Zoom in on a swarm of shifty-eyed cats, tumbling over each other, biting, mewling in a freak-out chorus. Had a whole family of them living down underneath the trailer. There were always like ten at a time. Some would get run over or eaten by alligators or tortured by mean kids, but they just kept replenishing themselves. They were unstoppable. I used to feed them popsicles. Kid Mel holds a dripping orange bar out to a skinny gray kitten. The kitten nibbles, then begins to glow.
Then a screech: “Melody, leave them fuckin cats alone, they’re diseased!”
Enter Mel’s mom. We drew her to fill the trailer: hair, boobs, huge pink lips. We made a background track in the studio of nonsensical babbling, like a cassette tape running on hyperspeed, to play in the home scenes, to create a nonstop presence of Mom in every scene. Mom was this itty-bitty woman, Mel says. Brief-looking, you know, like maybe five foot one, but God, she had this enormous rack, and these ropey little arms, and a lot of horsepower when it came to beating ass. She could land punches like a goddamn windmill.
There is a lingering shot of her mother loping through the house, cutoffs falling down her lower back, rim of neon panty peeking through. It was a few years before I discovered what my mother did for a living.
And here, the men return, different this time, floating in and out of the front door. They’d stay an hour or two, then leave. And I began to notice that, after they left, we suddenly had cash again, and we could go to Pizza Hut, or to the store.
The situation was obvious to Mel, who’d just started plowing through Elmore Leonard and any other troubled-looking paperback she could get her hands on: They were paying for sex. She could hear them falling around in the bathroom in the wee hours, would awaken to find a lifted toilet seat, a few cigarette butts (not her mother’s brand) floating in the bowl, and a fetid brown smell left by some large, strange man’s meditations.
Trailer interior. Bright maroon background. Slack-jawed trucker dude adjusts his belt: “You gon gimme a ride up the road?”
Outside shot: The trailer door slams open. The trucker dude is chased out onto the lawn, dodging thrown bottles, magazines, coffee mugs, while a crowd of agitated cats accosts his legs going mow mow mow mow mow. “I ain’t your fuckin chauffeur,” her mom yells.
Second interior shot: Mel’s mom, hair enormous, sits on their couch, a thick cloud of ganja smoke overhead. A circle of stoned dudes, red-eyed and loose, hoots at MTV’s The Grind. She did other stuff for money, too, Mel continues. She sold run-of-the-mill skunk weed, worth maybe five bucks for every twenty charged. Smattering of shrooms and coke, when she could get them.
“Those guys were the reason I didn’t try pot until the summer before college, by the way,” Mel told me later. “They made anything look dumb. They could make open-heart surgery look stupider than hell.”
Next shot: Mel, slightly older, watches from her bedroom window: A throng of police follow two plainclothes cops who posed as buyers. The scene is played out in shadow, with Mel’s mom struggling, then wrestled into handcuffs. Kid Mel, dragging a suitcase behind her, being led into a police cruiser. She went into custody, Mel says. And I went to live with my aunt on a swamp farm.
In the movie, I snicker.
Don’t laugh, fucker.
Sorry, it’s just—it’s a swamp farm.
Something occurs to me. I reach out and pause the clip.
Mel didn’t want to do Nashville Combat, at first. She said she didn’t think the idea was strong enough. But I kept haranguing her. I loved the stories she told about herself. I thought they were awesome. Funny and detailed and strong. I pushed her, like with Red Line—sketching it out with touches I knew she’d like, and then giving it to her to crack up over. One day I showed her the sketch I did of her as her dad, bearded with a pool cue. It made her laugh so hard she had to bend at the waist to let it out. “All right, Sharon Kay,” she conceded. “Maybe there’s something there. But Mom. This is how you do her face.”
She craned over, hand twitching, then straightened. A clear face, obviously beautiful but grimacing, staring at me from the page.
“Funny thing,” Mel said. “The prettier the face, the fewer the details. Fewer lines, less sketch time. Not as complex as an old lady. Or a dude. Any dude.”