Troubling A Star

My mom called this morning to tell me my biggest teen idol was dead. Brad Renfro died yesterday at the age of 25. He was a heroin and methadone addict who had spent the last few years plagued by legal troubles. But I remember him better as this mischievous, bad kid who appeared sweet and sad and was a remarkable actor. It's strange when your teen idols die. I haven't thought of him in months, not since I saw Bully, but I could still tell you all these details about his life culled from the pages of humiliation inducing Teen Beat magazines. I used to convince my little brother to go up to the register to buy these for me because I couldn't bear the embarrassment. Brad Renfro was born July 25, 1982 and raised by his grandmother in Knoxville, TN. Learning of his love for Led Zepplin they too immediately became my favorite band, even though I wasn't sure if it was a solo singer with a strange name, or an actual band. That is a love that has stuck with me, so thanks, Brad. Once on a road trip through Tennessee to visit some of my mother's friends we drove through Knoxville and I got my mom to pull over so I could buy make-up, on the very slim chance I saw him hanging out somewhere in the city, while we stopped for lunch. I had a poster of him on the wall across from my bed, and the nose had mysteriously turned white. I kissed it goodnight so often that it got rubbed off. But as I grew older, reality set in, the chances that I would meet him growing slimmer and slimmer, and my interest less and less. I still liked him as an actor, but I didn't really care what his favorite band was, they had become my own, somehow, not just a band I listened to to feel closer to a distant, troubled star, but something I listened to because of their own worth. I also started to realize that even if this goodhearted bad boy somehow descended from that Hollywood pillar I had put him on, I probably wouldn't like him all that much. He didn't have any of the qualities I admire, and didn't even have that swoon inducing shaggy hair anymore. I'm sorry about what happened to him, I wish that his talent hadn't led him down a path that would allow him to indulge in the drugs that killed him. I do think he would have been a good person, someone who began to realize there was more to life than that, maybe he would have stopped acting altogether and moved back to Tennessee; started a new life. I'm sorry that Hollywood took what it could from him--a smart mouth and a vulnerability that was tangible on screen, a pretty face with problems, and once he had given them what they wanted, turned its back on him, allowing him to fall in with the rest of the failed actors wandering its streets. I wish things ended differently for this child actor.