The New York Times published a story yesterday called “An Ode to Shopping Malls,” about a 40-year-old filmmaker named Dan Bell who’s documenting “the most depressed shopping malls in the mid-Atlantic region and beyond” in what he’s titled the “Dead Mall Series.” Bell’s YouTube videos, the Times‘s Steven Kurutz writes, “offer an unsettling visual document of the retail apocalypse that changing consumer habits, e-commerce and economic disparity have wrought.”
“Fifteen,” which appeared in the August 1982 issue of Esquire, is quintessential Greene, the midwestern boy roving the country with a notebook in hand, willing to lend a sympathetic ear, interested in even the smallest of stories. The premise of the piece is simple: Greene roams Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg alongside Dave Gembutis and Dan Holmes, two aimless 15-year-olds (naturally) who’re equal parts bored, hungry, and horny. In essence, model teenage boys. Dave and Dan eat junk food, zone out while watching a Cubs game on TV, and desperately try to meet girls without having the slightest idea how to start up a conversation. They express frustration at the Kafkaesque limbo of their lives: They’re old enough to get a job and take a date to a school dance but not yet of age to drive themselves anywhere. “Dave’s older sister, Kim, has dropped them off at the mall,” Greene notes. “They will be taking the bus home.”
