by Maureen Orth
As a handsome Naval Academy graduate, Jeff was a catch, and Andrew, according to Buchman, “always had a bevy of military men around him.” In the parlance of the closeted military world, however, Andrew was not known as a sexual “chaser” of gays in uniform. Buchman’s roommate, Steven Zeeland, author of The Masculine Marine, says Andrew was a chaser in the sense that he often tried to impersonate a military officer, claiming to be in the Israeli army or U.S. intelligence. “Andrew was the only one I ever met,” says Zeeland, “who posed as a military officer for any reason other than reasons of sexuality.”
To Jeff and the other gay officers he knew, all of whom had to walk the perilous tightrope of the new policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Andrew was valuable as a net-worker and a connector—the Dolly Levi of Hillcrest. “Andrew was very considerate of people,” says a career naval officer who was a close friend of Jeff’s. “He was one of those people who could introduce himself and you to just about anybody. So we always met a lot of people when we were with Andrew.” For the newly out gay man arriving in San Diego, explains the officer, Andrew was one-stop shopping. “He seemed to really enjoy meeting people, introducing people to each other—he seemed to like setting people up, as far as introducing them to people he felt would be good for them.” Plus he was the one who was buying.
“Jeff was a military officer and wasn’t making great money, and Andrew always had money,” says Judy Fleissner, Jeff’s former neighbor and close friend. “He used to buy all of Jeff’s drinks and buy him a really nice dinner, and this and that. I think if you had taken all of those away, I don’t think the friendship would have been the same.”
Once Jeff came to terms with the fact that he was gay, he began to make up for lost time in pursuing men—the younger the better. Andrew, who almost never went home with anybody, was blown away by Jeff’s insouciance. “That heartbreaker,” he called him. But Jeff still retained a sense of courtliness. “You know how people will go out sometimes and sleep with somebody and then in the morning not even remember what their name was?” asks Judy Fleissner. “Jeff was never like that. And that’s why there were so many guys who wanted to be part of his life, because he always treated them nice as a person.” “Guys would flock to him,” says Lou Feuchtbaum, an Annapolis graduate who knew Jeff and Andrew in Hillcrest. “He was so charismatic people sought him out.” Jeff acted like a kid in a candy store. He got a Marvin the Martian tattoo on his left ankle, wore a silver ring on one of his toes, and even had his left nipple pierced.
“Between the stalls in a men’s room on one of San Diego’s navy bases is a waist-high hole barely large enough to accommodate a man’s finger. Lunchtime is the best time to visit it,” Steven Zeeland writes in the article “Killer Queen,” published in Seattle’s gay magazine, The Stranger. Holes like this are known as glory holes. In 1995, Zeeland says, he told J. Buchman about an especially beautiful man he’d seen there three times. “The guy was shy, and only once, briefly, did he kneel down and, in accordance with the prevailing etiquette, stick his penis under the stall. Most of the time we just watched each other through the hole, or took turns sticking our pinkies through it, touching, just barely, the tips of each other’s penises.” Zeeland learned to identify the man by the cartoon mouse tattooed on his ankle. When he finally met Jeff one night at the West Coast, he says, “We shook hands—he looked at the floor.”
Clearly, the military was receding as a career option. “I think that he decided that the navy was incompatible with the lifestyle he was beginning to enjoy, and he didn’t want to pursue the navy anymore,” says a naval officer who once was Jeff’s roommate. “Andrew was the typical life of the party, and Jeff liked to party. But there were times when it wasn’t all roses. There were a lot of times when Andrew could get on your nerves after a while. Then Jeff would have Andrew butt out, and then they’d go to dinner and make up. Things were back to normal again. I think they both had that personality that they never wanted anyone to drift out.” In fact, Judy Fleissner, who is a lesbian, and her partner, Chris Gamache, warned Jeff that Andrew was over the moon about him. “‘Well, there’s your man, right there,’” Judy says they’d joke as Andrew approached. “‘He would do anything for you.’ And Jeff was, like, ‘No way!’ ‘Come on, Jeff, go for it,’ and Jeff said, ‘No way. Never.’”
Judy and Chris would sit having coffee with Jeff until the moment Andrew showed up; that, Judy says, was “our cue to leave.” The women didn’t bother to conceal their contempt, and the feeling was mutual. “God, Andrew, you look like shit,” they’d say. “Look how big you’re getting.” The two apparently saw right through Andrew. “Because we were such good friends with Jeff, we were, like, ‘You need to get this guy out of here. He’s a jerk and an idiot.’ And Jeff was just very adamant about the fact that he wasn’t. Jeff was like that with friends—that was part of the reason people loved him so much. He would do anything for you and back you a hundred percent.”
Early in 1994, when the Gridley was put into mothballs, Jeff transferred to the Assault Landing Craft Unit One, based on Coronado Island, near the Hotel Del Coronado. His transfer to a unit that did not go to sea was a tacit admission that his ambitions as a career naval officer had expired. Instead Jeff was enthralled by law enforcement—his favorite TV show was COPS—and his new career aspirations turned in that direction.
In January 1994, Jeff purchased an unusual Taurus .40 caliber, Model PT-100 handgun at a San Diego discount store. At $400, it was several hundred dollars cheaper than the .40 caliber Smith & Wesson favored by police agencies, including the California Highway Patrol. Law-enforcement officers found that the S&W packed more power and had less kickback than other powerful revolvers. Still, it was a heavy gun, weighing about three pounds. “The forty S&W is an effective man-stopper based on data from shootings and will probably be around a long time,” its consumer evaluators wrote. Jeff had learned to shoot at Annapolis. He was qualified both as a Navy Expert Pistol and as a Navy Expert Rifle. He and Andrew used to go target shooting together with his new gun. “Andrew knew calibers, sizes, weights of guns,” says his friend Tom Eads. Jeff could always count on Andrew to accompany him. “If nobody else,” says a former roommate of Jeff’s, “there was Andrew.” At one point Andrew showed friends a handgun of his own.
THE ONE THING that Jeff would not tolerate in those days was smoking dope. He once came home early from a much-anticipated date because the guy had pulled out a joint. “I can’t hang out with somebody who does that,” he told Chris and Judy. They, on the other hand, kept trying to tell him that Andrew was a dope dealer—where else would his money come from? “When we were sitting around drinking coffee, we’d be, like, ‘He’s a drug dealer!’ And Jeff would say, ‘No, he’s not! He’s got money from his parents.’ Andrew always had these stories about where his money came from.”
Though they kept the truth from Jeff, various friends and observers learned during 1994 and 1995 that Andrew did deal drugs. “I was witness to Andrew doling out drugs in bars—Percodan, Vicodin, Darvocet,” says Anthony Dabiere, then Andrew’s favorite waiter. He’d say, “‘This will give you an overall sense of well-being.’ We were given to understand he was using. We were also reminded that he had access to coke and high-grade marijuana as well.”
Eventually the news reached Jeff. J. Buchman, who had been introduced to Andrew by Lou Feuchtbaum, and who also knew Jeff, told Lou of incidents that left no doubt about the source of Andrew’s income. Buchman related that on the beach one day he had accidentally stepped on a stingray, and Andrew had given him a Vicodin for the pain. “When I knew him, he liked prescription drugs, not street drugs,” says Buchman. “When I asked him about it, he said he worked at a UCSD medical facility. He said he was going for a Ph.D. there.”
When Buchman confided to Andrew that he could use some extra money, Andrew proposed that they deal drugs together in the bars of Hillcrest. Buchman refused, without even bothering to ask what kind of drugs. Andrew showed Buchman the
gun he carried and suggested that if Buchman ever felt betrayed by his roommate, Andrew could have him killed through his Mob connections.
Buchman, who defines his role with Andrew as “lackey,” recalls sitting next to him once at the Landmark Theater Hillcrest Cinemas as Andrew hooted and shouted and clapped in glee at the over-the-top violence of Pulp Fiction. “He screamed the most when the guy in the backseat got his head blown off,” reports Buchman. “He said it was probably one of the best movies ever made. He liked it for its graphic portrayal. He said the violence was dream-like.”
Buchman, who wanted to become a marine biologist, was also shocked by Andrew’s cruel treatment of marine life. “We were just walking down Black’s Beach [the nude, gay beach in La Jolla]. We came to a rock outcropping encrusted with marine animals. There was a particularly large anemone sitting in a tide pool,” Buchman says. Andrew decided to feed it a live crab. “The crab was pinching at him—it didn’t want to get caught.” Andrew couldn’t get his hand into the crevice where the crab was hiding, so he smashed it to death with his car keys. “Then he picked out the pieces and fed it to the anemone. And then he looked for another one to feed it.”
Buchman told Jeff’s friend Lou Feuchtbaum, the former naval officer, about Andrew’s involvement with drugs, and Feuchtbaum felt it was his duty to warn Jeff off. He and Jeff used to have breakfast on Saturdays at a French bakery. “I told him, ‘Hey, Andrew isn’t one of my favorite people, hasn’t been one of my favorite people, and I’m really scared that there’s a lot more there than is on the surface.’ And I told Jeff everything I knew about Andrew selling drugs and threatening people. Jeff was not just a moral person as I would define him. Jeff was even a little righteous, or self-righteous.” Lou recalls that Jeff said he understood, but Andrew wanted to be his best friend, “so I can’t just leave him out in the cold.” Jeff even filled Lou in with additional details, including correcting the idea that Andrew got his money from his rich parents. “This is kind of sad,” Jeff said. “I hear he’s a clerk in a drugstore.”
When a fellow naval officer went to Jeff’s to watch the Army-Navy football game on TV, he tried to dissuade Jeff from seeing so much of Andrew. “‘I’ve known Andrew all these years, and none of his stories have ever matched. There’s something wrong with the whole scenario. Why do you spend so much time with him? What’s there?’” he wanted to know. “Jeff said, ‘You really got to get to know him. He’s a great guy. Warm heart. And he means well.’”
If Andrew was at times scary and callous, he could also be considerate and giving, especially with the items he had started pilfering from Thrifty. He would take to friends who were ill food and medicine from his vast supply. That was “the June Cleaver Andrew,” as Buchman says. He was even capable of becoming the “Marcus Welby Andrew,” says Ron Williams, a friend from the West Coast bar, who remembers a visit from Andrew when Williams was sick with strep throat. “He came over with a little black doctor’s bag. He took out the thermometer and looked at my throat and gave me some Augmentin. He said friends at school were becoming doctors and they supplied him. It worked.”
To Ron Williams, Andrew bared his insecurities about not being attractive and about having to buy his popularity. He also said his father had mistreated him. “He had pretty down times. He would be real quiet and reflective and talk about growing up with an abusive father. He said his father used to beat him up.” (There is no evidence of this.)
Jeff did not socialize exclusively with Andrew, by any means. He became especially friendly with a married couple, Kevin and Laura Gramling. Kevin, who was in Assault Landing Craft Unit One with Jeff, taught him to surf, and through a joke played on Jeff by another gay officer learned that Jeff was gay. It had no affect on their friendship, but Jeff still felt that his men must never know. “Hey, Kevin, if any of my men found out I was gay, it would be difficult to command the same respect from them.” One night, to educate Kevin or to soften his attitude, Jeff took him and Laura to Flicks. Various patrons came up to Laura to advise her lasciviously on “how to keep her man.” “I wanted to punch them out,” Kevin says. He and Jeff got into a heated argument, but they made up the next day.
Lou Feuchtbaum, who was frequently invited to Jeff’s house for dinner or cards with other guests, says, “I can’t remember ever having seen Andrew at Jeff’s home.” Jeff’s former roommate, a rising naval officer, agrees. “Andrew didn’t just drop by.” In addition, over time, Jeff had become more wary. “Until we were clear about what his background was and what he did with a lot of missing parts of the day, we just weren’t too willing to get involved,” says the former roommate. “I think everybody recognized that he made up a lot of fiction about his life—everybody just kind of accepted that.” However, whenever Jeff was challenged about Andrew, Lou Feuchtbaum says, he would say, “Hey, this is really pretty sad, and it’s pretty pathetic, and I can’t turn this guy away. He looks up to me.”
IT SOON BECAME apparent that Jeff had more important things than Andrew to worry about. At the end of 1994, another incident occurred that irrevocably marred his military career. The navy had recently agreed to comply with federal and local environmental regulations. No longer would Assault Landing Craft in Coronado be allowed to carry hazardous waste on board; it had to be stored at a special “Hazwat” station. Jeff’s men had removed ten cans of lead-based paint from the ship but the hazardous-waste site was so overwhelmed that Jeff’s chief petty officer ordered the crew to put the paint back on the ship, where it could not be stored properly. Then, to avoid an impending inspection by the Environmental Protection Agency, the chief arranged for a “training exercise” to take the craft out to sea. Jeff was not aware of the infraction until the ship was about to get underway.
But someone had tipped off the EPA, and an inspector boarded Jeff’s craft at sea from a coast guard ship. The improperly stored materials were found. Jeff, another officer, and three enlisted men were accused of conspiracy, with the implication being that they were trying to dump the hazardous waste in the bay. Jeff always insisted that that was never their intention, but as the officer in charge he took full responsibility. However, he was not supported by his command, and the EPA appeared to want to make the incident an example. In the spring of 1995, Jeff was called before a hearing presided over by a naval administrative judge. “It’s nonjudicial punishment where they could pretty much destroy your career, at the very least, and certainly make your life unpleasant at most,” says Lou Feuchtbaum. “Jeff didn’t back down. He stood his ground.” Jeff’s sister Lisa Stravinskas, a lawyer, flew to San Diego to be co-counsel for Jeff, and went to dinner one night with him and Lou and Andrew. “The only reason the navy pursued it as much as they did was because the EPA was pushing them to make an example out of Jeff,” says his former roommate, the naval officer. “I think he was a little upset that his superiors threw him to the wolves, basically. They didn’t support him at all.”
In the end, Lou says, “Jeff wound up getting a nonpunitive letter of reprimand, which means if he wanted to stay in the navy, it would have hurt him.” But Jeff had no intention of staying. Hoping to become a police officer, he took the California civil service exam. Judy Fleissner, at his request, took the test with him so that he wouldn’t feel alone. In May 1996, Jeff left the navy as a lieutenant. In July he was set to begin a training program in Sacramento for the California Highway Patrol. He was looking forward to a new life.
9
Crystal
EVEN THE MOST dedicated barflies in Andrew’s group went home when the clubs closed at 2 A.M. But not Andrew. The predawn hours were when the really wild parties began, and anyone who stayed up night after night, as Andrew did, immersing himself in the after-hours places, was almost certainly “tweaking.” Tweakers are users and abusers of the drug methamphetamine—“crystal meth” to the gay world, “crank” to the straight. Yet despite Andrew’s typical drug behavior—his habitual nocturnal lifestyle, his volubility, his brash self-confidence in public,
all of which are hallmarks of the effect of crystal—no one ever thought of him as a tweaker. But evidence now points to another of Andrew’s closely held secrets, one that many of his friends either did not suspect or chose to suppress or ignore: Andrew was a habitual closet user and dealer of crystal meth. It is a rough and extremely destructive drug, and it would strongly affect his future behavior.
At Wolfs, an after-hours leather bar near Hillcrest where Andrew would often drop by in the wee hours, alcohol is not served after 2 A.M. Most patrons don’t care—they are already high on meth and don’t want to spoil it with a drink. Instead, they are sipping bottled water, chewing gum, and frequently smacking or licking their lips. With pupils dilated and hearts racing, they play billiards at warp speed—grinding the ends of their cue sticks into the chalk, racing around the table to gauge a shot, then quickly lining up the cue and feverishly firing the white ball. Wolfs patrons, often tattooed and in leather, are mostly tweakers running on empty, hoping to score more drugs, have sex at dawn, or find a party with multiple sex partners.
Before Viagra there was crystal. Crystal meth doesn’t necessarily make you hard, but it certainly makes you easy. San Diego is the crystal-meth capital of the world. “The biggest gay thing to do is the drugs,” says Ronnie Mascarena. “Everybody in San Diego is doing it.” Andrew Cunanan was right in the middle of the drug scene.
Methamphetamine, or speed, is a synthetic drug first used widely during World War II and later, in the fifties and sixties, by motorcycle gangs who took it to stay awake on long road trips. Speed has always been associated with aggressive and churlish behavior. Think of the Hell’s Angels at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969. Crystal has come back recently with a vengeance, particularly as the gay party drug.
In the last decade on the West Coast, and more recently in the Midwest, crystal meth—cheaper than cocaine but harder-edged—has been used as a sex enhancer and as an enabler for “club kids” and others to stay up dancing for hours on end. Crystal, also known as ice, quartz, tina, crank, and even crack, is an appetite suppressant, and it has become the drug of choice for a significant substratum of the gay community; its use is thought to be on an epidemic rise in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, and it is spreading across the country. In the Midwest, for example, in certain communities, the use of methamphetamine has increased 300 percent in the second half of the nineties. “Crank,” in the straight world, has replaced crack as drug enemy number one, especially among white and Native American youth.
