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River Phoenix |
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| I can't tell you how much this
guy meant to me as a junior high schooler. I saved my lunch money
practically every day for two years just to get River Phoenix pin ups.
I clipped out all of the River Phoenix relics and threw out the
magazines. No other celebrity death jabbed me so deeply in the heart. It saddened me when Kurt Cobain died but I wasn't surprised. A glut of his near-death drug accounts littered the news for several weeks leading up to his last days. And my mind skidded out of control for awhile when Kristen Pfaff of Hole died. The sudden grungification, hence, morbid de-grungification of the world spurred me to take a long disillusioned walk. There was absolutely no indication that an even graver drug fate plotted to take River's life: cocaine, morphine/heroin, Valium, marijuana and ephedrine all at once. Just a couple of weeks before his chance-timed (oxymoron) Halloween death, I threw away every scrap of River Phoenix memorabilia that I had ever collected. This only aggravated the devastation. |
I learned a valuable lesson from this experience: never ever turn your back on the things that you love. "True" love is something you can never grow out of. It's too bad that it took an acute multiple drug ingestion to remind me of just how much I loved River Phoenix. I sauntered about like a zombie for at least three months after his death - hardly managing enough oneness with myself to walk to Shopper's Drug Mart let alone talk to my best friends. I was nineteen; he was twenty-three. |
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