The Animators(40)

There is a lingering shot of her mother loping through the house, cutoffs falling down her lower back, rim of neon panty peeking through. It was a few years before I discovered what my mother did for a living.

And here, the men return, different this time, floating in and out of the front door. They’d stay an hour or two, then leave. And I began to notice that, after they left, we suddenly had cash again, and we could go to Pizza Hut, or to the store.

The situation was obvious to Mel, who’d just started plowing through Elmore Leonard and any other troubled-looking paperback she could get her hands on: They were paying for sex. She could hear them falling around in the bathroom in the wee hours, would awaken to find a lifted toilet seat, a few cigarette butts (not her mother’s brand) floating in the bowl, and a fetid brown smell left by some large, strange man’s meditations.

Trailer interior. Bright maroon background. Slack-jawed trucker dude adjusts his belt: “You gon gimme a ride up the road?”

Outside shot: The trailer door slams open. The trucker dude is chased out onto the lawn, dodging thrown bottles, magazines, coffee mugs, while a crowd of agitated cats accosts his legs going mow mow mow mow mow. “I ain’t your fuckin chauffeur,” her mom yells.

Second interior shot: Mel’s mom, hair enormous, sits on their couch, a thick cloud of ganja smoke overhead. A circle of stoned dudes, red-eyed and loose, hoots at MTV’s The Grind. She did other stuff for money, too, Mel continues. She sold run-of-the-mill skunk weed, worth maybe five bucks for every twenty charged. Smattering of shrooms and coke, when she could get them.

“Those guys were the reason I didn’t try pot until the summer before college, by the way,” Mel told me later. “They made anything look dumb. They could make open-heart surgery look stupider than hell.”

Next shot: Mel, slightly older, watches from her bedroom window: A throng of police follow two plainclothes cops who posed as buyers. The scene is played out in shadow, with Mel’s mom struggling, then wrestled into handcuffs. Kid Mel, dragging a suitcase behind her, being led into a police cruiser. She went into custody, Mel says. And I went to live with my aunt on a swamp farm.

In the movie, I snicker.

Don’t laugh, fucker.

Sorry, it’s just—it’s a swamp farm.

Something occurs to me. I reach out and pause the clip.

Mel didn’t want to do Nashville Combat, at first. She said she didn’t think the idea was strong enough. But I kept haranguing her. I loved the stories she told about herself. I thought they were awesome. Funny and detailed and strong. I pushed her, like with Red Line—sketching it out with touches I knew she’d like, and then giving it to her to crack up over. One day I showed her the sketch I did of her as her dad, bearded with a pool cue. It made her laugh so hard she had to bend at the waist to let it out. “All right, Sharon Kay,” she conceded. “Maybe there’s something there. But Mom. This is how you do her face.”

She craned over, hand twitching, then straightened. A clear face, obviously beautiful but grimacing, staring at me from the page.

“Funny thing,” Mel said. “The prettier the face, the fewer the details. Fewer lines, less sketch time. Not as complex as an old lady. Or a dude. Any dude.”

Nashville Combat was the biggest thing we’d ever worked on, and the most personal. We both had the sense that the project was an extension of ourselves. A sense that it would become our shared history for as long as we were immersed in its making—that I would give up my own personhood for a while and double down in Mel’s, for as long as it took to finish.

It was the most energized I’d ever seen Mel. She spent hours talking into a handheld recorder, rehashing old stories, grasping to recall each possible detail. She sketched school lunches: the olive-green plastic tray, the pizza, the chocolate milk, the corn. What her mother tended to wear around the house in 1989 (brief cutoffs, occasional Def Leppard T-shirt), what Mel herself wore on the first day of third grade (Reeboks, same Def Leppard T-shirt). She went online, found the make and model of the double-wide in which they had lived, and contacted the company. They explained that her particular model, River Blue 973, had been discontinued, but sent the blueprints with their compliments. We started with the details. Two years of work, the story stemming from the little things, then growing out and out.

But when the project was done, I left it behind. At day’s end, the story was Mel’s—a narrative of how she got from point A to point B, and, now that she was at B, how to get shed of A as completely as she could. The telling of the story was the furthest she would ever travel from her old self—to stepping outside that world and, from a safer distance, watching. It was a project I’d wanted to start because, callous, I thought it was funny; for Mel, it was much more. And maybe she knew it, because she was the cautious one, the one who knew that the next step we took could be into a pothole.

The last scene of the excerpt lingers on the trailer as the sky grows darker. You know, the voiceover continues, it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there’s the reality that we’re not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper imprint—all the ridges and gathers—on who we are? Do we have a choice?

I let the scene go dark and stop. There’s a fluttering in my middle now. It’s enough to make me lean over, close out of Firefox, and open the blinding light of Word.