Rose of No Man's Land

by Michelle Tea

  Oh, this won’t be on television, Kristy assured her. This is just for the producers to see. But who knows, if I get picked maybe I could get MTV to come here for haircuts!

  The woman smiled. That’d be something, she said. All right. It’s pretty weird, you know, but I’m a flexible person. I’m Mercedes, by the way. She turned and looked deeply into the camera. Mercedes Patron, she said intensely. Her delivery gave me a little shiver. Who knew I would actually enjoy helping Kristy, ever?

  We followed Mercedes Patron and her excellent name through the salon and into a tiny back room. Along the way I trailed the camera across the incredible jungleness of the place, and got a swipe or two at some ladies getting their hair chopped. For the first time ever in my limited history of visits to Jungle Unisex, the hairdressers smiled at me. Of course they were smiling at the camera, but it was my eye that caught them.

  The back room smelled like shampoo and was hot and rumbly and loud from the washer-dryer stacks banging around a load of towels. It was hard to figure out where to cram myself to catch the best shot. I tried crouching down beneath where Kristy and Mercedes sat on aluminum folding chairs, but Mercedes waggled a bony finger sporting a curling gold M into my lens.

  Aaah aaah ah, she snapped. Too many chins down there. Shoot from above. I fumbled to my feet, wondering if perhaps Mercedes had been a soap opera star or something. She was so cozy with the camera. I wedged myself into a corner and zoned out for most of the interview. It was pretty boring, just Kristy talking about herself and her love of hair, and Mercedes nodding and making the occasional cooing noise as she fell under the spell of Kristy’s charm.

  Well listen, Kristy, she said at the end of a short monologue in which Kristy detailed her glee for shampooing the heads of strangers — how it must be aromatherapy from the shampoo or something because it just really relaxes her and people have even suggested she go to massage school because she scrubs their heads so wonderfully — What if I train you, here at Jungle, and you win this television contest and then you leave? I need a commitment.

  I saw this indignant flush rise up in Kristy’s face and I had a feeling she was having the same thought I was having, roughly: you expect me to pass up a reality television career to work at fucking Jungle Unisex at the fucking Square One Mall in fucking Mogsfield? For, like, six dollars an hour? Something like that. My thought included a mention of dandruff and other scalpy bits being lodged beneath fingernails and also the general poisonous odor of the place, the perm solutions and the peroxide, but Kristy is immune to these things. I watched my sister through the eye of the camera as she took a breath and assured Mercedes that she probably wouldn’t get picked because millions upon millions of young people from all over America try out and there’s only a tiny handful of slots and really she’s applying mostly because she believes it’s good to aim high in life, even when the odds are stacked against you. Watching Kristy spin it into a platform to display her unconquerable spirit was pretty impressive. Especially because Kristy is wicked superstitious and into affirmations and positive thinking, and it must’ve just killed her to say out loud that she didn’t have much of a chance of getting on The Real World. Kristy believes that saying things out loud makes them true, and it’s an interesting idea, especially when you consider Ma and her hypochondria and her illnesses.

  Lady Mercedes was quiet. Well, she finally spoke. I like your energy. You come back after the weekend and we’ll get you started. You know, shampoo and sweeping, and when you pass your boards we’ll see what happens. Then she winked, but it was mostly for the camera. I pulled back to get a nice shot of Mercedes Patron brandishing her scissors and generally making love to the camera. If nothing else, my footage could possibly be worked into a nice little commercial for Jungle Unisex. Mercedes slipped her shears into the brief apron bowed around her waist, and abruptly turned away. This person will not come with this camera every day, capiche?

  Four

  Back in Donnie’s Maverick, Kristy hit the steering wheel with the palms of her hands, smack smack smack. Fuck! she screeched. A long clump of hair was snagged in her glossy lower lip like a mouse in a glue trap. When she tugged it away it left a strawberry snail trail across her powdered cheek. From my view behind the camera, the gloss smear caught the setting sunlight coming in the windshield and made my sister’s face look glittered. I just couldn’t stop it with the camera. I understood part of Kristy’s obsession with it; I didn’t want to put it down either.

  This Is Great! I enthused. I Can’t Believe You Have This Now! I wasn’t taking her steering-wheel-smacking fuck-outburst too seriously. Watching someone through a camera sort of makes them look like they’re acting, and I don’t take Kristy’s outbursts too seriously anyway.

  Fuck, she repeated, this time a mutter, and jammed the key into the ignition. It was like me and the camera weren’t even there. I thought, Kristy is so good at ignoring the camera, she’ll really be perfect on The Real World. I hope that quality of obliviousness comes through for the producers. I can’t believe I said that out loud, she said darkly, steering us out of the parking lot. The neon bulbs of the MALL sign dazzled the rearview and then were gone. That was so negative. I can correct it, though. Right now I can. She took a deep breath. A fruity smell wafted through the car on her exhale. Kristy’s like a living, breathing air freshener. I am going to get on The Real World, she spoke in a controlled voice. I am going to get on television. I am going to be chosen for The Real World. Truly, this seemed to relax her. That’s the benefit of living in a dream world, I guess. You can just keep telling yourself all sorts of happy lies and cheer yourself up by believing them. I thought that Kristy and Ma had two halves of the same mental problem: Ma told herself bad things and believed them, and Kristy told herself really fabulous things until she was totally stoned with delusions of grandeur. But Ma’s anti-affirmations did seem to come true. Maybe Kristy was right.

  Five

  Later that night I stared at myself on the pixilated screen of Kristy’s ripped-off video camera. There I was, on my bed with sheets twisted around my legs, the same blue flowered sheets I’ve had since I was a kid, so faded now that they looked gray on-screen, you couldn’t really make out the little blue petals unless you knew what they were. I’m wearing one of Ma’s old T-shirts, a Weight Watchers T-shirt she still had from after she was pregnant with Kristy and before she got knocked up with me, when our dad was around. The accidental arrival of Kristy inspired a self-improvement spurt. Our dad tried to stop shooting drugs and Ma went to Weight Watchers, which I always imagined as a long, pink room filled with those machines ladies used to strap around their asses to jiggle the fat away. The T-shirt has a faded cartoon of a woman with a very big, blond head and a very small body and it says, “I’m A Loser!” It’s sort of hilarious to imagine Ma working out. I think the most exerting thing she does is occasionally have a fight with Donnie, but the two of them get along pretty great considering what problematic personalities they both have. Life is peaceful in the parlor, the two of them lazing on the couch, all the action on the television.

  On the little screen that pulls out from the side of the video camera I observed myself, innocently sleeping, completely unaware that Kristy was recording me. I felt bad for the girl on the miniscreen, me. There’s something terrible about the idea that you can be lying in your own bed, your mom’s old T-shirt tugging up around your ribs so that a boob’s almost popping out, mouth ajar, so vulnerable really, just trusting in that basic way that it’s okay to be sprawled out like an animal in sleep, and meanwhile someone’s training the sights of an evil camera on you. On the screen I twitched and smacked my mouth together. It sounded gummy, like an old person without their dentures in, and my mortification deepened. It is definitely the better deal to be on the other end of this machine. Just when I became very afraid that the me on the screen was about to make a really gross noise or scratch my crotch, the angle shifted and zoomed in on a small pile of mess beside my bed. There was the pair of jeans
I’d kicked off before bed, and the history book that I didn’t turn in splayed open and slashed up with the Easter egg ink of highlighter pens. A leather bracelet with a rusty snap, and the real centerpiece — a cluster of green glass beer bottles, all clanked into each other, propping each other up like a gang of drunken friends. The longer the camera rested on them, the less like beer bottles they appeared. They became like a sort of sculpture, green and round and deliberately arranged. As I noticed this effect and felt on the verge of some brand-new thought about it, the camera moved again, sort of violently this time, a dizzying swoosh around my blurred room as Kristy twirled and aimed the machine at her face. Her voice when she spoke was hushed. My sister, Trish, she whispered, is a teenage alcoholic. Another kaleidoscope spin and there I am again, only this time my sleeping posture and gaping mouth look very different, look like the posture and mouth situation of a teenage alcoholic. Now I looked passed out rather than simply asleep. I couldn’t believe I slept through this. The camera zoomed in on the digital alarm clock on my nightstand, the time uselessly flashing midnight. Then there was Kristy’s face again. She’s in denial about her problem, she husked into the camera. It looks like she’s not even going to make it to her last day of school. And Kristy capped off the drama with a final shot of me, sprawled and unattractive. I bounced in the frame as she backed out of my room and into the hall. Then static.

  God Kristy, I Can’t Even Fucking Believe You! I charged her bedroom. I didn’t care about the camera anymore and so I threw it onto her mattress. Why Didn’t You Just Plant The Bottles In The Bed With Me? That Would’ve Really Helped You. I swear you could see the idea of it flash across her face. The camera, my betrayer, was still streaming out its footage, the flipped-around screen showing our entrance into the dimly lit interior of Jungle Unisex, Christmas tree twinkles and soft tubes of light snaking up the animal-print walls. Kristy reached over and pressed the red Power button, twirled the blank screen back into the camera’s body, like a bird wing tucked away after flight.

  Well, you must admit you have a drinking problem, she said calmly. It might be exploitative of me to film you like that, but what am I supposed to do? They want to see my life and this is my life. She shrugged a dramatic shrug like some new twitching dance move, a jolt that tensed her whole body and shoved her shoulders up to her ears. This is my life, Trisha! How do you think it makes me feel? I took a deep breath, swallowing the Fucking Bitch sitting in my mouth like a wad of gum with all the flavor chewed out. Do you see what I am up against here? The delusions, the martyrness of it all?

  You Cannot Film Me Again Without My Permission, I said sternly. You Let Me Miss School, Which Makes You An Asshole. If You Want Me To Keep Helping You With Your Stupid Project, Which You Know Is A Waste Of Time Anyway — Kristy’s face shimmered at this, the same sort of shimmer I saw before she tried to smack me in the car, and I steeled my voice like my words were slaps too — You Know It Is, Kristy! But If You Want Me To Help You’ve Got To Stop Being Such An Asshole! God! Now I was screaming. I know it’s the worst because it gives everyone an excuse not to listen to me because now I’m officially hysterical and crazy, but oh well. It’s like my voice just wanted to get louder. I don’t have a lot of control over this stuff.

  Hey! There’s Donnie’s voice, shrill and whining out of the other room. Stop calling each other assholes! His mouth sounded characteristically filled with unswallowed mush.

  Really, Trish. Kristy looked at me. You drink too much.

  You Barely Drink At All, I accused, as if this was a sort of teenage sin, and, really, it might be. How Are You Qualified To Judge Too Much?

  You don’t know how to leave it for weekends, or parties, she sputtered, exasperated. Drinking during the week, on school nights, means you have a problem! I didn’t know how Kristy thought she’d fare in a Real World house filled with the youthful alcoholism and sloppy sex and constant fighting the show is famous for. I guess she could maybe worm her way in with the Controlling Older Sister angle, always freaking out on everyone, but really, didn’t she understand that she’d sort of be the joke of the show? Kristy exhaled a long, sad sigh.

  We already had this fight, remember? Earlier? She held the camera in her hands; lovingly she lifted a corner of sheet from her bed on the floor and rubbed the glass lens.

  Yeah, Well, I Hadn’t Actually Seen The Footage. I Hadn’t Actually Seen How Gross It Is And I Hadn’t Actually Known You Were Framing Me As An Alcoholic. Fuck!

  I stomped out from Kristy’s room — which is papered with pictures of models from magazines in little bikinis and shit. You would totally think she was a lesbian if you saw Kristy’s room, but she hangs them up to inspire herself to keep not eating bread and to do sit-ups. It’s a little overwhelming to walk into. It could almost be an art project about how fucked-up the whole world is about women’s bodies and sex, but it’s serious. Some sort of church of the female stomach. I crashed back into my own room, paint chips spraying from the door jamb as I slammed it shut behind me. My room is fairly bare, the way I like it. I think it’s embarrassing to hang stuff all over your walls. They’re like little flags, posters. You can take a peek into Kristy’s room and after the initial creepy horror you feel at the assault of glossy, skinny females staring sulkily at you, you understand what nation Kristy belongs to. Or what nation she wants to belong to, or wants you to think she belongs to. I don’t want anyone to think they know who I am just because they saw my bedroom walls, so I keep them empty. Once I was going to paint them purple. I scratched purple paint onto the useless wish list sledding with its magnet down the fridge. My walls were just the regular dirty white brand of walls. A little patchy in places, a little drippy. White paint clogged the wire squares in my window screen. My bedroom floor was scuffed linoleum, the pattern just as faded as the one on my bedsheets. Only a vague image remained, some shapes and lines repeating endlessly. It was old, our house. All the ages of the past shone through in the worn-out corners: today’s wallpaper peeling to reveal long-ago wallpaper. It seemed a good candidate for a haunted house, all the evidence of olden days still visible. Some old lady ghost could creak right inside and be comforted by the same old tub with the eagle-claw feet still in the bathroom, the green paint she’d slapped onto it while she was alive molting, flaking the linoleum like dandruff.

  So many other people had lived where I live, and it never even freaked me out that probably some of them died in there, maybe even in my own bedroom. I always thought that something kept us lucky, and maybe it was that we were being watched over by a gang of ye olde ghost grandmas, all swirling around in otherworldly housecoats. All the months we didn’t pay the rent on time and we were still here. Ma fake-sick all the time and she never got cut off, never got real-life bad sick either. Me only giving half a crap at school and still I got by. Being underage but never having a problem getting the beer I wanted, always that excellent swept-away feeling there in the bottle and I was good with it, I hardly ever puked and never, ever got blackouts. It was a real low-key sort of luck we had going on, my family. No megabucks sweepstakes won, no long-lost relative who croaked and left us suddenly loaded. It was a sort of loser luck, I guess, the luck of the cigarette-smoking ghost-grannies who shuffled the scuffed linoleum, but I’d take it over no luck at all.

  Ma made the sound of the television swell against the hateful hollers of me and my sister. Passive-aggressive for sure, but I’d rather Ma communicate her irritation by cranking up Jerry Springer instead of sending Donnie in to do some pretend-Dad song and dance. Still, the blast of talk show hysteria made all my jumbled anti-Kristy feelings surge higher and larger until my insides were chaos. My immediate instinct was to gather my beer bottles and run screaming into Kristy’s room and hurl them at the paper bodies on her walls, terrifying but not actually hurting my sister with the rain of green glass. But I am so contrary I rebel against even my own impulses, so instead I slowed down. I nudged my door deeper into the sticky frame. The rising heat and humidity would swell th
e door and goo the paint, effectively sealing me into my bedroom. Slowly I moved and breathed toward the beer bottles. The fluttering plastic handle of a grocery bag poked out from under my bed. I tugged it out and laid the bottles inside, dumping the drippy remains down my throat first, so that they didn’t spill out and dribble through the holes in the bag, making everything sticky and stinky. I tied the handles in a knot and continued to clean my room. I folded my limp jeans and placed my leather bracelet on my bureau. With my bare hands I gathered the gray dust bunny puffs that formed against my walls. I tossed them out my open window and watched them blow along the nighttime pavement like tumbleweeds. Everything was fine. Who cared about missing the last day of school, anyway? It’s not like I was particularly in love with any of my teachers. I was also not very connected to my classmates. I’m what they call on television a “loner.” On television most people are suspicious and even scornful of the loner, but one or two key people tend to be intrigued, and if the loner manages to avoid becoming a victim of circumstance, he or she often prevails. It’s not so bad. I only needed to locate the one or two key people who would find my lonerness interesting and befriend them. And then learn to identify the precarious circumstances that could victimize me. I thought: this is my summer plan. I decided it right then, sitting on my bed, which I had more or less made — tugging the sheet up over my pillow and then sculpting the fabric around the pillow so I could see its distinct shape, like in magazine pictures of beds. The air that came in my window smelled like summer trees, like their limey-green leaves. It smelled like the tar in the street that had turned gooey under the sun, the whole world softened in the heat.