The Animators(106)

It’s set in a bar in Brooklyn. The first thing you see is Mel, and not the default Cartoon Mel, all spiky yellow hair and knobby knees, but my Mel. We decided drawing each other for the end was the right thing to do. My Mel is an airbrush shot glowing from within: thirty-degree nose on the profile, high Cherokee cheekbones, lanky body folded over the bar like a praying mantis. I’ve never realized before now how right I got her in that shot. It is so much Mel, so fluidly her—the lay of the shoulders, the way the mouth stills in thought. A glass of something warm and amber sits by the crook of her elbow.

It’s one of the few scenes of the movie that has me in it. I’m coming into the bar to fetch her. It’s the uncut scene. “November Rain” is playing in the bar. Fuckin love this song, man, she always said. It’s sadness porn. Skanky, melodramatic sadness porn. But we both knew it meant something more. Both knew that if you were a child, and you watched TV in a room by yourself as we did, saw this video, heard this song, it struck something primal and private in you, the sense of being at your most alone in the anticipation of adult pain, a gray future memory. It was reassuring to be with someone else while you listened, so you were no longer the only one in the room, could be reassured that your adult life was not entirely the thing you had feared.

We weren’t able to use the track in wide release. The rights cost too much money. But this is the private cut, the one distribution keeps in their library. This movie closes out on Guns N’ Roses, the way the good Lord intended.

Mel’s voice fills the auditorium—the end of the movie, Mel’s adult self, ruminating on everything that has happened to her. There’s a collective curling back of the audience. It’s already slightly unsettling to hear the sound of Mel’s voice. I feel a spark of something blue and hot at the base of my spine.

I spent years trying to outrun myself, Mel says. Trying to make enough noise to drown myself out. It makes me ashamed to admit this. But it’s okay to let yourself catch up. It’s okay if you work to catch up to the things that have happened to you. You do it for yourself. But also for the people around you. The people who deserve to experience you, undiluted, honest. Your genuine self, given to them.

My cartoon self takes her by the elbow, pulls her to the door. My voice: “Come on,” I tell her. “It’s time to go to work.” We leave together. The door swings shut.

Your life is the people who fill it, Mel says. And nothing’s good without them.

The music ramps. I get the feeling of the room thinking the same thing at the same time: of Mel doing her ridiculous fucking Axl Rose shimmy-shaky snake. Her croon. Performed at a thousand parties. Her ghost is doing a staggering dance in the middle of the room. It’s hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain.

A voice joins in, then two, then more. Then louder, people together, singing, an unreal thing, a thing that does not happen in real life but is happening now, and soon the whole room is in a trance, singing. Fart sings, Donnie sings, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, Brecky sings with her arm around Donnie, Mel’s drinking buddies, they all bellow it, we can barely believe this is actually happening. And the chorus extends into the credits, and we keep singing through Slash’s guitar solo, the first one, that long, lonely tunnel between verses, and everyone is surprised that they know the melody, the song running like a vein underneath their thoughts for so long, the dim future for which we are all bound. We’re singing it to Mel, trying to lure her out from wherever she is, because she’s always the loudest when she sings this song. And if we sing loud enough, hard enough, if we don’t miss a note, she’ll come back to us, and all of this will end.

—

A caravan travels down the BQE toward Coney Island. The day has turned overcast. The twenty or so of us left close our coats, wrap on scarves, spit off the pier. The amusement park creaks behind us and a nearby housing project rises dull and red in the distance. Someone mentions keeping an eye out for police; scattering ashes from where we are on the coast is illegal.

“Is that right.”

“I looked it up.”

“Let em come at us, dude. Tell em to bring it.”

“Mel Vaught’s gonna be in the drinking water of everyone in Staten Island for a week.”

“That’s fuckin righteous.”

Everyone’s here now. The laughs die down. Someone sniffs. The waves beat and rush together. Donnie carries the jar from the service. She comes to me, presses it into my hands. “These are for you, sweetie,” she says.

I shake my head. “What am I— I don’t know—”

“You do whatever you think you should with them. Put them in the water. Keep some, scatter the rest.” The jar is warm. It nearly slips from my grasp. Donnie leans in, catches the bottom.

I open the jar and look inside. The ashes are white, and gray, and black. I stick my hand in. Soft, mealy, little bits of stony matter. What I’m fairly sure is half a back molar. One of the bones is striped, mottled like quartz. I hold it up. Put it back.

I look to Donnie. She nods.

I tip the jar a little. The ashes stream down into the water. I wait, let it settle. Dust drifts up. I sneeze. God. This is so fucking lame. Mel would have hated this. Before I can stop myself I look up, expecting to see her beside me.

I take a handful and throw.

I take another handful and throw harder. The wind kicks up. The ashes come back and hit me in the front. I cuss, yell, throw more. Another gust and it all blows back. Mel goes into my mouth and nose and hair. The ash streams into the crowd and they cough and groan, and I scream and throw and Donnie goes, “Okay, Sharon, you can stop now, honey, stop, you’re getting it all over yourself, Sharon, stop it now.”