Pulphead: Essays (41 page)

For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama
One Tree Hill
, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don’t let the off brands fool you, though, a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It’s one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It’s bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like with that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly
One Tree Hill
is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn’s siblings.

The
One Tree
character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I’d seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her—superfriendly always. Hilarie has a golden reputation in Wilmington. She’s one of the cast members who’ve made the place home, and she gets involved in local things. When we met, she gave us hugs, complimented the house, thanked us for letting them use it. She disarmed us—good manners had not been what we’d expected.

I don’t know how our house became known as a place to shoot. It’s not all that special. I think it’s sort of immediately sturdy-looking—guys who come here to fix things invariably remark on “how much wood they used on this place”—in a way that’s visually useful to a director who wants to say Big Brick House in as little time and with as few subtleties as possible. The studio has scouts who drive around looking for these things. And this is an interesting neighborhood. I learned from a local historian that it was created as a sort of colony by Christian Scientists in the 1920s. Lolita’s house from
Lolita
—the Jeremy Irons version—is down the street (it’s really pretty). One of the crew guys who came to paint our living room—a short, supermuscular dude with a biker’s mustache and cap, who knew a lot of Wilmington film trivia—told me that our house was in
Blue Velvet
, which David Lynch made here. I looked it up. Sure enough. Just for a few seconds. During the car-chase scene, when Jeffrey thinks he’s being trailed by psychotic Frank (in Dennis Hopper’s immortal performance), but then is relieved to find it’s only chucklehead Mike, the moment when the hub cap comes off and goes rolling down the street like a toy hoop (an unintended effect that Lynch reportedly loved in editing, causing him to linger on that moment—if you watch it you can see that the beat is held unusually long, compared with what you’d normally do on a curb-scraping turn, namely cut it off to emphasize speed), that happens in front of our house. There were other shows. The dresser in the guest bedroom had been, we were told, Katie Holmes’s on
Dawson’s Creek
. They used us as a haunted house in one episode of that series.

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 morning, 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?”