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Vice Blog

TEEN WEEK - A TRIP TO THE MALL

It's sweet they

went to the park and ate cupcakes and saw some weirdos on the train

, but before our teen interns went home to LA we had to fuck with them a little. On their last day we handed them 20 bucks and told them we were sending them to the mall to buy whatever they liked. Their innocent eyes light up with glee--yay, they were getting to leave their veal stalls in the office and go on an adventure…to shop! Little did they know we were sending them to what they would consider the front lines of "the ghetto." Off they went to the Fulton Mall…

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The assignment was to take $20 and go to some random mall in Brooklyn to buy whatever we wanted and bring it back, as well as take few photos. The mall itself was one of the most depressing and miserable places we've been on this trip. Supposedly the area used to be one of the most high-end places for retail shopping in New York, but over the years it has gotten just straight gangster. Like, the only things you can buy there are gold fronts, customized air-brushed t-shirts, and Rocawear.

The amount of morbidly obese old ladies carting around Target in these little red "Targetmobiles" was insane. The Target there is apparently one of the most profitable Targets in the whole nation. Inside was just pure hell. The layout is very vertical too, so there's floors and floors of just junk. We found this box of Crayola markers and took out the black one. There was this blender machine kind of thing called "Crock Pot"… the opportunity was too perfect. The "O" was changed.

We found a DVD of

Kickfighter 3 and 4

, which I actually plan on watching tonight. It kind of takes me back to the whole

Enter the Dragon

and

Shaolin Kung Fu Master

kind of classic martial arts films. I'm positive it's going to be shitty, but whatever.

After taking like three photos the digital camera our editor gave us to use died, so we had to start taking pictures with Chandler's cell phone. There's really nothing to do out there. There was no youth presence in the entire mall. There were no classic teenagers with gelled mohawks, smoking Marlboro Reds. No groups of little girls running around. No skaters kicking their boards around on the curb in the parking lot. It was basically dead.

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We went to Chuck E. Cheese and the line was almost all the way down the escalator. Swear to God we found like three kids who were lost without their parents. No one knew what the fuck was going on. It was pure chaos. We went down to the grocery store and just bought a bunch of $2 lotto tickets and scratched them for like 20 minutes. We didn't win shit. Nothing.

We ended up blowing the rest of the money on powdered doughnuts, Kix cereal, and bubbles.

We kept trying to take pictures of Orthodox Jews with these giant fur hats, but every time we even got near them they started yelling their heads off about how they would break Chandler's phone or something. So, we returned to the office with a bag of powdered doughnuts, Kix, bubbles,

Kickboxer 3 and 4

, and scratched lotto tickets. Our journey was a failure.

ELIEL FORD AND CHANDLER KENNEDY