How ‘Snakes on a Aircraft’ Author’s Life Modified Then Fell Aside

It was November 2021, deep COVID time, and I had unmasked to have a drink with Kiki Benzon at The Surly Goat, a bar in West Hollywood. I hadn’t seen her in 30 years. Within the early Nineteen Nineties, Kiki and I had been rivals on the über-geeky North American private-school debate circuit; she attended faculty in British Columbia, I used to be from Connecticut, and we’d met as seniors at a event in Boston, then one other in Winnipeg. After we acquired our tales on the desk — my writing, my spouse and youngsters, her educating (movie research at USC), her early current widowhood — we acquired round to John Connery Heffernan III.

“Heff” was my highschool classmate and debate associate and traveled with me to these long-ago tournaments; at considered one of them, he and Kiki spent a steamy evening collectively. Kiki and I had each fallen out of contact with Heff, however understanding him, experiencing him, was sufficient to bond us ceaselessly; it was like being a part of a secret membership. Anybody who knew Heff, even a bit of, had heard his manic, typically sensible disquisitions on literature, movie and hip-hop and had listened to him rhapsodize about quick vehicles, James Dean, jazz and the horror novels of Clive Barker. All his mates knew the best way he reacted to a novel thought or a compelling murals: He regarded really startled. He would widen his eyes and pull his head again, as if genius was scorching to the contact. Perhaps as a result of his was.

Each of us knew that in 2006, Heff earned everlasting Hollywood B-list infamy because the screenwriter of Snakes on a Aircraft, the cult basic, so-bad-it’s-good Samuel L. Jackson thriller with the title that explains the film’s complete plot. Heff had been all around the web then, and all of us who’d recognized him had informed our mates, “Hey, you realize that film Snakes on a Aircraft? I dated/debated with/noticed a present with/slept with/drank with/drag-raced with/acquired excessive with the man who wrote it.”

Within the years since, his path had gone virtually chilly. Right here’s what we knew from Google: He’d collaborated on a comic book e book and offered a script that didn’t appear to have been produced. A few years earlier, I’d discovered his Fb web page, with loads of posts about vehicles, previous TV (he was a Magnum, P.I. fan) and the Detroit Lions.

Our subsequent step was apparent. We needed to flush him out. At about midnight, we stated goodbye, agreeing to work the online and our previous mates to see what we may study. I acquired in my rental automotive, discovered the I-5 and started cruising towards San Diego, the place I had issues to do the subsequent day.

An hour later, my cellphone rang. I answered.

“Mark?” Kiki stated. “John’s useless.”

Rushing down the freeway, I pressed the cellphone to my ear. She began to cry. “I emailed his brother, and he wrote proper again. John died in 2017.” In response to Kiki, Heff’s brother’s e-mail was temporary and stated nothing about how our good friend had died.

I acquired to San Diego, slept badly and took an early stroll by the seashore. No person was out however me and some surfers. Wading on the fringe of the Pacific, I made a decision to seek out out what occurred to my previous good friend.

I nonetheless don’t know for certain. However after two years of looking out, I noticed I used to be much less considering how he died than how he lived. He had at all times courted hazard, taken dangers, performed a recreation of hen with life. In higher occasions, he was capable of persuade others to affix him on the journey. However once I talked to individuals who had been near him, from the late ’80s by way of his final days, I found that by the tip he’d misplaced everybody. He grew to become remoted, and I concern that when he died — assembly an finish that some say he had foreseen, even needed — he died alone, with solely his vices for firm.

***

Heff and I met as ninth graders at The Loomis Chaffee College, exterior of Hartford, Connecticut. At a faculty the place half the scholars boarded, we had been day college students, which meant we might by no means be on the high of the social hierarchy. The boarders got here from Greenwich or the Higher East Aspect, and so they had the true cash. However amongst day college students, Heff was one thing of an aristocrat. His household belonged to The Hartford Golf Membership, and his father, a profitable lawyer, drove a Jaguar convertible, through which Heff was generally dropped off or picked up. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Ryter, had been a congressman for one time period, 1945-47, which Heff favored to say. The household had a summer time home in Previous Saybrook, on the Lengthy Island Sound. I knew all this early on in freshman yr, in the best way {that a} freshman learns who issues and why.

Heff and I fell in collectively by way of our actions: debate, newspaper, cross nation. For the primary two years of our friendship, his cash and sophistication had been thrilling to me. To a 14-year-old boy whose personal father drives a Volkswagen Dasher, having a good friend whose father drives a Jag is an enormous deal. Heff and I additionally shared a preppy pomposity; we had been the type of boys who dressed our aspirations in suede elbow patches, or would have favored to. He as soon as informed me that his mom’s household had been the Von Ryters however had dropped the aristocratic Von; I discovered that as cool as he hoped I might.

Within the final two years of highschool, nevertheless, I grew to know that what was really compelling about Heff was the best way he betrayed the expectations of his class. He was deeply ambivalent concerning the manor to which he’d been born, and as highschool wore on, he realized that, aside from a sure sartorial sense and a freewheeling enjoyment in spending his dad and mom’ cash, he was ill-suited to being a New England preppy. He saved doing the issues anticipated of an Ivy-bound prep faculty scholar — debating, newspapering, operating, making good grades — however they weren’t him, or who he imagined himself to be.

For one factor, at a faculty that prized bodily grace, Heff was a horrible athlete. We ran collectively for 3 years, and what I bear in mind is how he by no means appeared to get higher. Heff did some theater, and he may draw. His actual ardour was for phrases, however his darkish sensibilities made it laborious to put his baffling, experimental fiction in The Loom, our literary journal.

“His tales nonetheless upset and amaze me once I take into consideration them,” says Sarah Larson, who edited The Loom and is now a workers author for The New Yorker. “Most short-story submissions that we acquired went for artwork however lacked an excellent plot; John’s had been tightly written, lurid, with a zinger of a plot. And the plots may very well be loathsome.” She recollects that considered one of his tales was a couple of poor Appalachian household that ate its younger for meals.

Heff’s struggles with this artwork — to not point out his inert, unsuccessful makes an attempt to get a girlfriend — solely sharpened his picture of himself as a wonderful failure. In fact, the college didn’t have a class, a lot much less a scene, for the type of man Heff was changing into: an old-school, rebellious beat. He was into jazz and Frank Zappa; he liked Jack Kerouac’s On the Street; and he actually liked Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-saturated basic, Concern and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Thompson and Kerouac spoke to Heff’s curiosity in fixed motion, in getting out of this place, if it’s the very last thing you ever do. Within the works of each authors, one may discover the 2 automobiles Heff would use to surge over the seawall, to see what was past: vehicles and medicines, literal motion and psychic motion. And from the second he acquired his driver’s license — and entry to his father’s convertible — he liked combining the 2. For many people, driving drunk was an occasional necessity, however for Heff it was a passionate pastime. “He outran cops a variety of occasions once I was within the automotive,” our classmate Adam Larrabee recollects. “This was the type of shit that would have gone actually unhealthy.”

Heff’s dad and mom supported his budding automotive behavior, offering him with a Jeep Cherokee, the must-have rich-boy journey of the time. I can’t bear in mind what occurred to that automotive — did he crash it? That’s my reminiscence — nevertheless it one way or the other went away, and his dad and mom acquired for him one other automotive. “When he graduated, his dad gave him a Porsche,” our classmate Sam Kenna remembers. “It was the automotive within the first Prime Gun. It’s a Speedster, the one Kelly McGillis drives.” Kenna by no means forgot how, the evening of highschool commencement, Heff let him take the automotive for a spin. “There may need been some alcohol concerned,” Kenna says, “for higher or worse.”

When he was drunk, or excessive, or seeking to get drunk or excessive, an interior meanness may come out. One time, he, Mark Murphy and another mates had been within the Berkshires at any person’s weekend home, and so they acquired drunk on beer and went sledding in a snowy discipline. “I used to be mendacity within the snow, face down, taking a break from sledding,” Murphy says, “and actually Heffernan pissed on me, simply drunk and being loopy. And I used to be like, ‘Dude, you are taking all the pieces manner too far.’ To him, it was humorous and demeaning — and I used to be like, ‘That was my jacket.’ ”

I seldom noticed the harmful aspect of Heff. I used to be too sq. to get drunk in a Jaguar and outrun cops. After we frolicked in his bed room, sober, he’d play CDs, toggling from N.W.A to Beethoven. He had a replica of Beethoven’s Ninth recorded by the Vienna Philharmonic, beneath Karl Böhm, and I bear in mind how we scrutinized the CD case, discussing the right way to pronounce the conductor’s umlauted title: “Berm”? “Burm”? “Buuurm”? That was on a Saturday afternoon, and who is aware of what he did that evening. I heard Monday morning rumors of Heff’s exploits, however I didn’t know for certain. There was quite a bit I discovered solely years later — as an example, that he was robbed, greater than as soon as, seeking to purchase medication in Hartford’s worst neighborhoods.

***

At Cornell, Heff and Murphy acquired assigned to the identical dormitory, a music-themed residence corridor often called JAM, for Simply About Music. Murphy remembers Heff placing up posters of Jim Morrison. “He idolized Jim Morrison,” Murphy says. “I bear in mind him speaking about it: ‘I need to be Jim Morrison, I need to get together, I need to do medication.’ His view of it was, I feel, ‘I’m most likely going to overdose sometime’ — reside a short life on the sting.”

Heff rushed a hard-partying fraternity, whereas Murphy selected a gentler home. “He most likely thought the fraternity I rushed was filled with dorks,” Murphy says. “He was type of unstable. He had that addictive persona: medication and medicines and medicines and medicines, simply stepping into bother. … It reached a degree the place I believed, ‘I’m very totally different from this man. We’re on very totally different paths.’ ” 

If Heff made shut mates at Cornell, I couldn’t discover them. However I did discover his one critical faculty girlfriend. When Heff met Andra in an English class, he was an 18-year-old freshman and he or she was a married 24-year-old junior who had taken a number of years off earlier than faculty. He was smitten. Nothing occurred that semester, however once they returned to high school the next fall, her marriage was on the rocks, and Heff made his transfer.

“He pulled out all of the stops, in his boyish manner, to allure the shit out of me,” Andra says. They started relationship within the spring of 1994. “We ended up having a really intense, very passionate love affair. It was so painful on the finish of that semester as a result of I graduated and he went to Australia” — to spend his junior yr overseas. She was nonetheless married and had no instant plans to divorce. “However we had been absurdly in love,” she provides. “We had spent 24/7 collectively the entire semester.”

“Andra, I really like you greater than something,” he wrote her. “Simply say the phrase, and I’m gone out of your life ceaselessly. However please, watch for me.”

She didn’t watch for him. However a number of years later, when she was in San Diego, she drove as much as Los Angeles to see him. “He informed me about two screenplays he needed to put in writing,” she says, “one about teenage vampires, the opposite about snakes on a aircraft. I stated, ‘That’s the dumbest thought you’ve ever had.’ ”

***

Heff left for California proper after faculty. “I purchased this massive blue youngster molester van with no home windows from my neighbor for about $1,200 and drove throughout nation to California,” Heff informed The Cornell Day by day Solar in 2006. “It took about three months to get there. I had 500 bucks in my pocket, which was sufficient to maneuver into this lodge in Little Moscow in Hollywood.” He acquired employed on on the movie faculty of USC, the place he labored because the manufacturing coordinator. Quickly, he left USC for a manufacturing firm known as Davis Leisure, the place he was the assistant to producer Craig Berenson. When Berenson left for Patchwork Photos, he introduced Heff with him.

At Patchwork, Berenson and another producers ran an everyday occasion known as Style Day Cocktails. On Monday, a style could be introduced, and on Friday afternoon, over drinks, anybody may pitch a narrative in that week’s style. On action-adventure week, Berenson pitched an idea that had are available, unsolicited, from a author named David D’Alessandro. It was a spec script known as Venom. The script was fairly tough, however Berenson thought the plot had potential.

“I stated, ‘Right here’s the setup — we’re on a flight from Honolulu to L.A.,’ ” Berenson remembers telling the room. “ ‘Previous the purpose of no return, 30,000 toes up, and 100 snakes get free. The captain is bit. What are you going to do? How are you going to land? We’ll name it Snakes on a Aircraft.” At that second, Heff turned to Berenson and stated, “Can I work with you on this?”

Berenson thought Heff had potential, so he agreed to possibility the script from D’Alessandro for Heff to rewrite. They labored up a pitch and offered it to Paramount, and Heff started engaged on a full script.

“The day we had been delivering John’s second draft was 9/11,” Berenson says. “That killed each aircraft film. I stated, ‘It’s not over and completed, nevertheless it’s six months earlier than we will speak about it once more.’ ” Heff bided his time, then returned to his venture. Producer Don Granger had purchased the script at Paramount, which now needed no a part of the film, and gave the rights again to Berenson. However Granger had left Paramount and was now at Mutual Movies, which had a manufacturing cope with New Line Cinema. “Don then confirmed it to New Line,” Berenson recollects, “and their govt stated, ‘We’d make this film in a heartbeat.’ ”

Ultimately, Heff shared writing credit score with Sebastian Gutierrez, who wrote the 2003 horror flick Gothika, with Halle Berry and Penélope Cruz. However Berenson notes Snakes was Heff’s film all the best way. “John wrote these first two drafts,” whereas Gutierrez “did the ultimate polish that acquired it excessive.” As for D’Alessandro, who had the unique thought, he “hated” the ultimate film. He had in thoughts one thing artier, extra stripped-down. “I used to be attempting to put in writing Aliens on an plane,” says D’Alessandro, now retired as an administrator on the College of Pittsburgh. “And so they turned it into some nonsensical factor, with 37 sorts of snakes.” 

It’s true, the ultimate Snakes on a Aircraft, directed by David R. Ellis and launched in 2006, is extra of a schlocky, gross-out groaner than a taut thriller. The plot is that this: To cease a witness from testifying towards him, a gangster stows away toxic snakes within the cargo maintain of a aircraft on which the witness is touring. After the snakes make their manner into the cabin and the cockpit, biting quite a few passengers and each pilots, the FBI agent escorting the witness should save the remaining passengers and land the aircraft. The characters haven’t any depth, the dialogue little wit. However the plot strikes briskly, the particular results are sturdy — the snakes are genuinely creepy — and, just like the catastrophe motion pictures of the Seventies, the film will get far on casting, being chock-full of stars and future stars: Bobby Cannavale, Taylor Kitsch, Kenan Thompson, Julianna Margulies, Todd Louiso.

Then there’s Samuel L. Jackson, who nonetheless wore his post-Pulp Fiction halo of cool, and who, because the FBI agent, utters the road that made one clip from the movie a viral sensation on the very second, a yr after the founding of YouTube, when video virality was being born: “I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking aircraft!”

It was one of many final nice catchphrases, and it’s the explanation that, whereas not many individuals noticed Snakes on a Aircraft, all people knew Snakes on a Aircraft. And what they knew, or thought they knew, was that it was macho, male, dopey and smug: the type of film that higher be in by itself joke. Heff had written a strong script, one which supplied two hours of excellent American popcorn leisure, however his repute within the business would ceaselessly be each larger and smaller than that. He was superb at making stuff that was fairly unhealthy.

***

I doubt Heff cared a lot about being a vital disappointment. In 2006, he was 32 years previous and had written one of the talked-about motion pictures on the planet; the long run was vibrant. However Snakes on a Aircraft didn’t result in a torrent of latest work. Mason Novick, who was Heff’s agent then, remembers his consumer as a car-obsessed bro, into racing Porsches, with a present for writing humorous, action-packed pulp that was, alas, troublesome to get produced.

“He had a script known as A Likelihood for Each Barrels,” Novick remembers. “We offered it like 5 occasions, however nobody would ever make it.” The plot, Novick says, was loosely primarily based on Crimson River, the 1948 Howard Hawks/John Wayne Western through which an expert gunman, Chery Valance (performed by John Eire) is employed to assist drive cattle throughout the plains. However in Heff’s model, the mercenary “was a white Rastafarian man” who got here to city. “It was so bizarre,” Novick says. “It didn’t get made then, and it actually wouldn’t get made now. However it was a type of scripts — it was a enjoyable script.”

Noah Rosen was Heff’s supervisor, proper up till the second within the mid-2000s when Heff fired him. Once I talked to Rosen, he was philosophical about his termination, even remembering Heff as a “gentleman.” “To his credit score,” Rosen says, “he took me to dinner to fireplace me, which nobody has ever completed since. Normally if you get fired, it’s a cellphone name.”

The 2 had been mates — “He was the good friend you had who you knew you had been going to get in bother with,” Rosen says, “and also you type of favored it, and also you had been type of scared” — however after being fired, Rosen by no means noticed him once more. He tracked Heff’s profession, checking studio databases to see what Heff was as much as. Which was just about nothing.

“He didn’t actually do something after Snakes on a Aircraft,” Rosen says. “My principle was that Snakes on a Aircraft type of killed him. I really like that film, I swear by that film, I’ve seen it a thousand occasions, I want there have been extra motion pictures prefer it. I don’t have a principle as to why he didn’t write anymore.”

Heff disappeared, from the enterprise and from the entire Hollywood scene. “I don’t know the place his mates went,” Rosen says. “For those who had informed me he moved away, went again residence, that will make sense. However the factor that needs to be stated is, he actually needed to make motion pictures, man. He actually needed to inform tales, and wrote his ass off and was fucking proficient.”

At about this time, Heff crashed his automotive whereas excessive on whippets. “He drove right into a 91-year-old’s home,” an ex-girlfriend of his tells me. He went into rehab, and whereas he was there, his then-fiancée dumped him. In a Fb publish from July 4, 2014, Heff alludes to the crash, which apparently occurred on an earlier July 4, writing, “the Fourth has a that means for me, too, and it’s chilly and metallic — the crash of four-wheel-drive sheet metallic, the metal body of a hospital mattress, and the nightmare surreality of my face being faraway from my cranium and titanium plates and screws being drilled in beneath to maintain the entire thing in a single piece. Enduring. Alone.”

From about 2010 on, Heff misplaced contact along with his agent, his supervisor and everybody who had made him, briefly, a rising star. In 2010, he was the author for a comic book e book, Driver for the Lifeless, the primary difficulty of a deliberate three-parter a couple of chauffeur who drives problematic corpses, like a newly useless vampire, to their graves. The comedian acquired some consideration within the horror and comics communities, and amongst die-hard followers of Snakes on a Aircraft, nevertheless it was not a success, and the subsequent two installments by no means appeared.

Whilst his writing profession cooled, Heff stayed close to Hollywood. From 2013 on, he was an everyday within the Superior Court docket of California, Los Angeles County. I’ve dozens of pages from the courtroom dockets about arrests, arraignments, probations and continuances: the institutional, Courier-font file of a life in decline. The costs included petty theft (he pled responsible and was ordered to pay $855 in restitution and courtroom charges, and ordered to “avoid all Goal shops within the metropolis of Pasadena”), possession of a managed substance and violation of probation. The Heffernan file ends in 2015, when he was placed on probation, ordered to pay $242.01 in restitution for shoplifting and informed to “avoid Walmart situated at 24671 Carl Boyer Drive” in Santa Clarita.

***

Heff’s friendships had been more and more on-line, with males he by no means met in individual. “I learn his Driver for the Lifeless comedian, the graphic novel, thought it was actually cool and regarded him up on Twitter,” says Jake Reedy, an Australian filmmaker. “We began chatting there on a regular basis, acquired to speaking on Fb. Grew to become good mates from there.” Reedy was awed that this big-shot Hollywood screenwriter made time for him. “It was at all times wonderful to me how beneficiant he was along with his time. You at all times suppose, ‘That is the man who wrote Snakes on a Aircraft for chrissakes!’ ” Heff would learn Reedy’s scripts and provide detailed suggestions. “I’m hesitant to say he was a mentor, however in loads of methods he type of was.”

Heff additionally grew to become shut, in an web manner, to Reedy’s good friend Dru Brown, one other Australian filmmaker. Brown recollects that Heff donated cash to a Kickstarter marketing campaign for Brown’s 2014 film The Suicide Concept. “On the final day of the marketing campaign, he gave us $500 for the marketing campaign,” Brown says. “He didn’t say something about it. He did it in a single day, proper earlier than the factor closed. I used to be like, ‘Holy shit, that’s unbelievable.’ He stated, ‘No worries, simply go make an excellent movie.’ There was zero ego about him. Only a nice, supportive man.”

After The Suicide Concept acquired some optimistic buzz and was acquired by Netflix, Sony Photos requested Brown whether or not he had another scripts he needed to direct. Brown reached out to Heff and requested him, “Do you’ve gotten something mendacity round?” Heff despatched him some previous scripts that had by no means been produced. “One was an previous Western, type of like a horror movie,” Brown says — almost certainly A Likelihood for Each Barrels, the script Heff offered however by no means acquired produced after Snakes on a Aircraft.

Brown final exchanged Fb messages with Heff “perhaps three or 4 months after that,” most likely in 2016. Later that yr, on Nov. 16, 2016, Heff would publish his final Fb message ever. It was, apparently, the five-year anniversary of Reedy and Heff changing into Fb mates. “Completely satisfied Friendaversary, Jake!” Heff wrote. “Hmm, which may come off just a bit too … pleasant. Y’know, we must always probly go shoot some sharks with machine weapons from the again of a monster truck or one thing, simply so individuals don’t get the unsuitable thought. Proper after I end watching all these Zac Efron motion pictures I downloaded. God, he’s dreamy.”

When Heff went darkish on Fb, his mates weren’t alarmed, not at first. “It wasn’t in contrast to him to take a break on social media, then pop again up,” Brown says. “However then months became a yr …” In 2020, based on Brown, he acquired a message from Reedy that Heff had died. “He stated, ‘Look, I simply heard from considered one of John’s mates …’ ” The story, as Brown heard it from Reedy, was that Heff had overdosed. “We had been devastated,” Brown says. “Stuff like that shouldn’t occur to good guys like that.”

***

Once I requested considered one of Heff’s previous protection legal professionals about him, I acquired a parable. “I used to say that again east, bother got here within the type of a pair massive guys with crooked noses and a baseball bat,” the lawyer informed me. “In L.A., she’s 5’2″ in a sundress.”

Finally, I discovered the girl the lawyer should have been referring to. Her title was “Lori,” and he or she met Heff in 2006, when he was dwelling in Oxnard. She was working as a “non-public dancer,” she tells me, and Heff grew to become an everyday consumer, paying for her providers “increasingly more.” When she requested him what he did for a dwelling, “He stated, ‘I simply wrote a film,’ and I stated, ‘Something I may need heard of?’ And he stated, ‘A little bit factor known as Snakes on a Aircraft.’ As soon as it got here out, I used to be like, ‘Wow, cool.’ ”

After the film debuted, Lori didn’t hear from Heff for “a pair years.” Then sooner or later, she went to go to a consumer in Pasadena, and Heff answered the door. “He had misplaced loads of weight, had a smaller home and all the pieces.” After they reconnected, she “stopped dancing” and began relationship him completely. She was the one who launched him to heroin.

“I used to be utilizing it,” Lori says, “and I informed him, ‘No, you’re not doing this.’ I used to be so towards him attempting it, however he simply insisted upon it, and we ended up simply doing it collectively. We had been unhealthy for one another, we had been deep into our habit, and he had the cash, and I helped him spend it.”

Over the subsequent few years — from about 2010, once they began relationship, to 2015 — Heff moved from coke and drugs, whippets and booze, into a strong heroin habit. In 2012, he posted to Twitter a citation attributed to late indie movie actress Zoë Lund: “If one can weep for pleasure, one also can discover pleasure in weeping. That’s heroin.” They fought habit, and the legislation, individually and collectively. Lori’s recollections of these years had been affectionate however hazy. “These years had been the very best years of my life, being with him,” she says, at the same time as they had been crammed with struggling. “We each went to rehab on the identical rehab, totally different rehabs, I don’t know … we each went to jail for various issues.”

After they spent down his cash, Heff started cooking up grandiose prison plots to make extra. He “acquired into fraud actually badly,” Lori says. “He needed to do all these items with fraud. He needed to do bank card fraud so badly.” As she remembered it, that scheme went south when the police, seeking to carry her in for a missed courtroom date, discovered she was staying with him. “They raided his home and located all the pieces in his workplace and took him to jail, and naturally he acquired bailed out rapidly” — by his dad and mom, she says. (I couldn’t discover proof of any arrest for bank card fraud or an identical crime.)

By 2015, Heff was not getting work, and he was having bother staying housed. “Mark, I don’t suppose I’ve the recollections you’re on the lookout for,” says a landlord of his from this period. “Once I knew John, he was a horrible junkie, spending his days doing heroin and smoking crack. He was utterly devoted to it and to his personal demise. I really grew to concern no matter he would possibly do subsequent and kicked him out of my property. No laborious emotions about him, particularly contemplating the best way he died: alone and friendless.”

Lori tells me that Heff had one closing shot at a greater life, a job provide in Northern California. On the time, he was clear and on Suboxone. The job, in San Rafael, was with a online game firm — an excellent match for a sci-fi/fantasy/laptop geek like Heff — and it paid $100,000 a yr. “He requested me to come back up there and begin a brand new life with him. I used to be like, ‘Yeah, after all, that is nice. I need to begin over with you.’ I went up there. I used to be clear, too. I used to be on the Suboxone with him.”

However the job by no means occurred. After his welcome get together, somebody on the firm discovered he had a prison file. “They known as him in and stated, ‘I’m sorry, we will’t take you on the staff.’ He was devastated, and so was I.”

After the job in San Rafael went bust, Heff and Lori moved collectively to Oregon, however she acquired depressed and determined to return to L.A. “That was the final time I noticed him,” she says. “I’ve a photograph of us, him with me on the airport and all the pieces, the final time I used to be with him.”

They saved in contact by phone. He discovered work as a automotive salesman, she says. She anxious that he was nonetheless utilizing. At one level, she acquired the impression he’d gotten himself fired by the automotive dealership in Oregon “as a way to gather unemployment.” Then, in 2017, she graduated from court-ordered drug courtroom and needed to share the excellent news with Heff, however she couldn’t discover him. Then she heard from their mutual good friend Ryan — who wouldn’t communicate with me — that Heff had died. In response to Ryan, Lori says, Heff’s “dad and mom acquired him an house in Virginia, and the day earlier than he was supposed to start out his new job, he went exterior and located somebody on the street and acquired a Xanax off somebody, most likely laced with fentanyl, and after being clear for thus lengthy, he took it and he died.”

***

After I started trying into Heff’s life, I reached out to his dad and mom and siblings. I acquired a response from his father, who had the identical gentle, heat voice as the person I remembered, the one with the Jaguar convertible all of us liked. He informed me his son had died from “sudden cardiac arrest,” which he says had killed the boy’s grandfather and one uncle. I requested if there was a grave, and he stated no. “We obeyed his needs and cremated him,” he says. (I discovered it unhappy, however plausible, {that a} man in his early 40s had made such needs recognized.) They scattered his ashes off Catalina Island, within the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. “He had a aircraft and used to fly out to Catalina Island. It was his favourite place.”

Lori went on the lookout for an obituary however by no means discovered one. His household “actually buried it,” she says. She was unhappy that they by no means reached out to her, however she understood. “I’m certain they blame me,” she says. “I imply, in a manner I type of want I by no means met John. As a result of I’m certain he wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t met me.”

I feel that’s unsuitable. Heff at all times liked hazard, and hazard, much more than his mates or household, liked him again. “I feel he at all times needed to have a heroin drawback,” our classmate Adam Larrabee says. “Within the sense of his idolization of Pulp Fiction and these form of wounded antiheroes. Perhaps I’m unsuitable in that …”

I discovered notices for 2 Catholic Plenty celebrated in Heff’s honor. One was in Previous Saybrook, Connecticut, the place the household saved the summer time residence the place Heff hosted a number of badly hid highschool events. It was, based on the church bulletin, requested by his father. The opposite was in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. A lady’s title was given because the requester of that one, however I’ve not been capable of finding her.

The final e-mail I acquired from Heff was in 2008. I used to be engaged on a memoir about our highschool years, and I had written to ask for his reminiscences. I had additionally taken the chance to apologize for an previous quarrel. He wrote again a candy observe through which he stated, principally, to not fear about it. “It was highschool,” he wrote, “and all people did issues they remorse and want they might change, and I’m actually no totally different and in no place to solid judgment.”

Me neither — no judgment right here. I want I may inform him that myself. I nonetheless harbor a small hope that he’s executing some twisted piece of efficiency artwork, hiding out close to a seashore someplace. On this dream, he’s spending his days browsing, studying, driving quick vehicles and flying small planes. At evening, he’s engaged on his subsequent screenplay. He’s nonetheless maintaining the promise to himself that he as soon as described in a letter to Kiki, his highschool flame. He knew, he informed her, that he was by no means going to spend his life “bored and depressing or in entrance of some tv.” He had different plans: “I would like my life to shine, child, and I’m going to make it glisten.” 

This story appeared within the Oct. 23 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.