Remember this?
Hey smilin' strange
You're lookin' happily deranged
Can you settle to shoot me?
Or have you picked your target yet
You're lookin' happily deranged
Can you settle to shoot me?
Or have you picked your target yet
It's the theme to The Adventures of Pete and Pete (1991-95), the first of the Nickelodeon "adults are insane" teencoms. Two brothers, both named Pete, negotite the weirdness of the city of Wellsvill, where no one is really well.
A bowling ball has mystical powers.
A garage band vanishes overnight.
Little Pete accidentally erases baseball from existence.
I liked Rick Gomez as Endless Mike, who knows more about the town's weirdness than he lets on. He sometimes bullies and humiliates Big Pete, and sometimes acts as his ally and protector. You might even find a gay subtext in their interaction.
No one ever explains why his name is Endless. Maybe the teenage boy is a manifestation of a transdimensional being who exists beyond time and space as we perceive it.
Or maybe he's got a big one.
When Pete & Pete ended, I moved on to other things, and thought about Endless Mike rarely, if at all. And the years passed.
Recently we started watching Silo (2023-), a dystopian science fiction series where 10,000 people, all of surviving humanity (that they know of) live in a huge underground helix. They can't go outside, or ever open the single door, because the air is poisonous (or so they are told).
And there in the cast list was Rick Gomez!
Right: Steve Zahn plays Solo, who survived a rebellion in his own silo, where everyone went outside and died. They buddy bond in Season 3.
A few years have passed, but you can still see that insoucient, all-knowing smile.
I wanted to check what Rick has been doing since 1995, whether he is actually gay in real life, and if he is really endless.
Searching for "Rick Gomez," "actor," and "nude" yields a lot of photos of Rick kissing guys (top photo) and showing his butt (left) in at least three movies, but it turns out to be a Google Images misdirection. The gay/nude actor is Ricardo Gomez.
Our Rick starred in five tv series between Pete & Pete and Silo.
1. Hitz (1997), about workers at a record company (remember records?)
2. Band of Brothers (2001), about World War II soldiers. Rick plays George Luz, who does some buddy-bonding during the War, but then returns to Rhode Island and does the married-with-children bit.
Not much of gay interest so far.
More after the break
5. The Crossing (2018) was a one-season tv series about refugees seeking asylum in an American town. Some of them have superpowers. Steve Zahn plays the sheriff, and Rick one of the refugees who becomes his deputy and buddy.
I don't know what movie this is from, but Rick has a nice physique.
There are about 300 photos on Rick's Instagram where he's hugging or hanging out with Steve Zahn. They do a podcast together, and in 2025 they collaborated on She Dances, with Steve as a dad trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter (played by his real life daughter), as she competes in a regional dancing contest.
Wait -- daughter? So Steve is straight? I'll bet that Rick is straight, too, and all they have is a buddy bromance.
There's just one photo on Rick's Instagram suggesting that he might be straight. EarDogPhoto, aka Kimberly Wang, writes that Rick and Jenny Gomez had just gotten up with a houseful of overnight guests, they hadn't had their coffee yet, but they still posed for this photo to demonstrate their powerful bond: "This is what love is."
Job, house, wife, kids, buddies,
got it.
Ear Dog also posts to celebrate Pride, so she's not entirely heteronormative. I don't know about Rick.
All that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.
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