The Animators(3)

It was mostly me Mel talked to that night. The rest of the art kids eventually left, but we stayed, huddled at the bar with Miller High Lifes. “They can’t hold their liquor yet,” Mel said, wagging her hand at the door. “Kiddies.” I didn’t tell her that I could count on one hand the number of times I’d gotten drunk.

I saw the corner of a brightly colored book sticking from her bag. Deadbone Erotica. On the cover, wonky neon lizards cavorted with large-breasted Amazonian women.

I plucked it out, looked it over. “What’s this?”

Mel raked her hand through her pageboy. It was the longest I would ever see her hair. Two weeks later, she would hit it with cerulean Manic Panic and walk around Smurf-headed until Christmas. Then she shaved it all off and bitched about the northern winter teabagging her scalp.

“That’s fuckin rad is what that is.” She leaned over and tapped the Deadbone cover. “You like comics.” It wasn’t a question.

I flipped through. It was drawn in a bubble style: weird, druggy shapes. I had just started paying attention to method, color, how things were rendered, the technical shit they wake you up to in school that you can’t help but see everywhere after. The comic was alive, bright and blasted. But there was something else drawing me in—the yellowed paper, the deep, musty smell. It was like cutting down a tree and counting the rings within. A creepy awareness of the years passing.

“I bet you’re more of a Warner Brothers fan, though.” Mel tilted her beer at me. “I can tell. From your stuff. You do that thing, too, where there’s this, like, acknowledgment that crazy exists. Like it’s out there and pretty close by, actually, but you don’t have to draw it for us. We get the hint.”

“I used to watch some Looney Tunes,” I said slowly, trying to gauge whether I was about to say something of friendship-disqualifying weirdness.

“Right on.”

What I didn’t tell her: I actually spent every Saturday morning watching Looney Tunes, then the uncensored, wartime Merrie Melodies marathons that aired on weekend afternoon cable. Nazi smashers, vintage high-speed chases through Technicolor deserts. I could still remember how offended, how personally smote, I was when Nickelodeon first censored those cartoons: blurring or blocking the oversized pistols, the entire screen fuzzing at the shot that made Daffy Duck’s feathers fly. I was already a purist. A devotee, of some sort.

The dust clouds in Mel’s picture. Those were WB takeoff clouds, to be sure. Funny and a little bit eerie at the same time. I knew I’d seen them somewhere before.

But saying this would have felt like speaking volumes. It was more effort than I could expend, for how afraid I was of chasing Mel off. So all I said was “Yeah, they were awesome.”

“So do you draw comics?”

“I used to. And then I went to this summer arts program. And the prof there told me to study architecture.”

I said this with difficulty. Mel was hellfire and balls all over, I could already tell. She’d never let anyone talk her out of anything. I felt my face burn.

But she just said, “That sounds character-building,” and then mimed ramming a straw through her eye.

Then, “Is your name really Sharon Kisses?”

“It is until I have the money to get it changed.”

“Dude, no. Your name is mind-blowing.”

“My name is a confirmation that my parents hate me.” I burped. “It’s Scottish. And it’s terrible.”

She gave me a long look while managing to swig her beer. “How’d you end up here?”

“You mean at Ballister?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged, embarrassed. I told the truth when asked where I was from, but I always considered lying first.

“You’re Southern,” Mel said. “Obviously.”

I pressed my hand to my mouth.

She laughed. “Try to hide, but you can’t. Whereabouts?”

“East Kentucky. About a half an hour from West Virginia.”

She whistled through her teeth. “Wow. I knew there was evidence of white trashiness in you, but Jesus H.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Might your couch have been covered in plastic wrap?”

I put my hands on my face in mock surprise. “However did you know?”

She smacked her palm on the bar and cawed. “I knew you were good people. That’s what I like to hear, man.” In her other hand, she dangled her bottle with two fingers, like she was used to holding a beer. “Fluted notes of white trashiness. Nuances of crackery, hillbilly goodness.”

“Hey now.” I shook my fist at her.

She clapped me on the back. “You’re good people,” she repeated.

I fumbled for something to say. I already had the sense that Mel’s brain ran faster than mine. “Thanks.”

“Note I said nuance.” Mel held a finger up. The bartender took it as a motion for another round. Mel shrugged, accepted. “You’re lucky, dude. We were full-on trash. No nuance. Just the thing itself, staring you down.”

I was going to ask what she meant, but she said, “You ever seen Heavy Metal? That futuristic cartoon from the eighties?”

“No.”

“Your stuff in class kind of reminded me of it. Want to go watch it?”

She wanted to hang out. The first time I would actually hang out with someone in college. My stomach blossomed. “Okay.”