It was very late on a Wednesday night in 1992 and we were not tired.
It was an invitation to an afterparty at an apartment in one of those tall 1920s apartment buildings that dot the narrow streets on low hills around Hollywood. I was working for my dad at the time, unwisely pep talking stockbrokers by phone before the markets opened in New York so I wanted to go home. But in his best Cary Grant in North By Northwest vocalization, Michael insisted the afterparty apartment would certainly have a telephone, as if conducting business from a strange apartment in the middle of the night was as natural as breathing.
As our designated driver, Michael got his way and so we headed to this random location at 3am on a Wednesday night. And that's how by 5am, while I was calling an unwitting stockbroker long distance in a dark bedroom next to a sleeping trick, Michael was wandering out onto the balcony to pretentiously smoke a Dunhill and ponder the moon. And to meet Eric Mueller., who was standing alone by the railing.
Michael and I were best friends, living together in his tiny two bedroom apartment in Pasadena where Eric followed us and then was quickly in regular rotation in the days and weeks to come. But as things between them began to wind down, Michael entreated me to become better friends with Eric. "We need to break up and I genuinely want to be his friend but he will never believe that. So you have to become his friend and then after a respectable amount of time, he will be my friend as well." This logic was very Michael but then in an unexpected twist, Eric supplanted Michael as the constant in my life.
Suddenly and without warning, everything was in perpetual motion. This was Eric. We both jumped into new relationships, me with Craig in West Hollywood, and him with Christopher Honey in Culver City. We were inseparable except when the Northridge quake collapsed the 10 freeway between us and we were literally cut off from each other for weeks. It all felt very stable at the time, our endless rounds of movies and dinners and parties but Eric was always on the move. And the puzzle pieces of our fates were locking into place.
In that time, the Derek and Eric show dominated. We worked together. Traveled together. And by the final year, for pure convenience, lived together in a terrific apartment on Sycamore in Hollywood. I'm not a great friend or roommate but I'm loyal, like a creditor. And an easy-going traveler, qualities which I think Eric appreciated. I can make you laugh, but I'm not fun. Eric was pure fun, and that was more than enough for two people. And like all of his close friends, Eric knew who we were and adventures with him were calibrated accordingly. His kind of fun, but made with us in mind.
Good movies and bad popcorn at the Laemmle Sunset 5, bad movies and great popcorn at the $2 theater on Fairfax. Bowling and Souplantation and Jamba Juice. Late night burgers and champagne in the swimming pool of the Phoenician delivered by room service, hunkered down at the Polynesian during Hurricane Floyd. Scratchy cheap sheets in a Hampton Inn outside Dulles, first class flights around the world with Scollay and Mickey. We were everywhere, all the time. But it wasn't my momentum or even our momentum. It was all Eric, and I was caught in the tail of a comet.
Eric reveled in things that personified the Hole lyric "I fake it so real, I am beyond fake", from televangelist Jan Crouch to Disneyland to the kabuki theatre of gay masculinity to a cat named Puppy. Artifice for artifice's sake, the sincerity at the heart of the lie, because they were all acts of becoming. Where our friend Michael shunned modern life because it was absurd and phony, Eric embraced it because it was absurd and phony. Eric knew you could make true whatever you needed to be true and then created a life that was completely true to himself.
The end of the 90s was the tacit end of our adventures. Eric moved to DC, I moved to Michigan. A year or so later, Emil tried to convince Eric to join us in New York City but whatever hopes we had of getting the band back together weren't meant to be. His adventures continued on mostly without me: moving to Switzerland with Claudio, dyeing Darin's dog pink while housesitting for him, a birthday party at Richard Simmons' exercise studio, sneaking into a child beauty pageant with Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Gos. Relentless joy, sublime and ridiculous, spread around the world.
And now it's at an end.
I think all the time about Marlene Dietrich's epitaph to Orson Welles' character in Touch Of Evil: "He was some kind of a man," she offers at the end, "What does it matter what you say about people." But it does matter. Because after someone is gone, their voice remains in the speaking of others. Maybe Eric might have seen himself more like Pinocchio, someone created by others who through his own adventures made himself real. But to me he was Tinkerbell, equal parts mischievous sprite and teen girl strapped to a high wire in Orange County, hurled out over an adoring crowd with minimal regard for their personal safety, surrounded by a shower of fireworks. For those who knew him, he was the light that illuminated our darkness and sprinkled the magic that let us fly.
Eric Mueller. 1971 - 2020
