I noticed him but he chose not to notice me. After he had dropped his mobile phone on the floor for the third time, he realised that he had to say something.
Life Story: The Third Drop
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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!
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.”
When I’m not in the mood. Sad scenes from a gay bar
Matchstick Man stretched and showed his slender stomach. Lean, flat and toned. It was for my benefit, and he knew that I would be distracted by the neat wave of wispy hair that headed south of his Calvin Klein waistband. But he still claimed to be straight, and when I suggested otherwise, he simply laughed.
The tall handsome guy, maybe in his twenties, looked fine from a distance. When he came over, I found that he’d had lots of botox and talked about Donald Trump in a squeaky voice.
An older man chatted me up, and said that I had a lovely smile. But I wasn’t in the mood, and played hard to get, and so I made an effort not to smile anymore. He called me an arrogant prick and left me alone.
A group of guys stood next to me. One of them, who appeared to be wearing aluminium foil, thought he was the patron saint for confused gays. He pontificated that he knew more than anybody else and his friends agreed with him. I wanted to make a noise like a sheep but somebody beat me to it.
Two guys told a friend that when they got together they were both tops, and so they tossed a coin to decide who would be the bottom.
Somebody behind me said something like, “Oh, poor love, poor heart, I played with your pain, I trampled on you with indifference!” – or words to that effect. I hoped that they were quoting from something, and this wasn’t part of their normal conversation, but somebody said, “I agree.”
The Angel grabbed me from behind and gave me a hug which I thought was sweet. He sat beside me and gave me a tour of his body tattoos. The last time I saw him, he insisted I speak to his grandmother on his mobile phone. It was an awkward conversation with somebody I didn’t know. She told me that he was ‘ a little shit’ because he forgets to take his ADHD medication and then he’s like a rabbit. My interpretation of a rabbit had been different to hers. Later… he ate pizza with his eyes closed and looked so tired that he may have drifted off at any moment.
That Moment – Familiarity is Dangerous
A night of drunken defiance, the air outside warm and sticky, carrying the sour breath of alcohol from the open doors. My head feels heavy, my stomach lined with white rum, and the thought of going home to curl up with a Jacques Tati biography feels more attractive than another drink. Still, I order another one – habit, not desire.
Ben messages to see if I’m out, and I can feel the eagerness in his words, the barely disguised hunger. Last week we sat in a corner booth until five in the morning, the world narrowing to the scrape of glasses and the whisper of confidences. But I put him off tonight. Familiarity is dangerous.
I once fell for him and, in a moment of reckless honesty, suggested we sleep together. He brushed it off with a laugh, not knowing that I never give anyone a second chance.
Charlie / Un après-midi en sous-vêtements
A hillside in the remote countryside. Serge Gainsbourg sang Black Trombone on the iPhone. Charlie danced in his underwear. His hair formed a question mark on his head. He looked cute. I grabbed him from behind and he reached over and patted me on the head like a dog. Then he pissed into the wind and I got covered from behind.
Charlie / The mystery of the black Calvin Klein briefs
The day started with a mystery that caused a problem. Charlie had done the laundry and I had been angry. It doesn’t matter how many times that you tell him to separate whites and colours, he refuses to do so. The result was that my white t-shirts came out pink yet again. When I challenged him about it, he sulked, and put the rest of the clothes away in silence.
And then we came to the black Calvin Klein briefs.
Charlie was putting them in my drawer and I pointed out that they didn’t belong to me. He held them between his fingers and examined them. “They are not mine either,” he decided. “They must be yours,” I replied. “They are definitely not mine.”
We stared at the underwear and waited for the other person to admit to owning them. But neither of us coughed up.
Charlie tossed them onto the bed.
“This poses a significant problem,” I decided. “If they don’t belong to either one of us, then whom do they belong to?”
“That is a very good question. Do they belong to someone who you have been sleeping with?”
“In your dreams,” I responded, but there was hesitancy in my voice. Charlie had the ability of making you feel guilty even when you were innocent, and this was one of those occasions. He pounced upon my uncertainty and decided that I had been sleeping with someone who had forgotten to take their underwear home with them.
“I can assure you that I haven’t slept with anyone. The only person that I’ve slept with is you, but even that’s debatable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just a bit upset because I know that they are not mine, nor are they anybody else’s that I know of, so the finger of suspicion points squarely at you. Have you been sleeping with somebody behind my back?”
Charlie rubbed his hands through his hair in desperation. “Do not be disgusting. I have not been sleeping with anybody.”
“Was it one of those American Mormon boys who came knocking at the door? Did one of them come back when I was out?” It was a cheap shot. But a few days before, they had come bright-eyed and eager to save our souls. I’d politely turned them down and said to Charlie that it was inconceivable that every Mormon boy appeared to be cute.
When Charlie was hurt, his French accent became more pronounced. “I believe it when you say that you know nothing about them, but you must also understand that I have nothing to do with them either.”
“But whose are they?”
“I have no idea. But maybe they belonged to Levi who left them behind when he moved out.”
“But that was weeks ago,” I said.
“I guess that there is no other explanation.”
And that was where we left it. Black Calvin Klein underwear unclaimed.
That Moment / There is a penis in my Guinness
The bartender pours me a pint of Guinness. There is something exciting about him. The fantasy, service, and the desire are charged with a kind of unspoken drama, where connection and expression flourish.
He stands at the centre of this world: confident, attentive, just out of reach. There’s power in the dynamic where he’s part host, part performer, and part confessor. That mix of emotional availability and physical proximity is incredibly compelling.
He leaves the Guinness to settle and waits. It’s a subtle performance of masculinity, of beauty, and a flirtatious smirk. There’s a silent dialogue: who’s paying attention to whom? He represents a safe focal point for flirtation and fantasy. He’s someone I want to admire, talk to, maybe even imagine a story with, without needing it to be real. It’s an aesthetic moment as much as an emotional one.
He’s a kind of canvas – with a quiet understanding, a rescuer, a rebel, a secret crush. Each interaction, no matter how fleeting, is charged with possibility.
He starts pouring again, and I ask for a four-leaf clover on the top of the Guinness. When he hands me the drink, I see that he’s tried to draw one in the foam.
I think there’s something haunting and poetic to explore in this distance between us – the observer and the observed where we are both muse and mirror. That space between emotional hunger and aesthetic distance – that quiet pull toward someone who may never cross the line into intimacy.
I realise that he hasn’t drawn a four-leaf clover after all and can see that it is a penis instead. He leans over and whispers that only wankers draw a four-leaf clover. I take a sip, and he smiles, quietly calling me a cocksucker.
Charlie / A moment in a Cornish harbour
Charlie stands in the glow that surrounds him. He is a dark silhouette bathed in the yellowish hue of an afternoon sun. He is unrecognisable and might be anybody. I hear strange voices that are drowned by the cries of seagulls. I help him down from the harbour wall and he smells of wood sage and sea salt.
It’s a beautiful sound. And it’s a sound that I love
Flup, flup, flup, flup. That’s the only way to describe it. Flup, flup, flup, flup. It dawned on me that the flup, flup, flup, flup had a regularity about it. Maybe every thirty minutes, never more than forty five, but the sound can be heard from early morning to late evening. When does a sound become a sign? I suppose it is when you want it to be. That flupping noise is made by Kieran, the farm boy who I’ve known since he was fourteen. That was five years ago, and now he’s grown into a handsome young man of nineteen. He works in nothing but a pair of filthy old denim jeans and a pair of wellington boots that flup along the road so that you are never in any doubt as to where he might be. I thought that farmers would be busy milking cows or ploughing fields, but Kieran spends his days flupping along. I end up waiting for flups and hide behind a wall to watch him stroll by. His bare chest will be covered in cow shit, and hay, or any other agricultural detritus, and it becomes fantastically homoerotic.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 