I hang up, pop a couple of ibuprofen for the low-grade headache I’ve had for most of the morning, and curl up on the couch, running my fingers through three days of hair grease. Click on Netflix. Light up a joint. Try to disconnect.
Brecky’s documentary series is on my “Recommended for You” suggestion list. If Mel and I ever call it quits, I guess there would no longer be a reason to consider Brecky my mortal enemy. The reality of my social stance without Mel occurs to me. Connections shouldn’t count, but God knows they do. And I will need them. I keep thinking about our fight: You can’t do this without me. It robs me of appetite every time. I’m not accustomed to thinking of myself in the singular; it’s a new, chilling experience.
I run a bath, light up another joint, put on some Ren & Stimpy to even myself out. I sink into the cold water and try to trace it all back. What happened to Mel this summer? How did we get out of hand together so fast? I think of the beginning of the tour, when we were still booking two separate hotel suites and she just passed out in mine night after night. How I was the only one to see how torturous it was for her to sleep, how she kicked and muttered and cried out. How watching the movie—something she once loved—turned her to ice, how she drummed her fingers on her knees at the opening credits, wincing; how, when the audience laughed, she pulled a flask I didn’t know she had from her pocket and slumped down in her seat to take a pull. I felt guilty admitting to myself how much I loved seeing people see the movie. How, when the audience laughed, I could feel myself flush and get wet, squirming breathless in my seat, glad I wasn’t a dude or else I’d pop a raging boner every time someone paid me a compliment, while Mel had to get high before meet and greets just to get through them. By the third or fourth screening this summer, her eyes were perpetually pink after eight P.M., no questions asked.
None of this is supremely new. Mel’s always liked to unwind, drink, smoke, smoke up. She’s a good-time girl. It’s the look on her face, more than anything, that makes it different than before; a sudden preoccupation when she’s still, the way she snaps in irritation when asked if she’s okay: “I’m fine. Jesus.” As if she’s been caught at something.
The undercurrent, rarely discussed: We did not ask Mel’s mom’s permission. Nashville Combat rides the line between memoir and fiction; we used a facsimile of Mel’s mom, a her-but-not-her, as the movie’s focus, though it’s understood that this particular line between fiction and reality is all but nonexistent. Distribution’s legal team told us slander was a hard case to prove if you changed names, where they worked, who they dated. “She doesn’t give a fuck what I do,” Mel maintained mildly. “You shouldn’t worry so much.”
But wouldn’t she want to know? I asked. Doesn’t she want to know what you’re doing in the world?
“Like I said,” Mel repeated. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”
But during the tour, I could tell she was thinking of that Salon article. Rolling the question over and over, like a pebble in the mouth.
We had planned to use the few weeks we had in New York before the tour to brainstorm, but she stopped working at the studio. Started taking her laptop and sketchpad to a bar in Bushwick called Dixie Mafia. I tried to join her there but accomplished nothing, sipping G and Ts and eyeing the male bartenders woefully. We haven’t had a productive day since Kelly Kay died. It marks the first time we’ve been blocked in a few years. Just trying to work feels stifling. Futile.
The women have multiplied. There have always been a lot—Mel has a way—but now there are more, and they are more fleeting. It used to be that Mel’s horndog would only really come out when she needed to unwind after a bad day. Like when we got shot down for a Hollingsworth the first time we applied—she wanted to drink, then fuck, then drink, in that order. She likes brunettes; in homage to her Florida roots, she’s drawn to women with deep tans. She’s rarely had girlfriends serious enough to bring around the studio, but now she doesn’t date at all. She prefers darkness, inebriation, speed. A near-dawn visit to someone’s apartment to shed clothes, bump bodies, fall asleep.
One morning, when I’d left her at Dixie Mafia the night before, she came into the studio sporting a brand-new black eye. “What happened?” I asked her.
She winked her good eye at me. “Her name was Starla.”
It’s all happened so fast, the transition of Mel’s hell-raising from preoccupation to main attraction, that I keep asking myself if I’m not blowing it all out of proportion. If I’m really seeing what I think I’m seeing. But you don’t work with someone for over ten years without getting some overflow, knowing a little of what they know, feeling a little of what they feel. I can feel the dark rushing at Mel’s center, the guilt that’s gnawing her raw. It rips me in half to see something she loves hurt her so badly. I wonder if this is why we can’t come up with a good idea. If she’s scared to work. And, if she is, what I can possibly do about it.