Rose of No Man's Land

by Michelle Tea

  Tam-pon, Rose sort of mouthed. She made an awkward gesture that involved spreading her legs and moving her hands around her groin area in a plunging motion.

  Tampons! Yeah! I’m sorry, okay! I’m sorry, what the fuck — baby, check the glove compartment. Over there. The only tampons you’re going to find down there are dirty ones. Oh, yeah! Yeah, now I’m having an affair with a couple of twelve-year-old girls, you fucking sicko! Right! The glove compartment. She sucked her lips into her mouth, licking away the cry-snot residue. Rose clicked open the glove compartment and came out with a squat, linty tampon. One of the ones that don’t come with an applicator to inject it up yourself. It was sheathed in a bit of plastic Rose tore through with her teeth.

  Watch the numbers, she said, spitting the plastic onto the floor. I bet it’s in one of those big buildings up the street.

  I stuck my head back out the window. Like a dog, I thought. How they’re always so happy, with their long faces poked out from a speeding car, their ears whapping around. I seem to remember having a dog, a long, long time ago. Sticking my own face out the window above it, the fur of its ears blowing into my face. I thought maybe my dad had a dog or something, but Ma said no, not ever, she hates dogs and would never live with one, so I don’t know. Maybe it was a dog dream or maybe I’m always creating these phony memories for myself, trying to re-create the vanished dad. Give him a dog. He’s living in Louisiana with a dog. They sit together by a river, the dog slaps at the foamy waters with his fat paws and my dad, I don’t know, toots on a harmonica or something. Right. More likely he’s drugged out in some shithole bar starting fights or hooking up with crazy women like the one currently driving us down Revere Beach Boulevard. The numbers were close now, we were in the heart of it. The traffic seized and people swarmed the sidewalk. Clamoring for fried ocean grub outside Kelley’s. Workers in oil-stained hats were shoving plates of sand-colored nuggets through the pickup windows. It made me think of work, of Rose at work, and me unemployed. Maybe I could get a job at Kelley’s. Maybe it would be cool to work on the beach, people coming to the window stinking like coconut. I locked eyes with a topless guy standing on the curb holding a paper boat of fried squiggles. He gave me a sharp nod as we passed, then slid his tongue out and licked his teeth at me.

  Rose was hunched over in her seat, her ass levitating off the pleather, stuffing the tampon up inside her. She ruffled around on the floor and came up with a Burger Empire napkin to wipe her bloody finger on. Then she balled the paper up and dropped it back into the mess. It was as if it had never, ever occurred to her to give a fuck. She had no fuck inside of her to give. She was void of fuck. She scooted her ass around in her seat, getting comfortable with her new tampon.

  The lady peeled the phone away from her face with a wet suck. She hit some buttons. She was answering our telephone. Which one of you is Kim? Rose opened her mouth. Here take it, fuck it, you can’t talk to someone who’s crazy. You just can’t. She took her hands off the wheel and shook them out like they were cramped. Rose held the phone to her ear.

  Hello? The sound from the other end was shrill static to me. It was like the call of a fry-happy electronic seagull. I dipped my ear down to eavesdrop.

  This is not Kim! the little voice chattered. We are going to find out who you are! You’re a girl! It was one of the mall bitches. Rose looked at me and shrugged, stamped her finger over the hang-up button and slid the phone back into my bag. When the chiming beep explosion erupted again we just let it sing.

  No kidding, the lady nodded at the sound. No point in talking to most people. We were at the skyscrapers now. Not true skyscrapers like the ones I saw on a field trip to Boston, but they were big for a regular city. Three of them, clustered together, looming up and over the boulevard. The numbers on the first one matched what the caller had given us.

  This Is Us, I said. I clicked open the door while the truck was still in motion, hopped out onto the pavement. The wild ocean air blasted my face, cool and soothing. Natural nighttime air, a relief from the tense static weather inside the lady’s truck. Thanks For The Ride, I hollered in to her. It Was Really Nice Of You. Hitchhiking was clearly no big whoop, providing you stick with crazy females and avoid carfuls of crazy dudes.

  Thanks for the tampon, Rose added, slamming the door on an escaping plastic bag. It whipped in the wind as the lady drove off toward the carnival. The carnival lights were candies against the sky, glowing orbs that pulsed and swirled like psychedelic fireflies. I know the rides are rickety and manned by weird prison dudes who never sleep and have swastika tattoos they gave themselves with sewing needles, and I know the games are all rigged and no matter how good your aim is you’ll never knock down the wooden bottle, that the larger-than-life hot pink stuffed snake is actually unwinnable, but still I love the traveling carnival. Its lot is a year-round empty place, crapass weeds burping from cracks by the chain-link, maybe a scattered beer bottle or crushed can, but really the space isn’t even interesting enough to steal a drink in, not with the wide expanse of beach splayed out across the street. The lot is a vacant nothing. Then suddenly one day you’re cruising past and there are the rides, all folded up on themselves, collapsed lengths of curving track, rings of dull lights, the fried-dough stands shut tight on their wheels. Slowly the thing unfurls. The eggs of machinery crack and stretch their metal legs into rides and games, the empty glass bursts into frenzied bulbs of brightness proclaiming, THE COMET! THE HAMMER! THE WHIP! It gets all filled up with trashy people and skanky girls and kids with guns but I love it anyway.

  We Gotta Hit The Carnival, I said to Rose. I gave her swishy dress a tug. She shrugged, squinting her eyes toward the lights. You could hear a faint rat-a-tat, the sound of cars rattling fast over slatted metal, the pale cries of the riders. Come On, Don’t You Want To Go On Some Rides?

  Not really, she shrugged. I’ve gone there before. It’s the same every summer. Rose was more interested in our authentic creepy mystery, the guy on the other end of the cell phone. Why seek fake thrills, I guess. Why let some mechanical chair lurch you through a shabby fun house where old Halloween masks with flashlights stuck into the eyeholes dangle on poles and beep like cell phones as you jerk by. Why pay three dollars to glimpse a fake monster painted in black-light poster paints when you can visit a real monster in his oceanfront lair? Before us his apartment building rose into the night. Being so big and near to the beach my lazy mind had imagined it would be a real nice place. On television, celebrities live in buildings like this. I’ve seen helicopter views of the rooftop pools, ringed with palm trees. But it wasn’t like that here. The door was set back from the street, we hiked the path and pushed into the hallway. The wall was filled with doorbells. I’ve only ever been inside an apartment once. The business I had in that one long-ago apartment was placing a dead bird into the mailbox of the lesbians who lived there. Me and this kid from school had found the bird on the street, its scrawny legs already stiff. We didn’t kill it. And we’d known the lesbians were lesbians because we’d seen them and they looked the way lesbians looked together, plus there weren’t ever dudes with them. I remember the two woman lesbians but I can’t remember my kid-friend as anything more than a grubby smear of motion. I remember the bird, hard as feathered stone. We lifted it with sticks, we balanced it into the apartment, a crappy place with all busted mailboxes, their narrow doors unhinged or outright gone. The bird plopped inside and we left. I think it’s good that I took such a long break from having friends because all I can remember from my old little-kid friendships is rotten activities like dumping dead things in gay people’s mailboxes, or finding the one person with a garden in all of Mogsfield and smashing their produce on the ground, tomatoes and cucumbers pulpy on the pavement. The air smelled fresh and clean from them, a smeared salad of dead veggies. Oh, and convincing a girl that her dead mother was a hitchhiking ho. It’s better that I abstained from friendships ’til now, when I’m mature enough to handle them. Those gay ladies could have been Rose’s gay moms
. Maybe Rose went down for the mail and her tiny kid hand, all stunted from smokes in the womb, came down against the rigor mortis wing of that bird.

  Beside the doorbells were pieces of masking tape with names jotted onto them. The dude gave me a number, not a name, apartment twenty-four. We scanned the wide wall, squinting at all the scrawled and homemade doorbell tags. The name beside twenty-four was Grafton. It wasn’t on tape, it was carved into the wall, with a little box carved around it. The doorbell itself was smashed, the tiny plastic dome half-cracked away, displaying metal beneath. Did You Ever Live In An Apartment Building? I asked Rose. She shook her head. I always wanted to, she said. All the different people running around, elevators…Rose hit the bell. Soon came the violent noise of the door buzzing us in. An angry, fuzzy honk. I had some more questions for Rose. They honked in my head like the door’s rude open sesame. Like, what the fuck are we doing? Why are we going into a weird dude’s house? Do you often go into weird dudes’ houses? The hallway was lined with a jumble of telephone books, a scatter of junk mail nobody wanted. Grocery circulars with pictures of bloody pink steaks arranged on beds of lettuce, pictures of juice cartons and cookies. The elevator opened its mouth for us, and the metal doors sealed us in. The steel box lifted us into the air, leaving our stomachs back in the messy hallway. I suddenly wished the cell phone was mine, really mine, and that someone who knew me would call it. This would have to be Ma or Kristy, maybe Donnie. Someone out there who would ring me up just to say hey and check in on me. Yeah, I’m In An Elevator With My New Friend Rose, I’d say. We’re Going To See Some Guy. Oh, Not For Any Reason, Just Going To See What’s Up With Him, I Guess. Here’s His Address And If I Never Return Come Dig My Body Out From Under His Bed. The doors slid open and released us into the hallway. It felt like some sort of bad hotel where people lived. There was a door with a twenty-four on it. Rose’s bony fist shot out and rapped the fake wood. Rose, I said. It seemed we should have a plan. An escape plan or maybe an explanation for not being Kim Porciatti. She shot a quick grin at me, wiggled her eye-pencil eyebrows, inky and arched. When she smiled her eyes themselves closed briefly, a sleepy face. I heard a scrabble behind the door and imagined someone was getting a fish-eye view at us through the peephole. The knob rattled and then there was an old man standing there, inspecting us. An old guy. He took in the sight of us and sighed. It was not a pleased sound. It was regretful and resigned. Well. He still had some hair and it looked like he’d even tried to fashion it, push the wiry silver wisps into a deliberate style. His face was awfully red, like he’d been steamed. He wore big glasses, and he looked at us through the plastic squares. Hrrmph, he noised. He shook his head. Well. His was not the voice on the phone. Not that thick and confident voice of sleaze, not this trembling little man.

  Rose and I just stood there like some weird-ass Girl Scouts who forgot their cookies, forgot their little uniforms, forgot their purpose in life. We looked at each other and then at the old guy. Let her in, Harry! called another voice, the voice, the phone-man voice, from somewhere inside the apartment. Harry turned his back and walked his elderly-person-walk away from us. We followed him inside the apartment.

  Shut the door, girls, Harry motioned. His eyes were blue but maybe he had cataracts. Maybe he was old like that, cataract-old. He settled himself down onto a puffy leather couch and tuned into the television, ignoring us completely. The wood-paneled room we stood in was filled with cigarette smoke; it spun around us like a terrible cotton. The old man was its source; a castle of spent butts clambered up from a wide glass ashtray. He lit a new one and blew smoke at the screen.

  Harry, you are polluting the house with your cigarettes. We got a porch, why don’t you smoke out on the porch. The man was in the room with us. He swung out of some back area, took a quick look and saw we were no Kim Porciatti. We weren’t even Katies or Yolandas. He looked us up and down with a sober expression on his face. His face was like Harry’s face, only younger. Younger but not young. Old, just not about-to-kick-the-bucket old. He was old like Donnie was old. His hair was gray but also yellow-blond, and he had the old man’s eyes, that cataract-blue color. His stripy hair was thick and in a long ponytail. His hair seemed angry at being captured by the elastic, it hurled itself around in unruly waves. The most alarming thing about the man was that he seemed to be pregnant. He had a belly like a hard, round rock. It protruded from his torso, he had followed it into the smokey television room. It wasn’t a fleshy ball, it didn’t jiggle or hang. It was like a pumpkin under his Harley T-shirt. Even a tumor would be bumpy or wiggle, I thought. I don’t know who you are, he said simply. The old man Harry made another snorting sound and gave the dude a look of pure disgust.

  We’re Friends Of Kim, I said. It sounded like a secret club or something, like I was talking code-speak. Friends of Kim. A charitable organization perhaps. The phrase felt foreign in my mouth. It came out of my stiff and awkward body like candy from the yap of a Pez dispenser. A mental expert could have investigated my posture and pointed out all the different angles of elbow and shoulder that proved what a giant liar I was. A dog could have lapped up the panic vibrations of fear coming off my skin like sweaty laser beams. But the dude with the misshapen torso was unaffected. Come on, he nodded his ponytailed head back toward where he came. Rose trotted off behind him but I was in no hurry to leave the room near the exit. I was in no hurry to leave Old Harry. Old Harry flipped through the television, exhaling blue clouds at the screen. He was like some wrinkled cloud-breathing creature, a myth. He was the pregnant monster’s father. The room held a lot of furniture, all crammed together. Stools and armchairs piled with newspapers. End tables sporting dust thick as velvet and random souvenirs and glass-framed pictures from a long time ago.

  So, Your Name’s Harry? I stalled. I could hear murmured voices from the back room. The high-pitched tones of Rose. If she screamed I would run for her. If I heard glass breaking or the sounds of things being knocked around, the noise of kidnapping or rape or strangulation. Harry glanced at me briefly, then back to the TV. Yup, he said. His voice was soft and dry.

  I Think I Saw You Once, At The Walgreens In Mogsfield? I wanted him to be that guy so bad. That guy who took so long to pay, that guy who seized me up when I had my period and was vulnerable to the sadness of everything. If I could locate Harry in my regular life then he could become a rope back to that place if I needed it.

  I don’t think so, he mumbled. I go to the Walgreens here in Revere.

  Really? I pressed. Maybe You Bought A Box Of Ice Cream?

  He gave a little chuckle and waggled his head. His sparse hairs in their deliberate placements didn’t move. Something real strong was holding his hairdo together. Strong and greasy. It shone in the television’s electric light. Football, men in tight uniforms tumbling over each other, rolling together on an endless grassy green landscape. The screen was shot through with gray pixels, little strands of bad reception. He breathed a new ghost into the room.

  You Like Living So Close To The Beach? I asked. You Go Over To The Carnival Ever? He brought the butt of his cigarette to his thin lips and took a papery drag. I looked around the room. To my right was a kitchen table with a blue plastic tarp for a tablecloth, and beyond that a little stove. Above the dark iron burners hung a string of topless-lady photos, their boobs like ice-cream sundaes melting on their chests. I peered closer. They weren’t photos, they were air fresheners. Still in their packaging, with the little dangly string for hanging off rearview mirrors. It was a real collection. Some girls had bouncy brown hair but most were blond. Their plastic packaging shone under the shadowy yellow light in the kitchen. They were held to the wall with pushpins. So, You Like Air Fresheners? I asked Harry. On the TV screen a bleacherful of people flung themselves from their seats and screamed. They shot their hands into the air, they flung popcorn and waved fat foam fingers. I thought about how nice it must be to feel so passionate about something.