He got nervous, obviously aware that he’d crossed some line. He told me that the stars, in their dining van, had asked for real plates. These were the first he’d seen. In that awkward moment on the brick path there, something came into my head that my across-the-street neighbor, Arnie, kept saying to me, rather passive-aggressively I thought, when I would pass him on the sidewalk. Inevitably remarking on the One Tree Hill stuff, he’d say, “The way my wife and I feel is, we don’t have much, but it’s ours.”
By then I was fairly certain that all the neighbors hated us. I’m sure that when we moved in, they were praying we wouldn’t resume the previous owners’ contract with the show, that the nightmare would end. These shoots couldn’t help disrupting the whole psychogeography of the block. To have to be waved through by cops into your own neighborhood, how obnoxious! The lights, the noise (the crew were always scrupulously hushed outside, but when you have that many people, there’s a hive hum). I felt how much I’d hate it, if I were one of them. And why our house, anyway? There was just some bad anthropological juju going on in our little barrio. And that’s not good. You don’t want that. When Armageddon comes and the village is reset to a primitive state, your clan will be shunned and denied resources.
When a disagreement about money came up—we thought we were owed for an extra day—my subconscious seized on it as an excuse (though I didn’t really need one, they were unpleasant about the money, which seemed weird, given we’d never been complainers). Finally one day we told them they couldn’t film there anymore. It was all too big a pain in the ass. I had a suspicion they were thinking about the attic. I’ve never had that confirmed, but the attic is neat-looking, and it would have been the next logical step. Psycho Derek isn’t dead, he’s in the attic, boring peepholes. Our daughter was getting older, old enough to start wondering why we regularly moved out of the house and then right back in again, and who was living there in the meantime? If my brain couldn’t handle the metaphysical implications of it all, what chance did she have? A producer called and offered us a lot more money at one point—so Peyton could say goodbye—but it had become a principle thing by then, and it felt good to say no, to reclaim the cave. And so, for primarily petty and neurotic reasons, I made a decision that negatively impacted our financial future. It’s called being a good father.
I remember when they came to get Peyton’s furniture. Because she’d moved in at the same time as us, her things and ours had mingled at the edges. My wife was at work, and with some pieces, I didn’t know whose they were. The guy who was in charge that day held up a vase that had been on the table. “I honestly don’t know if that’s ours or hers,” I said. I suspected it was hers, but had always liked it. “You know what,” the guy said, “let’s just say it’s yours.”
They sent painters in, which I thought was classy. Many of the walls had been scuffed by equipment and gaffer’s tape and whatnot. My wife gave them a bunch of bold colors, colors we’d never tended to before. The place looks totally different. It’s ours again, or rather for the first time. We burned a sage stick. Both literally and metaphorically.
Our only worry was that maybe we’d caused trouble for Hilarie somehow, affected the plotline in some way that made Peyton less essential to the cast, but when we ran into her some weeks later and voiced this concern, she was characteristically ultramature about it, and said, “You know, I think you really helped her grow up.” Her being Peyton. The producers had decided to zip forward the story line four years—just skip college, go straight from right after high-school graduation to right after college graduation, with the characters all back home, in order to avoid the dorm-room doldrums that have brought down other teen shows, like Felicity. Now Peyton lived downtown. She managed bands. “She doesn’t live in her parents’ house anymore,” Hilarie said. “She has her own apartment. I think it’s about time.”
* * *
A year passed. We were at the airport in London—my wife had a conference there. Standing in the ticket line, we started talking about the show—probably we’d seen an old episode in one of the hotels we’d stayed at in Scotland—and we were having a what-an-experience type of conversation. At one point, the woman in front of us turned around. Business suit, dark bun. She leaned forward, and in an unplaceable European accent, said, “You have a lovely home.” Not in a creepy way. She said it about as nicely as you could say something like that. “Are you a fan of the show?” my wife asked. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “I always watch it.” She knew exactly what Petyon’s house looked like. She described it for us. The white railing, the hallway.
By then we’d grown inured to fans coming by, frequently knocking on the door. They acted more passionate in the early days, or at least more brazen. They wanted pictures of themselves, of them with you, of you and the house, them and the house, one at a time. They were 90 percent female, teens and early twenties, but lots of their moms came with them. One of the few males, a tall skinny stonery guy, gave me half of a dollar bill, and asked me to hide it inside something on the set. I put it inside a little African-looking wooden bowl that we and Peyton kept by the front door. The bowl had a lid. He thanked us profusely and said that now he could sit at home with his girlfriend, who loved Peyton, and they’d know the other half of the dollar bill was in her house. When they came for Peyton’s stuff, it was still in there; I checked.
Nobody was ever scary or rude. One time we did get these Belgian girls. They were perhaps unwholesomely fixated on the show. Six of them showed up, with a Lebanese taxi-van driver who’d brought them straight from the airport, four minutes away. He’d evidently picked them up outside baggage claim and, hearing their talk of One Tree Hill, offered to give them a tour of locations. Now here they were. The driver stood behind them the whole time, as if presenting them to us for consideration. We gave them a couple of souvenirs from the show, a script from an old episode that had been lying around, something else I don’t remember. At these modest acts of kindness they broke down into tears, which caused my wife to go and get more things to give them, which made them cry harder. I can see them standing in the hallway, these beautiful girls, crying and laughing. They gave us a jar of excellent honey from their country, and an Eiffel Tower key chain that my daughter loved and we still use. Bless you, girls, wherever you are. Watching One Tree, probably.
The farthest away that anyone ever came from—another mother-daughter team—was Thailand. “Peyton House?” Mostly Ohio, Florida, places like that.
Just this week, we had two from South Carolina knock at the door. My daughter and I met them on the porch. If I had to guess, I’d say they were about to embark on their senior year of high school. You could tell they were good friends, because they never said a word to each other. They stared at us, and past us into the house.
“Can I help you?” I said.
The smaller girl, a brunet with a haircut somewhat matronly for one so young, said, “Okay … Did you know that your house used to be on a show?”
“Yes,” I said. “In fact, we were living here when they did that filming.”
Their eyes widened. “May we come in?” I glanced down at my daughter. She looked excited—big girls!
“Why not?”
The brunet’s question had given me a small, surprising tilt of nostalgia. Did we know that we used to be on a show? Did we know that? The time-lapse sands of pop-cultural oblivion, which will not be stayed, had overtaken us in just a few short years. We were trivia. These girls had come, before college separated them, to see something they remembered from when they were even younger, watching it together. Peyton isn’t on the show anymore. Hilarie and Chad Michael Murray both failed to return for the most recent season. Contract disputes, they said. Chad, in a wild merging of life and art, ended up marrying a girl from the local high school here, right down the street, New Hanover High. The girl was still a high school student when they met. Chad had to wait for her to become legal, before they could marry. We heard him once in the front yard on his cell
phone, on a night we were slow to get out of the house before a shoot, giving her advice about the SATs.
Hilarie’s still in Wilmington, doing her own production company, Southern Gothic. Last year we saw her in a serious movie, Provinces of Night, based on a William Gay book. Val Kilmer was in it. Hilarie played an “oft-unconscious junkie,” and she was good. She can act. She’ll be fine.
The girls wanted to see the basement—they remembered the prom episode well—but I said no. I took pictures to make it up to them.
After they left, I was walking back down the hallway with my daughter, who’s almost five. She’s turned into a lovely child. Little brown helmet of smooth hair. She reminds me of the tiny Martian from Looney Tunes—“Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator.” Purely in terms of silhouette. She marches around in a very deliberate way.
“Daddy,” she said, “why did those girls want to see our house?”
“Remember how I told you this house used to be on a TV show?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Those girls love the show, so they wanted to see where it was made.”
She stopped.
“Is our house still on TV?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “there are reruns, so, I guess it’s still on sometimes.”
She got a concerned look on her face. Standing with her feet apart, she threw her arms out, looking from room to room.
“Are we on a show right now?!” she demanded.
I said I didn’t think so.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank anyone and everyone who, in either a personal or professional capacity, showed him kindness at deadline time (the period of from four to five weeks on either side of a due date). Please know that he would change everything about his working habits, if he could locate the control panel.
Thank you fact-checkers, copy editors, proofreaders, and art/design people for making these pieces more readable in their primary magazine incarnations.
EVERYBODY AT:
FSG
GQ
The Sewanee School of Letters
The UNCW Department of Creative Writing
The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation
The Wylie Agency
The NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
Dimension Films
Harper’s Magazine
Oxford American
The Paris Review
As the author types the following names, he will pause after each to reflect warmly on his particular debt of gratitude in that case: Daniel Anderson, Emily Bell, Clyde Edgerton, Carol Ann Fitzgerald, Devin Friedman, Ben George, Peter Ginna, John Grammer, John Gray, Pam Henry, Benicia Fraga Hernandez, Jack Hitt, Roger Hodge, Amos and Maria Johnson, Betsy Johnson, Chris and Becky Johnson, Jackie Ko, Lewis Lapham, Ben McGowan, Ben Metcalf, Jane Baynham Milward, the Milward clan more largely, John K. Moore, Jr., Raha Naddaf, Wyatt Prunty, Woody Register, Ellen Rosenbush, Anna Stein, Jean Strouse, Beth Sullivan, Jen Szalai, Tom and Bibby Terry, Worth Wagers, Andy Ward, Matt Weiland, Kevin West, Sean Wilsey.
LAST BUT MOST:
Jin Auh
Mariana Chloe Johnson
Joel Lovell
Wyatt Mason
Sean McDonald
G. Sanford McGhee
Jim Nelson
Jan Simek
Marc Smirnoff
Lorin Stein
ALSO BY JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
Blood Horses
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2011 by John Jeremiah Sullivan
All rights reserved
First edition, 2011
These essays originally appeared, most in substantially different form, in GQ, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Oxford American, and Ecotone.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sullivan, John Jeremiah, 1974–
Pulphead : essays / John Jeremiah Sullivan.
p. cm.
Summary : “A collection of nonfiction essays”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-374-53290-1 (pbk.)
I. Title.
AC8 .S78135 2011
080—dc23
2011024875
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 978-1-4299-9504-7
Pulphead: Essays Page 32