Mel slips the squirrel back in her pocket. Shoots her cuffs, wrings out her shoulders. I see her hands tremble slightly. “Please,” she says.
Truth is, all this good luck has made us both a little gun-shy. When Donnie told us we’d won a Hollingsworth, it was like she pulled an atomic bomb from her pocket and flicked it on the ground. The grant is $350,000. We’ve just spent the past decade throwing ourselves into the blinding headlights of our work, wondering if it was ever going to happen for us, wondering if it wouldn’t be the smart thing to quit. Eating meals and drinking coffee at our drafting boards, getting by on a podunk grant here, some freelance work there, the inheritance Mel’s aunt left her when she died once saving us from eviction. Increasingly convinced that our lives, as they were, were as good as they were ever going to be.
The Hollingsworth is almost too good. There’s the feeling that it’s either saved us or ruined us. We walk into the night knowing that, cult status or no, Nashville Combat’s on a limited run, and grants don’t mean shit unless people actually go out and see this thing. It’s hard to escape the feeling that if we don’t come up with an amazing idea for our next project, it could all end here. So cautiously, carefully, we dress up and take the subway to Manhattan. Toddling with pants down into our uncertain future.
Donnie caps her lipstick and turns to us. “Ladies,” she says. “They’re waiting for you out there. Time to join your party.”
—
I remember that night in flashes—whether because I was drunk (possible) or because that’s just how I remember everything now (also possible).
In memory, I am a spectator, watching the tops of our heads bob through the banquet hall. Mel leads the way, the only person I’ve ever seen who walks like the theme from Sanford and Son is playing on a loop in her head, through a crowd of clean-cut patrons and artists wearing Chucks with nine-hundred-dollar suits, their dates in silk boutique dresses. Getting our picture taken with Donnie and collective reps and foundation officers. Mel with her mouth open, hair bleached and cowlicked all to hell, me a sad-sacked, big-tittied Haggis McBaggis with unspeakable split ends. Playing off each other when introduced. It’s the Vaught and Kisses Show: I’m the straight man, Mel’s the wild card, we joust, we get laughs.
I take an occasional look around for Beardsley. Mel glances at me, irritated, knowing who I’m looking for. Mel believing in the night, believing that I should be having a better time.
We’re hustled backstage and put in a dark side wing to wait for our walkout. I can see the snub tip of Mel’s nose, her long, sensitive fingers reaching out to toy absently with the end. Her hands make her the best draftsman I know, deft at the old-school, minute-by-minute sketches on which our work is built, the kind the old Warner Bros. studios once glorified. Had Mel been born sixty years earlier, and a man, she would have been a star: a prewar, chain-smoking, dame-ogling cartoon auteur. Not to say she’s not comfortable in her own skin, but one gets the sense she’s forever strumming on a wire in there, constantly trying to escape from some secret seam. It occurs to me, looking at her in the dark, that I may be the only person to see this, the only person able to get close enough to Mel Vaught in the wild to see the quivering underbelly.
I hear her let out a shaky breath. She’s nervous. I reach out and make her take my hand. One of the board members is speaking onstage.
“Their first full-length feature, Nashville Combat, is a true tour de force: equal parts angry and tender, funny and sorrowful, demonstrative of a thoughtful, skilled craftwork. Like its creators, the work seems older than its years. Vaught and Kisses have made known their allegiance to the ink-and-color tactics prized by classic animators, and the content of Nashville Combat is as compelling as its look—a story of modern womanhood, gay identity, family, criminality, and the travails of a late twentieth-century childhood. The vessel for these issues is co-creator Mel Vaught, who transcends autobiography to make something entirely new with her story of growing up poor in the Central Florida swamps with a delinquent mother who is incarcerated when Vaught is thirteen years old. It is dark, yet brilliantly funny, well crafted enough to let the light shine through the cracks.”