In the movie, there’s a short follow-up scene to this story—the next morning Mel’s mom crawls out of bed, sees the Lite-Brite, and in a face-twisting fit of rage, she throws it out the window, where it is quickly claimed by the trailer park’s feral cat pack. Mel’s mother has absolute murder in her eyes during the cut. It’s weird and abrupt, as a scene; amid all the noise, it is governed by a pregnant sort of silence.
It always made me wince a little, seeing these parts. But Mel doesn’t change, watching her mom destroy her Lite-Brite over and over. Sometimes she laughs. The joke is our default, even when it feels like we’re beyond the point of making them.
—
The first time I try to walk on my own with the twin beams in the Exercise Room, I shit my pants.
First I’m upright, straining, putting weight on my right arm in exactly the fashion I’ve been warned against, and then the gates release and it’s over. The nurses know right away. “Okay,” they say, “okay.” I’m hustled back to my room to be changed.
I keep my eyes closed while an orderly lays me down and undresses me. I try to picture myself somewhere else, my humiliation as distant object. It’s at least the tenth time this week someone has seen my vagina without the intention of having sex with it.
I tried not to cry when they removed my catheter, after I woke up. It didn’t work. It doesn’t work when I’m being changed, either.
—
I am brought a copy of this month’s Animator’s Digest. They did an interview with us right before the panel discussion. We are photographed in the studio, Mel in oversized flannel and Docs, nineties-style, feet cocked up on the desk, a pencil between her teeth. I am positioned behind her to hide my gut chub and double chin. The version of me who could walk and talk and feed herself, who could cry with both sides of her face.
I keep thinking about that picture as the MRI takes me into the tube, its machinery sliding me into the dark. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses in their studio, Brooklyn, NY.
Our Kotex commercial airs the same week the article is released. We were hired to design something “pad-centric” when Nashville Combat was in postproduction and we were subsisting on lentils and six-packs of PBR. We were instructed to steal some thunder from tampon usage with a “fun, lighthearted spot” showcasing the company’s new Super Light Close-to-You sanitary napkin. “Isn’t that a Carpenters song?” Mel said after they approached us.
We like to work backward, usually starting with a character’s essence—the look, the feel, the sound. The shit they’d say. The way they walk—is it a swagger? A tiptoe? A duck shuffle? Do they have an inner-ear infection, a bum knee? Only then, when they have a body, do they make it to the lightboard. Some imagine themselves quickly, with slippery ease; they cannot wait to be born. Others, not at all. This is a tough one, because it’s a thing—or, moreover, a product—we have been hired to sell.
When we’re stuck, like we were with Kotex, we talk it through. We retreat to the far end of the studio to toss a dirty pink Spalding ball Mel bought from a bodega back and forth. There’s something about watching the ball’s arc through the air, feeling its contact with the hand, that does something for thought. Ideas seem to come easier, the underlying wisdom of process and plan appearing in flashes, silver minnow bellies in the waters of distraction.
Mel tossed the ball in the air, let it drop, swooped down to cradle it. “I don’t know if I want to do this,” she complained.
I clapped my hands, held them up to make the catch. “It’s thirty thousand.”
“Dude, we just finished a fuckin movie. I’m tired. Come on.”
“We need the money.” I wound up, then threw it soft, a perfect parabola. “I need you to want to.”
She caught it, kept it. Jumped up and down. Rubbed her eyes. “What do they want,” she bleated.
“You know what they said. Glorify the Kotex. They said empower the Kotex, if memory serves.”
“So basically we’re trying to market a half diaper for grown-ass women here.”
“Exactly. So think. How do we empower pads?”
Mel turned. Tossed the ball against the wall. It thocked, came back. “Make em fight.”
“I’m not sure we should make them living things.”
“Or should we? Dude. Vampire Kotex.”
“Gross.”
“Or this. Ladies and gals, on their cycles, in a brawl. Wearing super-absorbent Kotex while throwing down.” She winged the ball up the wall again, harder. “One of em swinging a chain around like, YAAH! Kotex: Soak Up the Rage!”
“Softer tagline, maybe?”
She ran a hand through her hair, squinted into the middle distance. Said slowly, “Kotex: As Tough as You Are.”