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.
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.
—