I Kissed River Phoenix

It’s a good story that I never tire of telling

Pretty much everyone has had at least one brush with a celebrity in their lifetime, however brief, leaving them with a story to tell. I personally never get tired of hearing these stories, or telling mine. I’ve found the thrill is not necessarily the encounter itself; it’s how one chooses to tell the story.

The day I met Martha Plimpton was the 4th of July in New York City in the summer of 2000. As this was years before my decision to stop drinking alcohol, I was very drunk. My best friend Dorothy was visiting from Virginia and we were spending the 4th at a bar in South Street Seaport. There was some kind of maritime celebration and sailors from all over the world were in town, their ships of many sizes and colors moored just outside in that very port. Many of these international sailors were in the bar my friend Dorothy and I were in, also getting very drunk. It was a hot, sweaty, beer soaked happy camaraderie.

Drinking many beers has consequences and that’s how I met Martha. We were both waiting in line for the ladies room and I recognized her and told her I was a fan and had loved her in Goonies and Parenthood and she was very gracious and smiled genuinely and said thank you, and since I was very drunk I assumed we were now very cool with each other and also wanted to let her know I was cool and would afford her the privacy she deserved by not making a scene and she was like, cool, thanks.

The thing Martha didn’t know is that we’d both kissed the same boy.

When I was in high school, I saw River Phoenix’s band, Aleka’s Attic play at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. back before it was remodeled and it still smelled like cat pee. After the show, my friends and I saw him go downstairs with his sister and the rest of the band, and for some reason, we decided to follow them. There were 4 of us, I think, and we weren’t all that good of friends. My best friend Megan was there, and maybe it was her friend Sarah who got the tickets and Sarah and I didn’t really see eye to eye, and maybe some other rando friend was there, but the point is, we collectively decided to follow River Phoenix into the basement of the 9:30 Club.

When we got down there it turned out the basement was just a pretty small room where River and his sister and the rest of the band were standing around looking at us like, well? So we stood there awkwardly for a minute and maybe waved or smiled or said great show or something and then we went back upstairs all humiliated and awkward but River followed us up and we all stood on the stairs and there was a lot of nodding and I’m sure there was talking but all I know is that at some point I leaned over and kissed River Phoenix on the cheek. It was all the horrible things that happen in a 80’s teen movie — the record scratch, the slow-mo cam, the garbled voices, and that one clear voice of, most likely, horrible Sarah ringing out clear and sharp saying Jennifer. Oh. My. God. Then there was more shrugging and River Phoenix was gone and I was standing there in the leggings and tunic I’d worn that were entirely out of my sartorial comfort zone but seemed like the kind of thing a teenager should wear if they were going to see River Phoenix’s band at the 9:30 Club.

I decided not to share this information with Martha. Drunk or not, I had the presence of mind to realize me kissing my teenage crush River Phoenix on the cheek on the steps to the basement of the 9:30 Club was not the same as her having dated him for, like years, and that he was a real person whom she had loved, and who died unexpectedly, shockingly, on Halloween night in 1993.

I kept it to myself.

When I rejoined Dorothy and our new sailor friends I told them I’d met a celebrity by the bathroom and said who she was but told them not to make a scene. When Martha walked by the sailors greeted her gregariously, insisting with benign certainty she’d accept the beer they were splashily offering her. Martha said she had her own beer at her table and she’d just run over and grab it and be right back, and she did.

So Martha and the sailors and I all hung out and got to know each other. I asked her what she was working on and she said oh, you know, this and that and then I pressed her for specifics in a way that drunk people think is bonding but is really just awkward and aggressive and she raised an eyebrow slightly but said some vague things about interesting projects and mostly she talked to the sailors, who may or may not have actually known who she was, but knew she was famous and that she was hanging out drinking beer with them on a fine summer day in a new land.

Martha learned that the sailors had two hours of leave time the next day to explore the city before they had to be back on their ship so she advised something to the effect of “to not let anyone tell them what their New York experience should be”, and she went on to recommend going up to TK or doing TK or TK*. This is where things began to go south with Martha and me.

“Wait a second, Martha,” I said.

I pointed out that the sailors only have two hours, so they probably can’t go up that far, to which Martha breezily replied something like, well just go here and go there and see what you want to see and do what you want to do and I was like, but Martha, they only have TWO HOURS.

My frustration with Martha was growing by the moment. There were two million extra people in the city that weekend and crossing the street downtown was like being in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras. How could Martha be advising these sailors who had no idea how to get anywhere to go gallivanting around all over town with no specific, realistic destinations that would ensure they would return to their ship within two hours to meet the required curfew? Well, Martha said, really, New York is a magical place and you can go anywhere and do anything — truly make it your own and at this point I turned to Martha and yelled “Fuck you, Martha Plimpton, you don’t know anything about time management!”

Suffice it to say that was the end of my budding friendship with Martha. “Well, I’m going to go drink my beer over there,” she said, pointing to the far corner of the bar where her actual friends were hanging out and leaving us, but not without with a hearty sendoff from the sailors.

I used to pass Billy Baldwin, and sometimes, his wife, Chynna, nearly every morning on my way to work when I lived at 81st and Columbus. We’d wave hello sometimes. One time my friend Megan was visiting and we saw Finola Hughes in the subway and it couldn’t have been more perfect because Megan and I had spent every afternoon after high school eating microwaved hot dogs with melted American cheese slices and watching General Hospital, so when Megan struck up the nerve to casually lean over and say “I’m a big fan of your work,” she really meant it. I once saw Big from Sex and the City talking to the redhead from Head of the Class outside of the entrance to Central Park somewhere in the West 50s. I saw Ethan Hawke not once but three different times, the first time when I went as a plus-one to a party with my friend Pauline who had an assignment for a magazine. When I saw him I didn’t recognize who he was but I did recognize him so I did that thing where you think you see someone you know and he saw me see him and grabbed Uma’s hand and flung his arm over his face and pulled her through the crowd. I think I tend to have that effect on people. I saw him two other times, once when I was waiting for the subway at the Christopher Street station where he deliberately did not sit on the bench so that someone else could have it, and another time years later when I was pushing my son in a stroller in the West Village and he smiled and nodded at me like I was part of the fabric of the neighborhood. The most surreal celebrity experience I’ve ever had was when I got to sit next to Carmen Electra during the premier of Scary Movie, which she was in. Again, I was my friend Pauline’s plus-one so that’s how I got to attend — she had all the connections.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t the last time I saw Martha Plimpton. Sometime later I was out at the Evelyn Lounge on the Upper West Side when she sat next to us. She was with a group of her friends, and if I’m not mistaken, it was her birthday, or maybe it was mine… It was in January, I think which means it was probably my birthday but anyway, she was there and we locked eyes and of course I recognized her, and I don’t know if she recognized me but she definitely had that look that passes over someone’s face when they see someone who they either don’t like or don’t trust or both.

The thing is, I’ve told my Martha Plimpton story to all my friends and countless other people over the years, so it has become sort of an inside joke, typically casting Martha Plimpton as either my best friend: “Hey, your best friend Martha Plimpton is hilarious in Raising Hope” or as my nemesis depending on the narrative chosen for the occasion. I like to play along. It’s always comforting, like curling up with a cup of tea and a good murder mystery. I took it too far a few years ago when I saw something she posted online about not being able to get back to NYC from England, where she was working, to vote in person and I created a GoFundMe page that I sent to all my friends but then I took it down because I realized that this was the internet and she’s a real person and I’m 47 years old.

When I’ve told my River Phoenix story over the years, I’ve doled out the details sparingly, at times, just for the shock value. In college: “River Phoenix? I kissed him, you know.” Few things in my lifetime have commanded the attention, silence, and awe of a group of Gen Xers than this sentence.

I even like to tell stories about my friend’s celebrity encounters. I have one story about a friend who had a threesome with a very famous musician, which is definitely NSFW, yet somehow one day I found myself telling this story — at work.

Although my career has put me in the orbit of various celebrities, I’m not actually friends with any in real life. Still, I do like to think that some day Martha and I could get past our differences and would be friends, and oh the stories we could tell. After all, we have kissed the same boy.

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*I used the TKs in this story on purpose for all you old school magazine folks. XoXo