For every beige strip mall haphazardly stuccoed on the backs of underpaid, leather-skinned laborers counting down the minutes until the next smoke break, a bookstore. This was peak Florida, a microcosm of the economic boom of the 1990s when families strived perhaps more than ever to appear picturesque to outsiders. A smile with just-bleached teeth, a honk of your Ford Expedition and a wave to your neighbor, from one identical house in a subdivision built atop a sodded-in swamp to another. See you at the next homeowner’s association meeting. I went to school with kids who constantly had new clothes and gadgets and who lived in brand new houses in those subdivisions. Biking through those neighborhoods, I would often wonder how anyone ever remembered which house was theirs. But often just a street away were the lower-middle class, in structurally sound, if sheenless cinderblock homes built in the 1950s, homes built to weather windy thunderstorms on summer afternoons and occasional tropical storms and hurricanes in the early fall. Cracked, oil-stained driveways; windows and their protective covering peeling at the edges like onion skin; rough, smell and stain-harboring shag carpet; flying palmetto bugs and slithering backyard rattlesnakes; no central air conditioning, rendering the air inside the house positively soupy on so many hot and humid days; that was the Florida in which I grew up, the Florida that was, and remains, a cultural part of the American South, away from the transplants, snowbirds and the superficial cleanliness they moved to the Sunshine State to experience. Paradise.
We didn’t have much growing up. Mom was a bartender, dad a laborer, both jobs with inherent ebbs and flows in income. Other than Mom likely serving some of the employees, we never had a direct hand in the industries that brought so many of the transplants and their families to those subdivisions like aerospace engineering and military contracting. When you’re that young and impressionable, and you’re going to school with kids who always have new clothes, new gadgets and new houses, all you care about are things, ownership, about looking cool to your peers. I never knew what it felt like to want for nothing, to have parents working at Harris or Northrop Grumman building technology systems or government weapons or whatever they probably did there. The class of which my family was part predates all that stuff; in fact, we’re Floridians going back several generations, a particularly rare thing, especially in the coastal cities. I passed time by riding my bike around my neighborhood, hanging out at friends’ houses, playing Nintendo 64 and watching bad television, typical kid stuff. But as the new people migrated, they seemingly brought these new strip malls with them, which were nice places to bask in air conditioning for a few minutes, if nothing else.
A new Books-A-Million had recently opened in a strip mall across the street from the Melbourne Square Mall and surrounded by a fair amount of other chain restaurants and retail. Melbourne had a downtown with smaller shops, prettier streets, and more aesthetically pleasing architecture, but everyone was always looking forward then. It was the Convenience Era. Everything had to be bigger, better and louder. It wasn’t like it is now, when people are actively seeking to preserve buildings of the past and are just generally more reflective. Nah, bulldoze that shit and build a Books-A-Million. I was oddly loyal to this Books-A-Million, despite two things: That it wasn’t a particularly nice place to hang out, poorly laid out and dimly lit; and that a much nicer Barnes & Noble had recently opened down the street, much closer to my house. The best bookstores encourage browsing, reading of passages right there in the aisles, they’re bright but quiet, maybe there’s a cat who lives there and sometimes rubs its body on your legs as you’re standing there. This place had none of that, so I’m not sure why I continued going there, other than to look at their selection of cassettes. Cassettes are making a comeback now because they’re cheaper to produce than vinyl and have a quicker turnaround time, but in this era, the late 1990s, physical media still ruled. If you wanted to listen to music, you either had to turn on the radio or go to an actual store to buy some. File sharing was just beginning to crystallize but a lot of people, my family included, still had slow, dial-up internet connections, which made downloading very time-consuming. You could fling 100 AOL trial CD-ROMs across your computer room in the time it’d take to pirate a 96kbps mp3 of “Dammit” by blink-182.
I was just beginning to discover music I liked on my own, without the assistance of the radio or my parents or siblings. I would read liner notes of CDs I bought or borrowed and check out bands listed in the thank you sections, and buy cheap punk compilations on CD whenever I had a few bucks. I would buy CDs or tapes by bands I’d never heard based on the cover art, the band name, the track listing, the number of songs, a lot of reasons. I actually discovered the Suicide Machines this way—I picked up a copy of Battle Hymns because it was 11 dollars (this was a time when a lot of CDs were really expensive, almost always between 15 and 20 bucks), had 22 songs and “seemed punk.” More often than not I would just go to Books-A-Million and look because I was bored, had no money and it was hot outside and I needed some air conditioning for a minute. I had long, stringy black hair and was almost always wearing some sort of ratty black band t-shirt, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, Marilyn Manson or something else that would offend or confuse older people, and usually some sort of extremely baggy pair of jeans or shorts. I looked like what I was, a ‘90s teen. This visit to the Books-A-Million cassette section began like any other: I walked into the store, made awkward eye contact with a middle-aged cashier (note to teens: say hi to retail employees, ask them how they are. It might humanize you a little bit), and wandered past the tables of discounted books at the front of the store towards the right wall, where the tapes lived. I walked down the short, somewhat narrow aisle, feeling the cheap carpet under my feet, registering the way that carpet absorbed so much of what was already an extremely unfortunate lighting situation. I picked up a Nirvana tape, Incesticide I think, and as I began to read the track listing on the back I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder.
“Hey buddy, can you come with me?” He had short brown hair, icy blue eyes, and appeared young, maybe early 30s. Probably not too far removed from the academy. A transplant too, perhaps. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t really understand what was happening, because I was a oblivious teen without the ability to put two and two together, and I hadn’t done anything wrong—I’d never shoplifted from this Books-AMillion. I’m not sure why, really, but if I had to guess it was because there were always so few people there I was sure I would get caught if I tried. The more people that are around, the easier it is to hide in plain sight. As I walked out of the store, I briefly wondered if something had happened to my family. I remember when my grandma died, the cops came to my house and told my mom, but how would they have found me here if that were the case. This cop, who was nice enough, led me outside into the parking lot and explained that “several employees had been keeping an eye on me, and had witnessed me stuffing tapes and CDs into my backpack and walking out.” I was incredulous. My hands shook, I felt guilty. I told this guy that none of it was true, and offered to let him search my bag right there, right now. He didn’t search the bag, saying he wasn’t here to arrest me because as far as he knew, I was either telling the truth or lying and I’d just never been caught. Which was weird and confusing, looking back on it. He had me sign a piece of paper on the hood of his squad car stating that I would never come back to this particular Books-A-Million, and that if I did I would be arrested for trespassing. I signed it and left, riding my bike home past the beige strip malls, the shiny new chain restaurants with parking lots full of minivans and SUVs, past those cookie-cutter subdivisions back to my neighborhood just on the edge of it all. I told my mom about what happened. She believed me.
Remember magazines? They were these things made of printed paper (I know, weird) with words and pictures and advertisements about all sorts of different subjects, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, most of them centered on some sort of specific “lifestyle” or hobby. Your parents probably read them when you were a kid. Maybe you saw them displayed at the checkout line at the supermarket while you begged your mom for a candy bar (they really engineered the shit out of that layout, it’s impossible for kids to NOT see it). Magazines don’t really exist anymore, most of them are just catalogs because we read everything on the internet for free now. Before I knew I wanted to write for a magazine when I grew up, I plastered photos of metal bands ripped from issues of Metal Edge and Hit Parader and Alternative Press all over the walls of my room, floor to ceiling, paint rendered invisible. Sometimes I used them to cover up scuffs or even holes in the wall. Once when I dropped my guitar, which I never learned to play by the way, on my bed and the headstock punctured through the sheetrock of my wall, I covered the hole with a picture of Marilyn Manson or something. Back in those days magazines were much thicker than they are now, sometimes hundreds of pages, so I could get a lot of new wall material out of just one issue. Since I’d been banned from Books-A-Million, completely fucking unfairly, as we’ve established, I began going to Barnes and Noble near my house. It was newer, brighter, bigger and altogether better. I still don’t know why I remained loyal to that BAM, in hindsight. This place was great and, best of all, no one seemed to care if people just came in, hung out, and didn’t buy anything. There were comfortable chairs all over the store, and a little cafe in the center that sold coffee. Loitering was practically encouraged.
Every trip to Barnes and Noble started, and usually ended, at the vast newsstand on the right side of the store. Where the newsstand at Books-A-Million consisted of a couple shelves, the one at B&N was practically wall to wall, with each shelf covering a different subject. Lifestyle. News. Sports. Hobbies. And on and on. The sheer enormity of the thing was daunting, a gargantuan amount of wood and ink and paper of various degrees of gloss. I’d always end up at the music magazines, though. I bought AltPress almost every month, provided I had the money, which since I was a little bit older at this point my allowance was 20 bucks every Friday, so I usually did. I’d have so much cash right now if I’d saved any of it. Another magazine I really liked was CMJ, mostly because it came with a free CD sampler every month. I was huge on new music discovery at this point in my life, and also huge on making mixtapes. I’d sit on my bedroom floor on Saturday afternoons, a cheap area rug leaving impressions on the exposed parts of my legs, with CDs strewn in front of me, jewel cases left open, half-broken from teenage negligence. Perilous stacks of CDs surrounded my body, one false move often toppling them. I was a master at mixtapes in my mind, expertly sequencing artists of disparate subgenres, seamlessly transitioning between songs, and building a track list that ebbed and flowed, that rose and fell at the perfect times. The thing is to pick a really good opening track. That’s the hook. Openers need to be catchy, not too long, not too soft but not alienatingly abrasive, either. Then on Track 2, you up the ante a little bit. Track 2 is the anthem, the heavy song, the single. Then on Track 3, you throw a curveball. Maybe a ballad, or a song with horns, or a shorter, quicker song, something less than two minutes long. Closing tracks are crucial, too. You HAVE to close Side One with a longer, more anthemic song, and Side Two with something even longer. Or you can go in the opposite direction and just tack the fastest, quickest tune onto the end. Metallica did this all the time. “Damage Inc.” “Dyers Eve.” It depends on feel. The music decides for you.
I didn’t always buy CMJ because it was seven dollars, an average magazine price nowadays but fairly high-end in the late ‘90s. Most mags back then were about four bucks. So sometimes, when I didn’t want to buy the mag I just ripped the CD out and took it which, for some fucked up reason, maybe because it was a “free” sampler, I didn’t recognize as stealing at the time. It very obviously was stealing! I never got caught, because CMJ didn’t wrap their issues in plastic at this point, and also because the CD by itself wouldn’t set off the detectors at the front door. I knowingly heard Bad Religion for the first time in my life through one of those CDs, probably something from No Substance. I think it was “Shades of Truth.” Not one of their better songs, but now one of my favorite bands, and No Substance holds an oddly dear place in my heart because of that discovery. It’s objectively the 15th or 16th best Bad Religion album, but go back and listen to “In So Many Ways.” Talk about a great closing track.
The thrill of possibly getting caught is oddly alluring. Maybe alluring is the wrong adjective, but there’s an unexplainable, unmatched rush to it. You cover your tracks as best you can, you think anyway, but still, there’s a chance that you’ll slip up, that someone will see you, that some goateed guy in a red polo shirt who takes his inconsequential job far too seriously is sitting in a cramped, poorly lit upstairs office, staring at monitors, glassy-eyed, yawning, halfheartedly searching for any suspicious activity. Other times people are watching you and you don’t even realize it, you can’t possibly account for it. JNCO jeans and shorts were expensive. A pair of the pants, even just the regular ones without any of that weird back pocket flair most of them used to have, would run a mom or dad or grandparent over 50 bucks, easy, which I realize is not a lot for an adult to spend on a nice pair of jeans, but these were not nice jeans, they were for children, boys specifically, who would often just ruin them anyway. The first pair I ever got were so wide-legged that the right leg got repeatedly caught in my bike chain, leaving black lines and sometimes ripping off fabric entirely. These jeans, in hindsight, were extremely bad and impractical. I wore them anyway, because like most teenage boys I desperately wanted to be cool despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Florida is hot. The heat hits the pavement, which reverberates the heat back onto anything standing on it. It can melt the rubber right off your shoes. Naturally, shorts are a good alternative to pants in this climate, and JNCO shorts were a nice alternative to whatever normies were wearing. I needed a pair, so off to the mall I went.
Anti-theft technology was only just beginning to take hold. Stores were starting to install detectors at each entrance, clothes were being fashioned with those devices that allegedly exploded with blue ink if not properly removed. “Loss prevention” agents dressed in all black began roaming aisles, saying hello to customers but really sizing them up and seeing if they could sense anything off about them. What a weird, unforgiving, unrewarding job that must be. Congratulations, your job is to stand at the front of this ROSS and apprehend anyone caught stealing a slightly misprinted t-shirt that was barely fashionable last year, let alone right now. While this technology was in the process of being implemented, there were still ways to get around it. One could, with enough browsing, find a pair of shorts without the exploding blue ink device or any other discerning anti-theft technology. I badly wanted a pair of JNCO taxi shorts, probably because I thought I liked ska but really because they were a new thing and kids are always looking to wear or see or hear or just be the new thing. All kids want to do is feel like they’re a part of something, no matter the importance. That informs quite a bit about how we function as adults too. Weird to think about. I found a pair of these taxi shorts without any anti-theft devices attached to them at JCPenney and, sweatily, took them to the dressing room to try them on, except what I was really going to do was put them on, put my jeans on over them, and walk out of the store. The perfect crime. It went entirely as planned. It was almost too easy. There wasn’t even an attendant working at the dressing rooms, and the baggy jeans of the era allowed for a lot of room to, in theory and in practice, layer, whether you were layering for warmth or to take something without paying for it. I walked out of the dressing room and crossed the threshold of the exit door. No beeps, no alarms, no imposing dude dressed in all black, no poor minimum-wage employee chasing after me, nothing. I’d won.
Then he appeared. “I know you stole those shorts,” he said, from behind. My knees buckled a little bit, my legs began to tremble, my upper lip filled with sweat. I couldn’t stop blinking. “What?” “I know you stole those shorts. You’ve got them on under your pants right now.” I was incredulous and, as most teenagers are, wholly willing of lying to protect myself. “I didn’t steal anything,” I said. He approached me. He was a middle-aged man, with short tufts of curly hair graying on the sides of his head, with tiny eyes. I slouched just all the time, to this day my posture is debilitating, but he was definitely much taller than me, he had to be have been at least 6’5”. He seemed a hundred feet tall at that moment. He was wearing loafers, short khaki shorts and a tucked-in white polo with a noticeable paunch. His skin was slightly pink from the sun. He looked like your average Florida golf dad, but at this moment he held my life in his hands. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying. Lift up your shirt.” This dad had me dead to rights. I was going to jail right here. This was the moment that all that shoplifting, which truth be told was primarily not out of necessity, like a poor person stealing food might be, but out of sheer, suburban-based boredom and an innate desire to fit in, or fit in with the people who didn’t fit in, was leading to. What a waste. I felt so much guilt at that moment, the type of guilt that pressurizes inside your head and makes it feel like it weighs a ton, that feeling of guilt where you know you did something wrong, there’s no way around getting out of it, and for what? I’m sure he could read right through my tough-teen posturing. I was scared shitless, remorseful, mentally preparing for the worst as best I could at that age.
My hands and arms shook. I forgot how to breathe. I lifted up my shirt. The shorts weren’t showing. “Well, I’ve got your description. I’ll be talking to the store and telling them I saw you steal.” I walked away, toward where my bike was parked. I rode home faster that day than I ever have. It wasn’t a long ride anyway, maybe five minutes, but I feel like it took me two minutes that day. I got home, ran to my room, took off my pants, then removed the shorts. I placed the shorts in a drawer under my bed and didn’t wear them for months. Despite the fact that I’d survived the closest call up to date with a perceived authority figure, I was more worried now about my mom. She still did all my laundry, she knew how much money I had at any given time. I couldn’t wear these shorts around the house. She would ask questions to which I had no answers.