Pulphead: Essays (43 page)

Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan

“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
.