Tinderbox

  DESPITE PERSISTENT CHARACTER attacks for his leadership of the memorial fund, Morris Kight continued the fight for recognition of the Up Stairs Lounge. In January 1974, Kight made a lone journey back to meet “concerned members of the New Orleans Community.” Writing fund trustees afterward, Kight recommended swift action to meet the dire financial needs of survivors and families. Within days, the National New Orleans Memorial Fund issued its first set of grants, which totaled around $6000. Eventually, more than $10,000 of the amount raised would go to victims and families, with the rest going to gay New Orleans causes or to reimbursing New Orleans Emergency Task Force expenses from the period immediately after the Up Stairs Lounge fire.30

  Up Stairs Lounge survivors Fred Sharohway and Eugene Thomas, who’d scalded themselves by running down the burning staircase, received $618.15 and $718, respectively, most of which went directly to creditors. Survivor Michael Scarborough, who amassed a staggering $4900 in hospital bills during his long months in care, received $300 for personal expenses; he would be counseled to declare bankruptcy to clear his debts. Jeanne Gosnell, who remained bedridden and isolated at home following her release from the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, received $171.50 to install a phone line in her apartment so that she could reach the outside world.31

  Up Stairs Lounge victim John Golding’s widow, Jane, received $360 to pay the private school tuition for her son John Jr. The night of the fire, Jane had stayed awake in front of the television watching the news coverage with her three children, whom she had alerted to the emergency. She repeatedly telephoned Charity Hospital, but they didn’t have answers. She and John had lived a charade as a happy “Ozzie and Harriet”–type couple, but the circumstances of his death in a gay bar laid bare the family secret. When the reality set in, Jane went ghostly white and fell over in medical shock. Her daughter, who was studying to be a medical tech, had to elevate her mother’s feet and cover her in blankets until she came to. “I fell asleep praying,” recalled John Jr. “At the time, I was a religious little fellow, just praying, ‘Oh let this be a mistake, let Dad come home.’ ”32

  Afterward, people snickered around Jane, and she was forced to pull John Jr. from public school when bullies began to prey on him—a tall gangly youth, now without a father, who hadn’t yet been taught to defend himself. Administrators turned a blind eye, and Jane feared what would happen if playground peers discovered the “queer” circumstances of the death of the boy’s father. Jane hoped and prayed that a new set of classmates at a new Catholic middle school wouldn’t bother young John about his family.33

  In spite of Lucien Baril’s questionable stewardship of donations intended for the fire survivors, Morris Kight sent a letter on behalf of trustees of the memorial fund to the former pastor, who by then had returned to his old name, Richard Green, and was facing legal troubles in Dallas. In the letter, Kight sounded sympathetic. He expressed love and appreciation for Baril’s actions after the fire. “Without your deep Christian and brotherly concern,” wrote Kight, “our work would have been far more difficult, if not impossible.”34 It seems probable that, given the timing of the communiqué and the distribution of grants to victims, this letter was an attempt to ensure that Baril didn’t cause future problems.

  EMBOLDENED BY THE FAILURE of arson investigators to prove their case against him, Roger Dale Nunez had moved back to New Orleans by January 1974, shortly before Mardi Gras season and right before his twenty-seventh birthday. He reported his work accident to the federal government and began receiving disability checks. Roger also sought psychiatric help at U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, where a physician treated him for conversion hysteria—a catch-all disorder through which various physical conditions, such as blindness or seizures, can manifest out of psychological stress.35

  Roger used his welfare checks to pay rent in a downtown flophouse called the Imperial Hotel and, on the side, have some fun. His tenure in the hotel coincided with the building becoming a halfway house funded by the Catholic archdiocese. At the Imperial, Roger shared a room with a thirty-five-year-old cook named Ralph Forest. He befriended and then received the loving affections of this slightly older man, who was eager to please him sexually, financially, and otherwise. They made frequent love in what Forest called a “fifty-fifty proposition” of giving and receiving.36

  In December of 1973, Phil Esteve, the owner of the Up Stairs Lounge, opened a new gay watering hole called the Post Office. Located on St. Louis Street in the French Quarter, it was the heir to his ill-fated bar. “Much of the same kind of funky décor—complete with elevated dance floor—that pervaded the Up-stairs is in evidence at The Post Office,” read one notice. Buddy Rasmussen resumed his old position, working as Esteve’s bartender and manager, and former Up Stairs patrons like Michael Scarborough and Ricky Everett soon became regular faces..37 Life had to go on.

  Post Office patrons continued the ritual of holding hands and singing “United We Stand” at the close of each evening. Formerly, the song had been an affirmation of togetherness; now, it seemed like a dirge that dampened the atmosphere. Still, even with “United We Stand” playing and men with burn scars crooning in tears, Roger Dale Nunez had the unabashed temerity to show up at the Post Office with his boyfriend. Fortunately for them, regulars like Michael Scarborough were not there on the nights they visited.38

  That Mardi Gras, February 26, 1974, Roger Dale Nunez took a break from the costumes and bead “throws.” He spotted Sister Mary Stephen Ledet, a middle-aged member of a Roman Catholic order, in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel and approached her. The nun had been watching parades and laughing. She had sauntered into the hotel to explore her new place of mission. Ledet, wearing her traditional habit, must have seemed like a representation of the Blessed Mother to Roger, who had grown up religious. Roger introduced himself and asked Sister Mary Stephen Ledet to counsel him. To Ledet, Roger must have appeared as a wounded soul, and she obliged. The two sat and communed on Fat Tuesday, even though Ash Wednesday—the time of sobriety and reflection—was but hours away.39

  Roger confessed to Ledet of his “conflicting impulses” toward other men, which led her to give the advice that “no matter how low you are, you can always make something of yourself.” The two became friends, in the way that clergy can sometimes blindly define friendship. “She said he was a mixed up human being,” the fire marshals wrote after an interview with Ledet on November 20, 1974. “And he always said she expected more of him than he could give the world.” Ledet began to regularly counsel Roger on the phone and in person, and Roger began calling her by the pet name Mawa, baby talk for “mama.” “He didn’t, he didn’t like to er, to be gay and that er, threw him,” Ledet later admitted to the authorities, with some amount of embarrassment. “His problems all stemmed from that, you know,” she continued, “he couldn’t, he, he reached the point where he couldn’t accept himself for what he was.” Roger soon gained the confidence to speak about a haunting event. “She said he made a statement to her that they had taken him in for questioning about the Up Stairs Lounge,” the fire marshals would later report.40

  Roger told an appalling story to Ledet, presuming that anything he said would be protected within a spiritual “vow of secrecy” similar to that of a priest hearing confessions. “She said he tried to impress her, as if he wasn’t masculine,” the fire report continued, “and that she thought that’s how it [the subject of the Up Stairs Lounge] came in, that he tried to impress her that he did something, that they thought he had done something now, you know, big.” Roger affirmed to Sister Mary Stephen Ledet that he, in words she seemingly admitted later on to Fire Superintendent William McCrossen, “torched the Up Stairs Lounge.”41

  But it was also a confession that she would flatly deny to state fire marshal investigators when they questioned her in 1974, in an official capacity. Evidently, as Ledet later explained to McCrossen, she felt that she had reason to protect the man who once baby-talked her, who would tell a childless woman, “You’re
my Mawa.” After Roger made his admission, Ledet vowed to never tell another soul about what he said. She believed that Roger had mistakenly confessed to a capital crime with the belief that his words would fall within the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, a theologically and somewhat legally protected act of contrition that only a Catholic priest can administer. Because the Roman Catholic Church believed reconciliation to be a divine ritual, a plea for secrecy or forgiveness in relation to that sacrament held utmost gravity. It seems that reconciliation, even when bungled, offered Roger Dale Nunez a kind of holy insurance policy.42

  Under a different set of circumstances, Roger confessed to his boyfriend that he had set the Up Stairs Lounge fire. He first broached the subject with Ralph Forest after Mardi Gras day (around the time he confessed to Ledet) and affirmed the story again on a random night when the two were drinking at Wanda’s on Iberville Street. The proximity of Wanda’s to the ruins of the Up Stairs Lounge would make it a logical setting for an inebriated disclosure: Roger could see down the street and remember what happened there. “A friend of mine by the name of Roger Nunez,” Ralph Forest later told the fire investigators, “has admitted to me several times under the influence of alcohol that he had started the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge. When I questioned him when he was sober regarding the fire, he wouldn’t admit it.”43

  As to how Roger started the fire, Ralph Forest recalled: “According to what he told me and this was just once, that he used lighter fluid purchased from Walgreens.” Each time that Roger told this story to his lover, Forest couldn’t tell whether Roger wanted him to be glad or sad that he had gotten away with a heinous crime. His lover tended to make the admission matter-of-factly. When asked by the fire marshal why he had not immediately gone to the police or other authorities with such information, Forest explained, “Because I didn’t believe that he had done it and also because I still had feelings toward him.”44

  On March 7, 1974, John P. BonneCarrere, a state probation officer assigned to Roger Dale Nunez’s case, finally found his missing parolee. BonneCarrere wrote a letter to Judge Shea of the Orleans Parish Criminal Court describing the encounter: “I informed your honor that we had located the subject and that he had recently undergone brain surgery and we therefore did not effect his arrest at this time. The subject was under the mistaken impression that he had not been on probation.”45 Impressively, it seems that Roger appealed to BonneCarrere for compassion due to health reasons and won sympathy from a member of the criminal justice system with a legal responsibility to serve the warrant.

  RALPH FOREST REMAINED steadfast in his love for Roger, despite the confessions of firesetting, even as the younger man’s health deteriorated. Roger underwent a risky and ultimately unsuccessful brain surgery to remove a frontal lobe tumor at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in April 1974, and Forest nursed and supported him afterward. After weeks of painful recovery, Roger rose from their bed and promptly informed Ralph that their relationship was over. Roger, according to Forest, moved from their room in Lafayette Square to an apartment on Iberville. Attempting to start fresh, perhaps invigorated by his surgery or inspired by Sister Mary Stephen Ledet’s teachings, Roger romantically pursued a woman more than twenty years his senior.46

  Roger Nunez and Elaine Wharton Bassett met by chance when he was babysitting the child of a Wanda’s bartender in New Orleans East. This friend of Roger’s had a small cottage that offered a stunning view of Lake Pontchartrain over the lip of the levee across the street. Bassett happened to live two doors down from where Roger was babysitting.47 In a neighborly way, she must have come over to visit.

  Elaine Wharton Bassett—a vibrant, financially independent fifty-year-old—was immediately drawn to the young suitor. Perhaps she fell in love with him. Perhaps she felt sorry for him. Perhaps she wanted to mother him or be his angel. In any combination of these ways, Bassett became spellbound. Judging by the timing of their union, any preambles to old-fashioned courtship gave way to passion. Curiously, it seems that the couple didn’t find time to “test the waters” in bed during their wooing. Roger called friends—even Ralph Forest—to celebrate this newfound love. To Sister Mary Stephen Ledet, it must have seemed like the ultimate conversion; a man who’d been in a homosexual relationship in March and April had straightened out his life and found heterosexual bliss. Roger Dale Nunez married Elaine Wharton Bassett on May 17, 1974, at the Algiers Courthouse, just across the river from the French Quarter.48

  With their nuptials in place, they proceeded to the boudoir, where Roger admitted his homosexuality to his new bride and also told her that he was impotent. With these words, Roger dashed the hopes of the woman to whom he just pledged lifelong fidelity. It’s difficult to discern whether Roger had believed that the recitation of marital vows would magically cure his homosexual tendencies—as Sister Mary Stephen Ledet may have hinted was possible through intercession of the divine—or if Roger had merely been attempting to deceive an older partner in love for financial benefit. Bassett, no doubt, was devastated by Roger’s wedding-night confession. Mercifully, she did not seek an annulment and allowed her young, ill, unemployed spouse to move into a trailer in her backyard while they sorted out their future plans.49

  In a demonstration of stoic commitment to her new spouse, Bassett then took the dramatic step of changing her legal name to Elaine Bassett Nunez. During the months that Roger lived in her backyard, he also continued to receive his monthly Social Security disability check of $146, which proved to be insufficient for his expenditures. Subsequently, he began forging checks in his wife’s name and cashing them at Pirate’s Den, another Iberville Street bar. Indeed, he continued to drink near the ruin of the Up Stairs Lounge as the first anniversary of the catastrophe approached. This anniversary went largely unobserved.50 The MCC of New Orleans, after all, barely kept a foothold in town.

  A few people, however, would try to remember what happened. In one of the memorial fund’s last attempts to keep the memory of the fire alive, trustees disbursed some $200 so survivor Jeanne Gosnell could fly to Los Angeles and be a guest of honor in the reinstated Christopher Street West parade for Gay Pride. As a scarred survivor, with at least 60 percent of her body still healing, Gosnell rode down Hollywood Boulevard in a layered dress and sun hat. She attended a rally in honor of the Up Stairs Lounge victims at De Longpre Park (Los Angeles, in fact, appears to be the only city to hold a public Up Stairs Lounge memorial in 1974). Although Gosnell couldn’t say much to the crowd—it was still too difficult to talk about the death of Luther Boggs—she conveyed in few words the extent of the suffering, the lives lost, and her six months in the hospital. The tragedy, Gosnell observed, “seemed to bring us all together.”51

  Later that summer, on August 15, a New Orleanian who had taken a risk by offering help to Troy Perry during the last week of June 1973 died of metastatic lung cancer in the French Quarter. Clay Shaw had perished at sixty. Earlier in 1974, Shaw had suffered a blood clot to his brain and underwent a surgery that rendered one side of his body paralyzed. The condition had forced him to resign from his coveted post at the French Market Corporation, a job he’d assumed courageously—given the efforts it took, following his trial, to hold his head up high. According to an obituary printed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Shaw died with a $5 million civil lawsuit pending against former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. With the primary litigant deceased, that case now couldn’t proceed.52

  Clay Shaw’s obituary made the front page of the Times-Picayune. The city’s paper of record took stock of the man as “one of the founders of International Trade Mart and the man acquitted of charges of conspiring to assassinate John F. Kennedy.” The New York Times called him “the businessman who was acquitted of plotting to assassinate President Kennedy after one of the nation’s more sensational trials,” while mentioning the accusations of homosexuality. Indeed, Jim Garrison’s crusade marred Shaw’s reputation in death. None of these obituaries would recognize Shaw’s gesture of compass
ion for the Up Stairs Lounge victims. Even in his most vulnerable condition, Shaw had attempted to help others.53

  AS 1974 PROGRESSED, Roger’s condition worsened. In between bouts of partying, passing bad checks in his wife’s name, and recuperating in the backyard trailer, he had a stay at a mental health institution in Mandeville, Louisiana. He scheduled yet another round of brain surgeries for early fall. At some point, Elaine Bassett Nunez must have decided that she’d had enough of her young husband. Public notice for the separation of their marriage appeared in the Times-Picayune on September 12. As the divorce proceedings went on, Roger continued to occupy the trailer behind her residence, never once sleeping in the house.54

  On the early morning of November 15, Roger Dale Nunez took his own life by mixing Dilantin, his epilepsy medication, with three vials of barbiturates and guzzling it all down with six cans of beer. His soon-to-be ex-wife found him on the floor of a backyard shed and called the police when she could not revive him. The coroner pronounced him dead on sight at 12:30 p.m. With no small amount of grace, Elaine Bassett Nunez notified Ralph Forest, a man she knew loved her husband, of the premature death, and Forest called Sister Mary Stephen Ledet. Both were devastated by the news.55

  An autopsy would reveal a “thick walled cystic lesion of dura” in the “right front area” of Roger’s brain. In fact, Roger Dale Nunez had a skull-based tumor growing in his cerebral cortex, despite clear surgical attempts to alleviate it. Such lesions could have contributed to a vast range of anomalous behaviors. The autopsy provided proof of a mental disturbance, revealing a body and a mind at war. After Roger’s death, a grief-stricken Ralph Forest wandered, brokenhearted, throughout the French Quarter. He made his way to the Post Office, finding owner Phil Esteve behind the bar. Esteve at first listened sympathetically as Forest confided that his lover had died. Then the customer mentioned the man’s name.56