Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  Now Peyton lived here, and they needed to bring over her stuff. Greg had given us a choice: Either we can switch our furniture out with yours every time—load up your stuff and haul it away; haul in our stuff, use it, haul it away; reload your stuff—we’re actually willing to do that before and after each shoot. Or we can just leave our stuff here. Treat it as your own. We’ll take it away when the show is over. Let us decorate your new house for you. They may let you keep a few pieces.

  Theoretically that made sense. In reality (a word I can hardly use without laughing), it meant that we lived on a TV set. Of course, they consulted us on everything, showing us furniture catalogues, guiding us toward choices that both suited our taste and looked like something Peyton would have in her home. It meant more tasteful floral patterns than I’d expected, but that was okay. Maybe there was a little Peyton in me.

  She was complicated, deeper than the other teens on One Tree, which in teen-show terms meant that she often wore flannel shirts. The other teens would come to her for advice. She lived alone. Her biological parents were dead, her adoptive parents missing, or some combination. This created an explanation for how she’d come to possess her own large home while still in high school, and how it was that she often lay in bed with teenage boys in that home, talking and snuggling, unmolested by those awful ogrelike parents who beat on the door and scream, “I don’t hear any studying in there!” Peyton Sawyer: Forced to grow up too fast. Harboring an inner innocence.

  One thing we did not help choose: these dark charcoal drawings. In my memory they seem to appear overnight. There were a bunch of them, and they were the first thing you saw when you walked through the front door, and they looked as if they’d been executed during art therapy time at a prison. I said something to one of the crewmen at one point, something like, “Gosh, the whole front of the house is filled with some very intense and angry artwork.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Those are not happy paintings.”

  Petyon was in a tortured-artist period that season.

  “You can just put them in a closet when we’re not shooting.”

  When it was quiet again, we sat on the new couch with the baby, taking it in. Wow—the rooms looked great. A little sterile, a little showroom. But we hadn’t been able to afford to furnish this place ourselves anyway. What had our plan been, to pick up used stuff off the street that other people had put out for collection? I couldn’t even remember. There hadn’t been a plan.

  * * *

  I had a high school Latin teacher named Patty Papadopolous, an enormous person—she often needed a wheelchair to get about, for her girth and what it had done to her knees—also a brilliant teacher. She married young, but her husband was killed in Vietnam. Bottle-blond beehive hairdo. She schlepped between public schools, teaching the few Latin courses they could still fill, using a medical forklift thing that moved her in and out of her van. She was captivating on the ancient world. She told us how the Roman army at its most mercilessly efficient used to stop every afternoon, build a city, live in it that night, eat and fuck and play dice and argue strategy and sharpen weapons and go to the toilet in it, pack it up the next morning, and march.

  That description sprang to mind when the show arrived for the season’s first shoot. With the baby barely two weeks old, we’d felt that she was too small to be moving back and forth from house to Hilton. They did a series of scenes with us in the house, sequestered upstairs.

  Boxy light trucks appeared in a row down the street, a line of white buffalo. It was very E.T., the scene where they take him away. Cops were parked on the corners, directing traffic and shooing gawkers. In a nearby field they pitched the food tent, which soon buzzed with crew. The stars ate in a van. I looked out the window—miles of cable, banks of lights, Porta-Pottys. Walkie-talkies.

  It was a day shoot, but a night scene. They had blacked most of the windows. Upstairs, where we were, it was afternoon. Downstairs it was about ten o’clock at night. From the sound I guessed there were twenty strangers in the house.

  Silence. We listened.

  Peyton’s voice.

  I can’t remember the line. It was something like “That’s not what I wanted.” And then another character said something, footsteps. The director was having Hilarie do the line different ways.

  “That not what I wanted.”

  “That’s NOT WHAT I WANTED.”

  “That’s not what I WANTED.”

  You got a sense, even through the floorboards, of former-kid-star work ethic from Hilarie, giving 100 percent. And rolling. And rolling. No brattiness, every take usable.

  We heard general chatter, and could tell they were breaking off the scene. As the baby nursed, we listened for the next one.

  No next one. They were done, moving out. Gone by midnight, traffic barriers picked up. The city vanished. It had existed for about twenty seconds of footage.

  When the following shoot came, an exterior this time, we had family in town. That was fun. It gratified us to see them get a little thrill from it all, the occasional celebrity sighting. It also meant that some memorable, life-changing moments from my first days of being a father—of holding my own child in the kitchen and seeing the generations together—happened while Peyton was on the back patio having equally intense times. One of her fathers, who’d been a merchant marine, had come to port, and was trying to get back into her world. I may be slightly off on that, I had to put it together from dialogue fragments.

  You could see Hilarie’s sweetness in the way she humored our families. The scene called for her to run through the backyard, up the steps to the back screen door, say, “No, Dad!” and slam the door behind her. Each time she executed a take, my mother and ninety-year-old Cuban grandmother-in-law, their faces squeezed together in the window of the porch door, would smile and furiously wave at her through the glass, as we begged them to sit. Hilarie waved back, just absorbing it into her process. “No, Dad.” (Slam, smile, wave, turn.) “Dad, no!” (Slam, smile, wave, turn.)

  Did she want some black beans? Abuela asked. She was so skinny!

  “No, no, I’m fine. Thank you, though.” (To my wife, behind the hand, “They’re so sweet.”)

  She had a barbeque going out back. A grill, burgers. Picnic tables. All gone by dark. And at some point the next morning, a check flew in at the door, without a sound. As the ending voice-over of a One Tree episode might have put it, things were a little crazy, but we were going to be all right.

  * * *

  One thing did happen during the set-decoration phase. It was small, but the symbolism of it was so obvious, so articulate, I really should have paid more attention. They wallpapered the stairwell, and put up light sconces.

  It was the first little toe-wander across the Greg Perimeter, that line around the front two rooms. It was the first shy tentacle tap, the first tendril nuzzle.

  “But Greg distinctly said only the front two rooms.”

  Well, we only shoot in here. But everything you can see from this room has to match her house, too. It’s for continuity.

  Needless to say we hadn’t been around when Peyton had chosen the wallpaper—or when one of her lost parents had chosen it. Not that it was ugly or anything. Just somber. It didn’t say newlywed or newborn or anything newly. And it was our staircase. We had to walk up and down it every day. We couldn’t avoid it like we mostly came to avoid the front two rooms, treating them as a parlor. Peyton’s spirit lived there.

  The problem wasn’t the wallpaper, though, it was this curious thing the crew guys did with it once they got upstairs. They stopped in the middle of a wall. The paper wrapped around at the top of the stairs, so you’d see it if you were shooting up, and it did start down the hall, but about a foot and a half before it reached the first doorway, the first natural obstacle, it just terminated. That wall was part wallpaper, part paint, divided horizontally. It looked bad, and I’m a person who could live happily in a cardboard box if I wouldn’t miss my loved ones.

  The next mo
rning, when we pointed out the anomaly, they corrected it instantly. Inconvenience was hardly an issue. The crew were hyperprofessional (film crews almost always are—the constant time intensity of the work creates an autoflushing mechanism, instantly getting rid of the lazy and sloppy). It was rather the oddity of their having done something so glaring, when with everything else, they’d been so meticulous (because it turned out they really did take pictures of your bookshelves). The wallpaper ended precisely where the camera’s peripheral vision did. What the camera couldn’t see wasn’t totally real.

  * * *

  If our daughter later in her life finds that she possesses any of those contextless, purely visual, prememory memories, like some people have from their first two years, hers will be of a suite at the Riverside Hilton, in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. It rises beigely beside the Cape Fear River. My Lord, did we spend some time there. They knew us by sight at the check-in counter. We developed a game with pillows. Not a game, but a child stunt that could be endlessly repeated. We stacked up every pillow in the suite, maybe a dozen, in the center of the king bed, and laid my daughter on top of the highest one like the princess and the pea, and let it crash down onto the bed like a falling tower. She laughed until she gave herself hiccups. She was a toddler by then, of course. You wouldn’t toss an infant about like that, although with an infant, they’re so easy to balance, you could have done even more pillows, you could have done fifteen or twenty. My Cuban grandmother-in-law was given her own room, and she would watch the baby at night, while we hit the restaurants by the river with our meal vouchers. Mornings I woke around sunrise, before the baby even, and read by the window during that quiet hour. Best was when they gave us a room on the city side. You could watch the dawn invade the streets one by one, and see the old eighteenth-century layout of the town illuminated.

  Those junkets gave me a ghostly feeling. It’s strange to stay in a hotel in your own city. We had moved here, we’d found property here, and now they were paying us not to stay there, like people who lived elsewhere. People in the lobby would say, “Where are you visiting from?”

  It became unsettling, though, when we started to watch the show. The hours of Hilton boredom brought on epic jags of cable flipping (oh, sad and too-hard colorful rubber buttons of hotel cable remotes). In the dark we’d look for the house to come on. We competed like in charades to say “There it is!” first. (Not as a formal competition but spontaneously.)

  We formed memories of our house that weren’t memories; we’d experienced them solely through television. We hadn’t been there for them, yet they’d occurred while we lived there. It felt something like what I imagine amnesiacs feel when they are shown pictures from their unremembered lives. You thought, How could I not remember this, how can I not have known that this happened? Coming back home after a big shoot, and finding everything just as you’d left it, despite your certain knowledge that dramatic and often violent things had occurred there while you were gone, it kept bringing to mind a Steven Wright joke, from one of his comedy specials in the eighties. “Thieves broke into my house,” he said. “They took all my things and replaced them with exact replicas.”

  Once we’d boarded the Hilton gravy train, the Greg Perimeter vanished like a knocked-out laser security grid at a museum. Breached by the wallpaper, it had suffered other small incursions during the early shoots—lights in the upstairs windows, for instance, to boost the artificial sunlight during a night shoot/day scene, a truly disorienting scene, the last we stayed home for, when they made it afternoon in the front yard. Now they were actually setting scenes in other rooms. Peyton and Lucas (Chad Michael Murray’s character, the Chachi to Peyton’s Joanie) baked cookies in the kitchen. They got into a food fight and started slinging dough at each other. All over our kitchen, dough balls hitting the wall. Splat, in the cracks, on the cupboards, sailing out into the hallway. Surely this was grounds for a lucrative contract readjustment. I checked the terms— Arrgh! I’d signed over the whole property! “Equal to the amount of the mortgage,” said the guy on my shoulder.

  And besides, when we got home, everything was spotless. Couldn’t find a fleck of dough anywhere. Couldn’t find a chocolate chip (wish I had—it might be worth something on eBay). The only way the scene had affected us, in a strict material sense, was that we got our kitchen professionally cleaned for free. We’d faced harder challenges.

  That’s when Psycho Derek appeared.

  * * *

  Much later, when we were no longer on friendly terms with One Tree, I caught myself wondering if Psycho Derek had not perhaps been created purely as an instrument for abusing our house, to make sure we never forgot the name Peyton Sawyer. Who was he? Who was Psycho Derek?

  In another country, in another world, “Ian Banks” is a young blond Scottish writer. He has a pretty wife, and one night they’re out driving. He’s drunk and messing with the wheel. Crash, she dies. In his guilt and grief, he goes on the Internet and starts looking for girls who look like his wife. Guess what, his wife looked just like Peyton. He does some research. He learns that Peyton has a biological brother, separated at birth, name: Derek. Lightbulb—he’ll impersonate the brother. From behind that mask he worms his way into her world. But Peyton figures out he’s a violent obsessive. She cuts him off. That’s when he starts to attack. Our house.

  He tied up Peyton and her best friend, Brooke, in the basement, as a prelude to raping them (One Tree was getting dark, that’s where its campiness lost me, with the darkness—I don’t see how you get to be teeny-dumb and do psychotic teen rape fantasies, but as I say, the irony of the genre has evolved, found new crevices). In one episode Psycho Derek was pushed down our staircase, violently grabbing at the antique banister to save himself as he fell. In another he got thrown through our bedroom window onto a safety bag on the front lawn. Our house had become the stunt house (they don’t care, they’re at the Hilton, they need the money!).

  The crew couldn’t clean up after this stuff as easily. Everything was not the same when we got home. The yard was full of shattered safety glass. The handrail on the stairs was a few centimeters more rickety, thanks to Psycho Derek’s heavy grasping (when we watched it on TV we realized that the stunt guy had actually fallen backward onto the rail, with all his weight). Not to mention that in our minds the basement was now permanently a onetime BDSM sex dungeon, and not a mutual-consent swinger dungeon, either. Psycho Derek had created some seriously bad visual associations in the house, ones our daughter might not enjoy discovering come her own teen years—the basement bondage pre-rape had taken place on Peyton’s prom night. (Prom was hard on our house: Peyton’s friend, Brooke, mad at Peyton for something, had egged it on the day of the prom; deranged Brooke fans later re-created this incident in “reality,” hitting our house with eggs in the very same spots; at least we assumed that’s who did it. Could have been vandals.)

  I can’t blame Derek for everything. And I should take this opportunity to thank the real Derek, Peyton’s true half brother, who turned out to be black, and showed up just in time, wearing a varsity jacket, to save her from Psycho Derek, and our home from any more trauma. No, Psycho Derek had been neutralized by the time we ended the contract.

  What did happen? I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that it was a sort of caveman thing. Instincts that had lain dormant in my genome for generations awoke. Who were these strangers in my rock shelter? Why were they walking in and out without knocking or saying goodbye, why did they keep referring to it as “Peyton’s House”? This is my house. The more the story line expanded through the rooms, the worse the feeling became. And of course the crew guys, who’d now been coming to the house for several years—who knew it in some ways better than we did—couldn’t help making themselves more comfortable in it over time, sneaking in for more bathroom breaks. On one shoot, I remember, I’d been confused about where they needed to set up, and as a result neglected to clean the bedroom. Later a crew guy—the same one who’d told me about
Blue Velvet—said, “I’m not used to picking up other people’s underwear.” I felt like saying, Then don’t go into their bedrooms at nine o’clock in the morning! Except he was paying to be in my bedroom.

  Isn’t there another profession where people pay to be in your bedroom?

  One day, we were at the Hilton, and I realized I’d forgotten something. I drove back to the house in the middle of a shoot. On my way out, having found what I needed, I ran into one of the crew. He had dinner plates in his hands. I knew those plates—they were plates we’d been given when we got married.