I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. There’s a horrible cottony stillness for a good three seconds before I feel Mel stir at my side, just now waking up to the room. She jumps in: “Are you kidding? Kisses is the boss, man.”
Glynnis goes back to her with a lopsided grin. It’s genuine—not what she gives Fenton, or me, but something secret and hidden. They’re the only two people in the room again.
I have ten pages of notes sitting on my desk back at the studio, the weeks of worry and preparation I’ve put into this interview. My freshman year at Ballister, I listened to Glynnis’s podcast (and she was one of the first to post podcasts, at the very tip of the aughts) on the mammoth Dell I’d just bought for college. Listening to Glynnis always gave me the sense of driving around the periphery of a large city at night, lights made brighter by the darkness surrounding—exotic signage, alien parkways. I ran over the dummy questions, I practiced my best, thoughtful erm, my radio laugh. Thinking, Glynnis will love me, will love us. Never imagining I’d need to practice a defense against an ambush, against What was your stake in this?
I expect Mel to say something more here, something more directly in my defense. But she doesn’t.
“Fair enough,” Glynnis says. “But the question of setting”—she wags her finger back and forth between us; I’ve suddenly reappeared—“relates tangentially to a very old argument as to the nature of animation, which still has trouble defining itself as a mature genre. When subject matter veers toward the complicated or dark, as I would say it does in your film, it seems many will pull back out of a belief that the cartoon rules of content have been violated. Which brings us to a difficult point in the story of this movie: the death of Kelly Kay Vaught, the archetype for Nashville Combat’s Mom.”
A high-pitched shriek of gas comes from my midsection. The mic picks it up. Glynnis glances at me. Then back to Mel.
“This must be an incredibly tough time for you, Mel,” she says.
“Yeah, well,” Mel says, “it’s, you know, never easy to lose someone. Even if you hadn’t been in touch. Which my mom and I weren’t, not really.” She pauses. Where is this coming from? “Still a weird place to be in.”
“For those of you who don’t know,” Glynnis starts, and then recounts the entirety of the whole grisly Kelly Kay fiasco—the prison scuffle, the wound. I sneak a look at Mel. Her face is neutral. I see the pink lining of her left eye jump slightly.
“Had you discussed the movie with your mother?” Glynnis asks gently.
“No,” Mel says. “She didn’t even know about it. Like I said, we hadn’t talked in a while.”
“Some have suggested, how would one phrase this, a complicated relationship between the depiction of Kelly Kay in this film and the events surrounding her death. What’s your reaction to this?”
I grit my teeth. Mel crosses and uncrosses her legs, sniffs deeply. “What, that guy from Salon who wrote that story? That what we’re really talking about here?”
“Well, if you want to address that—”
“I have no problem addressing that. It was a ridiculous argument. It was bullshit.”
I reach out to touch Mel’s arm.
Glynnis throws her hand out toward me. “Let her finish,” she says.
I shrink back.
The Salon story was on the ramifications of what the author coined “reality fiction”—stories based on real life, real people, actual events—and how these works affected those on whom the characters were based. Discussed were a writer with a recent novel detailing a breakup with an ex-girlfriend who, in turn, claimed her business suffered as a result of the book, and a woman who’d written a television show about her spectacularly ruinous marriage who did not deny that her handsome divorce settlement may have been inflated as a result of the publicity. Nashville Combat was the article’s centerpiece: a film so personal, and so troubling, that it may have precipitated the death of its inspiration, provoking a fellow inmate to beat her, either due to celebrity or infamy.
It was a reach, by any definition. But it was also a huge blow. An incredibly damning story in a respected publication with high page views. We all told Mel to not let it bother her; Donnie suggested an Internet ban. “Fuck it,” Mel said, flapping her hand. “It’s so much chatter. Doesn’t matter.” But it bothered her, I could tell.
I scroll to the quote on my iPhone and toss it into Mel’s lap, then give Glynnis the evil eye: See? I can be useful.