Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Jeff moved to Minneapolis with a young ex-sailor named Casey Murray, whom Andrew had introduced him to one day at the beach. Jon Wainwright and others tried to tell Jeff that he hadn’t known Casey long enough to have Casey pull up stakes and join him, but Jeff was stubborn and wanted the security of a relationship. Casey arrived in Minneapolis about a month after Jeff. Within a month, the two broke up.

  Casey had no love for Andrew, whom he considered “fake and pathetic.” In fact, Casey would knee Jeff under the table every time Andrew told a whopper. “I kept saying to Jeff, ‘Don’t you see?’ But nobody would ever tell Andrew to his face—they didn’t want to hurt him.” Whenever Andrew’s name came up, Casey says, “Jeff would roll his eyes,” but he never told him to “butt out.” He told Casey that Andrew was someone to put up with, “more like a brother.”

  “The spotlight had to be on Andrew. You’d say something about your life—he’d have to have done it too, only ten times better,” Casey recalls. “He would come in dressed really nice, wearing a gold watch and carrying his phone. The phone would never ring unless he dialed it. He never had to go anywhere—he just said he did. He wanted to be busier than he was.”

  Andrew decided to visit Jeff for a few days to acquaint him with Minneapolis. But the visit lengthened, driving Jeff to distraction. “You try having Andrew in your house for ten days,” Jeff told Stan Hatley, whom he ran into at Y’All Come Back Saloon. “I told him he could either check into a hotel or go home: ‘You’re driving me crazy.’” Jeff also told a young Minneapolis woman named Dana Evans, “I need him to get out of here. I want him to leave.” David wasn’t prepared to have Andrew around either. “From my understanding,” Wendy says, “Andrew would come to town unannounced. He would barge in and put himself in David’s presence, and David would not be comfortable.”

  Andrew knew all about Robbie, but he kept assuring David that he was “changing,” and he would constantly thank David for helping to straighten him out. He was only changing for the worse, but he was clever enough to appeal to David’s penchant for helping the underdog. “David was the type of person who always picked up the wounded sparrow—sometimes with disregard for his own interests,” says Rich Bonnin.

  Back in San Diego, Andrew continued to mope. To raise cash he was forced to sell the Infiniti. “He said that after he sold his car that was all the money he had,” Michael Moore reports. He was piling up charges on his credit cards, and his use of both crystal and cocaine was causing even his carefree friends to notice mood swings. “He’d go from loud to somber and quiet. He’d be reading, and then wanted to be away from people. It would happen instantly,” says Franz vonRichter. “He seemed a little lost,” says Michael Moore. “Jumpy.” He would assemble people “for a several-hundred-dollar dinner, then walk away to buy magazines on cars and architecture and read them at the table.” Moore adds, “He had some poor table manners. He brought up sex toys having to do with electrocution at dinner. A dildo that had electric current. I was hearing more and more about it.”

  In mid-November, Andrew returned to Minneapolis for a weekend to attend a Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS benefit—DIFFA. David was having a party at his loft before the event, and Rob Davis, his boyfriend, was flying in. Andrew arrived on Friday, the day before the benefit. That night he and Jeff went to the Saloon, where they met Dana Evans and a friend of hers, an architect named “Joe.” Andrew and Joe started a conversation. “The only reason I talked to Andrew is because I thought Jeff was cute,” says Joe, who is from a well-to-do Chicago family. He had gone to Brown and to Harvard for graduate school, and had a brand-new Saab convertible, none of which went unnoticed by Andrew, who was very inquisitive about Joe’s father’s financial business. “He was really interested in where and what the place was.”

  Joe had recently come out of a three-year relationship, and Andrew was enthralled. He begged Joe to let him stay with him, because he had nowhere to go that night. They went to bed together, but immediately had an argument about who would be on top and who would be on the bottom. “I said, ‘Andrew, I’m never a bottom. I don’t like it.’ He said, ‘I’m not one either.’” Then Andrew, who had spent the previous two hours affectionately “all over me, smothering me in the pillow,” would not allow Joe to touch him. “Every time I’d go to touch his boxers, he’d flip out. We never had sex. He kept saying, ‘No, no, don’t touch me.’”

  The next morning, Joe remembers, “I woke up thinking, What is this guy doing to me? I had blood hickeys all over my neck.” Andrew had also bitten Joe on his chest, which left ugly bruises. “I just thought it was fun,” Andrew told him. Despite this behavior, Joe drove Andrew to Jeff’s apartment the next morning. “I couldn’t wait to get him out of my house.” Andrew said he was cold and borrowed a $1,200 Andrew Marc jacket from Joe. Andrew showed up wearing it later in the week when he and David had drinks with David’s close friend Monique Salvetti.

  At the pre–benefit party David threw on Saturday night, Rich Bonnin was surprised at the change in Andrew’s appearance. “He wore a nice tux which had fit at a different time. He looked a little plump. He looked more tired and worn. I was very struck by it, because when I had met him in the spring, he looked like the role he described himself to be.” Moreover, Andrew’s behavior was downright bizarre.

  Jeff came to the party, and so did a friend of his from work, Jerry Davis, an ex–Air Force officer, and another friend, Michael Reardon. Monique Salvetti, Rich Bonnin, Joe, and Dana Evans were already there. Rob Davis was playing host, and David was hanging back. “What is it you do?” Dana asked Andrew. “I’m a professional romantic,” he blithely replied, and turned toward the canapes. Rob had specifically asked that no one feed hors d’oeuvres to Prints, David’s beloved Dalmatian. Andrew filled a plate and gave it to the dog, who promptly threw up. What a jerk, Michael Reardon thought.

  Then Andrew went over to a table that had a framed picture of Rob and David together on it. “This looks interesting,” he said. He was trying to get someone to pay attention to him, and nobody would. He then walked over to the food table, which had two lighted candles on it, and nudged a paper plate toward one flame. A friend of Jeff and David’s named Rick Allen pulled the plate away. Undeterred, Andrew put some napkins on the plate, and shoved it into the candle flame. He then dropped the flaming plate on the table and walked away as the smoke alarm went off.

  Rob Davis grabbed the plate and held it under the kitchen faucet. When Andrew started whispering in David’s ear and brushing up against him, Rob, who is over six feet, had had enough. He pulled Andrew into a corner of the loft and slammed him up against the wall. “Excuse me, I understand you’re excessive. I’m not gonna have you pressing up against my man. While I am here, you respect my presence or you won’t be here.” Andrew backed off, saying, “All right, man. It was a whim.” Rob reports, “David was, like, ‘Thank you.’”

  When the party broke up to go to the benefit, Andrew rode down in the elevator with Jeff and suggested that they all meet up later. Michael Reardon, who was walking with Jeff, turned to Andrew and said angrily, “You are such an asshole.” But Andrew didn’t react. “He just let it roll off as if, ‘That’s not the first time someone has said that to me,’” Reardon remembers. By this time Joe and Dana had arrived, and Joe wanted to know where his leather jacket was, but he decided not to make an issue about getting it back. “Andrew was so freaky.” About a week later, Jeff asked Dana what she thought of Andrew. “I’m surprised you’re friends with him,” she said. Once again Jeff used the analogy of Andrew’s being like family. “You may not agree with what they do, but you’re there for them.”

  Both Jeff and David kept hoping Andrew would take the hint and ease off, but he never did. David took Robbie to Vail for a week of skiing before Thanksgiving, and Robbie bought David an I Love Vail bumper sticker for his 1995 leased red Jeep Cherokee. During this time, Andrew was staying in David’s loft, taking care of the dog. “The only fear that David had about
Andrew was his lies,” Rob explains. Where did his money come from? Jeff, who had gotten to know David casually, and had gone to dinner and to the gym with him a couple of times, tried to warn him about Andrew: “You can’t believe a word he says. He’ll say anything just to get a reaction.” Meanwhile, Andrew had told a friend that he was uncomfortable having the two people he cared most about living in the same faraway city without him.

  IN DECEMBER ANDREW, who had briefly left Minneapolis, found another excuse to come back, to loft-sit and take care of Prints. David confided to Robbie that Andrew had once told him that he had ordered someone killed. At a Christmas party, Andrew told Rob Davis that Jeff had come to Minneapolis because he had been involved moving cocaine across the Mexican border for Andrew; he had gotten scared because the California Highway Patrol was investigating him, and that’s why he had resigned. Although Rob claims that Jeff had also once told him that he had had to leave California because things had gotten a little too hot, the police have no record of such an investigation and nobody who knew Jeff would believe that he would involve himself with drugs. Andrew did apparently try nonetheless. Jeff once talked to one of his Minneapolis friends, research engineer Rick Allen, about Andrew’s attempts to recruit him for illegal business. “What Jeff told me,” says Rick Allen, “was ‘Andrew talked to me about doing security work for his “import-export” business.’”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Rick Allen says he told Jeff.

  “‘Drugs, Rick, drugs.’ Jeff was very hesitant to talk about it at all. He told me, ‘It’s not something I tell anybody about.’ I said, ‘What did you tell him?’ Jeff said, ‘I said, “Fuck you.”’”

  “Andrew also talked about having millions confiscated from foreign bank accounts through FBI subpoenas or warrants,” says Rich Bonnin. “He told David that’s what made him change his mind—he came so close to losing everything, he decided to go straight.” Andrew’s exact words, according to Rich Bonnin, were, “You just don’t walk out on the Mob.”

  In retrospect, it is amazing that people tolerated Andrew as much as they did. Yet Monique Salvetti, who met Andrew at a DIFFA weekend, and joined David and Rich Bonnin for a drink with him the following week, pronounced him “a radiant personality.” Andrew had gone right to her bookshelf, taken down a volume of Isak Dinesen, and promptly turned to his favorite passage and read it aloud. At drinks, Monique says, he turned on the full charm. “Andrew was very cultural. He knew a lot about arts and literature, and we were talking about things like that.”

  At one point he reached across to David and asked Rich and Monique, “Doesn’t our David remind you of Tom Cruise?” Since the two looked nothing alike, says Monique, “I thought that was just so ridiculous.” But later she told her friend, “He’s really great, David.”

  14

  Unravel

  THE MUSTANG SPA, open twenty-four hours, caters to closeted bisexuals and an admiral or two. “On the weekends I get the gays,” says owner Todd Kaufman. The Mustang is in North Park, a blue-collar area; not gentrified the way Hillcrest is, it is an easier place to hide. Early in 1996, Andrew started popping into the Mustang for quick sex. By the fall he was staying longer, sometimes for more than twenty-four hours. “I don’t think he was having sex at all,” says Kaufman. “I think he was annoying people.” Andrew was wandering around without sleep and looking the worse for wear. Kaufman had seen the syndrome before. “People start acting like they live here. I got the feeling he had lost his job and was on the skids. His stories were out of this world.” In his previous visits, Andrew had kept to himself and given the impression he was slumming. No longer.

  “You pigeonhole people,” Kaufman continues. “He went from being one type, dressed in nice clothes, to another—jeans, T-shirts, leather, bummy, sloppy. People start living at the baths because they don’t want to focus on what’s going on in their lives. They go into the bars till they close, then the baths till they close, so they’re never alone and don’t have to think about anything.” Kaufman calls this “cocooning. They get very into themselves, very weird.

  You have to put them out.” Andrew would come in at 2 A.M. on Saturday, after the bars closed, and would still be at the Mustang late the next day, eating out of the candy machine or getting an hour pass to go outside and buy something at the taco shop down the street. “Roseanne was on at five P.M. He’d sit and watch that.”

  About this time Robbins was in Mexico, attempting to get involved in the production of Titanic, hoping to help build sets for the epic film which was shooting there, but he wound up doing stunt work instead. Andrew, oblivious to the ridiculous impression he was making, would go around the Mustang bragging that he was building sets for Titanic and name-dropping about his Hollywood connections. “He got so desperate when he was trying to tell me these stories—he had to justify his worth,” Todd says. What Andrew was really doing was dealing drugs. “He was hanging out with three leather druggie types. He came off like a Catholic schoolboy in over his head. He gave the impression he was trying to act as tough as they were, and he wasn’t. They tolerated him because he was supplying. Two of them are in jail now.”

  Kaufman started keeping a sharp eye on Andrew, who he thought was on ecstasy or cocaine. “I got the impression people were using him. He was trying to buy people’s attention, and he was selling a lot, too,” Kaufman explains. “He got on my and my workers’ nerves, and I can put up with a lot or I wouldn’t be in this business.” Kaufman finally decided that he had had enough. “When he got too involved in dealing, I had to eighty-six him from the club. He made a bunch of threats when I kicked him out: ‘I’m going to tell my friends not to come in here.’” Kaufman never considered Andrew violent; he was, as he says, “controllable. It was very easy to throw him out—that’s not always the case.”

  Kaufman concluded that Andrew was suffering from depression and “very low self-esteem. He was leading several lives at once. He came across as someone drowning.”

  The previous September, Andrew had moved in with Tom Eads and Erik Greenman, a young gay couple he had introduced. Both were devoted to him, and he was crazy about their dog, a black Rottweiler named Barklee. They lived in a $750-a-month, two-bedroom apartment on Robinson Street, just a short walk from Rich’s, Flicks, and the California Cuisine. Erik was a waiter at Mixx, an upscale restaurant Andrew liked. Tom was in college and working part-time. In November he moved out, but he remained close to Andrew.

  While living on Robinson Street, Andrew would sleep most of the day, rise late in the afternoon, and take Barklee for a long walk in Balboa Park. Once a week he’d stop by the cigar store and pick out a few eight-dollar cigars, which he’d smoke in the park. Andrew fussed over Barklee, and on their walks around the neighborhood he would buy him his own special carne asada. He’d return to the apartment in time to watch Jeopardy! and make plans for the evening. Often he’d call Franz vonRichter, another young, attractive, platonic friend, to have dinner with him. Andrew would sit in the backseat of the Infiniti he would soon be forced to sell and let Franz be the chauffeur. “Every time we went out, he’d say, ‘Franz, stop by the Bank of America.’” Andrew kept his wallet conspicuously in his front pocket, and he would withdraw $400 or $500 at a time. “He went through a lot of money,” Franz recalls.

  During this period, Andrew also put on a lot of weight, the result of taking Franz out for elaborate dinners three or four times a week. “It was noticeable, bordering on gross. He looked something like a straight man would get,” says Shane O’Brien. “Cottage cheesy all in one area—the gut … ugh.” One day someone pointed out to Franz that he, too, had gained weight. “I went on a crash diet. I weighed 163. Then I got to 175, 180. In this community, that’s ballooning,” Franz emphasizes. “When I first met Andrew, he was 160, 165. Probably at the end he was 180 or 185.” Andrew, he says, felt bad that his body was so different from those of the men he was attracted to. “He liked military guys—navy and marines—the thicker, the st
ockier, the better. Hard, worked-out, thick,” says Franz. “If he said, ‘Do you think that guy is cute?’ it would mean short hair, lean, and hard.”

  When Andrew and Franz would go to Black’s Beach, Andrew would be the odd man out. “God, Franz, you have a nice body,” he would say. “There’d be all these people there with major bods, and Andrew would be eating a box of Oreos, smoking a cigar with a bag of Doritos, having a beer,” says Franz. “There was this naked guy on a bike selling beer, and we’d buy beer from him. Andrew was never naked on Black’s Beach. All his friends were good-looking.” According to Erik Greenman, “Andrew was definitely not one to get dates. He had to flash money. A good-looking guy wouldn’t look at him. That means an awful lot.” On one occasion Andrew took Franz to meet an older friend of his. “This guy really liked me,” Franz recalls. But Andrew became indignant, screaming, “‘I’m never going to take you out with him. Never! You stole the whole show. You embarrassed me in front of my friends.’” Franz says he told him, “‘Andrew, I only made you look good.’ But Andrew’s thing was he had to be the center of attention.”

  Although on the surface Andrew was pretending that everything was copacetic, as he gained weight and sank deeper into depression, his drug use was also increasing and his rage was barely controlled. Franz was often a target. Pretending to be playful, Andrew would grab him in a choke hold, throw him down on the ground, and twist his nipples hard. “He’d throw me down on the way back to the car or back to his house. There was an edge,” Franz admits. “We’d always carry on, but he’d say, ‘Franz, don’t ever cross me.’” One day Andrew grabbed the pocket of Franz’s shirt and tore the shirt right off him. He did it again later. “He had a streak about him, a sexual innuendo of being rough in sex. It kind of turned him on,” Franz says. “Andrew had a thing of just grabbing everybody. He’d come up to people all the time and twist their titties. He’d grit his teeth and smile and say, ‘You like that?’ He’d come up to a guy, grab a crotch in a bar, and say, ‘You fuck with David or Keith? He’s got a penis as big as yours?’ He’d grab their dick and say, ‘Yeah, you’ve got a big dick.’ Then he’d say, ‘Here, let me introduce you. You have to meet my good friend Franz vonRichter. My Austrian, German, Bavarian bastard.’ He’d do it with a fake German accent.”