant?'" Ashley said. "She told me, 'You know, that baby didn't ask to be born. You'd better figure out how to take care of it.'"
"I see a lot of sad things here," June reflected later. She's not surprised, she said, when some of the teenage girls end up becoming mothers.
"I've seen it before. They go from guy to guy, they end up pregnant, and I think the baby suffers the most," she said. "Mom usually isn't educated, so she can't find a good enough job, and it's hard...but how can she raise a child when there's been nothing taught to her by her own parents?"
Not all of the mall rats come from troubled homes, June said, but it's easy to spot the ones who do.
"Sometimes, I tell them I have to call their parents and they get so scared," she said. "I say, 'Do you get hit often?' and they clam right up. Kids like that, I keep a special eye on. I look for bruising, but usually you can't see it."
Others may not be physically abused, but have parents who are absent or don't know what's going on with their kids, she said.
"They're like lost children," she said. "Most of them live together, bond together -- that's their family. They take care of one another. Unfortunately, sometimes they make bad decisions."
Some mall rats don't drink, smoke or do drugs, describing themselves as "straight edge."
Sixteen-year-old Adam Dudley comes to Aviation Mall as often as his parents will give him a ride from Fort Edward, mostly to meet friends and get exercise playing DDR.
The mall, he said, is one of the few places teenagers can hang out without getting into trouble. He expressed concern about a rumor that security guards might start banning kids 16 and under from the mall at night unless they have adult supervision.
"I could not go to the mall, and what, go out and do drugs? That's a good idea," Adam said, his eyes concealed behind a curtain of shaggy hair. "This is more of a straight-edge scene. Some of the kids smoke, and that's just dumb," he added.
All in the family
Though the mall rats stick together, they're a diverse group, spanning a range of ages and interests. Some look fairly ordinary, while others have body piercings and tattoos. In a few cases, heavy eyeliner and androgynous hairstyling make it hard to distinguish male from female, to the point where they themselves get confused.
"Some of us have known each other for a long time, but like, I just met him today," Ashley explained to a reporter, gesturing across a food court table to another mall rat.
"Hey, you think I'm a him?!?" responded the teenager, who turned out to be a girl with short hair and baggy clothes.
She quickly shrugged off Ashley's embarrassed apology.
"Nah, whatever, I don't care," she said. "Give me some chips!"
END
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