Tinderbox

by Robert W. Fieseler

  Back upstairs, in the burning Lounge, those who hadn’t seen Buddy or hadn’t caught his words “Come with me” gathered with Hugh Cooley in a clump of about thirty in the back corner of the bar area. They sheltered there—as far as they could retreat from the advancing flames. It must have felt like the smart move, with Buddy guiding others in the direction of the fiery doorway to reach the theater. They’d only had seconds to make a decision, and there had been no Exit signs to call attention to Buddy’s wisdom or arrows to guide their steps.60 In fact, this group had backed into a death trap. Brick walls around them held in heat like an oven. Their means of escape, through three windows fronting on Chartres Street, was ramshackle, involving pushing, shoving, and stepping on broken glass.

  Each of these massive windows, taller than a man, had been enclosed by iron burglar bars like a grille. These bars, spaced ten inches apart to prevent partiers from falling to the street below, now held them prisoner. The metal seemed strong, but Hugh found that men with thin frames could narrowly slip through one by one. Rusty Quinton squished himself out. He grabbed the corner sign of the Jimani bar and hung from it perilously before wrapping his hands around a pipe and shimmying down the building. Quinton ran yelling into Gertrude’s, the nearby gay bar, on Chartres Street. It was 7:58 p.m.61

  Upstairs, flames drew closer to the corner, and while larger patrons attempted to push themselves through the bars, some got stuck. Flames audibly choked out the oxygen, causing men to faint and gag. The floor became embers beneath them, burning through the soles of shoes. Ceiling tiles dripped molten Styrofoam on their heads like napalm, with the same horrific capacity to bury into flesh as in Vietnam.62

  Oblivious to what was happening, Adam Fontenot sat on his stool. He felt a nip at his heels, somewhat muffled by the booze. The nip rose to his legs like the sting of a hot poker. It must then have crawled up his back and onto his head until everything was unimaginable pain and panic.63 He rocked back and forth. How does one process the thought that I am burning, that my life may not end in bed as an old man but right here?

  As one response, many froze in place. Most could not believe how the room that once protected them, existentially it had seemed, now engulfed them. Their Sunday beer bust was a charnel house, an auto-da-fé. The fire department’s Flying Squad arrived outside in a red engine. A hook-and-ladder unit specially trained for rescue, they’d flown down one-way streets from the firehouse. Helmets on, men ran hoses from hydrants and raised an extendable ladder. Donning fire suits, several firefighters prepared to run up the front staircase. Just within eyeshot on the corner of Iberville and Royal, Roger Nunez walked into the bar Wanda’s. Panting deeply and out of breath, he announced to the bartender, “Thank god, I just made it, from the fire.” Roger looked, as bar patron Jackie Bullard would later describe, “filthy, covered in black.”64 Patrons cocked their heads, confused about what fire he was talking about.

  Rusty Quinton ran back from Gertrude’s to a spot on the sidewalk under the Chartres Street windows of the Lounge, opening his arms to break the fall of friends who’d slid through the bars; several smacked into him. Milton Mary, a bartender on his way to work nearby, turned a corner and saw men stacked against the windows, pressing away from death. “I kept thinking, throw some grappling hooks up there, tie it to the bumper of the fire truck, and take off to rip those bars out so those men could spill out,” Mary recalled.65

  Those metal grilles glowed orange-hot. Touching them meant scalding flesh, but the alternative was being scorched to death. Phillip Byrd, with burns on his hands, Francis Dufrene, with burns on his face, and Adolph Medina all jumped into the firefighters and bystanders desperately trying to catch them. A splay of legs kicked through the paneling of other windows. The men were running out of room, arms tangled, necks outstretched. Seven more bodies inched through the bars until Glenn Green had his turn. With no time to think, he grabbed his lover, Michael Scarborough, and pushed him through. Or maybe Michael just thought that Glenn was pushing him when he was only heaving himself. Michael felt a whoosh and struck the sidewalk hard. He looked back but couldn’t see anything. “He saved me,” Michael thought or may have said aloud—he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t stand for all the people smacking at his back. His body smelled of cooking. He had been roasting. “He saved me.”66

  Glenn Green, who’d been holding his breath, must have inhaled with utmost exertion. It would have felt natural to take such a breath after expending all his strength. First, the superhot gases would have singed his lungs and rendered them useless. Then, the poisons he’d been inhaling reached his head: carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, phosphine. Suffocating, he doubled over on the floor and lost consciousness. Jim Hambrick was the last patron to fall out of the windows, sheaves of muscle exposed beneath flaps of skin, like shirtsleeves pulled back. Hambrick’s toupee had melted into his scalp. Plummeting face first, he cracked his head on the concrete, spewing blood into a gutter filling with hose water.67

  Joseph Bermuda, having walked from nearby Jackson Square, reached the pandemonium. “All I could see is young people trying to get out of the railings of the window,” Bermuda remembered. “I remember very clearly the young fellow, holding this thing shaking it and screaming, ‘Help, help!’ ”68

  Lambent flames reached the back corner of the bar area, and the street lit up with the sound of seventeen people shrieking. Seeing faces burn in the windows, Rusty Quinton yelled for them to jump. Fire ate them up. “My friends are up there!” Quinton screamed. Men coughed up parts of themselves and dropped to the floor, one atop the next: Clarence McCloskey and his lover, Bill Bailey, who’d attended church that day; Dr. Perry Waters, with burns over 75 percent of him; Reggie Adams, too tall to fit through the bars, who had once wanted to be a priest; Hugh Cooley, who tried to play the rescuer; and Mitch Mitchell, with charring so bad his face would be unrecognizable. Mitch curled into the fetal pose of fire deaths immemorial. Bodies piled grotesquely on the floor, bones searing and blood boiling. “[After] all those screams and yells for help, everything got quiet,” recalled Milton Mary. “And all you could hear were the firemen shouting orders. It was very eerie. It just went from a cacophony of noise to very quiet, and I realized then that all those people stacked like cords of wood against those windows were dead.”69

  In a standard “flashover,” poisonous gases are enough to kill before a fire victim can burn to death. But this Sunday evening fire had progressed too quickly; it could not be so merciful in each case. Whoever had hidden in the bathroom perished from smoke inhalation. Bud Matyi, with Rod Wagener across town and three kids in California, lay burned beneath the grand piano. In his last act, it seems that Bud threw his body atop Willie Inez Warren, the gay mother hen, attempting to shield her. He smoldered while she suffocated. Sensing death in seconds, Bill Larson surged with adrenaline and ripped off a piece of the wall. Exposing a new window, he leaned into open air and edged himself between the bars. It looked as if he just might make it, just might squirm free until an air conditioner dropped on his head and a piece of window casing penned him in place. Fire burst through the gap of air he’d miraculously created, devouring his clothes and hair.70

  Witnesses could do nothing but gape. Buddy Rasmussen looked on as a second burst engulfed Bill Larson with a commanding fury, which withered the skin on his face. So much seemed to happen simultaneously, but Buddy swears he could look past Bill a bit, to where Adam sat burning on his bar stool—just as he’d left him. Buddy watched a hose pierce the wave of flames and knock what had once been his lover to the floor.71

  Bill Larson drooped his head against the window ledge.

  His strength had not saved him.

  “Oh, god, no!” he shouted.

  It was 7:59 p.m.72

  : ACT II :

  FALLOUT

  CHAPTER 5

  Mayhem

  Dusk—June 24, 1973

  Up Iberville at the next corner, Royal Street, Stewart Butler and Alfred Doolittle drank and caroused at
Wanda’s, the Gene Davis–owned hustler bar. Their tempers had cooled after Stewart’s little flare-up with Alfred on the Up Stairs Lounge staircase, and they were back to being relaxed in each other’s company. More drinks, of course, helped to pacify the rage. Sirens blared a few blocks away, but Stewart thought nothing of them at first. Alfred was in good spirits, seemingly pleased that Stewart had finally listened to his entreaties. Sounds of alarm grew, interrupting their conversation as a red firetruck sped within feet of Stewart and Alfred—the engine from the Central Fire Station screeching as it plowed a taxi aside to reach the one-way of Iberville.1

  Down at the next intersection, nearer to the scene of horror, a district chief of the fire department waved the engine forward. Metal scraped metal as the truck smashed yet another car to the curb and rushed toward the Up Stairs Lounge in a blur. Something horrific clicked in Stewart’s head, a realization overriding the warm buzz of booze: Alfred, crazy fucking Alfred, had been right. “Alfred didn’t, but I went out there on the street,” recalled Stewart. He walked toward his favorite saloon, which he had left only minutes before. “I kind of approached it slowly,” he said. “And all this [he throws up his hands], gradually.” As Stewart headed toward the Lounge, Roger Nunez passed and entered Wanda’s from the direction of Walgreens. Roger made the strange announcement: “Thank god, I just made it, from the fire.”2

  His blackened appearance, covered in what looked to be soot, likely provoked this declaration—a means to explain his condition and win sympathy from patrons who might otherwise regard him strangely. Roger kept repeating these words as he wandered into and out of the bar to peer down Iberville. When someone later asked how he escaped the burning bar, Roger replied that he “got out the back exit door,” perhaps wagering that no Wanda’s patron could discern how his previous front-door ejection by Buddy Rasmussen made this means of egress impossible for him. Clearly, Roger’s story was evolving with the scene down the way.3

  A smell like charcoal increased as Stewart Butler neared the flashing lights. The walk, 145 steps from Wanda’s, took less than two minutes. What Stewart encountered looked like a war zone. The street reflected the blowout of an explosion: fire leaped from windows and smoke wafted off bodies, with friends pointing and officials yelling. Everything seemed to shout for Stewart’s attention; few details connected or made sense.4

  Fire engines stretched from street to sidewalk, which was littered with bits of glass, flakes of ash, pieces of acrid flesh, and pools of human fluid. Drunken sightseers ambled forth curiously between the casualties as firemen and policemen tried to hold them back. Indeed, a virtual cross-section of New Orleans society coalesced on Iberville, hugging the sides of the street. Guests exited from two pornographic movie houses near the burning bar. They coalesced with businessmen wandering from the Marriott’s Levee Bar or sauntering from the upscale Hotel Monteleone. Gripped by the flames, their eyes reflected a mixture of horror and fascination.5 Cinders fluttered like bright moths, threatening to light the entire French Quarter.

  Firefighters aimed a hose into a window, while others chased and tackled a man trailing smoke signals—hands slapping flames on his head, red running down from the burn. Courtney Craighead and Ricky Everett struggled to breathe, and Rusty Quinton cried repeatedly, “My friends!” Strangers echoed names of people trapped upstairs. Some cries, they tried to persuade themselves, answered in response. Milton Mary scooped water from a gutter and ladled it onto a soot-covered figure, who lay facedown with a gash on his head. Grabbing a fireman, Mary asked, “Can you put some water on this man?” The fireman answered, “He’s gone,” even though the man—most likely Up Stairs Lounge patron Jim Hambrick—was not actually dead but in a state of catatonic shock; he would later be discovered alive and rushed to the hospital.6

  Regina Soleto, bearing a checkbook and a hat borrowed from her friend Jeanne Gosnell, wandered back from her errand toward the Up Stairs Lounge. Minutes before, she’d left her lover, Reggie Adams, at the grand piano, close to Adam Fontenot and Bill Larson. Moving through rescue workers, she heard a distant yelling that she soon realized was the sound of her own screaming voice. Regina kept thinking she saw Reggie in the crowd, but each time it would only be a stranger’s face. She saw what looked to be an air conditioner detonate and fly from a window.7

  A silver ladder stretched toward her friend Jeanne, who was up on the fire escape.8 A white-helmeted man yelled for her to reach farther. Grabbing the handles with singed fingers, Gosnell ran down the makeshift stairs, which bounced in the air, and met the fireman halfway. Buddy Rasmussen stomped about angrily, as if he were looking for some culprit. He ran into Bill Duncan, an Up Stairs Lounge regular and close friend, and the two hugged in silence. From his nearby apartment, Duncan had heard yells and run outside. “Thank god,” Buddy said, not having known if Duncan had perished in the bedlam. Closer to the parking lot, Francis Dufrene sat stunned on the curb. Other survivors, like Robert Vanlangendonck, deputized themselves as medics.9 Somewhere down Chartres Street, an ambulance peeled away.

  Firemen dragged those survivors who’d fallen from the windows and lacked the strength to move another inch. “The guy’s skin stuck to the fireman’s hand,” recalled a witness of one victim. Survivor Phillip Byrd was physically thrown into an ambulance, where a man on a gurney begged him to remove his scalding clothing. Byrd burned his hands more trying to do so: the rags were hot enough to cauterize flesh. In a helpless moment when the vehicle accelerated, Byrd realized that he had defecated in his pants.10

  When Stewart Butler turned right onto Chartres Street, he saw something heartrending. It was “Bill Larson’s corpse,” recalled Stewart, who noticed the green fabric of Larson’s shirt clinging to pink flesh. Stewart gagged and cried at the same time. The watch on Larson’s wrist, cracked from heat, stopped just a few minutes past 8:00 p.m. One patron from the Jimani pleaded for firefighters to help the man. “He was caught and trying desperately to get out,” the man later told the States-Item. “The firemen said he was dead. But he wasn’t. I saw him move.”11

  A boot with a buckle, connected to a body bent in fetal position, hung from another window. This man was clearly dead. A few feet behind the boot, in clear visage, was a face scorched beyond recognition. It looked to be made of stone, unrecognizable as a human form except through prolonged observation, which provoked a shudder. Also visible inside, above the bodies, was the tiny statue of the Farnese Hercules. It was the only piece of the Up Stairs Lounge that survived the night intact.12

  Fire Superintendent William McCrossen, arriving on-site, readied his men to storm the front doorway, which smoldered and steamed beneath the shredded “Up Stairs” canopy. Flames, raked by winds, periodically gusted and swelled against their hoses, which painted the neighborhood in blood hues. Trained rescuers slapped on layer after protective layer, and a fire captain in a gas mask entered the stairwell to test the air. Heat temporarily stopped him in his tracks. Lifting his mask, he smelled what he thought to be the odor of gasoline residue.13

  Other firemen pressed forward, hopeful there was a life to save beyond the burning stairwell. They placed their weight on sieves of char and ascended, trusting the steps to hold their weight. What they found at the top, through the door, was everyone in piles, carbon mounds that were hard to describe. In the farthest corner, a stack of what appeared at first glance to be gnarled lumber sprouted arms and heads; it was the worst thing some had ever seen. “When I first saw the fire victims, it was kind of sickening,” admitted rookie fireman Rodney Gillespie to the Daily Record, a small New Orleans newspaper. Veteran firefighters, who typically deployed the “thousand-mile stare” as a psychological barrier between their minds and absolute chaos, broke down. “We were within eighteen feet of rescuing them—yes, we got that close—but it took time to work our way up there,” Fire Superintendent McCrossen later recalled. “I saw firemen throw up and cry when they saw those people dead.”14

  Additional emergency calls for aid brought engines and equ
ipment from every corner of the city, which created a traffic jam of emergency units. Thirteen fire companies, including four hook-and-ladder divisions, brought eighty-seven firefighters to the scene.15 Ladders hung in the air like construction cranes as firefighters extinguished the blaze by 8:12 p.m. The fire had burned within the staircase for around nineteen minutes, inside the bar for little more than sixteen minutes.16

  Night descended, revealing a half-moon in the firmament. Higher in the darkness, stars burned cold and distant. Major Henry M. Morris arrived and took charge of law enforcement. Police tape was rolled out to protect the crime scene as the chief detective conferred with the fire chief, who couldn’t yet speculate how many had perished inside. It wasn’t obvious with all the bodies fused together. It was still too hot to bring the coroner, or anyone but a firefighter, upstairs. Cops hustled around paramedics and patients. On a curb, Luther Boggs sat beside Jeanne Gosnell, his best friend. A white compress hung from Luther’s head, and he held his neck slack, as if broken. Jeanne gasped for breath behind an oxygen mask and looked blue, fogging up the plastic. Luther could neither hug nor comfort her: his skin dangled like papier-mâché from his hands, which he curled up like talons to avoid the contact of exposed nerves with anything but air.17

  HIGH ABOVE THE devastation, in the dishwashing room of the Port Orleans, Henry Kubicki worked through stacks of pots and pans. Roused from his lonely trance, he received an order from a chef to retrieve supplies from the hotel commissary, which resided in a basement level of the sprawling hotel complex. Snagging an elevator to the subterranean level, Henry navigated his way through cool cellars and eventually handed his order to a man of Cuban descent who managed supplies for the various restaurants in the Marriott. This man, speaking to a coworker, laughed and yelled, “Oh boy! We are having barbequed queens’ asses tonight!”18