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.
“Someone’s losing a finger tonight,” I say.
“It’s not a party until body parts are separated.” She wrings her hands at me, Italian-grandma-style. “So sock it.” Hands me a bottle rocket. I give it back. Two of the interns have cigarettes tucked behind their ears in knowing imitation of Mel, who tends to have this effect on the young. She begs tribute. I see at least one bleach-blond cut on a guy who was brunet last week; a lesbo haircut on a man turns out to be unremarkable.
I point to a bottle rocket. “Sorta close to a residential area, are we not?”
“Not that close.”
“Ridgewood’s like three blocks that way.”
“So?”
The interns look to me expectantly. “So?”
“Look at you.” Mel grabs my face. “So concerned. Let’s give her a hand. Sharon Kisses, everyone.” She smooches me hard and smacky on the forehead, scampers away. The interns run after her.