The Animators(9)

The kid’s hand grasps a pack of Skittles and slips the candy into her pocket. Cut to an old guy at the counter, coffee-ground stubble on his cheeks, scratching at his newspaper with a pencil.

Cut to a shadowy form in a trucker hat meandering in the next aisle. A swath of light comes down just far enough so you can see his eyes, wily and blue, glint knowingly. Meet Red Line Dickie, the voice continues. As far as Mom’s boyfriends went, he was actually okay. He tolerated me, because he found me useful.

The kid walks the next aisle, pockets a battery. Red Line does a little nod. They do a separate stroll for the door. Then, off-frame, the unmistakable click of a shotgun’s safety being switched. The rumble: “Tell your brat to empty his pockets.”

A close-up of Red Line’s mouth: luscious, cruel lips, yellow teeth. Jaw unhinging softly as he bellows, “Run!”

The scene fragments, goes sharp and bright. There’s the sound of shots fired—the frames go crimson at the pops—as Red Line and Kid Mel scrabble to a waiting truck. They throw themselves inside. The truck takes off.

Didn’t even have time to tell him I was a girl, Mel’s voiceover says.

In the motion of the truck, Red Line whips off his hat, reaches out his hand. Kid Mel smacks a bunch of batteries into it, then slowly removes the Skittles from her pocket and tips the contents, careening in the light, into her mouth. Red Line taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learned, the voice says. Never work for free.

“Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses,” the announcer says. Someone pushes us out, and there we are.

I’ve seen the footage: the way Mel steps up to the mic, blinking, eyes almost rheumy under the lights (we are both breathtakingly stoned), hair blinding white, and me behind her (looking really good, actually, I can see that now; mouth painted red, hair piled high, giggling). She’s handed the Hollingsworth platter. Speaks briefly, gestures to me. It seems, on film, that I need to be beckoned, that I don’t want to speak. She has to pull me in, hand on my lower back: Go.

In the recordings, I don’t look anything like how I felt that night, so well concealed am I below the layers of manners and makeup. I don’t trust myself to diverge from the script. I can’t be funny like Mel; God knows if I tried I’d blow my load on a knock-knock joke. So I make my remarks short: Thank you, you don’t know how much this means. Something forgettable, something I forget right after I watch the video. But whatever it is, I mean it.

—

We skip the official after-party and take it back to the powder room for half of Mel’s joint on the way out to the real party, in Bushwick. I put my hair up, tug it back down. Muck up my eyeliner, glance in the mirror to find I resemble Alice Cooper. Redo. Descend into the subway to sweat it all off.

It’s Friday night. The L train is full of surly girls in minidresses and young, loosened-tie professionals. We hang from the pole entering the tunnel, letting our bodies sway with the train’s stops and starts. Walk in companionable silence in the dark.

This party is in our honor to celebrate the grant. Our friends know how to throw down in varying, encompassing ways; Mel is not the only one who knows how to dance with the monkey, though many would argue that she does it best. We’re mostly artists here, animators and editors and ink-and-color guys. Our friends have all brought their friends, writers from DC and Marvel, a few novelists watching from the periphery with slow pink eyes. There’s the grad students we get for scut work, extra tracing and color help: Jimmy the Fire Maniac, quiet Indian John Cafree. Our digital team mills around the drinks table, giving us the two-finger hello in unison. Surly Cathie the sound tech is talking shop with an engineer named Allan Danzig, who claims to be third cousin to the musician. They all holler and wave.

And then there’s actual applause. It makes me jump a little—the room rippling with whistles and hoots. All our friends are here, and they’re happy for us. My stomach breaks into blossom. I forget the reception, I forget about Beardsley. Something wonderful has happened, and we have enough people in our lives who are made joyful by our success to fill a room. I am lucky, I think, with a stab of shame. I don’t remember that enough.

Our draftsman buddy Fart approaches. I asked Mel once what his real name was. “That is his real name,” she said. “Franklin Ambrose Randolph Turner. How’s that for an acronym.”

Fart grabs me in a bear hug and swings me off the ground. His Gregg Allman beard presses into my face. “Hey, boss,” he yells, then reaches out and noogies Mel hard. “Congratulations, assholes!”

The factory is a former fax machine assembly site. Fireworks someone brought back from down South are whistling off the roof. We’re in Barren Brooklyn, all chain-link fences and loading docks and aging signage.

From the roof, the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway is a dark river humming in the distance. A Black Cat spins and pops, tossing sparks. Someone breaks a bottle—not intentionally, not yet, that won’t start until Mel is blackout-boot-scootin-boogie wasted. This is merely a party foul, the night’s first, and the people yell thusly.

Mel grabs someone’s top hat, slaps it onto her head, and lights a couple of sparklers. “What it do, baby,” she hoots, jutting her hips alarmingly at an intern. A crowd circles her, bespectacled NYU and Brooklyn College kids, a few transplants from the design school in Rhode Island, all cradling fireworks. Mel’s pretty, prettier than me, but the asshole act quashes any signals she accidentally, incidentally puts out. One night at a bar on the Lower East Side, a guy told her she looked just like that actress from the nineties, the one in Tank Girl. “That blond punky thing,” he said slovenly. Mel told him he looked like Ned Flanders.