The Animators(4)

“Cool. I’m in Hagen. We can walk over.”

We chugged our beers. She motioned to the bartender and pulled a wallet from her back pocket—the first woman I’d ever seen who carried her wallet in the rear. We paid and hoisted our backpacks onto our shoulders, then she said, “Hold up.” Rummaged through her bag, came up empty-handed. For the first time that evening, she looked anxious. “I can’t find my sketchbook.”

“I’ll bet it’s back at Prebble. Let’s go check.”

The doors to Prebble were wide open, the janitors buffing the linoleum. We walked past them, unseen, and up to the art studios on the third floor. Mel’s sketchbook was lying on the podium. She grabbed it with an audible sigh of relief. “God damn, I thought I lost you,” she said, and flicked through. She stopped, mouth screwed to one side.

“What.”

“That son of a bitch. He went through it.” She peered closer. “He graded it. McIntosh fucking graded my private sketchbook. Look.” She pointed. “Correction lines. Check marks. In ink. See?”

She opened to a sketch of the interior of a 7-Eleven, rows of stiff, shining potato chip bags on a wire rack. In the corner off to the side, a baby screeching with crazed eyes, faint yet present—not the picture’s point, but a facet of its landscape. Lovely, McIntosh had scrawled.

She turned the page. Instead of a sketch, she’d fashioned a makeshift storyboard. A Shakes the Clown type doing coke lines off what appeared to be a Country Living cookbook proffered by a tired-looking call girl. Square two: Shakes straightens, one finger slyly held to nostril. Square three: gazes to the audience, eyes wide. Square four: a cacophony of light and noise, Shakes gigging his feet out, screaming, “SQUEEEEEE!” A pig’s head floats in the corner, winking, the cheerful harbinger of doom. The tagline below: This Is Between Me and the Voices in My Head.

I liked it even better than the stuff she brought to class—it was looser, less restrained, the style sharp yet just loopy enough. But underneath, McIntosh wrote, Why are you wasting your time with this?

Mel stuffed the book into her bag, took a look around, and nodded at the locked room tucked into the classroom’s rear. McIntosh’s office.

“Got a bobby pin?” she asked me.

I picked through my bag, handed one to her. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what he’s hiding in there.”

She knelt down, snapped the bobby pin in half, then bent it and stuck it into the lock, tilting her head to listen as she jimmied.

I looked over my shoulder. “Maybe we should come back later?”

“It’s the ten-to-six. Those guys aren’t the least bit interested in what we’re doing.”

The lock gave with a weak click. Mel held the pin up, triumphant. This was, I was quickly learning, my balancing point with Mel—her ideas gave me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I went along with them anyway.

McIntosh’s office was dingy even in the dark, with only a small window facing the woods to the college’s south. There was a crack in the wall coming from the spot where he’d nailed his Princeton diploma; from somewhere, we could hear a steady drip.

Mel yanked open the desk and began sifting through. “Okay. Cough drops. Tea bags. Pepper packets. Metamucil. Oil pencils. Shit. Okay.” She opened another drawer. Pulled out a canister of Maxwell House. “Oh ho. Hold the phone.” Wiggled her eyebrows. Lifted out a baggie.

“What is it?”

“It appears,” she said, “to be the dankness.” She brought the bag to her nose, inhaled. “Yes. That is middle-aged, professional-grade weed.” She unzipped her backpack and dropped it in. “You get high?”

I scratched my nose. There was a beat before I admitted, “Haven’t tried.”

Mel let her hands fall to her sides. “Aw, Sharon. You’re gonna love this. You’re gonna let the world happen to you, and you’re gonna love it.”

—

It was balmy outside, one of the last few seventy-degree halcyon days in September. We camped out behind Prebble with a bottle of Woodford Reserve we’d also found in McIntosh’s desk. I watched, fascinated, as Mel parsed seed from stem on the back of her sketchbook.

There was no way McIntosh could report the theft, which, we agreed, gave our steal the flavor of deceit. Not that it would have made much difference. McIntosh would be fired a few years after we graduated. I would encounter him not long after at an opening at PS1, saying, “Hey, Professor McIntosh, how are you?” And he would gaze at me, drinker’s rosacea creeping into his cheeks, and he would hiss, “You. Are a living example. That the world. Is unfair.”

Never again have I been as pleasantly stoned as I was that night behind Prebble with Mel, so high without shame or baggage. After a brief bout of paranoia, the night took on a crisp, golden quality. I felt the top of my skin lift off. The weight that had been sitting on top of my throat since I had arrived began to release. Time stretched, grew thin and gauzy, all fuzzy endings and beginnings. I can’t tell you how long we played roly-poly down the hillside, kicking off to land in a heap at the hill’s foot. Or how we made our way to SuperAmerica to stare at the Hostess cakes until the cashier said, “Girls, either buy something or get out,” and I gingerly picked up a pack of Ho Hos as if it were a living thing. Or how long Mel laughed when I tried to light the wrong end of a cigarette. And I cannot recall how we made our way back to my dorm room to find my roommate, a girl from Binghamton even more homesick than I was, mercifully spending a long weekend back home.