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Some of the rumors about Phoenix's behavior on that set are attributable to his lazy eye: When he flutter-blinked to center his iris, he looked under the influence. That said, he sometimes was. Flea, who was himself in recovery (and who was not a drug friend), spoke to Phoenix that Christmas, and so did Bobby Bukowski. After Phoenix came over one morning, still blasted on heroin and cocaine, Bukowski waited until Phoenix had taken a nap and eaten one of the garlic-and-raw-veggies-and-serial-glasses-of-water meals he used to cleanse his system and then gently confronted him, "I'd rather you just point a gun at your head and pull the trigger," Bukowski said. "I want to see you become an old man, so we can be old friends together." Phoenix wept and wept. "That's the end of the drugs," he promised. "I don't want to go down to the place that's so dark it'll annihilate me." For several months afterward Phoenix would sometimes all Bukowski for support when he felt the urge to get high. But in January Heart noticed that he'd become distant: almost surly.

Phoenix had striven mightily to keep his drug use from her, and he largely succeeded. But this time she realized "a substance might be involved" and asked River. He denied it. Heart and John repeatedly urged River to take a long vacation in Costa Rica, but he continued to shun the demands; of solitude. Yet he was troubled by intimations of mortality. Early last year he had a recurrent daydream that spirits were coming for him, and he feared the fateful numerology of turning twenty-three on the twenty-third of August. When a friend saw him in a heroin stupor that spring and said, "River, you're going to kill yourself," Phoenix just looked at him, the friend says, "like ~Yeah, so?'"

Last fall Phoenix filmed Dark Blood in an area in Utah reputed to be a magnet for alien visitations, which fascinated him (his latest karmic catchphrase was "Thanks be to UFO Godmother"). He told friends he'd been levitated over his bed, and he would sometimes lie on his patio and shout to the heavens, "Take me, I'm ready! What else is out there?" But Phoenix was clean and focused in Utah, as he had been that summer. He was in love with Samantha Mathis, whom he'd puppyishly pursued during The Thing Called Love, telling, friends "his head was going to pop off if he didn't get to hold her hand." And he had finally started sifting through his anger, spelunking into his own fault lines. His friends agree that he was strong enough to reemerge; that he was not ineluctably lost, like Jim Morrison or John Belushi. But for the accident of October 31, Phoenix would probably have made it through. But back in Los Angeles for three days in late October, depressed by the pain of his role as a lonely desert dweller in Dark Blood and by continual on-set fighting, he began with drugs again. He'd always hated Los Angeles.

Previously he'd been a public, celebratory user; now he used privately at the Hotel Nikko. Rain and Joaquin had flown out to Los Angeles that final day because Joaquin had an audition for the role of River's brother in Safe Passage. River was excited about the chance to play, at last, a normal young man, who heals his father's blindness. But Rain and Joaquin also sensed that River felt very alone. ln his last two movies Phoenix had darkened his hair to look older, and it's poignant that River, fed up with his pretty, face, went unrecognized by Johnny Depp that night at Depp's club, the Viper Room. Phoenix looked thin and strung-out in black jeans and Converse sneakers; he looked, finally, anonymous. It was a terrible death, of course--the stricken 911 call from Joaquin; River's eight-minute seizure, his head jerking and his knuckles banging the sidewalk--and yet it was a mistake of youth.

He seemed such an old soul it was easy to forget he was only twenty-three. In Utah, Phoenix would lie on his patio and shout to the heavens, "Take me, I'm ready! What else is out there?" A FEW NIGHTS after Phoenix died, his family and several close friends like Bukowski and Solgot sat around the table in Micanopy, drinking Gentleman Jack whiskey, John's favorite brand, and remembering River. They got in an uproar of laughter, and a tumbler that came with the whiskey abruptly shattered. Later, when Solgot was at the sink, three more of the tumblers broke simultaneously in the dish rack. "River's a joker," she says. In two separate memorial services, both held outside on still days, when everyone joined hands to think of Phoenix, the wind suddenly whipped up. He has often been in his friends' dreams, assuring them he is fine, though he seems quiet and sometimes melancholy.

"I am still connected to his energy," Heart Phoenix says. "When the wind blows I see River, when the sun shines I see River, when I look in someone's eyes and make a connection I see River. To have death transformed into another way to look at life is his huge gift." But for others the question of how to remember lingers. In London, Dermot Mulroney ran in to one of River's drug friends, a screenwriter, and slammed him against a wall. "This is how I feel about River's death," Mulroney said. "How do you feel?" The friend said he was clean--now. Certain scenes of Phoenix's movies are freshly piercing: when Phoenix stops clowning and admits in Little Nikita that "whenever people tell me to be myself I don't know what to do ... I don't know what myself is"; when he gleefully snorts cocaine in Idaho when Keanu Reeves reflects on their three years hustling and says, "What I'm getting at, Mike, is that we're still alive." And in the just-released Silent Tongue, the sequence when the spirit of Phoenix's dead Kiowa Indian wife goads him to commit suicide.

In rehearsal, director Sam Shepard roped Phoenix and Sheila Tousey with twine to cement the inescapability of their joint doom, and they play the scene hauntingly; when Phoenix maneuvers the mouth of the rifle under his chin, it's almost impossible to watch. But our wince would not be what Phoenix desired as

his legacy. Nor would he have wanted the other extreme. When 250 people gathered for the family's memorial service under a huge live oak tree at the base of the Phoenix property, the tenor of many of the remarks from the Klingons was, as Suzanne Solgot puts it, "River's in heaven, blah blah blah, it was his time, blah blah blah." "You would have thought he was ninety and had died in his sleep," says Martha Plimpton. "The people who were saying this felt tremendous guilt that they had contributed to his death." After hearing yet another speaker say, "River needed to go, and he's free now," Bradley Gregg, who'd played Phoenix's elder brother in Stand by Me and who became like an actual brother to him, leaped to his feet and shouted, "River didn't have to die to be free!" Not everyone heard, so he shouted again, "River didn't have to die to be free!" Gregg's wife, Dawn, added a clarion, "Wake up, wake up!" her tears soaking the baby she held in her arms.

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