Killer Show

by John Barylick

  As Butler’s camera traverses the dance floor, it captures male patrons in leather vests and tank tops. Women wear summer tube tops in deference to the club’s cumulative body heat. Everyone holds a drink — some, two. Smokers abound. Two patrons, standing near the apron of the stage, sport “Jack Russell ‘For You’ Tour” shirts, apparent leftovers from his abortive solo album tour. Others wear Budweiser caps recently thrown from the stage by Dr. Metal and his WHJY associates.

  At the monitor mixing board stands Paul Vanner, The Station’s soundman. Craggy-faced and bearded, with shoulder-length black hair and sunken eyes, Vanner wears a shirt emblazoned with the name “Human Clay,” the band for which his friend “Grimace” Davidson had recently set off pyrotechnic gerbs at the club. He urges the cameraman to speak into a nearby microphone. Beer-fueled patrons taunt Butler, “Hey, film me, man!” “We’re on TV, man!”

  Tracy King stops at the thirty-two-channel club sound mixer, kidding a fellow bouncer about the complex, pretuned system. “Stand up here and make believe you know what you’re doing, like I am,” urges King, smiling. “Move a switch — I dare you!” A few seconds later, Gina Gauvin strolls through the shot, natural red mane flowing across her black-clad shoulders and pale skin. The mood of anticipation is palpable.

  King then leads Butler’s camera to the back bar, which is attended by Julie Mellini, Paul Vanner’s roommate from years past. Mellini’s waist-length brown hair cascades over her three-quarter-sleeve blue top. She can’t resist playfully sticking her tongue out at Butler’s camera. High-test silliness is flowing tonight, as much as Budweiser.

  A string of low-voltage lights forms a rectangle on the ceiling above the back bar. Below them a glowing Anheuser-Busch eagle spreads its wings over the bar’s rear wall, next to a neon Marlboro longhorn: West Warwick meets Old West. Alongside the wall-mounted remnants of a smashed electric guitar from a previous concert, a clock face rimmed in blue neon hangs. Its hands point to 10:45.

  Shot girl Rena Gershelis passes before Butler’s lens, her tray of test tubes containing rainbow-colored liquids held head-high. Shining pink lipstick, wide-set model’s eyes, and frosted tresses complete the picture. She flashes a too-wide grin, mugging for the camera. No one can stay serious on such an upbeat night.

  Bouncer King parts the crowd further, leading Butler into the club’s dart room, where doors to the back storeroom are flanked by autographs of the rock band the Fixx. Through one storeroom door emerges bar-back Michael Jandron carrying a case of beer to replenish Julie Mellini’s stock. By prearrangement, Butler “chases” him through the crowd, creating a high-energy, almost frenzied visual effect. In so doing, his camera sweeps briefly past the door to the kitchen, inside which the viewer catches a glimpse of that room’s well-hidden exit door. Briefly visible at Mellini’s back bar is a red wall-mounted fire extinguisher, a good sixty feet — and hundreds of patrons — between it and the stage.

  Later in the tape, Butler’s camera rounds the corner behind the ticket desk, entering the main horseshoe bar area. A basketball game plays on the corner TV, below which the youthful radio station interns gather, clad in black hooded sweatshirts with oval “HJY” logos on the front. The kids appear perfectly relaxed.

  Butler’s camera sweeps over the horseshoe bar’s front windows. All three have neon beer signs — Bud Light, Miller Light, Coors — blocking their upper halves. A large metal Molson Canadian sign adorns the bar’s back wall, and a string of low-voltage lights mimics the back bar’s ceiling halo.

  Tending the main bar on this, her thirtieth birthday, is Dina DeMaio. She wears a translucent coral chiffon top with matching hair band — more conservative and elegant than any of her patrons. With her prominent cheekbones and perfect smile, it’s easy to see why Dina is at the main bar. She’s an attraction in herself. Checking on a couple seated before her, she asks, in typical Rhode Island waitress-ese, “You guys all set?”

  DeMaio, the single mother of a seven-year-old son, was nothing if not industrious. First in her family to graduate from college, she worked full-time as a legal secretary while studying to become a paralegal. Dina began working odd nights at The Station three months earlier to make some extra money for herself and her son.

  As Butler’s camera pans left, it captures Jack Russell’s guest-list acquaintances from Denny’s: Rick Sanetti, his wife, Patty, and their young niece, Bridget. Bridget’s blond hair falls midshoulder over her light-blue rib-knit top. A black leather bag is slung over her right shoulder. As the twenty-five-year-old gestures to her aunt and uncle, her silver hoop earrings sparkle beneath fine wisps of hair.

  Butler’s video passes the Sanetti party, then zooms in on the beer taps as crew-cut club manager Kevin Beese, wearing a black “EVENT SECURITY” T-shirt, draws beer into a large plastic cup. Beese sacrifices as much beer to spilled “head” as he leaves in the cup. Before the camera leaves the main bar, its focus settles on an exit sign above the area’s single outside door, then, returning to the polished surface of the bar itself, it zooms in on the watch-clad wrist of a man stirring his drink. The timepiece reads “10:50.” In the background audio, one can hear Dr. Metal launching into his introductory spiel for the featured act: “We’re back . . . we’re fuckin’ back.”

  Before returning to the stage and dance floor, Butler walks his camera toward the ticket counter attended by blond, smiling Andrea Mancini. Her husband, Steven, had finished his set with the local band Fathead an hour or so earlier and is helping check IDs. Mancini’s bandanna-clad bandmate, Tom Conte, and Conte’s girlfriend, Kristen Arruda, are relaxing near Andrea’s desk. A West Warwick policeman, Anthony Bettencourt, stands beside the ticket desk in uniform shirt, radio microphone clipped to the epaulet on his left shoulder. Hired as a “private detail” by the Derderians, Bettencourt is supposed to project a police presence and maintain order. At his side is another town cop, Mark Knott, seen in profile in his Gore-Tex patrol jacket with an American flag patch on the right shoulder. Knott was on routine patrol that night and stopped in to assist Bettencourt’s rock ’n’ roll detail with a “security check” — just in time for the main act.

  On the wall behind Andrea Mancini hangs a framed photograph of the Beatles in profile, circa 1970; a crudely block-lettered sign on her desk announces, “TONIGHT GREAT WHITE, TRIP, FATHEAD $17.” The wood-paneled partition dividing Andrea’s diagonal ticket desk from the entrance corridor (leaving only a thirty-three-inch opening through which patrons are admitted) is formidable — almost chest-high.

  Butler’s video documents the following pertinent history: At 11 p.m., Great White’s soundman Bob Rager cues a CD of prerecorded Great White music. As its volume builds, the band’s instrumentalists take their positions on the darkened stage: drummer Eric Powers in an unbuttoned gold metallic shirt; rhythm guitarist Ty Longley with shoulder-length brown curls flowing over his black vest; bass guitarist David Filice wearing a long-sleeve black shirt; and lead guitarist Mark Kendall with shaved head and sunglasses. At 11:04, Station light man Scooter Stone “bumps” the stage lights, creating a strobelike flash at random intervals, as he had been instructed by Great White manager Dan Biechele. (Biechele had explained to Stone in a preconcert briefing that pyro would be ignited soon thereafter, at which time Stone was to bring up full stage lights.)

  At 11:05, guitar feedback signals the entrance of Jack Russell, who bounds onstage, wireless microphone in hand. Great White slams into the opening chords of “Desert Moon,” and Dan Biechele touches the second of two wires to a battery terminal.

  Brian Butler, standing four rows back in the crowd, shoots video straight at the stage. His tape shows four pyrotechnic gerbs set off from the floor at center stage just in front of Powers’s drum alcove. Initially, the gerbs’ intensity produces a video whiteout. The camera’s iris takes a moment to adjust to the glare, but within five seconds of the gerbs’ ignition, small flames are visible on the foam-covered front corners of the drummer’s alcove where sparks from the gerbs have struck
them. The flames, no larger than candles, start about five feet up the walls.

  At fifteen seconds post-ignition, the gerbs cease sparking, as designed. Butler swings the camera to his right, revealing the closed stage door and a darkened exit sign above it. Just three seconds later, the flames on the corners of the drummer’s alcove, previously candle size, are now over a foot high.

  At twenty seconds, David Filice is seen staring at two-foot-high flames to stage left. The foam at stage right is now being consumed by twin two-foot tongues of flame, which Ty Longley notices for the first time. Kendall and Russell remain unaware, strutting and playing on as flames race above the lintel of the drummer’s alcove and onto the upper proscenium arch.

  At twenty-three seconds, the video shows flames licking up inside the ceiling of the drummer’s alcove and leaping up the proscenium arch. Much of the crowd remains transfixed, still gesturing in “devil’s horns” fashion. However, one redheaded female in the front row clutches both hands to her head in dismay. She is among the first to appreciate that flaming walls are not part of the show. Over the next half minute the crowd’s demeanor will shift from festive, to curious, to terror-stricken.

  At twenty-five seconds post-ignition, Butler’s video clearly shows flames consuming the egg-crate foam three feet above the drummer’s alcove lintel. Filice looks back intently at drummer Powers, willing him to abandon his post in the alcove. Kendall and Russell remain oblivious of the growing peril.

  Twenty-six seconds after ignition of the gerbs, smoke fills the cathedral ceiling area over the dance floor and begins to billow beneath the dropped ceiling into the remainder of the club. Butler starts moving with his camera toward the main door.

  At twenty-eight seconds, formal-wear salesman and amateur bodybuilder Joe Kinan is seen on Butler’s tape turning to his longtime buddy, Karla Bagtaz. He wheels to his left toward the main door with Karla at his side. In a few seconds Kinan will take off his leather vest and wrap it around his friend to protect her.

  At the thirty-six-second mark, Butler’s camera is near the ticket booth, shooting straight toward the stage and its door. The stage door is now wide open, an exterior light illuminating the frigid blackness beyond. Great White suddenly stops playing. Russell finally notices the flames engulfing the west wall and utters his last words of the concert: “Wow. That’s not good.” A master of understatement, Russell.

  Forty-one seconds after Biechele ignited his pyro, Russell and Kendall are still seen onstage, Russell ineffectually splashing one wall with a water bottle. Fifty seconds after ignition, the building’s fire alarm is triggered, sounding a piercing horn and illuminating strobes around the club. At fifty-seven seconds, Dan Biechele, who had run offstage looking for an extinguisher, jumps back onstage briefly. Butler’s camera, always facing the stage, appears to stop in one location for eight to ten seconds, during which pause Erin Pucino, the Derderians’ long-suffering gas-station clerk, can be seen attempting to get past the cameraman toward the door, her face contorted in the expression of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Butler’s camera thereafter moves past the ticket desk and out the front doors in a wave of escaping patrons.

  When Brian Butler exited through the front doors he was trailed by thickening, head-level smoke and a throng of increasingly concerned patrons. A few yards behind him in the pack, Erin Pucino was no longer moving of her own volition but, rather, as part of a viscous flow of bodies squeezing between Andrea Mancini’s angled ticket counter partition and its opposing wall. As the smoke changed in seconds from gray to black, people inside the club believed that all lighting had suddenly been switched off. In fact, the smoke from the burning hydrocarbon-based plastic foam was so perfectly opaque that no light from the ceiling fixtures could penetrate it. The lights remained on. They simply could not be seen from twelve inches away.

  With the force of surging bodies behind her completely offset by the resistance of those in front of her, Pucino floated suspended in an inky cauldron, where collective fear increased exponentially with each degree of rising heat. It occurred to her that leaving the club would not just be difficult. It could well be impossible.

  CHAPTER 10

  THIS WAY OUT

  WEST WARWICK PATROLMAN MARK KNOTT had been standing by the ticket counter with fellow officer Anthony Bettencourt when Great White took the stage. Just as the band launched into its opening song, Knott’s radio crackled: he was needed at a domestic disturbance elsewhere in town. The officer responded by heading out The Station’s double front doors.

  Knott paused on the concrete landing outside, bracing himself against the bitter February chill, when his radio picked up Bettencourt’s voice from inside the club. “The Station’s on fire,” radioed his colleague with surprising calm. Knott turned and reopened the front doors, where he was met by a human tide that bowled him back out the doors, over the railing of the club’s steps and onto the hood of a car below. Seconds later he managed to key his radio microphone and shout the word, “Stampede!”

  There were myriad reasons why people found themselves inside The Station when the firestorm was unleashed. Some, like Fairfield Inn housekeepers Tina Ayer and Jackie Bernard, had made their way onto Jack Russell’s guest list through happenstance. Others, like Steve Mancini, Keith Mancini, Tom Conte, and Al Prudhomme, were members of an opening band, Fathead. Still others, like Steve’s wife, Andrea, who worked the club’s ticket desk, were earning a night’s pay. But most were simply there to hear Great White and have a good time.

  Whatever different plans they may have had in entering the club that night, most shared the same idea when it came to leaving it in a hurry. They headed for the door they’d come in by — the front entrance. For some it would prove their deliverance; for others, a most unfortunate decision.

  Al and Charlene Prudhomme were Station regulars. Fathead’s drummer Al had played at the club for ten years and once even considered buying The Station from Howard Julian, until Charlene vetoed the idea. The night of Great White’s appearance, Fathead was the first of three bands to play. During the second band’s set, Prudhomme stood with bouncer Scott Vieira near the band room and the stage door to the right of the stage.

  As Trip struck its set-up and Great White prepared to take the stage, Charlene Prudhomme found her husband down front near the speakers through which recorded music was blaring. “I love you and all, but after seventeen years of your music, I just can’t take the noise down here,” she shouted in his ear. “I’m standing near the back.” And with that she made her way through the dense crowd (Charlene hated the feeling of people pressing at her back) to the area adjacent to Andrea Mancini’s ticket desk, alongside Patrolman Bettencourt, where she remained standing until Great White’s show. Charlene knew Andrea well because their husbands played together in Fathead.

  Seconds after Great White’s gerbs ignited, Charlene noticed orange on the wall behind their white sparkles. She grabbed the policeman’s arm and said, “That’s a fire.” Bettencourt didn’t hear her at first and just smiled back. She stepped to her right, into the space between Andrea’s ticket desk and its opposite wall, at which point Bettencourt grabbed her arm and shouted, “It is a fire,” then turned to radio his request for help.

  At that moment, Jeff Derderian ran from the main bar through the entrance area in front of Andrea’s desk, pushing Charlene toward the outside doors and heading toward the stage. Charlene had little serious concern even then, wondering if she might later go back inside to get her coat, or help Al remove his band gear. She passed through the single swinging door within the entrance corridor, then flattened herself against the wall to courteously hold the inside door open for the stream of exiting patrons. Like her husband, Charlene Prudhomme saw herself as unpaid club staff as much as patron.

  Within seconds of Great White’s pyrotechnic ignition, Al Prudhomme, too, appreciated that something was very wrong. From his vantage point near the stage door he could clearly see the foam catch fire. As orange flame crept up both sides of
the drummer’s alcove, Prudhomme turned back into the club, searching for his wife and his bandmates. Prudhomme thought, “I’m not going to get through this crowd to them” and bolted out the band door. Because he was “band,” he not only knew the door’s location, but exited through it without challenge. Prudhomme cut to his right around the corner of the building and sprinted for the front doors, falling on the parking lot’s ice. He leapt to his feet and charged up the club’s front steps where people were exiting briskly, but not fast enough for him. Prudhomme began swimming against the human tide, grabbing arms, pulling them past him through thickening smoke and yelling for them to “get the fuck out, get out, get out!” so that he could enter to find his wife. The sixth arm that he grabbed was the right one — Charlene’s. He pulled her from her inside door-holding post, down to the parking lot and away from the building to safety. When Charlene started to wander in bewilderment, Al yelled, “Don’t move!” He was terrified of losing her again. Later he would enfold her in his arms and tell her not to look at the scene of developing horror.

  Jack Russell’s motel housekeeper guests, Tina Ayer and Jackie Bernard, were close to the stage when Great White’s act began. Neither had been to The Station before, and neither knew any exit other than the front doors through which they had entered. When tongues of fire began to lick up the walls on either side of the drummer’s alcove and smoke billowed across the ceiling, the women turned to press toward the front door, Jackie in the lead. They could hear a distinct crackling sound above them as low-density, open-cell polyurethane foam on the ceiling burst into flame. Jackie clutched Tina’s jacket in the enveloping smoke, but the crush of the crowd peeled Tina from her grip. Jackie made it out the front door, part of the swarm of burning-eyed, stumbling escapees, and began to search frantically for Tina in the parking lot.