On River Phoenix

I was thirteen and Stand By Me was my favorite move. Four young boys out on an adventure. It was everything I wanted my life to be. Out with friends, away from parents, telling stories, watching out for each other.

My stories emulated Stand By Me. I wrote my own version over and over again, inserting my own friends. Four girls walked the train tracks, spent nights in barns. Amy, Liz, Sara and me. A pack of girls out on our own, often meeting up with a pack of boys. Andy, Ben, Brent and Toby. But thinking about it, I was never truly satisfied with the stories I told. Liz would still get the cutest guy. She was prettier than the three of us. Amy would go off with anyone, and Sara and I would still be left to figure out what to do with the leftover boys. I couldn’t imagine it any way than it already was.

I should have written me in place of Wil Wheaton’s character, Gordy. That would have made me happy. Scratch that. I’d replace Corey Feldman’s Teddy so that it would be just be me out there with Chris Chambers, Gordy and Vern. I could have all three cute boys to myself.

Stand By Me meant more to me than Star Wars and Pretty in Pink combined. More than I wanted to be Princess Leia with Hans Solo, or Molly Ringwald with Andrew McCarthy, I wanted to be Chris Chambers, be his best friend, and be his girlfriend too. Sensitive, misunderstood kid, smart, a peacemaker. That was me! We’d have great conversations and really important stuff, and Chris would always understand what I was talking about.

I was thirteen, and a story about thirteen year old boys was too much for me to resist. The age when I wanted freedom, the chance to make my own decisions, not to have parents tell me what to do. To stay out all night. It seemed dangerous, enticing, romantic.

Funny—it makes me think my obsession with Stand By Me may have led to my eventual separation those my three best friends I so often wrote about. One day, I wrote a short note:

Dear Amy, Liz and Sara,
Goodbye.

I couldn’t put up with friends who weren’t like Chris and Gordy. Either they were the kind of friends they should be, or I wasn’t going to have them at all. And they weren’t. They were becoming more interested in sneaking cigarettes and beer, and getting in the back of skater vans with bad boys than they were in late night, important conversations that revealed truths and secrets. I felt like an outsider amongst my closest pals.

I remember a few months later writing another letter; this time, just to Liz. Her mom and my mom were friends, and word had gotten back to me that Liz was confused by my disassociation. I took out my copy of “The Body,” the short story that Stand By Me was based on, and copied a paragraph that seemed to say it all for me.

“The most important things are the hardest things to say,” it began. I sent this excerpt to Liz. But my mom told me a week or so later that she was still confused.

***

When I can’t sleep at night I turn my thoughts to River Phoenix. My vision of him is tall and lanky, a little like a scared animal. He wears a black t-shirt and jeans and converse all-star sneakers. A pony tail holds his blonde hair back from his face. His eyes look like they do in the movies, where he tried to make them hard, his posture tough, but the scared part of him always came through. Maybe that’s why people loved him? Why any actor gets labeled great? Who they are shows through the characters they play.

I watched the DVD extras for The Thing Called Love. Dressed in an oversized suit coat, he would not look at the camera. It frustrated me, made me want more from him. It made me dream about being the one to open him up.

I’d like to be his Mrs. Fickett. That rich woman from A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. She was so smartly dressed. She was the kind of woman with a boudoir. A penoir.

There’s the scene in the movie where she’s just seduced Jimmy, but he thinks he’s seduced her. Mrs. Fickett is in a white satin nightgown, fresh from a shower. She’s the most unafraid woman she’s ever met. As he exits the room, she collapses into giggles on the bed, utterly satisfied. Alive. Surprised at herself and how she’d never thought of this before. He was the kind of boy she’d never been able to get in high school. Now it was so easy. And it didn’t have to mean anything either.

That’s the thing about River. No matter where he is, he makes you imagine standing next to him. He illuminates your desires, gives you the chance to imagine how things could be.

I do remember when he died. It had been a couple of years since I’d really thought about River. My Own Private Idaho hadn’t spoken to me the way his other movies did, so I didn’t think much of it when I heard the news. Drug overdose. Heroin. Something. A fashionable night club, movie star shooting up in the bathroom, stumbling out and collapsing on the sidewalk, while other movie stars stood around and watched, secretly thinking, “Now I’ve got a lot less competition.”

It’s only now that I feel a loss, more than ten years later. Perhaps because nostalgia for my own youth makes me long for him again. I would have been nice to grow up together. But then again, maybe he’d be married and divorced a few times already, and he’d be dating supermodels and modern dancers.

Oh—but my fondness for that dreamy-eyed River, I want to imagine something better for him. An Olympian, perhaps. Graceful, strong and outdoorsy. A long braid down her back. The smell of hard work on her skin. Or maybe I’d pair the actor with the soul of a poet with a real poet. They’d move to a sun dappled glade in the woods to escape the prying public eye.

Maybe that’s me, that poet. Somewhere in heaven, River’s waiting for me. He stands at the gate with two chestnut horses. When I get there, we’ll ride together to the banks of a clear-running creek.

How interesting. At 13, I’d let my friends have the boys I wanted. Now, a lot like Mrs. Fickett, I’m not afraid to take the best one for myself.