The curtains quiver, the window blows open and into the room flies a lovely boy clad only in cobwebs and autumn leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees.
Come with me, where dreams are born, and time is never planned
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Author Archives: Delicto
My Own Private Idaho – River Phoenix doesn’t just act – he drifts, aches, and unravels… and now we know that it was real
Scott: I only have sex with a guy for money.
Mike: Yeah, I know.
Scott: And two guys can’t love each other.
Mike: Yeah.
Mike: Well, I don’t know. I mean… I mean, for me, I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it… I love you, and… you don’t pay me.
Scott: Mike…
Mike: I really wanna kiss you, man… Well goodnight, man… I love you though… You know that… I do love you.
***
Watched ‘My Own Private Idaho’ for the first time. Charlie asked me if I’d seen Keanu Reeves recently because he looked old. But he was 61-years-old. River Phoenix still looks exactly the same… but that was how he left things. I remembered that I’d mentioned Phoenix before… but in one of my stories, he had appeared as a ghost.
It wasn’t going to be called ‘My Own Private Idaho’… better than ‘Blue Funk’ or ‘Minions of the Moon’… and named after a B-52s song. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays… Prince Hal and Hotspur and Falstaff… but here it was Scott Favor, privileged bisexual, Mike Waters, narcoleptic gay hustler searching for his mother, and Bob Pigeon, coke-dealing chickenhawk. Gus Van Sant: “My films are usually about relationships. I think you make films about things you lack.”
I can’t stop thinking about River Phoenix because, I guess, I’m in love with yet another dead man.
1987… “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” – River Phoenix.
1989… Star burning bright. Beautiful. Lightness. Creative. Camera object.
1991… Indie moment. ‘My Own Private Idaho’. Realism to fantasy. Challenging the norm. Self-destructive attitudes. Dark themes. Cool culture. Downbeat hustlers. Wanderers. A chance to become an adult actor. Gus Van Sant simply being Gus Van Sant.
Keanu Reeves laying in bed playing with his nipple. What River Phoenix needed after making this movie – a bath, a shave, an exfoliating facial scrub.
“How do you see yourself fitting in with younger Hollywood acting?” (A sweet voice). “I don’t see any of them in the perspective or in the limelight of Hollywood. I really don’t ever want to get that objective or self-consciousness of my place in this world of showbusiness.”
1993… LA nightclub. Halloween. Music blasting. Sitting on a couch. Tired. Intoxicated. Skinny. Bad skin. Ticking time bombs. Heroine. Cocaine. Morphine. Marajuana. Valium. Cold remedies. Addiction is an open secret here. And then the star exploded all over the pavement. Never did anyone move from casual drug use to death so quickly. The night that Fellini died – ‘A director’s sweet life. An actor’s brief life.’
Retrospective.
2025… ‘My Own Private Idaho’. Turning point. A troubling effect. Midnight rock sessions. Alcohol. Uncontrollable drug use. Crystal meth. Hooked. No chance of going back now. Progressive and fatal. Like ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’…if you go too near to the plant it will eat you. The best performance… but from now on he didn’t care enough about himself to look after himself. What about those he left behind? Nobody did anything to help him when he was alive… guilt… and lasting sadness.
Have a nice day!
Petty fortune telling is the field of the wishful
James shuffled the pack and gave one card to each of four strangers. His face gave nothing away. A cunning smile. He was Madame Delphine de Girardin entertaining Victor Hugo. Cards face down. One by one we turned them over. Julian. Four of diamonds. “Mummy’s favourite.” Olivia. Six of spades. “Vixen.” Shannon. Five of hearts. “Daddy’s princess.” I turned my card. Ace of diamonds. A sigh. “Shameless boy.” This was fun, I thought.
Stolen Words / The Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision
“We speak of the body of the young man at his fullest development, just on the brink of maturity, a young man who has retained some of his original innocence. The model for the classic Greek was the young athlete, from an aristocratic family, who competed in the nude in the original Olympic Games. It is not until later that the natural male form was used as a medium for the expression of godliness, an idea that later became the basis for a popular religious sect. A look back through the twentieth century will demonstrate just how long the Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision. Examine the popular male images of the past 60 years. How many of them have been both young and beautiful?”
Helen Ziou – Valley Advocate Amherst – April 1984
Back off – I’m not that person now
The soul of a good time. But something changed. I’m not a social person anymore, but everybody wants me to be. They talk shit all night. I want to say, “Please go away, I prefer my own company now.”
To die will be an awfully big adventure
The script didn’t work. We looked at it for hours… days even… until somebody said… “Ditch the Peter Pan shit, because everybody knows the Peter Pan shit already… focus on Michael, and only Michael, a handsome son of a bitch who Peter Pan would have fucked anyway.”
Charlie / I will make him appear extremely homoerotic
“Shameless. He floats naked in the water, the light rippling over chest and stomach. His lips, as if caught between a breath and a moan, his hand loose at his side like he’s waiting to be grabbed. There’s nothing soft about it – just flesh, need, and the unspoken dare in his stillness. Every line built for touch, for heat, waiting to be claimed. The invitation to take what you want. The sight is blunt, undeniable: he wants to be used.”
Charlie had taken his art in a new direction. He was bored, disillusioned with paintings of landscapes, objects and street scenes. A flirtation with what he called ‘art contemporain’ had ended in frustration. “Circles, squares, solid colours, lines, zig-zags … they mean nothing to me!”
The first that I knew about this new path was when I returned home to find Levi, our former lodger, sprawled on the sofa in just his underwear. “It isn’t what it looks like,” he flushed. ”I’m only doing it as a favour.”
Charlie shouted from the bathroom. “I am ready now. The bathtub is full and my camera is ready.” I was bemused to say the least.
Charlie wandered into the room. “Ah, you are home, mon ami. I need the bathroom for thirty minutes while I photograph Levi.”
The Polish boy with the Yorkshire accent followed him along the corridor and into the brightly lit bathroom. With a certain amount of embarrassment he stepped into the bath. “Lay down, Levi, and put your head underwater. I am going to stand on both sides of the bath and take photos from above.”
I watched from the doorway and listened while Levi was told to take deep breaths and submerge himself. Then he had to raise his right arm, then his left, and then both of them together. All the time, Charlie was precariously balancing, taking shot after shot.
When they had finished, Levi stood up, looking satisfyingly toned, and dripping from head to toe. Charlie looked him up and down. “As I suspected, you have a little dick, but we cannot all be lucky. You can get dry now.”
“I feel stupid,” Levi told him, “and I haven’t brought any dry boxer shorts.” Charlie flicked through the images and appeared not to have heard him, so I went to a bedroom drawer and gave him a pair of mine to change into.
That night Charlie spent hours searching for the right photo. The next morning he visited a local print shop and had it blown up to the size of a small poster. He placed it on an artist’s easel and studied it. “I am going to use this photo to create my next painting,” he announced. “If it is successful then I am going to start painting beautiful men from now onwards.”
I reminded him that there had been a time when he would have considered Levi anything but beautiful. “That was the case,” he replied, “but I needed somebody that I knew who was willing to model for me, and when I have finished, I will make him appear extremely homoerotic which is something he is definitely not.”
Stolen Words / The latest thing from Harvard
“Don’t fail to drop in to tea tomorrow old girl, or you’ll miss the treat of your life. A new beauty, my dear, the latest thing from Harvard. You may have read of him – Harold Halfseas. Has chestnut hair in crisp like waves all round his forehead; oval face, pure Grecian profile, marble and rose complexion and a magnificent figure. You’ll come? Thanks, darling! I thought you would.”
– From the World News – Columbus, Ohio – 2 December 1923
Somewhere he hasn’t yet imagined
He crouched at the platform’s edge, elbows balanced on his knees, his bare arms lit starkly by the fluorescent tubes above. The train had not yet arrived, but the rails sang faintly, a low vibration that climbed through the soles of his shoes. He leant forward, alert, as if he could will it closer with the sharpness of his gaze.
The station smelt of metal and damp stone, a place most would find tired and ordinary. But for him it felt alive – charged. His youth made everything sharper: the hum of electricity, the echo of footsteps along the tiled walls, even the restless air that slipped through the tunnel ahead. He sniffed his armpits and detected the sweet aroma of innocent sweat that he rather liked.
And then the lights appeared, two pale orbs cutting through the dark, and his breath caught. It was only a train—one of a thousand that came before and would come after. Yet in that moment it felt like something else entirely, a promise or a dare. The train held his past, and once he had boarded, it would move him towards a future. He didn’t know where it would go, only that he was ready to be carried.
He grinned to himself, a private smile that nobody else saw. His whole body hummed with the knowledge that he was young, and that youth meant possibilities.
The Bathwater
Maria was tired of life. Tired of the flat that they lived in. Tired of not having enough money. Tired of being a mother to a four year old. Tired of not being able to take a bath on her own. That was it. She was tired of Joe most of all. They sat opposite each other in silence. She kept still, but he fidgeted, unable to get comfortable and put his feet against the wall behind her and trapped her head between his legs. She noticed the scar on his left knee that had turned pink in the hot water. She also saw how white the bubbles on his legs seemed against the dirty bathroom tiles. Joe lit a cigarette and offered it to her, but she declined, and he simply shrugged. All the time he flicked ash into the bathwater, but she no longer cared. At least he wasn’t wearing sunglasses like he normally did in the bath. ‘I used to love him,’ she thought, ‘but now I hate him more than anything.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 