The Animators(116)

In a consoling tone, Mom says, “Well shit.” Reaches out to thump my knee. “Forget him. Just forget him. You gotta do what you gotta do. He don’t like it, he can go straight to hell. That’s what I say.”

This one is turning out better. I think I have a handle on the way her face comes together. “So did you like how we drew you in Irrefutable Love? Like you back in the day?”

She lights another Doral. “Oh yeah. I looked good.”

“Did you really watch it all the way through?”

She rolls her eyes and coughs. “What kind of mother do you think I am?”





THIS IS BETWEEN ME AND


THE VOICES IN MY HEAD


Nashville Combat and Irrefutable Love are licensed to Netflix. We’re nominated for some awards but beaten out by the Pixar types, big, flashy Cineplex productions. We never stood a chance—our loud, grainy clips next to all that slick shit, all that money and shine. I go to the awards ceremonies anyway. I sit with Brecky and Donnie and drink champagne and eat chicken.

I miss Mel then. Mostly because she would have yelled something appropriate at the screen when the Disney logo rolled by, or spat on the floor, or pissed on the red carpet outside, limo service guys drinking Diet Cokes, glumly looking on. I never noticed how big the silence was when Mel wasn’t screaming into it.

It has been almost one year.

This is the second phase of losing her: going out into the world and living in her stead. There is a talking of Mel back into existence. I watch in horror as Mel Vaught becomes a series of anecdotes.

Worst of all, some of the anecdotes come from me. Sometimes I get drunk and, with the right kind of people around—Donnie, Fart, Surly Cathie—it feels good to talk about Mel. Thoughts and recollections and discoveries, neutral and inflammatory. She is a mosaic, all shards and details without context. Her profile: strong, small nose, but, yes, a weak chin. Enjoyed making cats dance. Once owned a ginger tom, the late Mister Puddles, whom she made gyrate to Joy Division (meow, meow will tear us apart again). Sometimes smoked Parliaments, which she called P-funks. Rooted for Florida State, not University of Florida. Had a mallard bite her hand once in a petting zoo in Jacksonville and forever after fostered a hatred of ducks—always ordered it off the menu out of retribution. First concert: Rage Against the Machine, 1999, at the old Riverbend stadium in Cincinnati, a band that no longer exists in a venue that no longer exists. Loved explosives. Loved cartooning. Loved her friends.

Loved me. Apparently. Sides are taken. A drunken cartoonist named Hedgeberg stumbles up to me after an awards show in Austin bellowing, in front of a crowd, “She was in love with you and you ruined her, you rotten cunt.”

“What in the hell did he mean by that?” I ask Donnie.

She shakes her head. Says, “Nothing. Doesn’t matter. He’s drunk.” She looks as if she might say something else, but then shakes her head again, ushers me toward the car.

I go back to work, mostly because I’m boring myself shitless. Donnie wrangles some consultancy jobs for me in Atlanta, where I stay in a hotel by a loop exit for six weeks. Then I go out west for a few months, where some well-funded animators seek guidance. Los Angeles is a bright, hot blur. The sunsets are brown. My sinuses feel like dried elephant nuts. I stay in a sublet condo and make three thousand dollars in a day giving directives to guys young enough to waft off Proactiv fumes.

I carry my journal with me. I’m not filling it with much, but I keep it there, just in case. Did I ever have ideas, independent of Mel? That I ever made anything at all was a miracle, a freak intersection of luck and circumstance. I even argue to myself that Irrefutable Love was the product of some sort of proximity buzz I got from her. Still, my eyes never cease to note the angle of the thing, color gradient, shadow, proportion. The line of beauty. The greedy part of me that wants more, always more, is still there, but the voice demanding the want is weaker. And now, when the universe says no, I’m more inclined to tire, sit back, and with a feeling of mild constipation say, Okay. It is the ache of a phantom limb.

I try to pretend that I’m not sleepwalking.

“You look great,” people tell me. “You look healthy. You have color.” These are relative observations: My mug shot is a total Haggis McBaggis study if I’ve ever seen one. People are just surprised to see me with my hair combed and my titties put away.

Brecky Tolliver and I are friends, Mel. If you were alive, that fact alone might kill you. Brecky’s first project goes into development right after the new year. She’s shown me the schematics for a Civil War cartoon comedy, a project that, as is, looks super-dubious. But Brecky is wooing me, asking for advice, input. She does that a lot nowadays, trying to get closer. I shy away. Ours does not feel like an organic friendship. There is empathy, but there is no kinship. Something holds me back. It’s petty. But I can’t help it.

She convinced me to return, work with her on the show. “Be a producer,” she says. “That, you can do. Come home. You’re happier in squalor.”

“There’s no more squalor in New York,” I tell her. I come home anyway. Three years after the panel, Brecky gets her wish: She gets me, slow, soft prize that I am. I go to big brunches at the apartment Donnie and Brecky now share on the Upper West Side. I wash dishes, talk to people a little, move on the periphery of things.

I let Tatum and Ryan take over the lease on the studio. They’re good boys: dragging me out to Bushwick for movie nights, showing me their sketches. They work in the stockroom at distribution full-time, then part-time when they get a grant to do their own thing. It is touching the way they keep the studio rigidly intact the first six months, refusing to displace anything Mel might have touched. Despite my grumbling and face-scrunching, they insist upon unveiling and preserving the Sharon Wall.