Some alcoholics drink in pursuit of the right level of alcohol in their bloodstream that will allow them to function in oblivion. Jesse didn't drink to function in oblivion. He didn't want to function at all. If he thought it was possible, he would have drank himself to death. Instead, he drank himself to small individual deaths each night in hopes they would add up to one final bow.

Jesse Newman was without a doubt the greatest actor I ever met. He also had the unattractive distinction of being the greatest talent that nobody had ever heard of. Jesse was an illegitimate child in a very famous family of actors. .That left Jesse with the choice of being a joke in the media by letting the tabloids exploit his illegitimate birth or by only working outside of the broad eye of the media, and thus never achieving the notoriety necessary for fame.

Jesse was a lush by the time he was a teenager - drunk or on painkillers for almost every performance and in most of his day to day life. I didn't know that until later, that's how damn good of an actor he was. You couldn't even tell he was loaded. He was a better actor drunk or high than most people could ever hope to be even with their full faculties.

I don't fault him for drinking, though. I basically had my life handed to me on a silver platter and have done more than my share of drinking and drugs.

Eventually Jesse gave up on drinking himself to death. He died of a gun shot to the head. It was suicide, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. He'd been killing himself slowly for years with the bottle. He just decided to expedite the process with a ball of lead and a little gunpowder.

"Second star on the right and straight on till morning." That's what his suicide note read, a direct quote from Peter Pan - the boy who wouldn't grow up.

It wasn't a plea, that note. People who leave pleading notes usually swallow pills and call 911 themselves because they don't really want to die, they just want attention. Jesse's note was a prayer.
Jesse never got to be a child. He'd grown up as a child actor, supporting his ailing mother, her only support system. Jesse went from being six years old to being sixty. How fitting that he never looked older than a teenager, the exact years he never got to experience. I think that's what Jesse was hoping for in death, to experience the childhood he never was allowed to have.

I was the one who found Jesse, what used to be Jesse. Normal people find a body and they call 911. TV stars aren't normal people. We call our public relations firm, ask them what to do.

See, image is everything. A TV star saves a little girl from drowning and it's good press. An actor finds a dead body and it's not as appealing. In this age of sensationalism, a dead body alone isn't a good news story. It won't capture the ratings. Instead there have to be innuendoes that implicate the person who found the body, especially if that person is famous. Suddenly stories suggest that they were lovers or enemies who had once threatened each other, anything to make the headlines bite.

So TV stars don't call 911 when they find one of their friends dead. We call our publicist. Then we sit around and wait at the dead man's house until our publicist, agent, and attorney figure out if anyone can connect us to the body, who should place the anonymous call to the police, and how many states away we need to be before the anonymous call is made.

And we do our waiting in the house where we found our dead friend, where the body still lies in the bedroom, because we can't be sure if we've been seen entering and surely don't want to be seen leaving.

So while I sat there waiting, I read Jesse's diaries. Book upon book of words from his life. Confessions of the emotions he couldn't share with the outside world.

All those years I thought of him as my best friend, and I never had a clue what he was going through. He was always Good Time Jesse. It wasn't until I read his memoirs that I understood him. It wasn't until he was dead that I truly knew him.