LAST CALL
A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York
by Elon Green
Celadon Books. 255 pages, $27.
THE MYSTERY of the serial murders whose perpetrator came to be known as the Last Call Killer began when a maintenance man was cleaning up a rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike one spring afternoon in 1991, and he discovered in one of the garbage bags a freckled piece of human flesh. A year later, in July 1992, two employees of the New Jersey Department of Transportation picking up the garbage at a rest area on Route 70 found a human head. Hours later, on the Garden State Parkway, two workers discovered more body parts at another rest area. In May of 1993, a man spotted a human arm beside a dirt road in Whiting, New Jersey. In July of the same year a man who had parked his food truck at an overlook along the Hudson River in Haverstraw, New York, discovered a human head. More remains were found further up the Hudson near Bear Mountain. In all of these cases, the bodies were sometimes surgically dismembered and sometimes simply sawed apart, though this seemed to have nothing to do with sadism. It was done for convenience, the cops concluded, as the fastest means of disposing of an inconvenient corpse. Eventually the police in all these jurisdictions realized that they had a serial killer on their hands.
The first man whose body was cut up and put in the trash was Peter Anderson, a businessman from Philadelphia. The second was Thomas Mulcahy, from Sudbury, Massachusetts. Both men were married, in the closet, and patrons of a piano bar in New York City called the Townhouse. The third victim was a hustler named Anthony Marrero, the fourth, Michael Sakara, a fixture at another piano bar in the Village called Five Oaks.
Elon Green’s main motive for writing Last Call, according to an on-line interview he gave to Michael Bronski for the Boston Public Library, was to restore some individuality to these otherwise forgotten victims. In his epilogue, Green cites a novel by Thornton Wilder called The Bridge of San Luis Rey as one of the models for this book. Wilder’s novel asks: Why were the people who plunged to their deaths on the bridge when it collapsed? Wilder’s novel is a meditation on fate, or destiny, of the will of God; Green’s is more an investigation into the lives of four men who simply ran into Mister Wrong. But the real achievement of this book is the portraits of the men who were murdered—because, like accidents or natural disasters, crime always exposes subsets of society that we might otherwise have missed.
In telling the story of these killings, Green has created a social history of a certain swath of American society—gay lives, yes, but universal as well.
The closeted, prosperous, often alcoholic older man looking for sex in bars with cocktail pianists and paintings on the walls is not a figure that’s been covered very much, but when Peter Anderson arrives at the Waldorf Astoria to check in after being told by the bartender at the Townhouse that he’s too drunk to be served another cocktail, we read that he squeezes the buttocks of the porter who greets him when he gets out of his cab. It’s a small detail, but in that one gesture, we have the whole world of the closeted gay husband who has numbed the irreconcilable tensions in his life by getting smashed. The strength of Last Call is Green’s specificity, whether it be the logos on the bags used to dump the dead, or the technology of fingerprint identification, or the small gestures that give us a whole character.
But Green also puts these men into historical context. Because the murders occurred in the early ’90s, Last Call is a glimpse at a time when the AIDS epidemic was at its height, when violence against gay people in Greenwich Village and Chelsea was common, when teenagers from the outer boroughs would come into Manhattan to look for gay men to beat up, and a killer could avoid a guilty verdict for murdering a gay man by claiming that the latter came on to him (the “homosexual panic” defense). It’s a portrait of a generation of men who got married even though they were gay, who smoothed over the contradictions in their lives with travel and alcohol and the company of other queens singing Broadway songs around the piano in gay bars like the Townhouse. This is a very East Coast book—set between Philadelphia and New York, Bucks County and Fire Island, midtown Manhattan and rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike. The Townhouse, not only a piano bar but a place where hustlers went to find johns in midtown Manhattan, is at the heart of it.
There was always something intimidating to me about piano bars like the Townhouse; for some reason I found it less threatening to stand in a frieze of mute men in the Eagle’s Nest than it was to hang out among bibulous queens singing Broadway musical numbers. There was something so emotional, so needy, so intense about the performance of these songs by Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and Jerome Kern that after one visit to a piano bar in the West Village called Marie’s Crisis, I never went back.
At first, Last Call alternates between chapters on the murders and the lives of the victims, and then it branches out to include chapters on subjects such as fingerprinting, New York politics, and the rise of organizations that tried to get the police to take crimes against gay people seriously. One chapter pauses to give us a survey of all the bars in Manhattan at the time of these killings. There were bars on the Upper East Side (like Harry’s Back East), in Midtown (the Townhouse), on the Upper West Side (the Works), in Hell’s Kitchen (Tricks), in Chelsea (Splash), and in the Village (Ty’s, Julius’s, Badlands, the Ramrod), and, most aptly named, that pillar of the east Village, The Bar. And then there was Times Square with its peepshows and video arcades. And I’m leaving out the baths—including one on 58th Street that Green says Truman Capote and Nureyev went to, though I can’t imagine which one it was. (Does he mean the Everard Baths on West 28th?) Manhattan was a paradise for the gay man addicted to bars. Going to a different neighborhood was like going to another city. You could dip into a different gene pool. You could be a new face! It was raining men.
One was also aware, however, of the danger of picking up Mister Wrong in certain places. My first memory of the underbelly of gay life was the 1970s murder of a society decorator in his Napoleonic campaign bed by a hustler he’d picked up in Times Square. Soon after that there was the terrible murder of newspaper heir John Knight in Philadelphia by a trick who got him to open the door by screaming “I love you!”—a case that became the basis for Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell’s book Kings Don’t Mean a Thing. Then Ronald Crumpley shot up the Ramrod because he said gay men were trying to steal his soul. Later came the torture killing of the Norwegian fashion model Eigil Dag Vesti by the employee of an art gallery owned by Andrew Crispo. And then the cannibal murders of Jeffrey Dahmer, the torture killings of over thirty young men in Chicago by John Wayne Gacy, and in 1998 the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.
Last Call belongs to a list of books and movies investigating these and other murders. Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors tried to explain the spree killer Andrew Cunanan, as did Gary Indiana’s Three-Month Fever. David France wrote Bag of Toys about Andrew Crispo; John Wayne Gacy’s killings were turned into a made-for-TV movie; the murder of Matthew Shepard became a successful play; Jeffrey Dahmer spawned several documentaries and books. Before all of these, of course, there was the granddaddy of them all, Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1966).
Last Call is no In Cold Blood. (What is?) There are no lyrical sentences or stylistic flourishes; some chapters end with portentous teasers; cops are sketched in journalese (“Kuehn had a reputation as by-the-book, and not a man to chase false leads.”). But the dogged research and the way Green puts it together makes for a book one can’t put down. In the interview with Michael Bronski, Green says that he suspects the cops were willing to talk to him because he’s straight, which meant they did not suspect him of having a “gay agenda”—and the victims’ families were forthcoming because he assured them he was not out to “tarnish” their loved ones. He was especially moved not only by the four men who were dismembered but also by the first man he believes his subject murdered: a young man at the University of Maine—a story few people even seemed to know about. It was especially to redeem the latter from oblivion that Green was moved to write his book after coming upon a story in The Advocate about the garbage bag murders—because “the dead cannot speak.”
Tim McCarthy/ Asbury Park Press.
But for all its well-researched selection of detail and wealth of information, Last Call is missing one enormous ingredient: we never hear from the killer. By the time we’re finished, we have no idea why Richard Rogers murdered the five men or why he apparently stopped killing for eight years before his arrest. One can sort of understand the motivation of Andrew Cunanan (who shows up at the Townhouse on his way south to his fatal confrontation with Gianni Versace in South Beach). We can even speculate about Jeffrey Dahmer and about Matthew Sheppard’s killers. But we haven’t much of a clue about the motivations, or the psychological madness, of Rogers. He chose not to testify at his trial and refused to correspond with Green or grant him an interview. Now in his seventies, he’s in prison for the rest of his life, writes e-mails about Donald Trump, and follows the news; but he keeps to himself the “reason” (if that’s the word) he executed four innocent men (and, it is strongly implied, a fifth).
Nevertheless, the reason why killers do what they do is what we always want from a book about murders as grisly as these. The killers in In Cold Blood do speak—during a long car ride from Las Vegas to Holcomb, Kansas—which provides us with so much information that we do finally apprehend the mix of stupidity, blundering, and homosexual tension that lay beneath the needless slaying of the Clutter family. As for the other killers mentioned here, they’re all so different that one can’t generalize at all. Ronald Crumpley was nuts (or, as Arthur Bell quotes him, “I just didn’t like faggots”). Jeffrey Dahmer seems to have murdered his tricks because he didn’t want them to leave, so he cut them up and kept their body parts in his refrigerator. John Wayne Gacy claimed that he discovered that murder provided him with an intense orgasm. He was also an unbelievably cruel psychopath (that word we use when we cannot explain anything) who’d been abused by his alcoholic father. Andrew Cunanan seems to have been motivated by rage, drugs, and his inability to accept his downward slide on the socioeconomic scale from the elite school he attended as a poor boy of Filipino descent surrounded by affluent California WASPs to the life of a drug dealer in San Diego. Andrew Crispo was into S/M. The twink who murdered John Knight in Philadelphia was after money—like the killers in In Cold Blood, who went to the Clutter farm because they’d heard a rumor that Mr. Clutter kept a safe in his house. A friend of mine who was killed by two young men he picked up in Chelsea was suffocated for his credit card and cell phone. Murder is so often out of proportion to what is stolen. Murder, you might say, is the ultimate theft—you are not robbing a person’s possessions, you are stealing his life.
My friend, I suspect, was an example of what Oscar Wilde described as “feasting with panthers,” or what Arthur Bell in a Village Voice article suggested was John Knight’s fatal mistake—the desire of the well-educated, the privileged, to take in the less advantaged—though the killer in Last Call did not seem to be anything but middle class. The theory regarding the homophobes who murdered Matthew Sheppard is different: that people like them (and the teens who came into Manhattan to beat up fags) were trying to deny their own homosexual impulses.
The Townhouse, like Five Oaks, reflected neither of these theories. It must have seemed safe to the men who met the killer there. Yes, it was frequented by hustlers looking for johns, but it had a cocktail pianist (whose career we follow from the moment he’s kicked off a cruise ship for testing positive for HIV to the evening Green goes back to the Townhouse in his Epilogue). It was, after all, in one of the least dangerous of Manhattan neighborhoods: Midtown.
When Green goes back to the Townhouse in the epilogue to Last Call to see how it’s changed, we learn that it lost customers when it banned smoking, that hustlers no longer go there, and that the dress code has been severely relaxed. The epilogue has an uncanny, almost ghostly, goose-bumpy feeling to it, no doubt because of all that we’ve gone through up to that point. In Cold Blood ends when two of the characters, the detective and a young woman who knew the Clutter family, meet in the local cemetery after time has passed since the murders, and while it may have been necessary to give the reader a sort of catharsis, I was not surprised to later learn that Capote had probably made that scene up. In Last Call, however, the final scene at the Townhouse is totally believable, and in its brief vignettes, perhaps the most evocative thing in the book.
Having said all this, however, I should point out that reviewing a book like Last Call is almost impossible because of the problem of spoilers; to really discuss it, one would have to refer to too many things that the reader will discover while turning the pages of a book that is charged with considerable suspense. But, as Billy Baldwin said of interior decoration, God is in the details, and that holds for true crime writing. The pleasure of Green’s book lies in the way he has deployed all his research to bring these men, this era, this particular milieu of Manhattan, back to life. It may leave us with nothing but speculation: our desire to bring reason to what is surely an irrational impulse. But that does not take away the pleasure of wondering: Why?
Andrew Holleran is the author of the novels Dancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, andGrief.
