The Animators(6)

“It’s the greatest thing you can do for something,” she said. “Giving it movement. Possibility.”

She handed the sketch back. Looked at me very seriously for a moment, considering me. She said it again. “You’d be really good.”

I held her gaze, unsure of where to take all this. Finally I lurched over her, snatched the Zebra Cakes, and crammed one in my mouth. I stared at her. “I fotched me your Ding Dong,” I told her.

She giggled. “Fotch. Holy hell, what’d you do, roll around in a big pile of Hee Haw before you came to college?”

Mel twisted over me and reached for her backpack. Pulled out a handful of VHS tapes. Handed one to me. “Put it in.”

I slid it into my roommate’s VCR. Mel closed her eyes, smiled at the heavy, comforting click of it snapping into the gears. “That’s the best sound in the world,” she said.

The screen blinked dirty gray. A sinister, heavy-eyed duck, a methy Daffy, wears a trench coat in an alley. A lady rounds a corner, he flashes her. She screams. He turns slowly to the viewer, something in his movement a little jerky, a little slow, and grins. You can almost see the frames flicking to make the shift. “What is this?” I asked Mel.

“Dirty Duck. 1974. Offshoot of that whole Fritz the Cat San Francisco alt-comic thing. R. Crumb and all that.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. But I nodded anyway.

“I’ve always kind of liked how it looks. It’s gritty. I like how you can see someone, somewhere, actually drawing this. You know?”

I nodded again.

“Have you ever seen The Maxx?” Mel said.

I started, nearly knocking over the can we’d been using as an ashtray. “You’ve seen The Maxx?”

Mel grinned at me. “Of course,” she said. “That show was, like, a milestone, if you had cable and were a weird kid. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I leaned over, wiping up ashes with tissues.

The Maxx was my favorite show, that summer I was ten, in the days of our house’s fuzzy, unreliable cable. Not something my parents would have let me watch, had they been paying attention. The story of a superhero living in two separate but real dimensions: a grimy, dangerous metropolis in which he is homeless, and a wild jungle landscape in which he battles dark forces to protect his jungle queen, who in the city is his traumatized social worker.

It aired late-night when kids my age were supposed to be in bed. Alone in the living room while everyone else slept, I consoled myself in the light of the TV.

“Well, shit. I knew you had good taste,” Mel said. “I got it. Let’s break it out, man.”

She found the tape, slipped it in.

The screen lit with the eerie off-black of prelude. The hairs on my arms stood up. It was like being in the room with a ghost. The screen crackled, two or three lightning bolts cutting through the high fuzz of the analog. Mel had taped it from her TV.

I was suddenly back in my parents’ house, alone in front of the Magnavox, back when television had an end: the time of night at which it, and by extension we, went off the radar. The CBS affiliate played the national anthem, the flag rippling in the sky over idyllic shots of farmland and mountains. And then, the screen cuts to the green, creeping Doppler radar, the dread at the dead, single-note tone of sign-off.

It was while watching the show that the idea of being any kind of artist first occurred to me. Being wrapped in that story was the furthest I had ever been away from myself. That something could lift me out of my skin like that was a revelation. When I watched, I was able to discorporate—a word I would learn, and love, later on. I wanted that portal for myself, strange and private and good.

I felt tears come to my eyes. I turned away slightly, rubbed. Mumbled something about contact lenses.

Mel nodded. Kindly looked away. “Finding stuff by accident,” she said. “That’s how most people get started, I think. I stole Dirty Duck from one of my mom’s boyfriends, back in the day. Someone gave it to him as a joke, because it had cartoon fucking in it. But I loved it as soon as I saw it. Started drawing right then.”

She removed the last two cigarettes from the pack. Lit them both. Handed me one. “Instant love,” she said. “That’s how it works.”

We sank into a cozy little vacuum, Mel and I, watching. I don’t know if it was the cartoons themselves, or watching them with Mel, but that night was the closest I had felt to knowing what I wanted from my life. She was the first person to see me as I had always wanted to be seen. It was enough to indebt me to her forever.

—

I stirred on my dorm room bed with my first legitimate hangover, feeling like I was going to throw up on the floor. I saw the fuzzy outline of Mel sitting in front of the television, clicking through channels. I reached for my glasses.

She turned, hair matted. “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey,” she said.

“Did you even sleep last night?”

“I don’t sleep. Not really.”

We rose and walked slowly to the Student Center. Campus was silent. Through the glass panels of the center, we could see undergrads in ones and twos, eating cereal around the canteen.

Mel cleared her throat. “Listen. So, uh, let me know if you ever want to work on something. You know? Like partner up? Do some cartoons?”

It was a strange, shy moment. We didn’t look at each other—she stared at the ground, sort of shuffling her sneakers. I glanced over my shoulder at the center. It was quiet until I said, “Yeah. Okay. Why not?”