Iliana sat forward. “So this agent got you the jeans commercial?”
“Yeah, and my mom, she’s not too keen on the whole thing. She wants me to be a doctor. She’s always saying I’m a science whiz—and she was right, I was pretty smart in school.”
“And what about you? Did you want to be a doctor?”
He thought for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe. I know I wanted to please my mom. But it wasn’t in the cards. I was moving in a whole new direction. Anyway, the commercial. Turns out there are two boy parts. One is this romantic type and the other only wants to play basketball. So I’m hoping I’m a shoo-in for the romantic one, but for some reason they give that part to this short, dorky guy. He never went anywhere after that, no surprise.”
Iliana tried to remember what that other boy looked like—was he really so bad? She couldn’t conjure an image of him in her mind. Like millions of other girls back then, she had only really seen Jeff. And yet, it was strange to hear Jeff talk about people so disparagingly—the chunky agent, the dorky other kid. The person he had appeared to be, first in the commercial and then in the series, was so different. Always kind and sympathetic, always looking out for others and taking the high road. Had she been expecting too much of the real-life Jeff? Because when you came right down to it, nobody could be as perfect as that on-screen persona. Maybe she was being too hard on him—about his house, about his daughters, about his pretty typical adolescence. Maybe it was unreasonable to expect him to live up to all her childish expectations.
“So they start the rehearsal by working with the ‘romantic’”—he made air quotes around the word—“guy and the girl, and I’m bored and insulted, and finally I just wander over to the basketball hoop they’ve got on the set, and I pick up a ball and start dribbling. And the director calls, ‘That’s great, keep going!’ and they start filming me. Now, I’m no LeBron James, and basically my shots keep missing, but they still keep the camera rolling.”
“So you were actually missing all those shots on the commercial?” Iliana teased.
“Ooooh, the press can be cruel,” Jeff teased back. “Well, once I got used to the surroundings, I did make several shots. At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. But as you know, since you obviously watched it, they ended up keeping only my misses and cutting all my lines except for one word—‘Basketball.’ Which became my nickname on the Dreamers set. Basketball.”
“Basketball,” Iliana repeated. “I never knew that.” She had read so many issues of Teen magazine when she was young, she’d been sure she knew every teeny morsel about the show. But now she was getting more juicy tidbits to savor, the behind-the-scenes stuff she had never been privy to as a girl, no matter how many magazines she bought. Now she was an insider.
“The commercial airs, and pretty soon people start recognizing me,” he continued. “I’m in the mall, and girls are pointing at me and whispering. And at the pizza place, a girl asks, ‘Aren’t you the Reese Jeans guy?’ The Reese Jeans guy! And other girls ask for my autograph! All for whining about basketball.”
“You know it wasn’t just for whining.”
“No? Then what was it for?” he asked.
She laughed, shaking her head. Was he being coy, or did he really not know? It wasn’t the whining that girls loved. It was that he was cute and helpless and nonthreatening, missing all those shots. They wanted to meet him. They wanted to be his girlfriend.
“I think you know,” she said. “But continue. What did you make of your sudden popularity?”
“Well, life is never the same after that commercial,” he said. “Girls are always following me now. My friends think I’m king of the world. No surprise, I finally lost my virginity. Actually, I slept around a lot.”
She looked down. She wondered how many girls were in love with him and got their hearts broken by his selfishness. But maybe she was being naive. Surely this was the way any teenage boy in his situation would behave.
“Then one day my agent tells us about some TV show they want to build around me. By now, my mother’s all into it, but my dad, he was a classical musician, and he thinks I’m selling out. Like TV is bullshit. I remind him that it’s a show about a band, and I’ll be playing guitar and singing, too, but he doesn’t buy it. And one day he gives up trying to get me to turn it down. He just says, ‘Jeff, if you’re going to take this ride, I hope it’s the best time in the world.’ A sentiment that eventually became the title of our biggest hit.”
Iliana smiled at the reference. She remembered sitting in her bedroom, listening to “The Best of Times.” Listening and imagining he was singing about her. “So how did it feel to be on a TV show?” she asked.
Jeff stretched his arms above his head. “It was like nothing you can imagine,” he told her. “Before I know it, it’s the first day of rehearsal, and I’m meeting the other guys in the cast. Terry had been on TV all his life. He was funny, man. The morning we did our first read-through, he grabs my arm and says, ‘Basketball,’—he was the first to call me that—‘Basketball, in six months your face is gonna be on a lunchbox.’ And he was right.”
“I remember Terry,” Iliana said. His character was the one who usually had the girl problems—girls chasing him down the halls at school or fighting over him in the lunchroom. Iliana always felt smug when the teen magazines ran articles about Jeff instead of him. Take that, Terry! she wanted to say. Girls want sincere boys like Jeff.
“Then there was Bruce, he was the surfer dude. And the fourth, the drummer, was Peter. He grew up on a dairy farm near Scranton. They found him in some catalog for a local clothes store.”
Jeff laughed and shook his head. “You know, it all happened in a heartbeat. The show aired, and the next day we were famous. Can you imagine?”
“I think so,” Iliana said. The fact was, she could imagine, more than she wanted him to realize. She had spent almost all of middle school imagining what it would be like to be Jeff Downs’s girlfriend as his star ascended to the sky.
“I couldn’t live at home anymore—it was too dangerous, with all the girls and the mobs, the photographers,” he said. “The studio ended up moving us all into this building for VIPs. Man, what a place! We each got an apartment with a huge sunken living room and a serious stereo system, a huge master bathroom with a Jacuzzi, daily maid service, and gourmet meals whenever we wanted. And there was twenty-four-hour security, with cameras and intercoms. I loved it. At first.
“But then, you know, it got frustrating. We were so isolated. I mean, it’s understandable. If one of us got a girl pregnant or were caught with drugs, it would have destroyed the show. But we were kids! We wanted to go to rock concerts and stay out all night, drive down the coast in a convertible and camp out on the beach. Terry liked Las Vegas, and all Bruce wanted was to drive into Mexico and drink tequila. So the studio kept us working all the time, and if we did go out, we had to do it their way—drivers and bodyguards.”
“So what did you do?” Iliana asked.
“We rebelled. Hey, we were kids. One night Terry and I put on baseball caps and snuck out of the building. Freedom! The next week we got braver, and went to a convenience store for potato chips and Twinkies. Nobody recognized us. It was a crazy thrill ride. So a few months later we’re on tour, staying at this big hotel in Detroit, and Terry and I decide to do it again, and Peter and Bruce come, too. Only this time it’s different. There are a billion girls behind police barricades, and they recognize us immediately, and they just come charging. We race back through the revolving doors, but Bruce doesn’t make it. The girls jam the revolving door so he can’t get in, and they’re pushing his head into the glass and ripping his shirt.
“Well, finally the police tear everyone off, but boy, is he beaten up. He’s got this big cut on his cheek, and his wrist is fractured and his ribs are bruised and he’s got scrapes all over. You can bet we never went out alone again.”
“My God,” Iliana said. “How scary. Did you ever want to quit?”
Jeff shook his head. “Never,” he said. “Not then. Because most of the time it was fun. And the acting—I was really good. Do you remember the episode where my character’s dad has a heart attack? I actually cried real tears for that show. Wait, I’ll show you.” He looked straight at her and squeezed his eyes shut four or five times, as though trying to wring water from them. It was bizarre to watch, and she had to stop herself from laughing.
He pressed his fingers on his eyelids, then squeezed again. “There we go. See?” he said. “I’m thinking about the heart attack, and I can feel I’m starting to cry. I can do it, see?”
Iliana didn’t want to make him feel bad, so she nodded, even though she didn’t see any change at all. He was clearly a little deluded about his acting ability. After all, he hadn’t been performing Shakespeare. Still, the show was a long time ago. Maybe he was remembering how he saw things back then.
“And when we were touring, man, we were treated like kings!” he continued. “We rode in limos, we had huge hotel rooms, and if we were hungry all we had to do was pick up a phone and they’d send up anything—steak, a bottle of champagne, tanks of ice cream. And companies were always giving us stuff. I got a Porsche one year. I got cases of Dom Pérignon each New Year’s. I got VIP tickets to any ball game I wanted. One day Terry tells some interviewer how we could all use time away on a deserted island, and the next day a big travel company calls: No deserted island available, but would two weeks on a private beach in Tahiti do? We went to the White House. We were on the Tonight Show.
“And then there was the money,” he said, looking as though he barely remembered she was there. “We didn’t make much when we started the series, but once we had concerts, that’s when we raked it in. I didn’t even know how much I got, that’s what I had a business manager for. All I knew was that I was loaded. I bought a house. I owned three cars. I built my dad this acoustically perfect music studio. I sent my mom to the Riviera.
“Needless to say, I didn’t do much saving. So the money didn’t last long. I lost a ton on some hotel venture in Texas that my business manager talked me into. I lost a ton to agents and managers I trusted, who are now living the high life because I never read my contracts. All those Jeff Downs posters that hung in millions of teenage girls’ bedrooms? I never saw a dime. We signed away all our merchandising rights.”
“So what made it worth it?” she asked. “Tell me—what was the best time you had, the best thing you remember from those years?”
Jeff lowered his voice and folded his arms on his desk. “The best time was when it was all starting—those first weeks of rehearsing, when we were so stoked about what would happen,” he told her. “There was this place we’d go, Nate’s, before we got too big to go out on our own. It had the best burgers, and it was on the beach and smelled of beer and ocean. So the day comes when our show will be on the air for the first time, and we’re there eating lunch, and Terry notices a row of those old newspaper machines, where you put in a coin to open the door and get a paper? Well, he gets one and turns to the TV page and sees our names listed, and he’s got this big smile on his face. And suddenly he puts in another coin and this time takes the whole pile, fifteen of them. He’s standing there, smiling and holding this stack of papers.
“Well, Peter goes to the next machine and pulls out all the papers, and then Bruce and I do it, too. So now we’ve got around forty newspapers, and Terry jumps into his car and takes off, and the rest of us get into my car and follow him. And a few blocks later, we see Terry at another row of machines, taking more papers, so we do the same. At some point Terry heads back to the studio, but I keep driving the others, and we keep emptying newspaper machines and laughing our heads off.
“Yeah, we got yelled at when we showed up at the studio nearly two hours late,” he said. “But it was so great. I swear, I think it was the best afternoon I ever had.”
He got up and went over to a half-size refrigerator against the wall. He pulled out two bottles of water and placed one on the desk in front of Iliana. She twisted the top off and took a sip. He sat back down.
“What’s on your agenda this afternoon, Ms. Fisher?”
“Just have to pick up my kids at two thirty,” she answered. She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven. She hadn’t heard her phone ring, but she reached in her bag and double-checked anyway. No missed calls.
“And I take it you want me to continue.”
“I want to know what happened next,” she said. “How did it end? Will you tell me that?”
“Ahh, the painful part,” he said, still smiling but also sounding a little melancholy. “I guess I promised you the whole story, didn’t I? Okay, onward. So the first season it’s all beginning and the second season we’re on a roll, but then things change. Did you know teen idols have a shelf life of two years?”
She shook her head. It was strange to think of Jeff as having a shelf life, like bread or cereal. But by the time the Dreamers started their third season, she was in high school, writing for the school literary magazine, covering the debate team for the school newspaper, getting to know the president of the debate team, who would become her first boyfriend. After the second season, she couldn’t even remember any episodes.
“It happens slowly so you don’t even realize it,” Jeff was saying. “Our fourth album didn’t sell as well as the other three, then the TV ratings started to drop, then one week we didn’t even make it into the top ten. That’s when the fighting began. We were animals, trying to protect our hides. Terry complained that he wasn’t getting enough close-ups. And Peter was married by then, he threatened to quit if he had to keep touring. There should never have been a fourth season. Nobody was watching anymore. The reporters were calling us ‘The Bad Dreams,’ ‘The Nightmares.’ Same guys we used to slip bottles of liquor to or bring into our hotel suites when we were touring. Now they made fun of us. We were a joke.”
He opened the desk drawer and took out another old photograph, which he offered to her. She took it. It showed the four Dreamers sitting on the wood railing of a boardwalk, with the ocean behind them. They were shirtless and tan, with blue Levis and bare feet. There were four girls in the photo as well, two standing on either side of the boys. They were in bikinis, although the one on the far left was wearing a long, unbuttoned denim shirt over it. Everyone was smiling, except for this fourth girl, who stared into the camera, her lips a short, straight line. She reminded Iliana of the youngest girl in the family picture downstairs. The photo looked faded and felt thin and worn in her hand. She knew it was old, but she also guessed it had been handled a lot. Did he show it often to others? Or look at it a lot when he was here alone?
“That’s Catherine, my wife, the serious one. Did I tell you she was in the show?”
“You did,” Iliana said. “Were you dating back then? What did you like about her?” She was curious as to how Catherine ended up with Jeff. What had it taken to date this adored teen idol, let alone to become his girlfriend and later his wife?
“It was mostly that she wasn’t like the other girls,” he said. “She was smart, always doing something brainy. She was getting a degree in dance, and she would read these biographies of famous choreographers—Balachee or something. Once she spent two hours on the phone with her father, helping him with his taxes! How does a twenty-year-old know how to do taxes?
“But there was this thing about her, this tiny little piece of her that was a risk taker,” he continued. “I mean, she came all the way from New York and auditioned for our show—you’ve got to have some adventure in you to do that. And I was always chasing that little piece of her. And it was so sexy when I found it. Once I convinced her to spend an entire weekend in my apartment without getting dressed. Just to go back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, eating and making love for two days straight. This was so not like he
r, she always had to study or clean out a cabinet or something. I got such a charge, being the guy who got her to go against her nature. What an incredible weekend.”
The mention of Catherine’s decision to travel from New York to California was like a knife jab. Why hadn’t she ever had the courage to do something like that, something gutsy and bold and risky? Why had she played life so safe?
“But at the end of the third season, Catherine decides to leave LA,” Jeff said. “I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t such a great boyfriend. But I was so mad when she abandoned me. She thought the show didn’t have a future, and she was right. After the fourth season, we’re canceled. Nobody likes the Dreamers. Nobody will admit ever liking us. And it’s every man for himself. I tried a solo singing tour. Do you remember that?”
Iliana shook her head guiltily.
“Don’t worry, no one does. Nobody bought tickets. I could barely fill half an auditorium. So I cancel the last few cities and go home. Except now, home is on the East Coast. My parents have moved with my brother to New York, so I move in with them. But I can’t stop thinking about what it was like at the beginning. When the commercial came out, and those girls asked for my autograph, or the day we drove around, grabbing newspapers. I would have given anything to do it again. I felt like an old man. I was twenty-three years old.”
Iliana looked down. She knew just how he felt. Going to college, getting her first job, meeting Marc, getting married, giving birth—all the important firsts of life, why did they have to come so early, so close together, bam-bam-bam? Why couldn’t they be spread out over a lifetime? What was a person supposed to do when all the good firsts were over and the only ones left were bad firsts that you didn’t want anyway? The first irreparable fight. The first promotion lost to someone younger. The first spouse to get sick. The first funeral to plan. And yet Jeff was wrong. He hadn’t been washed up at twenty-three. He went on to get married, have a family, start a business, create a product line. Life gave a person a lot of chances.
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