I was seven years old when Rico Yan died, gone to sleep and never to wake up again, aged twenty-seven and fresh off the immense success of Got to Believe!
He’s been gone fourteen years. I barely remember anything, to be honest. But somehow, his impact on me remains, and it’s as great and painful as ever. I have no idea why, but the void he’s left is still unfilled, and in my head, his presence is still really vivid.
In some ways, this was my first true brush with the experience of death, how tragic and unbelievable it can be, how bad its timing is. How it can affect a person. Maybe that’s why.
*
I was ten when my mom pointed to River Phoenix on television and said, offhand and matter-of-fact, “Oh, that boy is dead.” Stand by Me was on HBO, and I watched that cigarette-smoking kid with his sleeves rolled up and his vulnerability fluctuating with strange fascination, because I couldn’t comprehend that he was right there, and he was also gone.
I would see him years later, in The Thing Called Love, one of his last films, also on HBO. He was all grown up. He brooded even more than he did as Chris Chambers. He played guitar and sang softly, somberly. He was beautiful. “He’s dead,” my mom reminded me, sounding slightly sadder this time, her voice conveying the sayang of it all.
In the years that followed I would exhaust River’s filmography and learn more about him than I ever had any business knowing. I would listen to his songs and delude myself into thinking that I understood him. The more alive—the more flawed—he seemed, the higher I put him on a pedestal. But I never quite forgot the fact that came before the rest: He’s gone. And call me morbid, but that only pushed my infatuation further.
*
I was thirteen when Entertainment Tonight aired a visual obituary for Heath Ledger. I had never seen a single film of his; the most I ever heard of him was through a pop culture reference Meg Cabot made on All-American Girl. I started off detached and slightly curious, but I was a blubbering mess by the end of it. He had one of the nicest smiles I had (still have) ever seen.
I fell into a routine: I made my dad buy me a VCD of 10 Things I Hate About You at the now-defunct Video City in SM North that I watched every day after school. I drew a black ribbon on my hand to signal my mourning; I’d refill it when it faded and draw it on again after it washed off. I read Wuthering Heights because Heath and his sister had been named after the central characters. When I got older, I started putting “The Weakness in Me” by Joan Armatrading on and walking around bookshops, pretending he was following me with a copy of The Feminine Mystique, as normal people are wont to do.
But when I think of him, I think mostly of Patrick Verona and William Thatcher, and with that I do him a disservice, again and again and again.
*
It was around that same time when I was thirteen, my Heath Era, that I found Charlie Bartlett among a pile of pirated DVDs at North Ridge Plaza. The poster looked cool: skinny kid looking smug, doodles all around his head, Kat Dennings, pre-Iron Man/comeback Robert Downey, Jr.
At this age I had begun testing the waters of nonconformity and embracing weird uncoolness. Charlie Bartlett sold prescription drugs to people at his school and was cheerful to a fault, unlike broody, moody me, but he was a wiry, vibrant outsider who was never anyone else but himself, and I found comfort in that.
It was also around this time that I bought a back issue of CosmoGIRL! that featured Anton Yelchin—Charlie Bartlett himself. He was eighteen. He talked and made quick jokes (no doubt spoken in his signature animated tone) about taking pictures (he would end up getting a better camera than his late-2000s phone and get really, really good), buying vinyl (another factor that made me want to start my own collection), and sleep (he certainly looked the part). “Confidence is a big thing with [Charlie],” he had said. “He never feels like he has to be certain things for certain people.”
I was pretty much a goner. I followed his career pretty closely after that: in New York, I Love You as a teen going to prom; in Middle of Nowhere as a lonely amateur drug seller; in Like Crazy as a young man in love and other things that resemble it; in Only Lovers Left Alive as a rock-and-roller with a healthy dose of naivete; in Rudderless as a musician with Fabrizio Moretti-like charm; and in 5 to 7 as a struggling writer who has an affair with an older married woman. And the ones that came before, like the brilliant, difficult Fierce People, and the better known titles, too. He could inhabit characters like, well, crazy.
He became a constant, an omnipresent comfort. I’d been counting the days until I could see Green Room, and whatever else. There was going to be so much else.
So when I woke up this morning, checked Twitter, and saw that a friend had tweeted: WHY !!!! DID !!!! ANTON !!!!!! YELCHIN! !!!!!! DIE!!!!!!!!! for the briefest of seconds I thought maybe, just maybe, she had seen a movie. Maybe it was even Green Room. Maybe I’d just been spoiled.
I’m not going to repeat to you what you already know. I can’t.
I went to sleep a mere thirty minutes Before. I’d been watching a film in which two sisters were hosting a party, not knowing that their mother was dying in a car crash. They looked so happy, so unaware, that it made me cringe. I never want to be in that position, I decided.
The funny thing was, ironically, right at that moment, I was.
My cousin texted me to ask what the hell had happened. That’s when it really hit me. We had discovered Charlie Bartlett together, come to think of it, and have had a joint obsession over Anton forever, I’m just realizing. It’s hard sometimes to convince her to see a certain movie that I love, but I only have to mention his name once to get her to agree.
Rudderless is a hard film to watch on its own, heartbreaking, and it only gets worse with repeats. Of course, this only makes me like it even more. And now there’s this added layer of heartbreak—I almost feel like never seeing it again. In the 7-Eleven near where I work, I made the mistake of thinking it would be fine to listen to the songs Anton had performed on the soundtrack, where he sang lines like You’re so emotional...guess what, the music never stops, and It’s a long way down/Even longer way back up.
I was so wrong. But, hey, my New Year’s resolution had been crying in public whenever I damn well liked.
In the beginning it was odd even to me that this loss hurts this much, that it’s getting to me this deep. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. All of it was so abrupt. He was so talented, and so real, and so unlike anyone else. He was so young. He would never be twenty-eight.
And once more it doesn’t compute in my head, which seems to be stuck in denial mode right now.
I just had to get this off my chest, I think. Someday maybe I’ll write about him and do him justice. But for now I think I need to process.
