by Maureen Orth
One night he met twenty-six-year-old Tim Schwager, an assistant manager in a San Francisco Denny’s, at a gay dance club. Andrew offered to get him drugs—ecstasy or cocaine—but Schwager refused. “He said he was associated with people who dealt in San Diego,” says Schwager. “He was kind of like a middle man.” Andrew also bragged about knowing various celebrities—Lisa Kudrow, Elizabeth Hurley, Madonna. “He said he had lunch with Lisa Kudrow the previous weekend.”
Andrew took Tim Schwager back to the Mandarin Oriental. Schwager’s memory of what took place is hazy. “I think I was drugged that night, or I had too much to drink,” he says. Like Joe in Minneapolis, Tim also began to have “memory flashbacks of trying to fight him off during the night. I wasn’t attracted to him sexually. I woke up with three hickeys on me.” Tim Schwager remembers going to sleep in his underwear. “When I woke up, I had nothing on. After that night, I knew he had a rough side to him.”
They ran into each other again the following weekend. “He kept his arm around my neck the whole time. He started to like me, but I rejected him.” Andrew then went to another club, and when Tim got there, he saw him coming on to someone else. “‘You’re a player, aren’t you?’ I asked him. He just laughed his sarcastic laugh.”
Tim says Andrew told him he was moving to San Francisco, but before that “he said he had to go to Chicago to do something.”
THE WEEKEND BEFORE he left for Minneapolis, Andrew stayed in San Francisco. The whole weekend seemed tinged with the dark foreshadowing of the tragedy about to unfold. Andrew was clearly on drugs. At the Midnight Sun he grabbed his old friend Steven Gomer from behind and spun him around. Steven remembers that his hair was so butch it made him look like “a terrorist commander ready to infiltrate.” Steven reintroduced Andrew to his friend Philip Horne, an attorney. Andrew said he was looking for a roommate. So was Phil. Andrew told them all about an apartment he was renting in the Marina district—two bedrooms, two fireplaces, and Phil would have to pay only $630 a month, because Andrew would be traveling, over-seeing his seventy-employee factory in Mexico, which constructed Hollywood movie sets. Andrew’s lying was so ingrained that a few weeks earlier he had actually engaged Steven in a conversation about the Occupational Safety and Health Act regulations and how they affected his employees. Phil could not believe his good luck in finding an apartment. Andrew told him he would call him the first of the month.
That night, says Steven, Andrew was very “amped-up and aggressive,” grabbing hard while pretending to be playful. “He was really over the top. When we were in the bar, he was jumping all over me, picking me up constantly, up and down.” Steven says he felt like saying, “You’re embarrassing me. It looks like you’re humping me like an animal, and it’s inappropriate and certainly not welcomed.” But he didn’t.
When Andrew ran into his old Berkeley friend, John Semerau, in the back of the bar, he was even more unruly. “He grabbed me around the neck so hard he was choking me by his grip,” recalls Semerau. “He hurt me. He was very aggressive in trying to be affectionate, grabbing, choking, gripping his hands as hard as he could grip.” Semerau told Andrew to cut it out. “Andrew, you’re really hurting me. Stop it!” Andrew showed Semerau a flyer for an S&M party he was planning to attend the next night, and invited him to go. But Andrew never called. “He kind of spiraled,” Semerau says. “Over the last six months, whenever I ran into him, he was particularly aggressive.”
In the eight years since they had known each other, Andrew never allowed Steven to pick up the dinner tab, but that night he did. They walked around the Castro holding hands, and Andrew told Steven of his great love for David Madson. “He made no mention of the fact he was being rejected.” Steven had never heard Andrew say such things as “David is the man for me.”
“Why do you say that?” Steven asked. Suddenly Andrew’s face contorted, and he let out a loud, manic laugh. “‘Well, he let’s me do anything I want to him,’ and he just started cracking up.”
“What are you into?” Steven wanted to know. Andrew started reciting a long list of S&M proclivities: cages, harnesses around the genitals, latex masks. “Latex masks? You mean, like with holes for the nose, eyes, and mouth?”
Andrew cut him off: “At least in the nose.” “At that time,” says Steven, “we were no longer hand in hand.”
They got on Steven’s motorcycle and started riding back to Andrew’s car. Then Andrew surprised Steven again. He came on to him, entreating him to go to the Mandarin Oriental with him. Implicit was the idea they could practice what they’d been talking about.
“Andrew, come on. We’ve been friends for eight years. Don’t you think this is a bit silly?”
“Well, yeah, maybe so.”
Steven says Andrew was much more open that night than he had ever been, but he was revealing a side of him Steven had never imagined: “Everything was always so upbeat and so happy, and he was showing me that he was unfulfilled, dissatisfied, and troubled.”
Andrew begged Steven, “in a very puppy-doggish way,” to show up the next day at Cafe Flor so that they could spend the afternoon together. “I promised him that I was going to keep to the plan, and I did not. I didn’t show up, and I didn’t spend the day with him, and I didn’t call to explain. And that was the last we spoke.”
BUD MOORE, A good-looking blond friend of Jeff’s who worked in advertising, ran into Andrew the next night at the Cafe, a Castro hangout that attracted a younger crowd than did either the Midnight Sun or Badlands. Bud had had a crush on Jeff, and they had dated casually, but since he was twenty-six, Bud says, “I was too old.” Through Jeff and other friends of Bud’s in San Diego, Andrew’s reputation had preceded him. So Bud wasn’t interested when Andrew started coming on, hooking him in a hammerlock and trying to keep his arm around him. “I knew he was a liar.” Andrew grabbed Bud’s baseball cap and he wouldn’t give it back. He kept teasing Bud and hiding it behind him. Finally Bud went up to Andrew, leaned close, and let his full glass of water drop and break at Andrew’s feet. “I’m asking you one more time, give me back my hat,” he said. This time Andrew did not resist. Rejection was becoming his middle name.
On Sunday night, John Semerau went to the Midnight Sun to watch The Simpsons and again saw Andrew alone at the bar. He let him have it for not having called about the S&M party. “Andrew, I’m very pissed off. I’m tired of your superficial b.s. I’ve had it. And stay away from me.” But later that evening Semerau relented. “I was feeling so damn guilty, I started talking to him. He didn’t say much. He didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry.’” They walked out together, says Semereau. “He walked me to my car.” There they said good-bye.
But Semerau continued to be haunted by the look Andrew had had on his face when he grabbed so hard and choked him. “Something had snapped in him.” Only later did Semerau realize that “Andrew was hunting, getting the thrill of the hunt, the thrill of the kill. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in his body. He had stepped over the edge.”
16
Good-bye
ANDREW’S PLATINUM CREDIT card would no longer clear. He owed over $40,000 on two cards and was dead broke his last week in San Diego. In fact, Andrew DeSilva had even filed for bankruptcy. After an initial refusal from American Express, Andrew bluffed his way one last time into being allowed to purchase a ticket to Minneapolis, leaving on Friday. Then he would move to San Francisco for good. Yet in San Francisco Andrew had said he had business to take care of in Chicago, and while in San Diego he was telling friends, “I have unfinished business with Jeff Trail.” In preparation for leaving, Andrew started giving his possessions away.
He summoned Tom Eads to claim a pair of black, buckled Ferragamo shoes. “He wasn’t giving away his tux shoes,” Eads says ruefully. But Andrew did give friends a cashmere topcoat and some fancy sweaters—things from his old life, before he had started gaining weight, shaving his head, and shooting crystal meth. Erik Greenman was well satisfied: “I’m the roommate. I got lots of stuff.” Later, Erik s
ays he realized, “Andrew was saying his good-byes.”
On Wednesday night Andrew went to Mixx with mortgage broker Richard De Bethizy. Andrew told friends he might take a job with a title company and De Bethizy was in a position to help. On Thursday night, April 24, Andrew threw himself a farewell dinner at California Cuisine, but he made it clear that he had no money to pay for it. Those who attended the last supper were his oldest friends: Robbins; Tom Eads, who had lived with him and Erik Greenman briefly; Ken Higgins, who owned the lighting company; and Arthur Harrington, the lawyer. Franz vonRichter was working that night at a hotel, so he was unable to attend. “Dammit, where is he?” Andrew demanded. “I’ve staked him to dinners for a year!” Dominick Andreacchio, also the former recipient of three or four free dinners a week, managed to drop by. In retrospect, Dominick says, the hugs he kept getting from Andrew that night seemed “very final.”
The dinner was a somewhat somber affair, as if Andrew were holding his own wake. Arthur Harrington, who, along with Higgins, brought a couple of bottles of Veuve Clic-quot champagne, claiming that if it hadn’t been for Andrew no one at the table would have even gotten to know any of the others. “He was the glue that held us all together.” Eads recalls, “Two people made that comment. Andrew helped them not to feel alone.” Anthony Dabiere, Andrew’s favorite waiter, wrote in raspberry puree around the edge of Andrew’s plate of chocolate truffle tort, “Good-bye to You.” When the time came for Andrew’s toast, he was decidedly low-key. He said he was feeling bittersweet about leaving. What he was going to miss most, he said, was Barklee, Erik’s dog.
On the way out, Andrew whispered to Higgins—who had helped pick up the check—that he would “have some money by Sunday.” No one would have guessed, to hear him, that his ticket to Minneapolis was one-way.
IN THE TWIN Cities, Andrew was like a character out of the old Bill Murray Saturday Night Live skit, “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.” Jeff didn’t want to see him. Neither did David. As usual, nobody would tell him to his face, but Andrew was not stupid.
“I’m very uncomfortable about his coming,” David confided on the phone to his boyfriend, Cedric Rucker, in Virginia. By this time David had met another man he liked in Atlanta, a graphic artist, and had begun a relationship with him, but he hadn’t gotten around to telling Cedric. He was also apparently seeing a third man, in Minneapolis. “David was apprehensive about Andrew’s visit,” Cedric says. “He held suspicions that Andrew was involved in the international drug trade, bringing drugs into the country from across the Mexican border. He probably had ties to organized crime. I said, ‘Why would you want to be affiliated with this?’ He said, ‘Because he’s trying to make a change in his life. Andrew just needs help.’”
At this time, David was agitated for another reason. His old stalker, Greg Nelson, had reappeared. In a coffee shop in the Uptown district, named Cafe Wyrd, David had looked up to see the stalker staring at him through the window. David immediately left and drove to Monique’s in order to see if he was being followed. A few days later, when he went with his coworker, Linda Elwell, to the lot near work where he parked his Jeep, he found it scratched across one side and dented, a sure telltale sign.
On Monday Andrew left a phone message for Jeff: “I’m coming to Minneapolis next weekend, and I wanna see ya.” He ended by saying, “So yeah, I’m excited. I hope I get to see ya.” But Jeff was also uneasy. On April 7, Jeff’s mother had undergone cancer surgery, and he and his sisters had gone home to be with her. There, Jeff confided to the sister he felt closest to, Candy Parrott, that he had a problem and needed her advice. “This has happened before,” Jeff explained. “Andrew is coming to stay in a couple weeks, and I’m involved with this guy, Jon, and I don’t know what to do about it.” Until then Candy, who lives in Austin, Texas, had had no idea that Andrew wanted to be anything more to Jeff than a platonic friend. She had met Andrew the previous September, when he had flown to Houston with Jeff for Jeff’s job interview. “I never read anything sinister into this,” Candy says. “The way Jeff expressed it to me was that this had happened before. Andrew had come to Minneapolis in November, and at that time Jeff was involved with Casey.”
Andrew, it appears, was carrying two torches simultaneously. First, in Minneapolis, he would see if there was any way he could get back with David, “the man I want to marry.” If not, Jeff would apparently become the object of his desire. “He’s always wanting more than I want to do, and I just don’t know what to do about it,” Jeff complained to Candy. But he did not mention any push from Andrew about going into the drug business—only that Andrew wanted a “relationship” with him.
Andrew, who had always been solicitous of Jeff, desperately needed to think that someone, somewhere, also cared about him. At the same time, the drugs and pornography he fed on kept his cruel and domineering sexual fantasies at fever pitch. Candy gave Jeff some rational, sisterly advice: “You owe it to Andrew to let him know you’re involved with Jon and let him make the decision.”
Jeff, it seems, did talk to Andrew, who was not happy with what he had to say. Not long after, Jeff phoned his friend Mike Williams in San Diego to say that he and Andrew “had had a huge falling-out.” He said he never intended to speak to Andrew again. Even a month before that, when Jeff ran into Stan Hatley at the Saloon one night and Stan asked about Andrew, Jeff had said, “I don’t want to talk about him. He’s pissed me off.” By the end of April, however, Jeff had relented. It was clear that Andrew was going to stay with both David and Jeff the weekend of April 25, whether they wanted him to or not.
Thursday, David started casting around for something to do with Andrew. That night his ex-boyfriend, the TV producer, happened to call David, who explained the reason for Andrew’s visit: “Andrew has some business to discuss with Jeff Trail.” “What type of business?” the producer wanted to know. “It’s a long story. I don’t want to get into it right now,” David answered. The producer recalled rumors about Andrew and Jeff and their “shady business dealings. I’d heard it was drug-related.” When David’s former roommate Rich Bonnin learned that Andrew was showing up again, he was not pleased, but David waved him off. “I ain’t going out of my way for him.”
Meanwhile, Jeff was so broke he asked to borrow a hundred dollars from a friend at work to tide him over for the weekend. Jeff had made plans to be out of town when Andrew arrived and maybe avoid him altogether. On Saturday he was taking his boyfriend, Jon Hackett, a student at the University of Minnesota, for an overnight in the country to celebrate his twenty-second birthday. They were staying at the Dancing Winds Goat Dairy and Cheese Plant and Bed and Breakfast. Andrew could stay at Jeff’s apartment in Bloomington Saturday night—he’d leave the key under the mat—but Jeff was making it clear by inference that he would have no time for Andrew.
Andrew packed one black Tumi duffel bag for his weekend in Minneapolis. He put in handcuffs, pornographic videos, and five 200-milligram glass vials of the illegal steroid ML testosterone. The fact that the steroids were packaged in vials and not Baggies, says a Hillcrest drug dealer, meant they were “upper-class,” to be used by yuppies. Andrew may have taken the steroids to raise some ready cash. They could also have been a love offering to David, who was fanatic about working out and had bulked up in the last year, though his friends insist he did not use illegal drugs. It’s unlikely that Andrew, who had weight problems and never worked out, would use them himself.
Friday morning, Ken Higgins drove Andrew to the airport without much conversation. Later he would remember that Andrew had told him more than once how he hated Gianni Versace. Andrew was deeply jealous and resentful of the rich and famous Italian designer who “came from nothing” and who through “hard work” had become an international celebrity and gay icon. Andrew called Versace “the worst designer ever” and told Higgins he was “pretentious, pompous, and ostentatious.” Outwardly, Andrew sought to keep his rage in check, but inside he seemed to be keeping a little list. Yet nobody picked up on how
seriously depressed and deranged he really was as he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 576, scheduled to arrive in Minneapolis at 5:20 P.M.
David dutifully picked him up at the Minneapolis airport. Once again he was stuck with Andrew. Once again Andrew came bearing gifts that David accepted. Five of his friends from work had casually suggested David join them for dinner at the Caffè Solo, across the street from the loft. They were mildly surprised to find David and Andrew already at the bar waiting for them when they arrived. Linda Elwell, Laura Booher, and Kathy Compton all agree that David seemed rather quiet. “David was not at ease,” says Kathy Compton. “He seemed bugged.” Andrew urged him, “Show them what I got you.” He had brought David a gold Cartier watch. It was “not new,” David assured them, just a thank-you from Andrew for helping him turn his life around.
In fact, Cartier watches, never used but not exactly brand-new, were on Andrew’s list of “what fell off the truck.”
During dinner Andrew mentioned that he was planning to return to California Monday morning, but he wasn’t very friendly. He told Kathy Compton about his grandmother’s Rolls-Royce convertible, which he had ridden around in as a kid. He informed one of the women that he had a company that made sound-abatement equipment for movie sets—just like the one Norman Blachford used to run. Later David and Andrew met Monique and a colleague for a drink at Nye’s Polonaise, a camp polka palace with Naugahyde booths and a crowded dance floor fueled by “the World’s Greatest Polka Band.” They stayed and talked for about forty-five minutes. Andrew told Monique he might be having brunch with Jeff on Sunday; maybe they could all get together after that. He said he was setting up a factory in Mexico to make prefab movie sets.
Then Andrew and David headed to the Gay Nineties to dance. David stayed longer than Andrew did. The next morning David was up by nine o’clock to work out at the gym. A little later he talked to Monique. “Is everything OK?” she asked. “Yeah,” he said. They made plans to meet later that day, but Monique couldn’t reach him. She had plans for Saturday evening, so David invited her to have dinner on Sunday. David also talked to Cedric, who overheard Andrew ask, “Who are you talking to?” David told him, and then carried on as if he weren’t there.