Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

It was a nothing Friday, so Keisha and I went to the dead mall for pepper spray practice. I’d YouTube’d it, and found a cache of tactical experts: burly wife guys whose intentions seemed noble, but whose obsession with sex trafficking felt perversion-adjacent. My interest in pepper spray was like snow globe collecting— I bought one or two myself, and was gifted several more by people who care about me. I positioned them around the house, on my nightstand or in the front hall catch-all tray, and forgot about them. The tactical experts of the internet used phrases like “assailants” and “threat recognition.” They choreographed elegant S-shaped arcs of self-defense. There is a video called Choosing Pepper Spray for Everyday Carry, in which a guy named Chris unboxes various canisters and then attacks the front shell of a mannequin affixed to a tripod. Choosing Pepper Spray for Everyday Carry is 26 minutes and 16 seconds long.

We didn’t want the showiest pepper spray. We wanted discretion, because pepper spray practice was part of a solution to a deep anxiety around being seen. It was also an excuse to wander around the dead mall Target, wondering if things in the juniors section would fit our boobs— they wouldn’t— and then get seasonal specialty coffees from the Target Starbucks.

I picked Keisha up with two keychain pepper sprays, two pairs of plastic safety goggles, two printed paper targets, and a roll of scotch tape. Keisha provided one keychain pepper spray, one face shield, and two plastic 16-ounce bottles of Diet Coke. We wore our matching Realtree-patterned platform Crocs, tactically.

The dead mall is dead in the way that deserts are dead: to the casual observer, a barren wasteland, but in reality teeming with life. There’s a phone repair stand and a real gold jewelry stand and a Chuck E. Cheese, which Keisha says you can drink in. There’s a Seafood City, resplendent with jackfruit and ginger candy and live lobster. There’s a 99-cents store with plastic pearl beads in every color and bootleg compilation CDs from a distributor in Barcelona, with titles like Sadness… and Romantic Collection: Earth. (Sadness… relies heavily on Gregorian chanting and Enya.) And then there is the Target. The Target on Colorado in Eagle Rock is not to be confused with the Target on Colorado in Glendale, nor the Target on Colorado in Pasadena, nor the other Target on Colorado in Pasadena, nor the Target on Eagle Rock in Glassell Park. This Target has all the niche items, like year-round bathing suits and boxes of plastic lemons to put in a glass jar in your house. Keisha used to take a daily walk to the Target on Eagle Rock in Glassell Park, but then some guy followed her home and wouldn’t leave her alone until she hid in a laundromat.

We parked on an empty stretch of asphalt at the base of the dead mall’s baby blue steel sign. We sipped our Diet Cokes while I taped the paper targets to the dead mall sign, just above eye level. I put on goggles and Keisha pulled down her face shield. I took my pink pepper spray and aimed.

It’s not that I don’t want to be alive, but I want to not have to consider whether I’m alive or continuing to be alive. I like to go on little walks around my neighborhood. Actually, I don’t know if I like them, but I feel compelled to go on them, like I’m my own dog and I have to take myself for walks or else I chew up all the furniture in my brain. I can existentially turn myself inside out by taking a walk and occasionally stopping by an open window— not in a stalker way, but like if someone’s windows are open to the street, and you can see a vase of Gerber daisies on their dining room table, and a rattan lighting fixture over it. I consider that a kindness, to leave the blinds open sometimes. It’s not supposed to feel powerful. I think that to extract power from the experience of watching, there has to be an expectation that the things being watched would at some point know you had watched them, and the power would be in the deception. Instead, on a little walk, I hope to achieve a feeling of communion with the lighting fixture. Two objects that are so familiar they go unnoticed, even when they’re loved.

Our pepper sprays were either unaerosolized gels or expired. We limply squirted goop in the general direction of the paper targets. It really did work better with an S-arc. It was hard to hold your spraying arm behind you, as the tactical experts instructed, because we wanted the canisters as far from our faces as possible. The exercise seemed to be creating new fears, like pepper spraying myself. We were inconsistent with our pressure, skittish, wavering. It wasn’t about excellence, though; we were building muscle memory. Years ago, in a therapy group, I spent hours practicing soft smiles. The point was to smile until it became a natural stress response, to let your endocrine system follow your facial cues, to manipulate your body into serenity.

The dead mall has a Macy’s with only one floor person on each floor. Sometimes I like to get a little stoned and walk the maze of floor model mattresses and think about when my mom took me to Macy’s as a kid and it felt like the height of luxury. Clicking hangers. It smells the same, the concrete-and-sneaker smell that every mall has. The Macy’s has three years in it, maybe, and when it’s gone I can’t imagine anything filling that space. That’s when the dead mall will probably die.

Keisha and I took down the paper targets and used them, fruitlessly, to wipe away errant spray marks on the baby blue sign. We considered that perhaps we were vandalizing. In this way, we became assailants.

We pocketed our pepper sprays and went to Target, to Starbucks. We’ll do it again and again, until we get it right.

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This essay appears in a forthcoming anthology from Archway Editions, set for publication in January 2023. I’ll be sure to shout it out when it’s live! In the meantime, I have new fiction in Archway’s NDA: An Autofiction Anthology, now available for pre-order.