Rose of No Man's Land

by Michelle Tea

  Rose was gently knocking the crushed crystals onto the back of the hippo. With the matchbook she shaped them into sparkling sugar snail trails. My cigarette burned like a flaming planet in the dark. This time the choke was smaller and I held it in, my eyes watering in the dark. Then I felt my head empty out and balloon up, up and away. I leaned dizzy into the hippo. I Never Knew Cigarettes Got You High, I told Rose. I Would Have Probably Tried Them Earlier.

  They only get you high the first time, she said, pulling the cash from my pack and tugging a bill from the roll. So enjoy it. She grinned at me. This is going to really get you high, though. Are you ready?

  For The Battery Acid? I asked. I looked at the twin piles on the hippo’s back. I dunked my finger into one, gentle, and held my finger, tipped in sparkle, in the light. Surely this couldn’t be battery acid, it was too pretty. It looked like really expensive eye shadow or something. Like glitter. I reached out and dabbed it onto Rose’s cheeks and her laugh was the call of some exotic animal, a rain forest cry. She swatted away my hand. Lick your finger, don’t waste it, she told me, brushing the stuff from her face and then slurping her palms. She twisted a twenty into a tight paper straw and with one end poked into her nose she leaned over the drugs and inhaled them. She tilted her head way back, in the spotlight beaming up from the turf I could see her pale scalp, the tiny pores her thick hair sprung from. Rose was futzing with her nose, rubbing it and snorting and sniffling. Whoa, she said and reached for the Yikes. She plunged her finger into the neck of the bottle and flicked the stuff up her nose. Did snorting this stuff make you then want to snort everything, I wondered. I watched Rose for visible evidence of the drug’s effects. Her face had new color in it, flushed like when she was at work, hustling around the fryers. Her eyes sparkled. The sparkle of the drug had dripped into her eyes and made them hard and shiny. She held out the twenty. Do it, she ordered. Listen, though, don’t breathe out, breathe in, hard.

  Duh, I said.

  Seriously, she said, swatting at her nose some more. Her voice sounded stuffy and clogged. The first time I did this, I don’t know, I just blew out and I sprayed the stuff everywhere.

  When Was The First Time You Did It? I asked.

  At work. In the bathroom. Marty, one of the cooks, had a bunch and he shared it with me. We did it in the bathroom. And then we did it in the bathroom. She laughed.

  I bent my head over the shimmering tuft. Rose did it with Marty the cook. Who was Marty the cook? Would I want to do it with him too? I handed off my cigarette to Rose who took a greedy drag and then a chug off the bottle. With the twenty stuck into my nostril I inhaled like my wind would douse the fire that was burning up my chest. It shot like a bullet through my nose and then clung, stinging, to the back of my throat. Oh My God, I gasped. My nose felt seared. I touched it and felt for blood, but it was dry.

  Here here here, Rose thrust the bottle at me. Put some up your nose, she said, but it was my throat that felt awful, like it was shriveling into itself, collapsing, the twinkling powder corroding it. Now I understood how it could be battery acid. How it could be nasal spray, medicine someone played mad scientist with until something meant to open up your sinuses instead collapsed them. I dumped the Yikes down my throat, swallowing what was left. Rose was ready with a new one. I liked this division of labor. Sure I was having to haul the illegal shit around, but Rose had fixed up the drugs on the hippo’s back and was now taking care of me, ready with a vodka drink. I felt a surge of immense gratitude.

  You Are So Nice, I told her. You Are Really, Really…Caring. I Hope That Doesn’t Sound Gay. I Mean, Not Gay. I Know, Your Mom’s Gay. That Must Be Kind Of Cool, Having A Gay Mom? Is It? Or Is It Hard? My Mom Isn’t Gay, She’s Got This Boyfriend I Totally Hate. If She Was Gay At Least, You Know, He Wouldn’t Be Around, You Know? So That At Least Must Be A Good Part Of Having A Gay Mom.

  I could feel my heart shaking and convulsing in my chest. Was I going to die? I felt great, but these great feelings were being interfered with by the thought that I might die. From a drug overdose, at T-Rex Miniature Golf. Maybe I’d always been attracted to it because I knew, psychically, that it was the place I would die. That I would die a druggie’s death, by the orange hippo with a black-haired girl named Rose. Am I Going To Die? I asked her. She thought that was funny. She shot her hand out and placed it atop my Weight Watchers T-shirt, over the place where my heart bucked and rocked inside my rib cage.

  It’s your heart, she said, feeling it kicking like a baby in a pregnant woman’s stomach. No shit, I wanted to say, but all my words were piled up somewhere behind the car crash that was my primary organ. I couldn’t speak. I felt just deranged with what were the best and the worst feelings I ever felt, duking it out inside my body. And now Rose was leaned in to me, one hand holding my cigarette elegantly. Like a flapper, I thought. And I said, I managed to creak out, You’re Like A Flapper, and she smiled at that and closed her eyes in the dark and became sealed inside her own experience of the drug, one hand holding smoke, the other flat above my heart, which was maybe starting to slow or maybe I was acclimating to its new style of beating, and Rose leaned in to me then and she kissed me.

  And the real purpose of the drug became clear, the kiss banished the bad feeling of racing panic, was some sort of friendly violence I’d never experienced before. Rose’s mouth chewed into mine and she tossed the cigarette to the Astroturf and I did not even care that it would maybe burst into flame. I thought that would be fine, really, and that this was the meteor I’d been craving and it had landed here on my body, was pushing me back onto the scraggy fake ground and scrambling all over me like a spider, or a sci-fi crab-girl from another planet. Rose’s teeth bit into me and I swear, a new talent bloomed inside me, kissing. This was the best ever and I was good at it, I took right to it, amazing, all this time in my room and I could have been kissing someone, kissing Rose. My hands clutched a slippery bundle of her hair and held her face to mine. We bit each others’ tongues and it was sloppy and spectacular and her hand slid below my heart to where my boobs were and she touched them and it was fine that she did this, totally okay with me, and I realized my body was on fire, my body was finally happening, it had arrived and Rose could have it. I thought I should touch her boobs too since she had touched mine so I did, I slid my hand under the gaping neck of her nightgown-dress and felt them hot and cold, I touched them and it made her mouth open wider and her warm breath blew into me like weather and I felt like mush, like a ruined planet, and with her bony fingers she was pinching me and it hurt and I wanted it to hurt more. It was like I felt everything and yet was numb, my body suddenly superhuman, feeling sensation so intensely that only the most intense sensations registered, the plunge of Rose’s tongue and the pinch of my lip between her teeth, her claw at the skin beneath my shirt. She lifted off of me and took a frantic drink from the glass bottle and dove back into me, her hands around my neck, she pulled me into a roll and I was on top of her and she squirmed beneath me, her nightgown-dress hiked in a tangle, I saw her underwear, I saw the holes around the elastic and their dingy color glowed at the edge of the hippo’s floodlight. I saw her underwear and I touched them and she gasped, she affixed her mouth to my ear and filled it with tickles. I touched her again and then again and again and realized I could touch her as much as I wanted to and I felt like the king then of some Super-Lotto-jackpot island, thought that this was our land here, a land of plastic glass and staring gnomes and helpful dinosaurs, this was our special land and I was its king, feeling the place change as I touched it, feeling it shift behind the cloth, and I admit that though I felt like its king, I was scared to move the fabric and touch beneath it, I was scared to even though I knew she did it with some guy named Marty, or maybe I was scared because of some guy named Marty, but either way I was scared to do more than just touch and touch and touch it more, so that’s what I did and that seemed fine with Rose.

  Twenty-one

  Afterward we lay around on the plastic grass. We looked
up at the wide bowl of night, squinting for stars, but you can’t see any above Route 1. We’d traded stars for the tall neon sculptures that advertise the restaurants. I say who cares. It’s not like we can make the stars extinct. The stars are the last bit of nature we can’t fuck up; we only fuck it up for ourselves, stacking lights on top of lights ’til we blot out the sky. I think it’s an okay trade-off. I like the neon, and I like knowing the stars are up there too. Shining down on some more-country part of the world. Instead of stars we lay beneath the general glow of Route 1, the combination of all the neon on the strip rising into an orangey glow of sky, like a forever sort of sunset or gust of pollution. The round, white lights shooting up from the Astroturf. Cars on the highway added extra beams into the mix, like zooming disco balls they sped by, strobing. The light seemed alive with a pulse like the one inside my body, my new pulse, or perhaps it had always been there and the crystal had highlighted it.

  It’s Good We Both Wore Our Pajamas, I said to Rose. I tugged on a bit of her nightgown, rubbed the fabric between my fingers to hear it scratch. We Could Just Sleep Here At The T-Rex.

  Oh, we’re not going to sleep, man, Rose laughed. Not for a while. Not on this stuff.

  It didn’t feel weird that we had kissed or touched. I felt really okay. I sincerely hoped that it would happen again but I also wasn’t freaking out about it. I was just floating in some plasticky garden of goodness. Rose sat up and opened the backpack. She dumped its contents onto the ground in a clanking mess. The rest of the Yikes, the shimmery drugs in their jewel-bag, the smokes. The picture of Paulie’s cousin and the Polaroids, two of them. I flipped them over. One was Kim. Kim and Rose, side by side on the spiky green.

  You Took It, I said.

  Yeah, fuck him. Why should he have that? A picture of anyone. I wish I could have taken them all.

  There Were More?

  Rose nodded. What are we going to do with all this shit? She lifted the cell phone. It had rung a ton while we were making out. She hit buttons and saw what we’d missed. Calls from Katie, calls from XXX. Calls from Home. Fuck this phone. She offered it to me. Do you want to make any last calls?

  Unh-uh.

  She pressed the wide, rubbery button on the top, fiddled around and the phone went dead. I want to bury it, she said, but you can’t dig this shit up. Her nails dug at the turf. She stood up and walked down the slope to the windmill. When the course was turned on, the windmill twirled, its blades blocking the golf ball hole as they spun down. The windmill was all about timing. Crouching, Rose chucked the cell phone deep inside. Okay, we got rid of that, she stomped back up the slope. This? She held up the redheaded dancer, light bouncing off the glass. Your turn. I walked it to the shrubbery edging the path, tough little bushes of dark green leaves. They seemed almost as phony as the Astroturf but when I dug beneath the woodchips I felt real dirt, damp roots twining deep.

  It’s Hard To Tell What’s Real In This Place, I called to Rose.

  That gnome? Not real.

  I pulled the velvety stand from the back of the frame and set the picture down beside the red-capped gnome. I arranged branches of bush around it, the glossy leaves framing the frame. I pushed woodchips up around its edges. The light found the dancer — she looked like a miniature girl sashaying through an enchanted, gnome-ridden bush-forest. Rose liked it. Rose was cracking up. She lit up another cigarette and I huddled beside her, received the burning treat each time she passed it my way. I rated smoking second under kissing as best activity ever. I was glad I’d waited to try it, now I had a new thing to get into. Another new thing. I liked how the smoke totally invaded your body. It swelled your insides, then burst out in a dramatic escape. It was like eating, only better. I wanted to never eat again, never sleep, only smoke and think great thoughts and kiss Rose. I passed the cigarette back to her and took a hit off the Yikes. We talked. We talked about her mom and how sad she was about Irene and maybe just about life in general. How maybe when you’re depressed for long enough it just damages your brain, makes you regular sad all the time. We talked about my mom and how sick she wasn’t and was. And all the talking and thinking about her made me sad in this way I hadn’t felt before. Not sad like old-people sad, but some cousin of that emotion. I thought about Ma lying day in, day out on the saggy couch. Ma had a life, just like I did. That was her life. A whole life spent on a couch. I had to stop thinking about it. It was making my chest feel like a tight plank. We talked about our dads instead. Our nowhere dads. There wasn’t much to talk about. We talked about Paulie’s ruined arms. They were easier to think about than moms. We talked about Paulie’s stomach and the fetal alien probably living inside it. About how a guy turns into a Paulie rather than a more gently offensive loser like Donnie, or a more normal guy like you might see on TV.

  No mom, Rose offered. Right?

  Too Obvious, I said. That’s Like, People Could Say We’re Like This — I waved around a bottle of Yikes in my one hand and the end of the cigarette in my other — Because We Got No Dads.

  Rose shrugged. Maybe we are. Who cares. I cared. I didn’t like thinking of my general personality being the result of a mistake. Ma’s mistake of marrying him or his mistake of leaving, my mistake of being born from their mistaken relationship.

  It’s not like that, Rose shook her head and drank from the Yikes. It’s just like — life is there to mess with you. You just have to relax and let it mess you up. You can’t resist it. You turn crazier when you try to stop it. I thought about Kristy and her positive-thinking spells and how tense they made her. And Ma’s stupid routine, always coming up with a new germ infestation. Maybe if she was just honest and said, Yeah I can’t deal with the world, I want to lie around and watch Dr. Phil, maybe she’d be happier.

  And really, any way the world fucks with you, you probably could have seen it coming if you just thought about it. My ma is crazy about Irene being in the war, but Irene was in the army when she met her. Why did she go on a date with an army person? My mom, she explained, protests stuff. She brought me up to New Hampshire to try to shut down a nuclear power plant when I was like four. She’s got bumper stickers all over the car about peace and love, and then she goes on a date with an army person and gets depressed when she goes to war.

  Whoa, I said. Totally. It seemed like an extra amount of air was getting into my lungs. My nostrils felt huge, the back of my throat wide and dry, no matter how much Yikes I drank. A bitter ooze crept down from my nose like an underground creek, dripping a crumby sludge of leftover drugs over my tonsils. It was like all you had to do was snort a little bit of crystal and it created a magical spring that kept leeching the drug into your system. I snorted and swallowed. Don’t You Want To Stay Here Forever? I asked. Rose passed me the last of the cigarette. The whole cigarette thing was fine if I didn’t think about it too much. The smoking process was excellent, but if I smelled my fingers or thought about my breath I become obsessively grossed out with myself. I held the smoldering butt between my thumb and pointer finger, making an Okay sign like I’d seen Rose do earlier. I flicked it. It shot from my hand like a tiny firework, arcing orange into the bushes.

  Nah, let’s go walk around. Rose hopped up. Let’s go into all the restaurants. She was off and headed toward the chain-link fence, the backpack slumped on the ground for me to carry. I stuffed the items we were keeping back into the pouch of it, the Polaroids and the drugs and the money. We had three more bottles of Yikes left, and I don’t know how many cigarettes. I strapped the backpack to my shoulders and hiked down the Astroturf to where Rose was already scaling the fence. I was sort of sad to be leaving our special golf garden. I wondered if the making-out was something that could only ever happen there, in the plastic hush, among the cartoon statues. A strange otherworld, like Never-Neverland where kids don’t grow up. A world where a couple of girls could make out with each other and nothing tragic or stupid would happen, not even a minor conversation to take it back or trash it, nothing at all except that magical ignition of inte
rnal sparks. We’d stepped into a fairy ring where upside-down was rightside-up. I didn’t want to leave it. I felt a sudden physical plummet, somewhere inside my chest. It was a drop that took me off balance and made my body feel noodley. Paulie had talked about a crash. It had made Kim Porciatti want to kill herself. Had something crashed in me? It felt like a car hitting the brakes behind my heart.

  Yoo-hoo! Rose was on the other side of the fence, her sneaks poked through the links, waving her arms at me. The backlight of the rushing highway shone through her nightgown and I could see the outline of her body beneath it, like a shadow puppet. She called to me, Don’t bother with the dinosaur, she said. It doesn’t help. Just hop the fence. The dinosaur, our guardian, protector of the magical land of nighttime Astroturf. I knocked its orange back with my knuckles and heard the sound roll around its hollow insides. I could hop a fence no problem. Rose clambered down to the ground and I soon dropped beside her. We looked up at the T-Rex, its mouth in a forever roar, angry at the cars below, at the giant pagoda across the street.

  Bye, Guy, I said. I gave a little wave. We turned to cross the highway and I knew it had our back.

  Twenty-two

  If you have nothing to do and nowhere to be and you’re just hanging around on drugs, Route 1 is a seriously festive place to be. All the Vegasy restaurants. The Chinese restaurant with the river, the steak house with a neon cactus as tall as Monster Paulie’s apartment building and a herd of fake cows grazing out front of the building, all wooden like a ranch in Texas. The Mexican restaurant built like a shabby shack strung all around with Christmas lights and blaring Mexican guitar music you can hear as you pass by the parking lot. The Italian place with a replica of that crooked tower sticking out of its roof, all wonked. Even the crappy sausage sandwich joint where you order at the window has an enormous neon sign advertising it. It’s about fifteen times the size of the sausage joint itself, which looks like a food trailer from a traveling carnival. But I guess if you’re going to compete in the Route 1 restaurant world, you need to have a lot of neon. We went to the Mexican restaurant first, because it was close enough for us to hear the yodeling Mexican singer. The romantic swells of his voice bobbed in the air like bubbles. We walked alongside the road, the cars careening close. We walked one in front of the other, me leading. I didn’t like not being able to see Rose. I felt that falling sensation in my body again. It left my legs trembling. I guess it was maybe time to eat, but the thought seemed lousy. I didn’t have an appetite. The Mexican restaurant was shrouded in a hazy glow from all the Christmas lights; I could see the colored halo shining up from the dark like the light of a UFO crashed down in an empty lot.