Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Tuesday was Boys’ Night at the Flame, a lesbian bar north of Hillcrest on the grand boulevard bisecting Balboa Park. One of the habitués of that era was a charming con artist named “Larry,” who eventually got strung out on drugs, arrested for fraud, and sent to federal prison. Larry, with whom Andrew often hung out, allegedly knew mobsters and was a master at credit card fraud. He came from a family that masterminded car thefts and oversaw a fleet of over one hundred shoplifters—who hit major department stores and brought out hundreds of thousands of dollars of “product” to be sold at 25 percent of retail. Larry says he arranged for Andrew to buy product.

  One night Andrew watched Larry casually “pick up” a previously targeted, fully loaded red Porsche right outside the bar they were about to enter. He never forgot the incident. When Andrew bragged that he knew people with connections to goods that “just fell off a truck,” he meant Larry. Larry knew of a certain “big room,” he would say, and Andrew allegedly had access to the source where a “Cartier watch, Persian rugs, a Peter Max painting, a case of Dom Perignon, Cristal or Perrier-Jouet champagne, et cetera et cetera,” cost anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of list price.

  The trunk of Andrew’s old clunker was suddenly full of Polaroid cameras, calculators, fans, heaters, Jurassic Park videocassettes, and men’s cologne, all of which he would distribute as presents. He could easily have shoplifted these things from Thrifty Drug. “He probably just paid a guy a hundred dollars to set a box from the warehouse to the side for him,” Larry said, implying that such pickings were way too slim for real pros. “Who’s gonna hit a truck like that?”

  Wednesday nights and many other nights, Andrew hung out at the West Coast, a three-story dance club with an outdoor bar, where he was the main attraction. “He held court. We all worshiped,” says Sheila Gard, who worked at the West Coast for a time. “Yes, Andrew, whatever you want. You’re the god.”

  Sometimes he’d get “wasted on vodka,” climb up on a platform, and dance to “Copacabana.” Other times he would say he was a recovering alcoholic. Even so, he would often have Mike Whitmore, the bartender, spike his espresso glass with Bushmills or Baileys.

  Andrew had a secret crush on blond, blue-eyed Mike and tried to come between him and his boyfriend, Matthew. But then, he also had a crush on Matthew, as well as the doorman, Stan Hatley, an ex–air force officer who was dark and handsome. “He always told me that Richard Gere and I were his two dream men,” says Stan. However, most people remember that Andrew had trouble scoring. “He’d cruise and cruise, but I’d never see Andrew leave with a person,” says Ronnie Mascarena, another pal from that era. Andrew claimed that he preferred paying for sex to having a relationship. “He said he’d hire hookers,” remembers John Beuerle, another regular. “Andrew liked them because there were no complications. ‘When I’m done with you, see you later.’”

  Now old friends realize that he was probably also talking about himself. “He often showed up in a tux at bars,” says Shane O’Brien, who was just coming out at the time and who became part of Andrew’s clique. “He’d always be going to dinner parties requiring a suit and tie or tuxedo. I don’t know who they were with. I guess they could have been tricks.” Stan Hatley recalls, “Andrew was associated with limos and taxis and private screenings. He’d be all decked out in tan khakis and a navy blazer. We’d say, ‘Where did you go?’ He’d say, ‘The opera, this or that show, that benefit.’ We’re finding out now he was a hired guest, so to speak. [But] I was proud I knew Andrew. He was the type of person, you could walk into a room of a thousand people, and the one guy everyone wanted to be around was Andrew.”

  As for Andrew, he wanted to be around anyone who looked like he had money. “He carried a wad of cash. He flashed around fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills. To those of us who came from the background he wanted to come from, he wouldn’t buy us drinks,” says Stan Hatley, who was supported by his well-to-do dad. “It actually became a sore spot with me.”

  In 1991, to impress Shane O’Brien, who was also supported by his family, Andrew said, “I go to dinner with Gianni Versace once a year.” He then proceeded to tell Shane all about the dinner he had had with Versace at Stars Restaurant in San Francisco the year before, when Versace was doing the costumes for the opera there. He told similar stories to Robbins, but Robbins had no idea who Versace was or any interest in finding out. Andrew also told Shane that he dined annually with Debbie Harry. “Whenever she came up on a video in the bar, he’d say, ‘I get to have dinner with her and you don’t.’”

  By 1992, Andrew DeSilva was telling everyone he was Jewish and had a commission in the Israeli military. To some he boasted that his father was a ranking member of the Mossad, or Israeli intelligence. He took a shine to a pretty young Jewish woman named Elisa Denner. “He could speak with a Jewish New York accent about going shopping and to lunch. He acted like a Jewish American princess in a guy,” Elisa says. Andrew told Elisa, “We could be married. I’ll take you to Hollywood.” He begged her to go with him so that they could break into the movies as a couple. Elisa’s close friend, Ronnie Mascarena, told him, “They’d never allow anyone with your voice on TV!” Ronnie explained that “Andrew had a very nasally gay voice. He felt he needed a beautiful woman on his arm to become famous and wealthy.” Elisa adds, “He used to tell people I was his ex-wife. He told me he had a daughter.”

  For years Andrew flashed pictures of Lizzie and her daughter as proof of his marriage, but he said he never saw his family because “my wife has a restraining order against me.” His excuse for never letting Denner or anyone else go to his house in Rancho Santa Fe was that, “he was in the closet because of his parents—they’d cut him off.” Once, friends caught him driving his old beat-up LTD. “He said it was his maid’s. We knew it was his,” says Ronnie. It was easier to let Andrew indulge his fantasies about being rich and a member of the Israeli army.

  “What would an active officer in the Israeli army be doing in San Diego?” asks Hatley. Spies, after all, wouldn’t be announcing themselves. “With Andrew, you kind of pacified him. It was easier to pacify than hear him tell it all night,” Sheila Gard says. “If you disbelieved him, he’d push it. Or he’d get real defensive and almost pouty. We were all there for Andrew, so it wasn’t any fun if the life of the party was pouty.”

  8

  Jeff

  ALTHOUGH ANDREW WAS a practiced phony, he knew the genuine article when he saw it. Jeff Trail, a handsome, authentic all-American kid with dark hair and an engaging smile, was Andrew’s ideal. Jeff was a graduate of Annapolis who knew how to fly before he knew how to drive; he was an excellent marksman and a skilled sailor. Many of Andrew’s now tarnished dreams were embedded in Jeff. Andrew was in awe of Jeff, and he claimed they were like brothers, pointing out that they were born only six months apart and that he too had once hoped to go to the Naval Academy and pretended that he knew how to fly and sail. Actually, Andrew had never had a flying lesson, and going out on the water made him seasick.

  In many ways, Jeff was everything Andrew was not. From the beginning, Andrew was highly possessive of Jeff, who had grown up in De Kalb, Illinois, a small university town sixty miles northwest of Chicago, where the big crop is corn for corn flakes. Jeff personified the solid ideals of the land he sprang from. He was loyal and law-abiding and kept his word; he made friends easily and loved to be needed; he hated being alone. He liked to cook, play cards, sit around a fire and talk. During his entire childhood and adolescence, Jeff lived in the same house, on the edge of Northern Illinois University, where his father taught mathematics.

  Like Andrew, Jeff was the baby of the family. His mother had had four other children, a son and three daughters, before being widowed at a young age. Ann Davis then enrolled at Oklahoma State University, hoping to become an elementary school teacher in order to support her family. There she met Stan Trail, a kind and thoughtful math professor, who is now emeritus at NIU. Ann eventually earned a master’s at the University of Chicago and be
came a reading specialist. Jeff was the only child Ann and Stan had together.

  The family was close-knit—even today they take their vacations together—and Jeff, the youngest by nine years, was doted on. In return, he adored his parents. After he grew up, Jeff was still so respectful of his father that in the middle of a discussion with someone he would say, “Just a minute, I’ll call my dad. He’ll know the answer.” Jeff was the family conservative, at odds with the rest of the bunch politically. Says his sister Sally, “We could never figure out how we got a Young Republican in the family.”

  At an early age, Jeff decided he liked the military. His older brother, Mike (who would die suddenly, less than a year after Jeff), was a Navy corpsman in Vietnam. Sally, seventeen years Jeff’s senior, enlisted in the Air Force and later became a career naval officer, one of the first women to attend the Army War College. Jeff wanted to be a Top Gun pilot. “His room went from toy soldiers to an eight-foot mural of the moon and the stars,” says his youngest sister, Lisa.

  Jeff took flying lessons when he was a sophomore in high school. Later, his family and friends held their breath as he flew them over De Kalb in an old Piper Cub from the local airport where he worked after school. He was so determined to get an appointment to Annapolis that he earned nineteen college-course credits in trigonometry, calculus, and linear algebra before graduating from high school.

  De Kalb High had a lot of bright kids, many of them children of Northern Illinois State faculty members. (When Jeff was a freshman, the senior-class valedictorian was Cindy Crawford, who won a scholarship in chemical engineering to Northwestern University.) De Kalb High in those days was superstraight. “If you smoked cigarettes, you were considered a burn-out and completely ostracized,” says high school friend Chris Walker, who eventually worked in the Clinton White House. “There were no drugs and no smoking and very little drinking. Jeff led by example. He was one of the leaders in that.”

  Jeff’s honors humanities teacher, Joe Lo Cascio, who led his students through Dante’s Inferno, describes him as “an ideal kid—Jeff was going to be a significant person.” Lo Cascio remembers him for his “strong values and his great code of ethics, a sense of academic vigor and a wonderful sense of self, and a very supportive family, obviously.” Elegie Lo Cascio taught Jeff honors English. “Jeff had a great sense of tradition and obligation and a tremendous sense of honor.” His favorite book was The Iliad.

  At Annapolis, with its rigid discipline, elite tradition, and tough course load, Jeff was faced with the greatest challenge of his life. Set on a picturesque point where the Severn River meets Chesapeake Bay, Annapolis is both awe-inspiring and intimidating. Whether midshipmen are listening to organ music filling the Academy’s domed chapel, the cacophony of orders and questions barked out in the cavernous dining hall, or the roaring cheers of “Beat Army!” they are never ever allowed to forget what is expected of them: excellence.

  Jeff took responsibility very seriously. He soon realized that he wasn’t going to be one of the few chosen for Top Gun, and became a political-science major. His grades were mediocre at best—he graduated 839th out of 950—and his only honors course was in leadership. However, he earned two stripes during his senior year for being chosen as a battalion adjutant, a semester-long leadership position.

  Jeff’s sexual preference must have been gnawing at him, but he still did not know for certain that he was gay. In the pre- “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, his father remembers, several midshipmen discovered to be homosexual were thrown out. Jeff, a stickler for rules, told his dad, “They better not try to come back!”

  Up to then, Jeff had dated but had had no real girl-friends. His best female friend there, Liz McDonald, recalls how she and Jeff, “did weddings and dinners and drinks. You just liked him instantly. He was warm and made you feel at ease. If Jeff was your friend, he was your friend for life.” Jeff’s middle sister, Candy, remembers that he visited her during a wild spring break for college students on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Jeff told her, “I just feel so different from all these kids.” She thought he meant that because of all the rules he was subject to, he couldn’t identify with Margaritaville.

  Jeff graduated in May 1991 and was posted in the fall to San Diego, to Surface Warfare Officer School, where he’d learn to handle ships on the high seas. Out clubbing one night, he met Michael Murphy, a student at San Diego State, and had his first homosexual experience. It threw him badly. Jeff was very uncomfortable when Murphy took him to a gay beach up the coast in Laguna, and left immediately. Jeff soon broke off the relationship. “He was really upset, pacing around with his head down,” Murphy recounts. Jeff was frightened, saying, “I can’t understand myself, me being this way. This is the first time I’ve not been able to understand myself. I’ve always understood myself before.”

  His fellow officers on the USS Gridley, a steam-driven cruiser built in 1963, had no idea that Jeff was gay. He was one of only two unmarried officers on the ship, which was deployed to the Persian Gulf to help keep the peace after the Gulf War. Jeff flew out to be with the ship in late spring 1992 and returned to San Diego in October. His father proudly sailed with him from Hawaii. Thereafter, except for a few cruises to Mexico and one to San Francisco, the ship stayed in port in San Diego, being refurbished and getting readied for engineering trials. In the end, the Gridley was scheduled for decommissioning in January 1994.

  During his time on the cruiser, Jeff worked in the boiler room in the engineering division. He commanded forty-two men and was very popular. It was almost as if he had made a conscious decision to identify with them instead of with his fellow officers in the ward room. “Jeff was proficient and a real good guy. He stuck up for his men—sometimes to the detriment of the mission,” says Ted Cudal, his chief engineer.

  One incident that sunk Jeff’s chances for a brilliant naval career occurred while he was on the Gridley. The new commanding officer in the engineering division had just gotten out of Department Head School and appeared to the men to be very green. Even the other officers in engineering joked that he was clueless. He was soon transferred, and at his “Hail and Farewell Party,” Jeff had to give a gag gift. Handing him the board game Clue, Jeff said, “We’ve all been talking and we pretty much decided you never had a clue, so here it is.” Suddenly the party went silent; junior officers did not say such things to superiors even in jest. The captain of the Gridley was not pleased, and Jeff got a B in judgment on his final fitness report. “If you didn’t get straight A’s as a junior officer, you were never going to get anywhere,” says Scott Silsdorf, also a junior officer on the Gridley. “If you got a B as a junior officer, it was a big black mark to get over.”

  Once Jeff accepted his homosexuality, his feelings of discomfort on board ship could only have greatly increased. In late 1992, Jeff spoke anonymously about what being closeted in the navy was like to a TV interviewer for a segment on the government’s policy toward gays in the military on the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours. “I am not able to share my life with those around me,” he said in silhouette, in an interview that went on far longer than the bits actually aired. For himself, Jeff continued, “being gay is a half natural and half conscious choice.” He sounded relieved to say that “I finally reached a point that, yeah, I’m gay and I can admit it to myself.” But he certainly didn’t sound as if he would have voluntarily put himself in such a difficult position. “When I sit down and think about it—I torture myself. I’m between a rock and a hard place.” He couldn’t reveal his true self to the navy or to his parents. “The way I do it—I’m very closed about how I feel. I’m very protective of my emotions, and I try not to be very emotional about anything. I tend to disassociate myself. I’m very good at putting the blame on other people and not myself.”

  He wasn’t certain, he said, how much longer he could keep it up. Ever the conservative, Jeff decried the waste of taxpayers’ money on training for qualified people who then had to leave the military simply because they were gay. When J
eff gave the interview to CBS, he had three years left of the mandatory five he had promised to complete.

  That period roughly coincided with the time Jeff got to know Andrew—late 1992, early 1993. There was a mutual attraction. The closeted military man was in awe of the utter flamboyance and ease with which Andrew handled his sexual orientation. More important, Jeff couldn’t believe all the cute boys Andrew could introduce him to. Andrew was always very solicitous of Jeff, though almost everyone who knew them insists that they never had a sexual relationship. “There was some strange bond there between Andrew and Jeff,” says Jeff’s closest friend, Jon Wainwright, then a real-estate executive in La Jolla. “Andrew would hook up people for J.T. It was kind of strange, actually. My belief is that Andrew was very infatuated with Jeff.”

  J. Buchman, who was a marine when he met them, witnessed an interesting dynamic between the two—an elaborate mutual deference. “Jeff was kind of needy for attention, and Andrew would give attention,” Buchman says. “And Andrew would require a certain amount of attention and respect given back to him. They massaged each other’s egos—the alpha male thing. Andrew stooped down and acted like an ape (mimicking a chimp opening its legs and exposing its genitals, as homage to the leader of the pack) in deference to Jeff. That is one of the things Andrew would do for Jeff.”

  In gay karaoke bars, Jeff discovered he had a singing voice. “On karaoke nights, if Andrew asked Jeff to sing, Jeff would sing,” Buchman relates. “Jeff would stand up and be Sinatra. He did a stellar impersonation. Andrew loved that. And in turn Andrew loved being listened to for his anecdotes. He and Jeff listened to each other.”