The Animators(19)

The bell dings. The doors slide open. Fenton is waiting. “You’re late,” he hisses.

“No, we’re not.” I point to the clock. “We’re right on time.”

“From my perspective,” he says, “you are unbearably, undeniably late. Now, come on.” He actually snaps his fingers at us as he turns on his heel. “We’ve got to get you two mic’d up.”

“Gonna get you mic’d up,” Mel mutters. She imitates Fenton’s mince for a few steps. “Hey, Fenny, you lost weight?”

“No.”

“You look, I dunno. Smaller.”

“It must just be in your head.” He whips out his phone. We can see over his shoulder there’s nothing there—no new messages, no schedule pop-up. He fucks around with it anyway, thumbs knobbing.

Fenton stops at a set of double doors posted with QUIET PLEASE! RECORDING IN PROCESS! We push through to rows of cubicles, clear glass, nubby metal soundboards. Stations are separated into DJ booths, where bespectacled women and hunched men gesticulate, then wait pensively through message breaks. Sound guys motion for guests to speak up, pipe down, cut off.

Fenton turns to Mel. I get a mental projection of him at six, class tattler, getting off on chalk dust and fluoride treatments. “I heard you were drunk at a panel discussion and acted like a fool,” he singsongs.

—

Fenton is referring, of course, to the Midwestern Women in Film Conference panel back in July.

It was a shitshow. Mel was fifteen minutes late, of course, and as she ran onto the stage, interrupting someone’s very serious answer to a question about the state of feminism in the modern documentary, she thumped me on the shoulders and whispered loud enough for the mic to pick up, “Sorry, dude.” The audience laughed. We tried to laugh with it. Mel was still drunk from the night before. It was obvious. Painfully so.

When the moderator asked us our first question—“Why cartoons?”—Mel burped and said, “For all the bitches.”

Pretty fitting answer for a question that stupid. But it got more laughs and, from the other end of the stage, an audible snort. I knew without looking that the snort came from Brecky Tolliver, producer and creator of the Obsessives series, mini-documentaries detailing the lives of female collectors and connoisseurs throughout the country. Not our cup of tea—the last time we tried to watch, we just ended up slinging empty PBR cans at the flat-screen—but Brecky is a big deal. Two-time Hollingsworth winner, Vassar grad, confirmed lesbian, smug as the rug’s snuggest bug. “Quiet work that manages to make itself loud,” The New York Times decided. It didn’t sound like a compliment to me.

Brecky hates Mel. Likewise, Mel thinks Brecky’s a fuckwit and has never attempted to conceal this opinion. “I’ve never seen her do or say anything genuine, man,” Mel said once. “She’s got this ridiculous streak of sanctimony. Everything she does, she makes a point of doing it. Look at how urbane and sensitive I am. Trying to have a conversation with her is pointless. It’s like trying to chat with a monkey who’s masturbating into a mirror.”

Brecky’s snort set Mel off. “Yeah,” she said, and pointed at Brecky. “Check that out. Brecky gets it. Breckinridge knows the score. Don’t you. Breck.”

Brecky rolled her eyes. But Mel had her in her crosshairs. “You should do an Obsessives on cartoon groupies, Brecky.” To the audience: “She’d have lots to say about it, because she loves me. Brecky loves me. She wants to do me in the ear. Isn’t that right, Brecky?”

Brecky smirked. Unable to come up with some witty rejoinder, she simply leaned back, crossed her legs, said, “I don’t think so.” But it was too late. She had asked for it. Now she was going to have to sit there and take it until Mel ran out of steam.

She fixed Mel with a withering look. “Can we get back on track here?” she said. “Can you answer the question? Please?”

Mel let her face go slack. Pointed at her, then at herself, then back at her, beaming. The audience giggled. The moderator laughed, said, “Okay, let’s refocus here—”

“Lemme give her some sugar,” Mel mooed. “Lemme give Breck some sug. Come on. Come owon.”

Brecky sighed, kind of did that fake-laugh-lip-bite thing—she’s too well bred to tell Mel to fuck off, that’s her problem—and so Mel didn’t stop, just snaked herself up and danced over, crooning, “B-hole pleasures! B-hole pleasures! It’s easy like Sunday mawnin! Come owon!” And she whipped her shirt off, sports bra yellowed, belly button a rude outie under the lights, and commenced to rub the shirt all over Brecky, slathering her general area with furious, fake affection, twirling the shirt over her head while the room disintegrated. Making certain no one would be able to look at Brecky for at least a week without thinking of her as the B-hole Pleasures Girl.

It was insult humping. Mel invented insult humping. And it worked. A tagline covering the panel in ReAnimator: The Cartoonist’s Source the next day: “Vaught Takes Her Shirt Off, Twists It Around, Spins It Like a Helicopter.”

Yeah. So that’s how that went.

I approached Brecky after the panel. A few of her interns hovered around, giving me the stink-eye. Brecky flicked them away with one hand. “Hey,” I said to her. “I’m really sorry about that. Mel gets a little weird sometimes. I hope she didn’t make you uncomfortable.”