The Animators(8)

The Hollingsworth is almost too good. There’s the feeling that it’s either saved us or ruined us. We walk into the night knowing that, cult status or no, Nashville Combat’s on a limited run, and grants don’t mean shit unless people actually go out and see this thing. It’s hard to escape the feeling that if we don’t come up with an amazing idea for our next project, it could all end here. So cautiously, carefully, we dress up and take the subway to Manhattan. Toddling with pants down into our uncertain future.

Donnie caps her lipstick and turns to us. “Ladies,” she says. “They’re waiting for you out there. Time to join your party.”

—

I remember that night in flashes—whether because I was drunk (possible) or because that’s just how I remember everything now (also possible).

In memory, I am a spectator, watching the tops of our heads bob through the banquet hall. Mel leads the way, the only person I’ve ever seen who walks like the theme from Sanford and Son is playing on a loop in her head, through a crowd of clean-cut patrons and artists wearing Chucks with nine-hundred-dollar suits, their dates in silk boutique dresses. Getting our picture taken with Donnie and collective reps and foundation officers. Mel with her mouth open, hair bleached and cowlicked all to hell, me a sad-sacked, big-tittied Haggis McBaggis with unspeakable split ends. Playing off each other when introduced. It’s the Vaught and Kisses Show: I’m the straight man, Mel’s the wild card, we joust, we get laughs.

I take an occasional look around for Beardsley. Mel glances at me, irritated, knowing who I’m looking for. Mel believing in the night, believing that I should be having a better time.

We’re hustled backstage and put in a dark side wing to wait for our walkout. I can see the snub tip of Mel’s nose, her long, sensitive fingers reaching out to toy absently with the end. Her hands make her the best draftsman I know, deft at the old-school, minute-by-minute sketches on which our work is built, the kind the old Warner Bros. studios once glorified. Had Mel been born sixty years earlier, and a man, she would have been a star: a prewar, chain-smoking, dame-ogling cartoon auteur. Not to say she’s not comfortable in her own skin, but one gets the sense she’s forever strumming on a wire in there, constantly trying to escape from some secret seam. It occurs to me, looking at her in the dark, that I may be the only person to see this, the only person able to get close enough to Mel Vaught in the wild to see the quivering underbelly.

I hear her let out a shaky breath. She’s nervous. I reach out and make her take my hand. One of the board members is speaking onstage.

“Their first full-length feature, Nashville Combat, is a true tour de force: equal parts angry and tender, funny and sorrowful, demonstrative of a thoughtful, skilled craftwork. Like its creators, the work seems older than its years. Vaught and Kisses have made known their allegiance to the ink-and-color tactics prized by classic animators, and the content of Nashville Combat is as compelling as its look—a story of modern womanhood, gay identity, family, criminality, and the travails of a late twentieth-century childhood. The vessel for these issues is co-creator Mel Vaught, who transcends autobiography to make something entirely new with her story of growing up poor in the Central Florida swamps with a delinquent mother who is incarcerated when Vaught is thirteen years old. It is dark, yet brilliantly funny, well crafted enough to let the light shine through the cracks.”

The lights dim. A screen behind the podium flickers.

To us, the opening credits of Nashville Combat are like the voice of a friend. We know it immediately. We worried over the first two minutes for months, trying at least twenty different approaches before settling on the final cut. “What’s the best way,” Mel kept saying, “to get someone’s heart rate up? Make them feel like someone’s hovering just over their shoulder? That’s what we need.” We used distortion to fuzz the initial frames, making it look like a bad conversion from analog, like the old stuff we love, something best seen in a piss-drenched movie theater forty years ago, seats knifed to bits, carpet stained, a man with no face in a trench coat two rows behind you. The landscape is all smeared pastels, ink blobs—a dirty bizarro world, part Ren & Stimpy, part Clutch Cargo, part seventies German cartoon porno.

I can feel every year that has passed since we met in the first thirty seconds of the movie. All those nights in college we spent sketching, talking Tex Avery and the old school, dissecting everything from The Simpsons to Krazy Kat, tracking down lovely old Nickelodeon bumpers and watching them over and over, taking notes, finding out about production companies, learning how to track other artists, their techniques, their tics. We pored over all the gritty American International stuff, all the Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic we could handle. The grainy, ripped-off VHS and Betamax tapes I picked up on trips to Manhattan from hole-in-the-wall comic book shops and porn retailers back when a good chunk of the Village was still dangerous. The beginning of our work life together, the 2001-to-2002 school year, tinged with rising terror levels and TVs blaring, a raw feeling around the edges of everything. The first night we met. I look down at my arm. The hairs are standing up.

Onscreen, a skinny kid with a yellow bowl cut walks through a gas station. My mom went to prison when I was thirteen years old, the voiceover says—the voice being Mel’s, of course; no one else could replicate that rippling, broken-glass sound. I was probably lucky I didn’t go with her.