The Great Mall of the Americas

I could not find my way back to my truck, it was there, at the Great Mall of the Americas. I don’t feel too bad about it, that is about losing my truck at the Great Mall of the Americas, anything that huge had to be a challenge for someone little like me to remember; I was diminutively speaking a small man, 5 feet 3 inches, most people are now taller than that, Lucy the ancestor of human kind was only 3 feet 6 inches, and Lucy, of the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo show was certainly taller, at 5 feet 7 inches, taller than even Ricky, her Cuban husband. Like wise the mall of the Americas dwarfs me and I lost my truck in it.

I didn't expect to lose my truck, I am more likely to lose my keys, but this time I lost my truck. I thought I might lose my notebook but I didn’t lose my notebook though I have nightmares about losing my notebook I lost my truck instead. My truck weighs in at 4300 pounds, my notebook weights in at 4.3 pounds, most soldiers have to carry fifty pound backpacks, me 4.3 pounds and a couple more, and I am ok with that for I never walk very far, I don’t like walking. I don’t like walking long distances, it seems pointless; I don’t like cars, I don’t like being in cars for more than fifteen minutes, I don’t like plane travel for more than 45 minutes, I am a short distance person, the American continent would have never been discovered by me; I don’t have the urge to travel, the travel industry would have never materialized nor would have the international marketing industry if my genes predominated the human species, they don’t. I am but an antler within the human species, a nail of deciduous layered growth, so as to create a bony structure that intimidates yet a pair of nail clippers would cut it off.

My name is Davit Nutt, from Albarsperk, a small town in the Dacoma territories that used to belong to the Dacoma Indians but then they signed it over to the white men, and now they just operate the casinos. I am not however an Indian, I am a white man, and I don’t own the greatest mall in the Americas, I am just there now because we had a business meeting, I am a shoe salesman. I work for Longer and More Comfortable Molly’s. We specialize in shoes for people that are made larger by the culmination of their appendages.

We call them Molly shoes, I don’t know why we call them that, but I suppose Alph Parks, the owner of the company probably had a fat girlfriend named, perhaps Molly and he married Ethel Swarny and probably wanted to remember Molly instead, at least when he went to work and so there you have us, we are Molly Shoes Inc.

I am a catalog salesman, I go from door to door and sell shoes to people that are challenged by the size of their foot. This year, I made it to the list of top ten sales reps within the company; that is damn right I am the sixth most successful sales rep nationwide, frankly it is an honor. But equally I cannot brag, it isn’t that hard to sell shoes that are larger and more comfortable for larger people. And it isn’t hard because shoes of our size, large, extra large and wider and extra wider, (the secret of our design success,) large and cushy, well where else are you going to get that if not at Molly’s Shoes!

You have to give credit to big Alph, he saw the market coming, he predicted that America, as it became a bigger nation, would need bigger hamburgers, bigger malls and bigger steaks and consequently bigger cows, and bigger sex toys and logically it followed that Americans would get bigger, as success breeds size and their bigger size would make them not fit into their shoes; and thus Alph, a former hotdog salesman from Romaine Kansas opted to match the opportunity with the shoe and he begun to design shoes that are bigger and cushier and more comfortable and he hired me as his first salesman.

Why he hired me is still mesmerizing to me, the good lord cares for us in mysterious ways, I was at a greyhound bus stop, waiting for a bus to go nowhere, my wife had left me, precisely because she was not impressed by me, she once said that I could inspire a poem about yawning. When she left she took our daughter Nancy with her, Nancy ate a lot of cornflakes, and had grown where now she could use Molly Shoes but I don’t know where they are. They also took Henry with them, gosh when I think about it why even our children had sort of fat names, maybe that had something to do with it, or could it have been the chili-fries?

Ah what is a father to know, I don’t even know when we made those kids, maybe they are not even mine, frankly I wish I had greater paternal sentiments but I am more proud of having been invited to the Top Ten Molly Salesmen of the Year reunion, than I am of fathering Henry and Nancy; though they are harmless both and nice kids too. Still, as I hate to admit it, Nancy is nothing more than some kind of gum consumption machine that I am afraid will reproduce by happenstance; and Henry is a Video game fanatic consumer, where the games can never keep up with him, there is even a sweat spot on the carpeting right where he sits in front of his video game player to slaughter civilization over and over again. All this while our pooch Darwin, perhaps the most evolved member of the former family sits and muses over a bone shaped biscuit.

Davit Nutt, that is me, I am skinny, no more flesh on me than is required to cover up them bones, you can see my veins and arteries fluctuate in size with the ambient temperature, I am deathly afraid of the cold, I might be a mammal but my blood gets cold at the sight of a shadow, I am always looking for heat, maybe that is why I was attracted to my wife, she had layers of flesh. I am naturally attracted to heft, and so it is easy for me to sell oversized shoes, really I don’t understand how the other salesmen got ahead of me, they might have lied on their sales reports, maybe their managers bought some of the shoes to earn bonus points, maybe they faked sales, or maybe they overstuffed the inventory, because really I doubt that someone could beat me at the art of selling oversize Molly shoes.

I get into a house and I go in there and I say, “Look it here you see this here shoe, it will support all aspects of your lovely leg, (eighty percent of my customers are women,) and see how we have constructed the support structure to mimic how grass cushions a foot, why there are hundreds of thousands of invisible grass hairs growing right out of our shoes, and they use this new and exclusive and patented nano-organic technique where, by recovering the humidity produced by the sole of your feet, they will regenerate the grass like follicles in our shoes, so as to create a fresh grass sole supporting turf, where you will never notice you are wearing shoes, you might even feel your lovely feet naked.”

Then they sniffle and say, “But what about smells?”

“Oh nothing to that, don’t even mention it, because our nano-organic shoes have self reproducing soles they are also, impressively, self refreshing and so you go on and enjoy them as you might the morning dew under your naked feet.”

Of course I don’t use our shoes and they notice this and ask, “Why don’t you use them if they are so good?”

“Oh gosh” I flush red, “I wish I could use them, I have asked Alph to make them my size but as you can see a skinny fellow like me has not the frame to support a naturally growing sole environment shoe underneath his feet; there is not the necessary pressured conditions to create the ambient temperatures and chemical cataclysms to regenerate new soles, a process that is usually bi-monthly, for anyone offering two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.”

The buyers do seem a little confused by all the science and so I reassure them, “But Alph keeps working at it, that guy he doesn’t give up, he knows that there is a huge market potential for his shoes and he doesn’t want to stay just a niche shoe, he wants to branch into the Olympics and Wimbledon. Why just imagine if the tennis stars could feel the grass underneath their feet, it be a whole different game; we at Molly Shoes realize the responsibility of the experience that we need share with our sole mates.”

I think it is because I am skinny that they think they have to take me under their arms, but when I smell underarm perspiration I know that I have made another sale, and there you have it, that is why I am here today, at the biggest mall of the Americas celebrating the biggest shoe success story of all time. Only I had a few wines, I normally don’t drink wine but since the boss has gotten a little rich he now feels that he has to drink wine and so he orders wine for us all too and you just cannot say no to the boss, he has this way of convincing you that you should drink wine and sell his shoes and so I do both, only the wine doesn’t sit well for me; I think us men of skin and bones should really stay away from any kind of liquor and so now because I didn’t follow that rule I am searching for my truck.

My truck doesn’t have an alarm, I get tired of alarms going off without reason, cars screaming smog are bad enough we don’t need them being obnoxious too. I never got the alarm option even as my insurance company was willing to give me a 10 percent discount off of the insurance bill if I added the alarm, apparently thieves are scared off by alarms, I refused that; and I also refused the 3 percent discount if I took the model without an ashtray, apparently smokers get into accidents three percent more than non-smokers; I also got the yellow paint job even though there was a 1 percent discount on that as well; but the truth is that I like yellow even though yellow crashes and clashes with red cars more often than not, and besides that I do smoke and so I figured what is the difference, I have a 3 percent greater probability of crashing and that probably buries that other 1 percent for having an attractive paint scheme.

And even with the attractive paint scheme I cant find my truck, damn. And if that were not enough I think the alcohol is having some effect, this I think because I have good reason to believe that at the Great Mall of the Americas I keep on going up the same stairs and the same ramp at least five times, and unless I get sober fast I might not find my truck.

Now in the old days it was easy, if you lost your vehicle at the mall you could just sit it out till about 10 pm where everyone had gone home and then the only car on the parking lot would be your yellow truck, but today the malls are open twenty four hours per day, and the people too are open twenty four hours per day, and so there is no way to empty out the parking lot.

Of course I hadn’t given up the faith, I figured I could find my truck, either by waiting for a sober memory or by ending the number of parking slots available for parking, I am an optimist, I think. And so I get into this mammoth elevator, I think it could house 30 people, and it goes straight up fast, I am going to explore the upper levels of the super parking complex, the elevator doors open like a portal into another dimension, slowly so as not to rip a little girl’s fingers off, slowly so that if there are thirty people in the elevator they can all witness with each other the industrial might of the great mall. I walk off into the ninth floor, I think it is the last one, I don’t dare to assume that I know how wide this mall is or how tall, I am on the ninth floor, ok.

Immediately as I step off I am elated at finding a Mall Cop in a white scooter type mobile with blue warning lights all over, the young man in it is a healthy fellow, well built but not robust, just good looking, he could have been in a golf cart without that blue uniform and looked the part of a wealthy country chap, I yelled with my voice while reaching him with wild armed signals.

“Hey there fellow, have you seen a yellow truck with red stripes running through the side and a chrome step, there are no two alike.”

“Well maybe yours is yours sir and with all due respect that makes it unique but here I see Ferraris by the half dozen.”

And with that he punctured the gas pedal on that electric kart gizmo and sped off, where I operated to catch him with my legs.

“No, no, just wait a minute; ok maybe there are others like mine, ok, (I was gasping for air,) but could you just be so kind as to give me a ride around this floor to see if it is here?”

The young man, I must say, was all proper, “Hey Mr. I sure would if I could but company policy doesn’t allow me, you might sue us if we get into an accident and I could lose my job,”

I paused him, “Yeah, yeah don’t worry I know and your girlfriend is pregnant and you really need this job, lets leave it at that and I will just walk on.”

With that we both signaled a mutual salute of professional attention and he purred off in his electric gizmo.

I scratched my head, I felt silly being lost, but I felt more silly for being drunk on the wine, still I went off to review the cars on the ninth floor. Not mine, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, not mine, Lamborghini, not mine, till I came up to a large concrete wall with the number nine on it; I had completed all the rows, I didn’t, anyway remember driving up nine levels, four maximum, I was afraid of heights. As I stood in front of the wall as if I were peeing like a Frenchman, I realized that I was in front of a door, I opened the door, and before me stood a clown in a huge ruffled yellow dress with white gloves, red cheeks and a falsely welcoming smile.

“Hey, hey Mr., you are our one millionth customer to the ride of the cytoplasm, you get to get on for free, put your money away, your money is not good here, (he was patting my back) your money is not good here, you are on us today, Mr., free suite, free food, free rides all day long and you get to start here, this is the get go point; (his happiness and incessant jolliness contagious but in a must way), you just get right on here, right on here. (guiding me with that charming force of a clown that hinders none.)”

“But I am not here to ride your ride, sorry I was just looking for my truck.”

“Yes, yes adults always have some fancy excuse as to why they don’t really want to ride our rides, but you dint come to the ninth because you dint know we were here, obviously you got here and you didn’t get here by accident right!”

“No, no you don’t understand Mr. Clown, what is your name, I am sorry what is your name?”

“Me, (his hand confirming towards his lapel,) “me, I am The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!” And with that he let lose a huge sarcophagus laughter, and repeated it for my enjoyment and any near-by listener, “The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!, that is me sir.”

“Well Mr. Clown of the Mall of the Americas, may I just walk by you, and sorry to have gotten caught in your life line.”

While I was saying that a huge squelching sound irked my ears and ended audibility within the vicinity, it was the sound of a huge mechanical machine on rail road tracks coming into its station; the cart however was little, tiny, a pure black pure metal contraption huge enough for one tiny person, but it had amplified sounds, and an amplified personage and what was more interesting was that the rails were on top so that its wheel carriage was hanging from its roof. The whole contraption, cart for one, was accompanied by a child’s song blurting out so loud that you could not hear what was audible.

“The crash cart, the cart of carts, the steroid of carts, is here to take you away, away, away you will slim into other worlds, you will hide behind the buttons of giants, you will skim the surface of milk waffles, and aid us in adding cherries to the supper chocolate sundae engine, and when we run out of cherries, which we will, you will help us push the last mile into the station. Hop, hop yourself and hop on board you all, we are on the cherry train, on the cherry train to the spiral, the black and white spiral awaits hurry on board for this train is ready to depart.” The music jostling the train and my ears, the clown pushed me onboard and locked the little black door tightly shut.

The cart as I tell you was no larger than I was, I felt like a man with a funny hat in a silent film, awkward and unaccountable. The cart whisked off at about ten miles per hour, a silence whisked in. Clouds started forming over the track, the cart began to feel, as indeed it was, too small for me. I could not make myself comfortable as an inch of something, bolts, rods, levers, pullies, wheels, springs would inch into me from all angles; my head barely cleared the metal ceiling, there were fortunately no windows so I could breath fine fresh air, but beyond that it was very claustrophobic and now I was in the plenitude of pure flight, on a track moving somewhere, but where?” I scratched any part of my body that I could scratch, I looked for moving parts on the cart, there were none, helpless, I ducked the clouds, frowning at parrots, seagulls and condors.

I don’t know why but at some point I started feeling comfortable when the thing sped up, wow, sped faster, I thought for sure it would come off the track, then it did a 360 track route, and swung downwards, I banged my head several times, my arms bruised too, I covered my eyes to prevent injury and then the thing flattened out after a remarkable screw entrance into a tunnel, and stopped; as if its passenger were not human the whole contraption swung and sprung open as if a dump truck, and thus unleashed me into the pavement. A sweet voice arrived over the intercom.

“You have arrived at the spiral tour, you do not need a ticket, you have been properly identified as our one millionth customer, your rides with us are free for the rest of your life and consecutive life times there after, please sit and wait, please sit and wait, we will be loading you into the spiral very soon, you need not get anxious, enjoy some drinks and food on us, don’t eat too much the spiral can make you a little dizzy, if you are pregnant or on your period we don’t recommend that you ride the spiral.”

I got up and scrubbed myself off while taking notice of a food stand and went right to it. A young lady, short, full of tightly straightened blond hair and dressed in a cheerleader outfit, came up to me before I could reach the counter; she was on roller skates, and made sure to halt me. “Don’t go to the bar sir, please, if you go there they don’t give me credit for your service, and if you tip while there I have to then share the tip.”

I was flustered but I leaned into the red stool that was nearest me, “Please may I have some water?”

“Oh is that all you want?”

“Yes please just a glass of water urgently.”

“But sir it doesn’t cost you anything, you are our one millionth customer and they will tip me based on your order, couldn’t you help me out, order more, I can take it home with me if you don’t want it, just help me out, its not going to cost you anything.”

Gasping for air. “Ok, Goldy, (the name on her name tag,) just order what you will, all I want is the glass of water.”

“No sir, I am not in this just for myself, you must order something for yourself, please.” Spitting her gum on the floor.

“Ok order me a hotdog and fries, and a glass of ripe cold water please.”

“Ok, that sounds better, I will add a couple of hamburgers for myself and my boyfriend, but don’t you tell anyone old man, I don’t want to lose my job over this.”

“Listen if you get me a glass of water then everything is fine, please the water.”

Giving me a sort of up and down dirty look for a skinny man. “Alright.”

Goldy came back with the glass of water and bags packed with hotdogs, fries and hamburgers, I left everything at the table and went to look at the sky, and that is when I realized it was night time. You could count every star in the night sky, amazing, it was a privilege, I got all moved by the scenery, the sky was sort of blue from the stars bleeding their light over it, and there were so many of them, and while marveling this a chorus of voices came to me.

“There he is boys, there is the millionth dollar customer of the mall of the Americas, this is a grand moment for us all.”

With that they started to shake my hand, while photographers snapped pictures of what were obviously company executives and company clowns with me.

I saw the president, a man that I identified himself as, “I am the president of the Great Mall of the Americas, it gives me great pleasure to be here with you tonight to witness you becoming the first of our spiral ride customers. Why I envy you, I wish I were going first.” He elbowed me, and as he said that the cameras snapped on furiously.

“Sir I think there has been some huge mistake I haven’t bought anything at your mall, I was just looking for my yellow truck and that is how I ended on the ninth floor.”

The fat, jolly, well dressed fellow smiled big eye, “We love modesty, that will sell better, you’re a good fellow, I admire you, sure fellows, this isn’t our million dollar customer, he is too modest for the title.”

They all laughed, clowns hugged me and forced me to dance with them, and then all the lights went off and a huge drum roll went off blaring an operatic voice, “The ride of rides, the spiral of spirals - spirals over us all, this is the moment, this is us, this is the time of the greatest mall of all time, and our one millionth customer initiates us into the blaring and spiraling infinity.”

The lights began to brighten quickening and flooding everything and the floor space opened up; Goldy rushed to pick up her food-to-go, and I backed up against a wall till I could make no half space any further; and suddenly the floor widened and the spiral opened and it was a corkscrew of black and white spinning wildly; I was all scared, and then the clown came up to me.

“Sir, you may cut the blue ribbon that unleashes the black and white corkscrew ride, unleash it please.” And with the oversized scissors in my hand, I cut the ribbon and a big orchestra blasted itself into the scenery, and dancers of every type scored every inch of floor space while trumpets blared.

The president then came up to me, and as if pointing a gun to my back escorted me to the entrance of the corkscrew, with a couple of fillies to charm me with their adolescent understatement. Still I hesitated, when they pushed me off.

I began yelling and yelling, and yelling and the spiral passed through me as if a time machine, the whole of my life was going through me, and there was nothing easy throughout the spiraling fall, until a big scarlet red bed began to seem obvious, and I landed on that huge cushion, and before me splattered cameras, signs hailing the millionth customer, and I, dazed couldn’t understand what it was all about.

Seconds later, the president and his executive clown landed near me and got me immediately off the red cushion bedding, sort of cleaned off my ruffled suit, and allowed the immensity of cameras to further pin us. Then a reporter came up to me, “How was it and what did you feel?”

“I felt dizzy, I don’t know, I felt lost, I felt spiraling out of control, I am surprised I am not hurt.”

And with that a roaring laugh came over those present. And the president grabbed the mike, and pointed at the ride, “You see it is just a spiral, it only takes you from the ninth floor to the first floor, and he felt totally out of control, ladies and gentlemen I give you the greatest mall of the Americas, the greatest mall in the land, where you are sure to feel out of control in a perfectly ordinary world.”

I fainted. Thinking about my yellow truck.

RC