I generally notice when the moon is full because my dreams get increasingly bizarre. Last week, I had a vivid dream in which I stood on a Hollywood sidewalk and witnessed River Phoenix's death. It took a long time, a seemingly long time anyway, and I did nothing to help him. I felt aware, even as he was dying, of a barrier that existed between his celebrity and my obscurity, and I allowed his brother to tend to him while I stood and watched, feeling that it wasn't my place to interfere.

When I woke up, I thought about River Phoenix. I met him once, when his band was opening for my roommate's Velvet Underground cover band in Boston, at the Rat in Kenmore Square. River and his sister Rain came to our apartment one drizzly afternoon, took a cab from their hotel in the suburbs and arrived with another member of their band, a boy named Tim, about fifteen years old, with an angelic face.

Rain was outspoken and dramatic, but River was withdrawn and extremely shy, almost invisible. My roommate and I led them on a walking tour of Boston, and River suddenly came to life as we passed a McDonald's, wrenching open the door and screaming, "Meat is murder!" to the startled patrons before jogging casually to catch up with the rest of us.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that was nearly empty. The girls behind the counter grew silent as we placed our order, and stared at River, uncertain if they recognized him, unwilling to ask. My roommate Elizabeth commented about it, but Rain snapped, "They don't know anything!" and it seemed wise to drop the subject.

We all sat together at one big table on the second floor of the restaurant. Rain, River and Tim had vegetarian meals, and at one point, Rain gasped, lifted a shred of beige matter from her salad and called across the table, "River! It's TURKEY!" with disgust. The pale slip of flesh that had poisoned her food dangled from her fingers.

We saw the band again a few nights later, but when we asked if they wanted to go out, Tim told us that River couldn't. He couldn't go anywhere. There was a street full of girls waiting for him. Tim went out with me and Elizabeth and because he was too young to drink, we went to a coffee house in Harvard Square, where he asked the waiter if the lemon cake on the menu contained any dairy products.

When they left town, I didn't see any of them again, although Tim wrote me letters from Florida in a neat, tight hand, folding the paper over and over into a small rectangle before enclosing it in the envelope. Once, calling from Florida, he asked me very seriously if I'd ever seen a Bunuel movie called "The Altruistic Dog." I liked talking to Tim, he was unselfconscious and kind of endearingly earnest. He was also very cute, and I had a vague crush on him that my roommate and I laughed about. She had the same vague crush, and we both recognized the silliness of it and enjoyed it.

It all seems like a very long time ago, and River Phoenix has been dead for more than ten years. The Rat, in Kenmore Square, is gone and has been for years. I left and moved to California, where the saturated colors of the landscape make the brick and mortar of Boston seem as grey and unreal as the Hollywood sidewalk of my dream.

Loyal Dan sent an e-mail today, an obituary from the Boston Globe, reporting the death of Paul Scott, a friend of ours from the era when I lived in Boston and went to college and did theatre in bars and drank cheap beer at the Rat.

Paul was hilarious and brash and a good comic actor, and a good person, to boot. It's been a long time since we'd seen each other, as we lived on opposite coasts, but from time to time, I run across pictures of him in my photo albums, or talk about him with Dan, and it feels strange to know that now, his absence is permanent.

The funeral home where his family is holding the wake has a website, with an online guest book visitors can sign. I read through the entries and felt a distinct distance I was not able to bridge through electronic condolence.

Star of the day. . .Major Tom