A Beautiful Non-fiction Story

I probably am breaching copyright protection on here, but this story was online years ago and has now disappeared. I was so struck with the story that I made a point of saving it on my PC and so glad I did, as its just beautiful and captures so well the heart of who River was.





[quote]First Place, Nonfiction (tie), NMW Awards 18





Robert von Stein Redick
Uncrossed River
Copyright 2004 by Robert von Stein Redick









For years after the incidents described in "Uncrossed River," I was unable to see them as anything more than loss and humiliation, "an expense of spirit in a waste of shame." This verdict kept me silent, or clouded my efforts to write about River and Anju with impossible evasions. How startling, then, to look again and find sense and solace, and compassion for everyone involved. Loss made such discoveries possible, it seems—along with perserverence, honest readers, and many calm, quiet drifts of days.

- Robert von Stein Redick




They got the shapely bods,
They got the Steely Dan T-Shirts
And for the coup de grace
They're outrageous.
—Steely Dan, “Show Biz Kids”


This is a work of nonfiction, about an actor and a fiction writer and a woman lost among dreams. A true story, that is, of three adherents to pretty nontruths. As the fiction writer in question I am most anxious to be believed, to rescue the events which follow from the snarl of irony and improbability in which I've left them for over a decade. River Phoenix was an actor, which is to say that he was part idol and part mirror, for a number of fans quite beyond any method of counting. He was also a “real person,” contradictory and confused, and at least in moments—those moments I knew him, for example—fiercely protective of a kind of sincerity that cut through the gestures and make-believe that are the very stuff of his vocation.
Make-believe worried River often and early. “You see people you work with closely change every day and get really selfish,” he told a reporter after the release of his adolescent blockbuster, Stand By Me. “You get snobby and don't have time for the fans on the street who respect your work and want some contact. Or you start saying, 'Oh, this friend isn't good enough for me because he's not in the business. I'll have to be friends with someone who's more important'. You can change, and it's sad."
Of course we all drag contradictions around, bags of shot tied to our ankles. Most of us live with the discomfort; gnawing the ropes now and then but mostly slogging forward, awkward but upright. It's also possible, however, to become too entangled to move. In River's case, dislike for the vain world of acting grew into outright contempt just as he succeeded in wrapping that world around his finger.
But writers act too: on the page, where they play many parts at once; and in the flesh, trying out forms of persuasion, modes of drama, routines. We take on this pseudo-acting with guilt or zeal, humility or bombast, but take it on we do. And since to speak of acting is to speak of bodies, of glamour and ephemera, I will tell you my secret: I was his equal in looks. At twenty-one I had thick chestnut hair to my shoulders, big ravenous eyes, the nose and cheekbones of nameless Hungarian forebears (Köszönöm, guys). It was a face girls touched at parties after they'd had a drink and before they said hello. It didn't last. The eyes rejected contacts, forced me back behind frames; the hair fell in monsoons; a sudden conversion to vegetarianism stole a little of the blush from my skin. But while it was there it was glorious—a windfall, and a startling apotheosis for a kid just liberated (through the miracle of Accutaine) from rather grim congenital acne.
I was at the height of this beauty parabola the first time I met River. He was touring with his band Aleka's Attic; they played the University of Virginia in a benefit concert for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War. I was vice-president of the latter club and fancied myself its mouthpiece. I was inordinately proud of having caused Senator John Warner's chief of staff to squirm with my questions at a lobbying event in Washington. My anti-nuke work won the approval of a great many idealistic girls, and I frankly believe that the hope of carnal apotheosis drove my writing, speechmaking and radical-press editing more than the need to stop the MX missile or underground tests.
I want to think it was different with River. The day of our first encounter he and his band's viola player were sitting anonymous and overlooked on the curb outside the jail-like building to which the university had relegated our concert. This was 1987, post-Stand By Me and Mosquito Coast, but there were no handlers or overmuscled roadies in sight, just a pair of rather sunburned teenagers who looked as if they hadn't slept in a while. I remember being stunned by their bad posture and neglected T-shirts. Their plain scruffiness. I remember them squinting up at me as I introduced myself and thanked them (in some offhand and probably excessive manner) for supporting The Cause. I remember shaking hands and asking a few questions, or perhaps boasting a little of my own activities, and I recall the shy, laconic tone of their answers. Then I sped off on my Raleigh in pursuit of some other stimulus. That evening I didn't even bother to watch him play.
At our second meeting River and I were both quite changed. We were six years older, which made me a sagacious twenty-five. I was in graduate school—by odd circumstance, in Gainesville, that north Florida college town where the itinerant Phoenix family had at last come to earth. Gone were my glory days of carefree narcissism. My ego had been doused with all sorts of anti-inflammatories. My heart had been broken badly once, and (I believe, though I'm clearly a suspect witness) permanently the second time. I'd traveled throughout South America and blown all my research funds on a half-baked project that still hadn't yielded a degree. And River had gone from star to superstar.
May evening, 1993. Gainesville's new hotspot is the Covered Dish, a grimy club with a sign depicting a casserole spilling eighth notes and a noodle blowing sax. Like some fifty others, my girlfriend Anju and I were escaping the heat and smoke in the parking lot with its broken asphalt and vague smell of piss and garbage and wisps of Spanish moss on the phone lines. Through the open doors the club's interior glowed like a rotisserie. That's where he stood, fidgeting, teetering a little, backed up to the doorframe as though for protection.
White T-shirt again. More muscle, now, as befit a young Indiana Jones—his grand, balletic cameo at the start of Last Crusade. But the face was hunted, the body apologetic and flinching, antithetical in poise to the screen-idol image of himself. He had friends, two or three guys his own age or younger. They didn't seem to know how tight to cling to him; they shuffled in and out through the crowded doorway, brushing his shoulder, half-catching his eye.
River tried to live in Gainesville, not just hermit himself there, fortressed on his mother's estate from the crush of shrieking, snickering fans. It was becoming impossible, but he hadn't given up yet. Wisely, he spoke up about his desire for an unsensational life in which he could enjoy his friends and play his music without hoopla or body armor. The press (and twenty thousand gossipy undergrads) circulated these hopes rather efficiently, and Leaving River Alone became a point of local pride. But for every kid who got the message there was another who didn't, or didn't care. And like the kids who clung to him in embarrassment, as if to be his friend were to flaunt a designer jacket among the poor, some people were stuck in between.
I must pile on another coincidence, now—with a warning that the biggest is yet to come. Anju and I had rented and watched a River Phoenix movie just the night before. This still strikes me as exceedingly odd. We had spent years in Gainesville with no particular desire to lay eyes on the local celebrity. We were not admirers of his work, at least until that random choice in the video shop. The film was Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, a cold portrait of teen sexploitation and the coming of heartlessness with age. A flawed movie of deep feelings; a tearjerker that leaves you feeling a bit of a sucker. A cult film overnight.
I had been thinking about Idaho for twenty-four hours. The ambiguities of the plot mystified me, yet River's lovesick character, betrayed by a Machiavellian Keanu Reeves, seemed like a brave facing up to the catastrophe of loving anyone. In fact I had been nipping from just such an emotional flask for months; River's film simply pushed me over the edge. I felt I had no choice but to talk to him.
Still I'd be guilty of a conceit to imply that curiosity about Idaho alone drove me on. I was not spurred by the clean interests of art, or the film's slightly maudlin lurch at deeper meanings. I wanted face time with River Phoenix. I wanted this essay, if not a grander one, if not an outright induction to the grace of knowing his family. I wanted to be able to mention the quality of Heart Phoenix's pancakes or the way his younger brother Leaf told a joke. There's no way to deny this: I wanted some of the magic of River's life to rub off on my own.
I walked up to the doorway. I remember the cautious way he met my eye. Sizing me up as a potential crazy or (passing that first test) gibbering fan. I was almost blind with pride at my own, approximately normal, voice.
“Excuse me, are you River?”
A nod. The eyes still wary, his whole body tense.
I then spelled out my flimsy little case for bothering him: our brief meeting in Charlottesville (he made no pretense of remembering), my fascination with Idaho, my confusion about the plot and the huge, ambiguous pain shooting through his character, a Portland boy who goes to bed with predatory men out of sheer destitution. Strangest of all, I claimed, were the boy's ties to an older man that might be his brother or father or even (was I grotesquely off the mark?) both.
Our faces were ten inches apart—further than that and the music drowned us out. He listened, and then his look became (to my incalculable relief) encouraging. He still seemed to be waiting for a trap to spring, but now it was concentration as much as caution that made him tense. No, he said, I hadn't misunderstood. The older man in Idaho was brother and father to River's character Mike, who is slowly crucified for not knowing how to love the man, or what kind of love to ask for in return. Emotionally orphaned, Mike falls in turn for his only friend, the ne'er-do-well rich kid played by Reeves. In the film's signature moment, Reeves tells River that he doesn't believe two men can ever love each other. The desperately needy Mike at first stutters agreement. Then, groping for each word, he contradicts himself: “Well, I don't know … for me, I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn't paid for it.” Almost whispering, he adds: “I love you, and… you don't pay me.” River, who wrote the line and sold it to Van Sant, recited it for me with a slight distortion: “I love you and you don't need to pay me.” In other words, here I am, Keanu, yours for the asking.
River almost smiled at me. I say almost because the smile, if it was there at all, was dampened by what I imagine as our shared desire that the conversation not fail, not become a joke or a cheap piece of theater, a fobbing off on his part or a flattering on mine. The canned music ended and the band returned for a second set. Anju had wandered off. People squeezed past us into the Dish, and we kept talking.
I could smell booze on his breath, see the slight loll of his head. But whatever he had drunk did not slow his mind, or his tongue. He told me of the thrill the story gave him, the debates with Reeves and Van Sant, the scenes shot with wiseass energy and then reshot dark and deadpan. River could have written a treatise on Idaho, on rejection and homosocial bonding. I can't help thinking now that I did him a disservice by not writing it down. He would be dead five months later in Hollywood, outside another nightclub.
Eventually he turned the tables. Who was I? A graduate student, came the ignominious reply. I made haste to qualify that answer, for I thought my studies noble. At UF I was part of the splendidly named Tropical Conservation and Development Program. It was the high-water moment for “sustainable development,” education, when even generalists and romantics could find a scholarship to help save the world. I was both, and had lately returned from Argentina. River eyes went wide at the news.
“You did? Hey.”
Hey, I thought.
Then he asked if I'd spent time in Chile. Some, I said. A few weeks.
“I bought land there,” he said. “Ancient forest. The alerces. I've never seen it.”
He owned alerces forest in Chile. The trees are called the redwoods of the Andes, and while they're not actually the same family, they approach redwoods in size and outshine them in longevity: some were known to be three thousand years old. I had walked among these trees in Nahuel Huapi National Park in Argentina, just two months before. I told him this and he just stared. For a moment I must have done the same, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that this awkward kid with a bad haircut owned trees that had germinated before Romulus pitched a tent on Palatine. And then, because my mind was full of her waking and sleeping and no aspect of Chile could possibly matter more, I told River about Natalia.
“I have this Chilena friend. She's a field biologist, and one of the most beautiful people on earth. Maria Natalia. Nati. I was just with her tonight.”
“She's Chilean?” he said, sounding younger by the minute.
“She's wonderful,” I said gravely. Because I could not say I'm in love with her or She's so spiritual she might be crazy. Both of these would have been true statements, but for rather different reasons they were unutterable.
In any case the tide of craziness was dragging us further from shore. Why the hell was I talking about Natalia? My girlfriend's state-of-the-art jealousy radar had picked her out as an enemy months ago. But Anju didn't know the half of it: didn't know that I'd spent the six weeks since my return from Argentina in one ecstatic and partly delusional fever dream about Nati, didn't know we climbed trees in the dark or taught each other songs in three languages or that I called her from Santiago or that she'd kissed me on a rooftop while nightjars dove at the streetlights, gorging on moths.
Any moment now he'd laugh. Offer his hand, tell me he had somewhere to be. I waited for it, already preparing myself not to care. Instead, with no affectation whatsoever, he said the last thing I could ever have predicted.
“Could she be my future wife?”
“Possibly,” I said at once.
Only when the word left my mouth and sent a flicker of thought over his face did I feel the tremendous effort I had made in that split-second. I wanted her myself, you see: wanted her madly, with the same fusion of idealism and avarice that made me want River's friendship and South American vistas and a novel praised by Robert Stone—but more than any of these, for Nati was indeed beautiful and lambent. My relationship with Anju was a shipwreck. We fought, wept, limped through ceasefires, turned differences of culture into acts of high treason. It was all the more frightening for the growing certainty that I loved her.
Predictably, Nati was everything Anju was not: ethereal, forgiving, roughly my height. Anju was a septualingual Indian firecracker; Nati was a shade who murmured a few words at a time, sonorous, as if speaking through a waterfall. She was fond of abstractions. Anju laid her meanings on the table, filleted them in plain sight.
Consequently I had built a life with Anju—as much as two headstrong geeks from opposite sides of the world can build a life—but I lost my mind over Natalia. She would think nothing of leaping on a bicycle at midnight and riding from the university to my shack on the lake, nor of rising from the bed where we lay talking (endlessly talking, never making love) and announcing that she had to go—ya, this minute, ciao. She hated personal questions, plans, had a way of turning my hints about a future together into a discussion of Sufism or Rilke. She said I love you with ease, but I'll be there at nine was beyond her power.
Anju left town that summer—a botany course in South Florida. I wrote stories, and occasionally a page or two of my thesis. Then Nati materialized at a professor's cookout on the opposite side of a volleyball net. Her face, her tensed body tracking the ball overhead contained something of Yeat's fairy children and Salinger's Phoebe, and she beamed and sprang about her few square yards of grass as if dancing in an icy surf. When I approached her afterwards we managed to do no more than exchange names and grin at each other's sweaty faces. Then, beaming, she ran into the house.
Days later I was courting her. It went nowhere fast. She liked me—liked my already-fading looks and my giddy desire for her, which she mistook for her own childish zeal for life. I brought her vegetables from my garden; she replied with Neruda or Violeta Parra. We reveled in the limits of language (her English as quirky as my Spanish) and the confidence that the essentials were somehow getting through (they were not). She asked me to explain Wallace Stevens' “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and I just laughed. We grew drunk on each other's stockpiles of poetry. Drunk too, like Neruda at Macchu Picchu, on the natural splendor outside Gainesville: palmettos groves, cypresses knees like cloaked and huddled pilgrims, tree frogs belting their sexual songs by the thousands, loud enough to drown out the jets from Eglin Air Force Base. In my mind that summer it was all counterpoint to Nati's fugue. One night we took a canoe out on Newnan's Lake, and I was so desperate to impress her that I leaped over the side. As I treaded water in that lake boiling with alligators and Florida cottonmouths I saw quite suddenly that this woman had me, body and soul. I don't think Nati herself ever figured that out.
By the night of the concert at the Dish, nothing was resolved except that infidelity was the scariest, ugliest addiction on earth. Anju had returned from her course; Nati met me in gardens, stairwells, cars; and even though days passed between such meetings her voice or touch still scalded me awake five times a night. In that lunatic time a compassionate professor shoved me into his office and asked what the hell was the going on. I tried to sit down and knocked over a small bookshelf and found my eyes swimming with tears. A truthful answer would have been that I was torn between a narcotic illusion and a solid love that hurt like thumbscrews. But it would be a long time before I saw things so clearly. I told him I had family problems.
But I didn't try to hide my obsession from River. Part of me still believed in all the kisses and cariño Natalia could lavish when she chose. That must have been what he saw in my face, for a similar excitement began to surface on his own. He asked questions. Wasn't I exaggerating? “She walks around Gainesville talking about the soul?”
“She says it's your soul that does the talking, all the time,” I told him. “But we're afraid of what it tells us, so we smother it with noise.”
“God,” he said. “What a friend.”
I began to enjoy myself. Finally, someone to tell! And before long, despite my own fixation on Nati, I succumbed to the role of matchmaker. It was too good to resist: this dreamy millionaire boy, who bought forest he'd never seen and told a stranger about his gay-hustling film as if conf