Rose of No Man's Land

by Michelle Tea

  Yak, yak yak, Harry. Paulie had his hands going like a couple of little mouths, puppet hands. Yak, yak, yak. I’ll see ya later. Stay out of my room. Paulie held the door open and we were in the hall. He was laughing. I tell him, “Stay out of my room,” but he can’t, right? ’Cause it’s his room too. I thought about that old man sleeping forever in that room with Monster. The dancing girl shining in the lamplight like a little sun. It was too much. I wanted to set him free. I was glad we were out of there. We still had Monster Paulie with us, but at least we were off his turf. We were in the humming elevator and then the downstairs hallway and then we were free.

  Paulie walked us down the boulevard. He seemed to know bunches of people meandering the beach. Dudes in baggy shorts, their T-shirts hanging from their back pockets like tails. Craggy beachwomen who looked like they’d fallen asleep in the sun for about forty years. Girls our age who looked embarrassed when he said hello to them. I wondered if their naked boobs were pinned to his wall too. I would not have thought it so easy for someone like Paulie to get a girl to take all her clothes off for a photo, but what did I know. Apparently it was a cinch. We halted at a market called Mickey’s. A stack of Boston Globes sat damp and windblown in the doorway and a clock just inside said it was just past nine. I could smell its milky corner-store smell. We stood in the blue and red glow of the beer sign behind its window. What’s it called again? Paulie asked.

  Yikes, Rose repeated. Yikes. It comes in bottles. Big bottles. She held her hands apart, suggesting the size of a really big bottle. It’s not beer. It’s vodka plus energy drink. Got it, man?

  Paulie was nodding. I got it, he said. I got you, right? Don’t I got you? Ever since he took Rose’s picture, everything that fell out of his mouth was a lousy innuendo. I think he was trying to be sexy. He was a lot less intimidating outside in the real world. Now he was just another dude. They were all around us, dangling their arms out their car windows, sleazing by us on the sidewalk.

  Yeah, you got me, Rose said. What are you going to buy for me?

  Oops, said Paulie. His eyeballs were a kaleidoscope of colors eyeballs shouldn’t be. Red, yellow, maybe a bit of purple. If Paulie wasn’t an actual monster, then he was dying. His planetary stomach, the raw stretch of his inner arms. I took him in. There on the street, like a regular beach guy. Paulie was totally dying. He was going to wake up dead some day in that little bed. Old Harry Chester would surely outlive him, Old Harry Chester in all his clouds of cigarette. He would find his son beneath his gallery of underage nudie girls. Maybe he’d tear them up and flush them down the toilet. But Polaroids are hard to destroy.

  Oops, Paulie grinned, shooting a fat finger at Rose, shotgun-style.

  Yikes, Rose corrected. Yikes!

  Yikes, Paulie headed into the store. I might like to try something like that. Sounds interesting.

  Get your own, Rose said. I mean it. We ducked around the corner while Paulie did our shopping. This is crazy, she laughed, shaking her head. What a crazy night. Do you always have such crazy nights? I just looked at her. How odd that she didn’t understand that the crazy night was all her fault.

  I Don’t, I told her. I Never Have Crazy Nights. I Don’t Hang Out With Anyone.

  What do you do?

  Nothing. Steal Beer From My Mom’s Boyfriend. Watch Television. Sit On The Front Steps And Look At People. Rose opened the backpack and pulled out her cigarettes. She lit one up and took a deep gulp of smoke. Weren’t You Scared? I asked her. What If He Puts Your Picture On The Internet?

  Rose laughed. Him? He’s practically brain-damaged. His brain is mush. He can’t talk full sentences. I doubt he even knows anyone with a computer.

  All Sorts Of Stupid People Use Computers, I told her. Or, He Could Send It To A Magazine —

  Stop tripping, she said. Look. She dunked her hand into the pack and plucked the Polaroid from inside. There was Rose, smiling hugely. A smile so big it ate her face. She was naked, malnourished, her arms stiffly outstretched. Oh My God, I said.

  Look, look, she was gushing breath and laughter. She pulled the corner of a heavy picture frame from the pack. It was the cousin in the canary yellow leotard. Her hands were stretched the same way Rose’s were in her Polaroid. Same deranged, impossible smile. She held the two pictures together.

  I Can’t, I covered my eyes. It’s Too Much. I Can’t Believe You Did That.

  Rose zipped the bag shut just as Paulie rounded the corner, a heavy paper bag resting on his giant belly-mound. At least it had a utilitarian purpose.

  Ladies, Paulie crouched with a gasp and a grunt, depositing the bag with a clank beside us. Are you smoking? he asked Rose. His haggard face got all bunched up. Don’t smoke, whattaya crazy? You kids today know better than that. What, you gonna sue the government when you get cancer? ’Cause you will get cancer. What are you gonna do then, huh? When it’s all your own fault? Who you gonna cry to?

  Wow, Rose said. She stood up, shook the sandy beach sidewalk from the back of her dress. Don’t you think it’s weird that you’re, like, a drug dealer and you’re getting bent out of shape over smoking? Don’t you think that’s hypocritical? That you use teenage girls to make pornography and lecture them about smoking? You don’t think that’s sort of fucked-up? I just wanted Paulie Monster to go.

  It’s your lungs, Paulie said. You ever see a cancer death? It’s not pretty.

  Death generally isn’t, Rose smirked. And speaking of, we’ll give your regards to Kim Porciatti.

  You just keep your regards to yourself if you don’t want that picture of you hung up on telephone poles all over Massachusetts, he said. He shook his head. Listen, you crash, you start feeling bad, don’t be stupid. Give me a call. I’ll hook you up, anytime. But you gotta come here. I don’t deliver. He turned on his shit kickers and shit-kicked himself around the corner and away from us. His splitting was a relief we could feel. In our bodies, in the air all around us. The world felt wide open and sweet again. I relaxed and breathed more air, could detect all the parts of the world in every huff, part fried scallops and part cigarette, part yummy beachy smell and part piña colada tanning lotion, part Rose’s baby powder and part my own stinky scalp blowing in the breeze. It all smelled great blended up together in the air. Rose stuffed the bag of Yikes into the backpack and handed it to me. Your turn, she said, even though it was all her shit in it, all of it hers and all of it somehow against the law. I thought of my room and the stacks of stolen car batteries piled up against my wall. Down the road a tremendous twinkle rose and fell, rose and fell against the starless night sky. One of those rides that spin you every which way inside a rusty old cage. It flips you up into the air and twirls you upside down and in dizzy circles, all your change tumbling from your pockets and you hope the other people in the other tumbling cages don’t barf on you. You Really Don’t Want To Go? I jabbed my finger at the glow. You Really Don’t Like Rides?

  We have crystal, Rose said. She sounded personally offended, and I guess she did go through a lot to get it, but she never even asked me if I wanted any. I didn’t even know what the fuck crystal was. We can go on rides later. We should go do some crystal and drink. It’s still early. She tugged out the evil cell phone and glanced at the time. We’ve got all night to ride rides. We got to get out of here in case Paulie comes looking for his pictures.

  And so we were back on the side of the road, trapped in that cheesy pose, thumbs out, looking for a ride to Route 1. Rose wanted to break into the miniature golf course to use the crystal. The thought of it made her so happy she spun around on the sidewalk, her soft nightgown fluttering around her. She hopped in her sneakers. Inside, at night? she gasped. You will love it! I liked that Rose was so quick with an agenda. I wasn’t used to making plans, and really, if it had been up to me we probably would have aimlessly wandered back to my house and sat out on Donnie’s lounge chair, bored out of our minds. We passed up the ride offers of about twenty different cars of men and accepted a ride in a beat-up little Toyota with a lady
who barely looked old enough to drive but insisted she was thirty.

  Nuh-uh! Rose gasped. You look like a kid! What’s your beauty secret? Do you have any?

  Clean living, the driver said. I make pottery. I don’t stress out. When you stress out it creates all these hormones and chemicals in your body and they really wear you down. She gave us stern looks. You should probably not hitchhike if you want to stay young. I’m sure it produces stress hormones.

  We’ll consider it, Rose said. She told the woman to drop us off at the gigantic Chinese restaurant on the strip, a ways down from the golf course. The restaurant was superhuge and red and I’d never eaten at it because it was some big-ass expensive deal, not like your regular pupu platter take-out job. It sounded magical. I wanted to go inside but figured they’d take one look at my shabby shorts and Rose in her nightgown and boot us right out. Instead we crossed the zillion lanes of zooming traffic heading every which way up the freeway. In the distance was the golf course, we aimed ourselves toward it, jogging, beating oncoming traffic, sprinting down the street, so close to the cars it made my heart jumpy, scrambling up a slight landscaped hill ’til we reached the length of chain-link. Behind it was the dark and gnomey garden of T-Rex Miniature Golf. I’d seen the T-Rex for as long as I could remember, always driving by it on Route 1. When we were little me and Kristy would sit excitedly in the car as it whizzed toward the giant safety-orange dinosaur that was the spot’s mascot. The dinosaur’s strong orange neck craned out over the chain-link fence and its jaw was a cranked-up menace, flashing fake metal teeth, jabby and dripping in white paint. Beyond the T-Rex were clusters of smaller, less threatening dinosaurs, and little troll families and a windmill, a frog pond, all of it scattered across fake plasticky grass. I got to go to the T-Rex once when I was wicked little, so little I can’t remember much, just climbing on the dinosaurs while Ma and my dad smoked cigarettes and smacked the little colored balls around with the clubs. The T-Rex had a little ice-cream hut with machines that crapped out swirls of soft serve, and a batting cage where you got locked in a swear-to-god cage with a sinister machine that spit baseballs at you. The batting cage always scared me. I have a vague memory of my dad inside it, the balls coming too fast for him, and the swings of his bat struck me as violent or something. He was cursing the balls, hollering Fucks and Shits and embarrassing Ma, who was hissing Sssshs at him, which he could not hear over the machinery whir of the demonic baseball contraption. That’s probably why I don’t like the batting cage so much.

  Me and Rose climbed the fence by the dinosaur ’cause it seemed like the easiest way to do it and we were weighed down by the six-pack of drinks Paulie bought us, that brand-new mixture of vodka and energy drink all swirled up together in big bottles. The bottles clanked around in my backpack with everything else. Naked pictures, drugs. I was kind of nervous about it and thought, oh yeah great, so now if we get busted I’m the one holding everything and I get to go to jail or whatever and Rose could just skip away, back to the oily recesses of Clown in the Box, never to be seen again. But that was just one mind. My other mind was psyched to be entrusted with the wad of bills, damp with the sweat of spending an eight-hour shift at the Clown stuffed down Rose’s shiny underpants. Psyched to be entrusted with the care of the top-secret one-of-a-kind Polaroid of Rose, Rose’s crumpled pack of cigarettes, a book of matches jammed into the cellophane. Just happy to help out Rose, Rose in her nightgown-dress, filmy with weird, bunched-up flowers stuck around the neckline. Rose with her duct-taped sneakers, looking and smelling so different outside her Clown uniform, after her post-Clown shower. When she hauled herself up the fence in front of me I could catch a stink-cloud of baby powder and the smell of it made me feel dreamy. Unclean thoughts like Monster Paulie and Old Harry Chester could not survive a blast of baby powder off a girl like Rose, I thought. I should dust myself down with some baby powder after a shower too. Why not? I resolved to have it be my new thing. Rose shimmied down the neck of the dinosaur — looking, for one weird and excellent moment, like the air freshener Donnie had dangling from the Maverick’s rearview, not a drooling tittie-girl but a chick who looks like a witchy Viking straddling a giant lizard — and stood on the Astroturf with her skinny arms extended to catch my pack. I looked down at her suspiciously.

  Are You Sure? I asked. What if it squashed her. She looked like a twiggy bug there on the ground. What if all the Yikes bottles busted open and soaked the stolen money and turned the drugs into a paste and ruined her cigarettes?

  C’mon, man, she shook her arms impatiently. I’m strong, come on. I was at the top of the fence, my flip-flops jammed into the chain links. I leaned forward and carefully shimmied the heavy clanking pack from my back. Behind me cars honked on Route 1. I could feel them honking at me. C’mon, before someone calls the cops, Rose barked from the dark below. Her pale arms gleamed with a glow-in-the-dark sheen. I lowered the pack by its straps until I was bent way over the fence. Rose’s grasping fingers almost reached it. I let it fall and she caught it in her arms, fell backward with it onto the fake grass.

  I loved climbing onto the dinosaur. I can’t tell you how many times I’d daydreamed about it, cruising by on the highway below. It seemed, for all its ferocity, aching to be climbed. As I hugged its neck and heaved my legs around its strong but wobbly body, it felt oddly living to me, helpful. I Love This Dinosaur, I hollered down at Rose. I sort of slid backward down its body, then leaped beside her. She was rifling through the pack, pulled out a bottle.

  We’ll share, she said. She wrapped her little fingers in the fluffy nightgown-dress and yanked the cap free. The bottlecap’s tiny teeth tore at the fabric but she didn’t seem to give a shit. C’mon, she said, and started marching deeper into the golf course, leaving the pack on the ground for me to grab.

  This was a dream, being in the shut-down, nighttime golf course. The freeway beyond buzzed and flashed with endless cars, but the course was its own pocket of quiet. The planks of the windmill were still, the frog fountain dry. Spotlights lit the walkways and shone into the creepily staring faces of the gnomes clustered throughout the place. I followed Rose to a backlit hippo painted the same neon orange as the T-Rex. Its goofy mouth was wide and filled with round teeth. Have You Ever Played Here? I asked Rose. She took the pack from me and nodded, fumbled around on the inside, digging for cigarettes and crystal. She held the tiny bag above the spotlight, squinting into the brightness.

  Shit, she said. Do you have, like, an ATM card or something?

  I shook my head. I Don’t Have A Bank Account, I shrugged. I Don’t have Any Money.

  Do you have a driver’s license, something to crush this up with? I peered around the hippo at the baglet. The stuff inside was chunky, like pebbly dust from split geodes. We went to the Museum of Science on a field trip once and I really liked the geodes, that there could be fancy-ass crumbs of jewels hidden inside just your regular no-big-whoop rock.

  Does It Come From Rocks? I asked. This Stuff?

  Rose shook her head. No, it comes from, like battery acid I think. Like from car batteries? That and nasal spray.

  Nasal Spray? I didn’t understand how anything could come from Nasal Spray, let alone these beautiful little chips. The battery acid thing sort of scared me. Maybe Rose was fucking with me. She wasn’t a fucker, though. I was glad about that. Rose was pretty straight-up, serious. You could tell that she wasn’t one of those girls who do things like slap you and say, “Fuck Off” and then when you get upset say, “Ohmygod, I’m just joking with you!” so then you have to laugh and pretend that you think it’s fun to be slapped and told to fuck off. I had a feeling that if Rose ever told me to fuck off it would be because she really wanted me to fuck off, and there’s something real safe and relaxing about being around a person like that.

  Because Rose told me to find a golf ball I walked around the course, peeking behind the gnomes and the various statuary plonked along the paths. I couldn’t find any balls. I wandered around the frog fountain and bravel
y poked my hand into the hole at the base. My hand bonked something and I drew it out, quick. It’s fucking scary to shove your hand into a dark hole. When nothing ran out from the little cave I slid my hand back in and wrapped it around the pocked golf ball. I brought it back to Rose like I’d just, I don’t know, done something really great and won a prize. I had a huge smile on my face. Yeah! Rose hooted. She put the drugs on the hippo’s back and rolled the golf ball over it again and again. With the floodlight beaming up at her, shadowing her face and lighting the curve of her head, her bird-skull with its cap of flat, black hair, Rose looked supernatural. She looked like she was casting a spell, her face bent over her repetitive movements, the skidding sound of the ball rocking.

  Suddenly I wanted a cigarette. I don’t know how to explain it. Watching Rose do her weird little drug thing like I wasn’t even there, focused and breathing through her thin mouth, it filled me up with a sensation I could only call compulsive. It was like I wanted something enormous, wanted a meteor to crash down at the T-Rex miniature golf course, crushing us to death and setting the world on fire. I felt an antsy, liquid energy running through my body. Can I Have A Cigarette? I asked her. She looked up from her work. Sure, she said. You want to give it another try? You know where they are.

  The match flared fast in the night air. There was no wind, just this great air that pooled around us, perfect air that rose into the night sky. Slightly damp air that smelled like powdery flowers, like clean babies, like Rose. I held the match and crackled my cigarette to life, fuming away all the good smells with my toxic smoke. My mind lit on Old Harry, wasting away in his exhaled haze. I shook the image from my head. Would I have to think about Old Harry Chester every time I saw a cigarette now, for the entire rest of my life? It seemed like it would possibly be worthwhile to take up smoking simply to give my impressionable brain a series of new cigarette associations.