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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Practically every day, cars stop in front of our house and people get out to take pictures of it, and of us\u2014me and my wife and daughter\u2014if we happen to be outside. Or they'll take one of Tony, who cuts half the neighborhood's grass. Tony loves it. He poses for them, with his rake and lawn bags, grinning, one arm thrown wide as if to say, \"All this, my friends.\" I've told him several times to start charging, but he won't even hear it. He does it, he says, because it makes him feel famous. Usually it's only one or two cars. Other times it's eight or nine in a day. It depends what time of year it is, and what's happening on the Internet. Once there was an event of some kind in town, and we got more than twenty. I go for long stretches when I forget it's even happening. I really don't see them, since I don't leave the house that much, and they're always quiet, they never make trouble. But a month ago my new neighbor, Nicholas, who just moved in next door, came over to introduce himself. He's a tall thin guy in his fifties, glasses and a white beard. Very nice, very sociable. Before he left, he said, \"Can I ask you something? Have you noticed that people are always taking pictures of your house?\"\n\n \"Yeah,\" I said\u2014pressing play on my spiel\u2014\"it's silly, I know, but our house used to be on TV, not anymore, those people are fans.\u2026 Isn't that funny?\"\n\n \"I mean, it is constant,\" he said.\n\n \"I know!\" I said. \"Hope it doesn't bother you. Tell me if it ever gets annoying.\"\n\n \"No, no, I don't mind,\" he said. \"They're always polite. They almost seem embarrassed.\"\n\n \"Well, tell me if that changes,\" I said.\n\n \"Okay,\" he said. \"I just can't believe how many there are.\"\n\n Nicholas and I have now had some version of that conversation three times, one for each week he's lived next door. Every time, I've wanted to tell him it's going to end, except I don't know if it will. It may increase.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n My brother-in-law sells trailers in the Arizona desert\u2014indeed, he professes to \"have the trailer game in a choke hold\" in that part of the world. Not long ago he told me about the Stamp. He had a boss whose office was across from his in the trailer they worked out of. The boss had a huge specially made rubber stamp on his desk that read APPROVED. Whenever things were getting tense in my brother-in-law's office, when the boss could hear that negotiations were becoming sticky, usually on the matter of the prospective buyer's gaining loan approval, in he would saunter with the Stamp. Saunter doesn't describe his walk, which my brother-in-law imitated. The boss was a little guy, and his legs sort of wheeled out from his body as he walked, like something you'd associate with a degenerative hip condition. He'd come wheeling up to the desk like that and BAM bring down the Stamp on the application, APPROVED. Then he wheeled away, leaving the buyers stunned and, as it dawned on them, delighted. \"You understand,\" my brother-in-law said, \"a lot of the people I was selling to were Gypsies. As in literal Gypsies. They didn't have mailing addresses.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n The story goes some way toward explaining how my wife and I got permission from a bank to buy a giant brick neocolonial house\u2014also how the world economy went into free fall, but that's for another time and a writer with nothing to do but an enormous amount of careful research. My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man\u2014that's how he put it, \"Y'er a rich man, ain't ye?\"\u2014who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter's boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, \"shoot him below the knee,\" he said, \"that way they cain't get you with intent to kill.\" Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he'd lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he'd saved a drowning black boy's life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience \"came to love some blacks.\" He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody's boss came forward with the Stamp.\n\n Around the time it became clear that we'd gotten ahead of ourselves financially\u2014and thinking back, that was a seismic twinge in advance of the market meltdown, a message from the bowels that people like the guy with four cell phones and a Jersey accent working out of a storage unit in Charlotte, who'd loaned us the money, probably shouldn't have been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like me\u2014that was when we remembered something our buyer's agent, Andy, had said. Something about a TV show that might want to use the house. Somebody might be calling us. We had written it down. A guy named Greg.\n\n Often I think of Greg. What an amazing guy. Truly amazing, as in he brought us into a maze. We only ever saw him once. I've never seen him since. And this is a small town\u2014you see people. It was like they flew him in for this meeting. He was a big guy in a loose Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. Did he tell me he played rugby, or did he look exactly like someone I knew who played rugby? He sat across from us at our kitchen table, a thirteen-foot dark wood table that purportedly came in pieces from a Norwegian farmhouse, relic of nesting panic (long table, order). Greg sat across from us. He explained that they'd mostly be using only the front two rooms of the house. This was the place they mainly shot. The rest of our character's house had been re-created on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.\n\n He laid out the deal they'd struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your bookshelves to make sure we've put the books in order. That's how thorough we are. We even pay people to come in afterward and clean up. The house looks better than you left it.\n\n We'll pay you $\u2014\u2014 for an exterior shoot, $\u2014\u2014 for interiors. The combined amount equaled our mortgage.\n\n Yes, I think we can work something out.\n\n \"The front two rooms\"\u2014that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated: It has a poetic density to it, like \"cellar door,\" so I remember. The front two rooms.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n A lot of movies and TV shows are shot here, in our adopted coastal hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina\u2014Wilmywood. It started when the late Frank Capra Jr. came here to make Firestarter in the early '80s. He liked the place and stayed, and an industry evolved around him. Dennis Hopper bought property. Now half the kids who wait on you downtown are extras, or want to be actors. You'll be in Target and realize you're in line behind Val Kilmer. We have studios and a film school, and we're known in the business for our exceptionally wide variety of locations. You can be doing beachy beachy and suddenly go leafy established suburb, go country hayride, then nighttime happening street, pretty much whatever.\n\n 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 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.\n\n 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\u2014good manners had not been what we'd expected.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n 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\u2014guys who come here to fix things invariably remark on \"how much wood they used on this place\"\u2014in 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 between 1900 and 1920. Lolita's house from Lolita\u2014the Jeremy Irons version\u2014is around the corner.\n\n One of the crew guys who came to paint our living room\u2014a shortish, supermuscular dude with a biker's mustache and cap, who had grown up there and knew a lot of Wilmington film trivia\u2014told 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 hubcap comes off and goes rolling down the street like a toy hoop\u2014that 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.\n\n 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\u2014load up your stuff and haul it away; haul in our stuff, use it, haul it away; reload your stuff\u2014we'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.\n\n 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 catalogs, 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.\n\n 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 thereof. 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.\n\n 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 ecuted 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.\"\n\n \"Yes,\" he said. \"Those are not happy paintings.\"\n\n Peyton was in a tortured-artist period that season.\n\n \"You can just put them in a closet when we're not shooting.\"\n\n When it was quiet again, we sat on the new couch with the baby, taking it in. Wow\u2014the 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.\n\n\n\n I had a high school Latin teacher named Marcia Markopolos, an enormous person\u2014she often needed a wheelchair to get about, for her girth and what it had done to her knees\u2014also 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.\n\n That description came 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.\n\n 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\u2014miles of cable, banks of lights, porta-potties, walkie-talkies.\n\n\n\n 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.\n\n Peyton's voice.\n\n 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.\n\n \"That not what I wanted.\"\n\n \"That's NOT WHAT I WANTED.\"\n\n \"That's not what I WANTED.\"\n\n 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.\n\n We heard general chatter and could tell they were breaking off the scene. As the baby nursed, we listened for the next one.\n\n 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.\n\n The second shoot followed close on the first period 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. Of course, it also meant that some memorable life-changing moments from my first days of being a father\u2014of holding my own child in the kitchen and seeing the generations together\u2014happened 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.\n\n 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 ecuted a take, my mother and 90-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.)\n\n 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.\")\n\n She had a barbecue 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.\n\n 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.\n\n \"But Greg said only the front two rooms.\"\n\n Well, we only shoot in there, yeah. But everything you can see from this room has to match her house, too. It's for continuity. Made sense (dammit).\n\n Needless to say, we hadn't been around when Peyton had chosen the wallpaper\u2014or 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.\n\n The problem wasn't the wallpaper. 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.\n\n The next morning, when we pointed out the anomaly, they corrected it instantly. Inconvenience was hardly an issue. The crew was hyperprofessional. (Film crews almost always are\u2014the 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.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n 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 Hilton Wilmington Riverside in downtown Wilmington. 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 that 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.\n\n Those junkets gave me a ghostly feeling. It's strange to stay in a hotel in your own city. We had moved there, we'd acquired property, and now they were paying us not to stay there\u2014like people who lived elsewhere. People in the lobby would say, \"Where are you visiting from?\"\n\n It became unsettling, though, only 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.)\n\n 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 '80s. \"Thieves broke into my house,\" he said. \"They took all my things and replaced them with exact replicas.\"\n\n 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\u2014lights 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\u2014arrgh! I'd signed over the whole property! Equal to the amount of the mortgage, said a voice.\n\n 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\u2014it 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.\n\n That's when Psycho Derek appeared.\n\n Much later, when we were no longer dealing 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?\n\n 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\u2014he'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.\n\n He tied up Peyton and her best friend, Brooke, in the basement, presumably as a prelude to raping them. (One Tree was getting dark. That's where its campiness lost me, with the darkness\u2014I 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.\n\n The crew couldn't clean up after this stuff as easily. Everything was not the same when we got home. The yard was still full of safety-glass shards. 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.)\n\n 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 somehow, and who showed up just in time, wearing a varsity jacket, to save Peyton from Psycho Derek and our home from any more trauma. No, Psycho Derek had been neutralized by the time we ended the contract.\n\n 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 good-bye; 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\u2014who knew it in some ways better than we did\u2014couldn'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 (confession: hungover), and as a result neglected to clean the bedroom. Later, a crew guy\u2014the same one who'd told me about Blue Velvet\u2014said, \"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\u2026 he was paying to be in my bedroom.\n\n Isn't there another profession where people pay to be in your bedroom?\n\n One day we were at the Hilton, and I realized I'd forgotten something, a laptop cord. I drove to the house in the middle of a shoot. On my way back out, I ran into one of the crew. He had dinner plates in his hands. Wait, I knew those plates\u2014they were plates we'd been given when we were married.\n\n 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.\n\n It wasn't that big a deal, but in that awkward moment on the brick path there, something came into my head that my across-the-street neighbor, Charlie, 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.\"\n\n By then I was pretty sure all the neighbors hated us. When we moved in, they were probably 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.\n\n When a disagreement about money came up, my subconscious must have seized on it as an excuse. We told them they couldn't film there anymore. It was 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 overhead in the attic, boring peepholes. Our daughter was getting older, old enough to start wondering why we regularly moved out of our own home 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 more money at one point\u2014so Peyton could say good-bye\u2014but 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 we had, 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.\n\n I suspected it was hers but had always liked it. \"You know what,\" the guy said, \"let's just say it's yours.\"\n\n 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.\n\n 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\u2014just 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. 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.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n A year passed. We were at the airport in London\u2014my wife had a conference there. Standing in the ticket line, we started talking about the show\u2014probably we'd seen an old episode in one of the hotels we'd stayed at in Scotland\u2014and 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 Peyton's house looked like. She described it for us. The white railing, the hallway.\n\n By then we'd grown inured to fans coming by, frequently knocking on the door. At night, at dinner, flash bulbs will go off\u2014it looks like lightning in the windows. People 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.\n\n 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.\n\n The farthest away that anyone ever came from\u2014another mother-daughter team\u2014was Thailand. There were two girls from Australia, one white and one aboriginal. They assured me that the show is huge down under. Lots from France. But 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.\n\n \"Can I help you?\" I said.\n\n The smaller girl, a brunet with a haircut somewhat matronly for one so young, said, \"Okay.\u2026 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\u2014big girls!\n\n \"Why not?\"\n\n 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 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 left. Contract disputes, they said. Chad, in a wild merging of life and art, ended up getting engaged to a girl from a local high school here. The girl was still a student when they met.\n\n Hilarie keeps close ties to Wilmington, doing her own production company, Southern Gothic. Not long ago we saw her in a serious movie, Bloodworth, based on a William Gay book. Val Kilmer was in it. Hilarie played an \"oft-unconscious junkie,\" and she was good. She'll be fine.\n\n The girls wanted to see the basement\u2014they remembered the prom episode well\u2014but I said no. I took pictures to make it up to them.\n\n After they left, I was walking back down the hallway with my daughter, who's almost 5. She's turned into a lovely child. Little brown helmet of smooth hair. She reminds me of the tiny Martian from Looney Tunes\u2014\"Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator.\" Purely in terms of silhouette. She marches around in a very deliberate way.\n\n \"Daddy,\" she said, \"why did those girls want to see our house?\"\n\n \"Remember how I told you this house used to be on a TV show?\"\n\n \"Yes,\" she said.\n\n \"Those girls love the show, so they wanted to see where it was made.\"\n\n She stopped.\n\n \"Is our house still on TV?\" she asked.\n\n \"Well,\" I said, \"there are reruns, so I guess it's still on sometimes.\"\n\n She got a concerned look on her face. Standing with her feet apart, she threw her arms out, looking from room to room.\n\n \"Are we on a show right now?!\" she demanded.\n\n I said I didn't think so."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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