(1985. You Can't Take It With You cast photo. Ryann seated on lap in front. I am in back row with Michael)
Of the friends I made independent of my family, Michael is one of the oldest and certainly the closest. After leaving high school, we were roommates for a time in a tiny two bedroom apartment on South Vinedo in Pasadena. He was the first person I ever came out to. He took a photo of me when I was nineteen that is still my favorite. It resides permanently in a silver frame on my piano and I don’t care how vain that makes me look. When I had my wisdom teeth out, he took me home and kept me awake by playing Scrabble, insisting the next day that I had beaten him handily. A sketch of Alfred Hitchcock he drew for my birthday years ago still hangs on the wall of my house. He slept with someone once just because I wanted to sleep with their friend. On prom night, he took us to the airport and tried to convince the security people to let him lay down on the conveyor belt and get scanned. They said no. Just this morning, I told my roommate for the millionth time about the day he totaled my car driving too fast through an intersection in Silverlake. We could have been killed, flipping around and skidding backwards through a busy street at rush hour, but somehow, miraculously, we survived without a scratch on us. But now he is inexplicably gone.
All of the happiest adventures of my desperately broke young adult life were with Michael. His time working at the Rialto Theatre that lead to his cameo in The Player and his acquisition of that damned popcorn machine that no matter how many times we cleaned it filled the apartment with the smell of stale popcorn if the temperature rose above 75 degrees, which it often did. Later, when he worked as a dispatcher for the Sheriff’s Department, a call from a reporter about a mountain lion sighting provoked him to respond that officers were out patrolling Altadena with sides of beef strapped to the doors of their cruisers in the hopes of luring the animal out into the open. During the LA riots, in our petulant boredom, we broke curfew and drove to Palm Springs with no idea where we were going to go or what we were going to do. And that’s how it was for him.
He shared my love of Gore Vidal. We would obsess over Gore’s book of essays United States like a two man book club with only one book. He danced around our living room to Thomas Dolby’s “The Key To Your Ferrari,” always relishing in that final whispered line that he would never fail also to utter: “because aliens ate my Buick.” We flew along the 710 freeway in that old green Barracuda that when it hit just the right speed would gently float up and down like a yacht out to sea. We had danger, adventure, car accidents and fights. But most of all we had fun, in that way that can only be had when you are young and without care.
(Early 90s. Party at Paul's apartment. Michael tries unsuccessfully to avoid my camera.)
There has been call to honor Michael in death as he lived: in private. But he wasn’t a private person. Not in the sense that we think of. In fact nothing about him conformed to our ideas of society. In our age of constant public revelation, reality fame and online ubiquity, Michael certainly marched to a different drummer. But he wasn’t private. He just thought we were all silly. And that the superficial things we cared about, in particular caring what others think of us, were ridiculous. A truly private person would pretend to be someone else or try to blend in quietly with his surroundings, to go unnoticed. That didn’t interest him. He wanted to wear what he wanted wear, do what he wanted to do, sleep with who he wanted to sleep with and live as he pleased. And it didn’t matter to him if we liked it or not. He was going to be himself no matter what and there wasn’t room in his life for people who didn’t let him be. He was the most truly independent person I ever knew.
He never tired of teasing me about my shallow concerns about my looks or my desires for fame. He knew what a truly private person I was despite how I may act and he couldn’t wait to embarrass me in public at every turn. When my Dad came to California to see me in one of the many high school plays we did together, Michael unceremoniously dumped me in a trash can right in front of him. He knew how mortified I would be and he was always, by hook or by crook, trying to get me to come over to his side and not care what other people thought. My Dad called him, “the son I never had” and when I asked Dad who that made me, he replied dryly, “You’re the son I did have.” Michael loved that line.
(1986. With Heather Bodell in The Mousetrap. My favorite photo of him.)
I always tried to get him to go to our high school reunions and the last time I saw him was three years ago when I was in town for our twentieth. He didn't want to go. High school reunions were like online social networks (which he also avoided), public displays of affection purely for the sake of making a point, not a real attempt at human connection. But he wanted to make sure both times that I told everyone he was dead. I thought that was ludicrous and refused. “If it is so important to you, tell them yourself!” I snapped impatiently. “That’s not how it works,” he replied, with a guffaw and that Cheshire cat smile of his. So I feel like I need to honor his wish and tell people the truth. He died and this is who he was to me. And he was someone who was really important to me.
Michael was an accomplished photographer. He made beautiful sketches. He wrote wonderful short stories, the few he gave me to read I kept and still have. He had a crazy idea once for a porn movie about Nazis on a U-boat that time travel to the most famous human disaster of the 20th Century which he wanted to call “Going Down on the Titanic.” His humor was daring and inappropriate, he liked to laugh at all the wrong things and he wanted people to be uncomfortable. It wasn’t to annoy them. He just wanted to shock people out of their mundane rigid existences and feel comfortable being their true selves.
(Michael as photographer, captures a wary moment between me and Disney's John Addis)
He kept a journal that he filled with his most intimate thoughts and personal adventures. Once when we were on one of our many pretentious outings (like fantasy Jaguar shopping on Colorado Boulevard, or in this case, having a cocktail on the patio of the Huntington Hotel), he left it behind at the table when he went to the bathroom. I thought it would be funny if when he came back, I pretended to be reading it. He kept it so closely guarded. But when I opened it randomly to a page, a major secret I had not known was revealed and when he returned I felt compelled by our friendship to confess what I had done. He wasn’t upset at all and, in that cool way of his, informed me that the page I read was old and a lot had happened since then, all of which he proceeded to tell me on the ride home. There were some things that he was private about but not out of shame. It was just out of old fashioned, this-is-none-of-your-business thinking. He was old-fashioned in a lot of ways.
(In my wedding party. In typical fashion, he is the only one aware of the camera.)
After I moved away from California, I came back for a short visit and while in town, ran into him on the street. It was on Santa Monica Blvd and he ran across four lanes of honking traffic to confront me in a wild mocking manner. How dare I come to town and not call him to see him! He made the kind of ridiculous display in public that made him happy because it irritated me but I could tell he was genuinely hurt. Michael didn't care what people thought of him but if he cared about you and trusted you, he really wanted you to care for him back. I tried calling him the other times I came to town but he would never return my calls. The damage had been done and things were never quite the same. I would still see him a few more times in the company of our friend Eric and the last time I even spent a few moments talking with him at his small apartment of quiet elegance in West Hollywood.
But I think I will remember him most vividly the last time I saw him at the Vinedo apartment a year after I moved out, sitting at that small round table in the kitchen eating a simple chicken breast and some asparagus on a plain white plate. He had gotten a small TV after I left, which surprised me, and it had taken up residence on the other side of the table where I had sat. I had been appropriately replaced! He confessed that he acquiesced a bit in his attempt at “staying connected with the outside world.” But that was more about trying to make relatable small talk with other people who didn’t love Ken Russell movies or Spy Magazine log rolling in our time or sitting quietly in a carefully lit room reading a book. His connection to the world as we know it was tangential at best but his mind was extraordinary, panoramic.
"A consequence of debating someone with as clever and as sharp a mind as yours is that you grow impatient," he wrote twenty years ago in a nineteen page handwritten apology for what I felt was him putting me down too much in public. "When I think it absolutely imperative to make what I feel is a valid, important or profound argument, I see your eyes glaze over with the peculiarly American expression of a news reader, searching for some sound byte. My 'forty-two page dissertations' bore you." He explained that his "mind works in the realm of the allegorical" before ending cryptically with "You are the most American person I know, but my car has been ready for an hour and I've a lunch date, so I'll let you ask what I mean by that before I tell you."
Yes, his need to carry on like a character in 18th century Europe was exhausting, and only grew more so as the years progressed, especially if you were trying to keep in contact with him, but he could also be extraordinarily sweet in his way. For instance, in closing a scathing five paragraph negative review of my screenplay ("bloodless, gutless, and shallow beyond the point of making the point of shallowness") he wrote, "I hope that you find my typing forgivable, however. If I thought I could type well, I'd type letters to more people rather than just you."
Tonight our friend Paul in trying to make sense of what happened took to the internet and came up empty-handed. “He has zero web presence.” Paul texted to me, another of the modern things I never saw Michael do. “I couldn’t even find one photo or reference to him online. Are we sure he existed?” I guess in a way, he never really existed, not like the rest of us do, glued to our smart phones or the latest Real Housewife. He was a man of a different time, who expressed himself in a different way. He wanted to be known but he made himself known through his photography, his drawing, his writing, even the simple lost art of conversation. And I think if he had one regret in life, it would be that other people didn’t respect his desire to be himself in his own way.
His life can’t be summed up in a text message or a status update or a blog posting. Michael loved Gore Vidal’s essay about his friend Orson Welles, and that friendship reminds me so much of our own. I think about Michael laughing along with Gore telling of Orson complaining in his later years “I am selling dog food now. Oh I have fallen so low,” an expression I repeat in my head fairly often. But now to my own surprise, I am the one in Gore’s shoes, wishing I could pick up the phone and hear that voice one last time. I have no doubt that Michael would think it was silly of me going on like this, making such a fuss, but that’s just how he was.
(1999.Leaving LA, Michael takes a moment for one last embarrassment as Dennis Hensley looks on)
