The Last Dreamer (11 page)

She reached the top step and felt a tingle of relief trickle through her body. The large attic room was entirely businesslike. It reminded her of the small lofts in old buildings in Soho where graphic artists she had sometimes hired for
Business Times
worked. There was a wood floor and slanting wood beams on the ceiling, with tall, old windows lining the walls. Two tables with computer monitors were in the center of the room. A man and a woman were staring at one.

Jeff seemed more at ease now, too. “Hey, guys, here’s the reporter I told you about,” he called as he took her coat. “You online with Stefano?”

The two nodded, the man holding up a finger to indicate that they were in the middle of a critical step. “We’re waiting to hear if he’ll do it.”

Jeff kept his eyes on his employees as he explained to her what was going on. “We’re creating this whole new category,” he said. “A lightweight, real upscale comforter—organic cotton, super-high thread count, all the bells and whistles. Perfect for expensive beach homes—the Hamptons, Fire Island, those kinds of places. We got a lead on this amazing Italian designer and we’re hoping to convince him to do some ultra-sophisticated prints for us. We’ve got a small shop in East Hampton that would do the launch, and if it takes off, we’ll roll it out to other high-end markets.”

The two people pulled back from the computer, smiling. “Perfect!” the man said. “He’ll do it. Man, this product’s going to be awesome.”

Jeff congratulated his employees for locking Stefano in and then introduced them to Iliana.

“We’re going to overnight some fabric samples to the factory and get something to eat,” the woman said. “See you later, Jeff. Nice meeting you, Iliana.”

The two of them headed downstairs, and she and Jeff were now alone again. The room was quiet—as quiet as the house had been when they were alone there together. Iliana started to feel nervous again, but Jeff looked totally relaxed as he sat down in a modern, leather office chair behind a large executive desk made of dark wood.

He motioned to Iliana to sit opposite him. “Okay, Ms. Fisher,” he said, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “The ball’s in your court. What exactly would you like from me?”

They were words she would have given her right arm to hear when she was in middle school. And back then, she would have answered
Love me! Be with me! Make me special!
Today she had a different answer. But in a way, she realized, it was still the same.

She reached in her bag and double-checked that her phone’s volume was turned up, so she’d hear it if Matthew or Dara called. Then she took out the small digital recorder she used for her local stories, flipped it on, and set it on his desk. She didn’t know if she’d actually get an assignment and need his quotes, but she wanted to record them anyway. She wanted to hold on to his story forever.

“Are you okay with this?” she asked.

He shrugged good-naturedly. “You’re the boss.”

“Then tell me your story,” she said. “I want to know everything. I want to know how you became a star, and how it felt to be one. I want to know what you liked, and what you didn’t like, and how being a star was better or worse than what people would expect it to be. And I want to know how it felt when everything ended, and how it feels now, when it’s all behind you. I want to hear it all. ”

Her interest clearly delighted him, as he looked like a man who had just drawn a winning poker hand. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

Chapter 11

“It all comes down to the music,” he began. “The first day on the set, they told me they didn’t need me to play. They had studio musicians lined up. But I took out my guitar and started performing this song I wrote, and their mouths dropped open. Even the top guy, Stan Shore, did a double take. ‘Waddayaknow?’ he said. ‘The kid’s got a sound.’ And then—”

“Wait, wait,” Iliana said. “Start at the beginning. The very beginning. How did it all happen, how did they find you?”

“From the jeans commercial.”

“And how did you get that? Did you go to an audition?”

“Yes. Well, no. No, what happened is
 . . .”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Okay, if you must know, Ms. Fisher, it starts a year earlier with this community theater thing that is just too embarrassing to talk about.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You promised me great stories. And remember, I told you my M&M’s story. As you said, we’re friends now.”

He folded his arms on his desk. “Pretty shrewd, to use my own words against me. Okay, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll give you. But I reserve the right to cut this part out of the finished article, got it?”

She laughed. “We’ll discuss what goes in and out of the article later,” she said. “Let’s just start. No holding back.”

He leaned his chin on the palm of his hand. “Okay, then I guess I’d have to say that it really starts when I’m sixteen,” he said. “Living at home, bored at school, hating my parents, desperate to lose my virginity—a typical teenage boy, right? But then everything changes when this new family moves next door. The guy, he’s nice and all, but it’s his wife, Wendy, who gets me
crazy
. Man, she was hot. Long, honey-colored hair and pink lipstick, golden-tanned legs that go on forever. And they had these two little kids, and I just loved that. It meant that she actually had sex! Yes!”

He pumped his fist, and Iliana forced a smile. She didn’t like to think of Jeff examining Wendy’s legs or imagining Wendy in bed. Her daydreams of him when she was young had always been G-rated.

“And she’s part of this community theater group, and one day she tells my mom they need a teenage boy to play one of the roles,” he said. “All this kid has to do is sit on the couch pretending to watch TV, and at one point say, ‘Hey, shut up, I’m trying to watch!’ So my mom asks me, and Wendy tells me she’s in the cast, too, and I say, ‘Oh, yeah!’ You see, I didn’t have much to do with girls before then. My friends and I, we just hung around at the mall or behind the school, getting high. But now, I’m spending all this time in rehearsals with Wendy—and even though the play sucks, I’m in goddamned heaven.”

Again, Iliana found herself slightly put off. She hated to think that Jeff was just like all the potheads she remembered from school who gathered in the afternoons, swarming the building like termites. “So was it only about this woman?” she said. “Or did you like being onstage? What did you want to come of this? Were you thinking the play could lead to something big?”

He shook his head. “Wish I could say I had big, important goals for myself, but hey, it was all about Wendy. What can I tell you? I was just a kid. So opening night comes, and I’m backstage, and suddenly I notice a couple in a corner, in this intense lip-lock—yup—it’s Wendy, with one of the idiot lighting guys. I don’t know if I was more upset for myself or the poor schmuck she was married to, but I just want to punch someone. And then the stage manager yells, ‘Places!’ So I’m onstage and I have nothing to do but watch an imaginary television and listen to the other actors say these stupid words I’ve heard a million times, and you can tell that the audience hates the show, they’re coughing and talking and barely paying attention. But me, I keep seeing that damn kiss over and over in my head, and it’s killing me. And finally it’s time for me to speak and I shout, ‘SHUT UP ALREADY, I’M TRYING TO WATCH!’

“And don’t you know, I brought the house down! I stole the show. I guess the audience recognized in me every teenager they had ever encountered, and they thought it was hysterical. They laughed and clapped for almost a full minute!”

“That’s wild,” Iliana said.
This
was the story she wanted to hear. She loved the chance meeting of passion and good timing. Of course, she didn’t like the hints of egotism emerging as he told his story. She hoped they were simply an indication of inexperience. As he told her, he hadn’t talked about himself to a reporter in a long time. Maybe he didn’t remember how easy it was to sound arrogant.

“And as it turns out, there’s this casting agent in the audience—a chunky lady with electric-blue eye makeup, and she tells my parents that she could get me work. I had never even thought about doing more acting, but Wendy walks over and I scream, ‘Yes!’ as if this is my life’s dream. And Wendy looks disappointed, I guess because she was hoping this would be
her
big break. But the agent barely acknowledges her. So much for Wendy—she could have her husband and her babies and her little backstage indulgences.
This
whiny teenage boy was going to be a star!”

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
.