Instantly, the voice was all he heard. It was calming and reassuring. It spoke to Jesse slowly and evenly, repeating itself for emphasis. “Break down the wall. Break down the wall.”
It took only a moment for Jesse to realize the voice was giving him the only practical advice that might save hundreds of lives. He called his band to action by waving one arm in a circular motion over his head.
“Come on, Tim. Come on Rene. Help me knock out this wall behind the stage.”
Rene was already coughing badly. “What are you talking about? We can’t do that.”
“There’s no other way out,” Jesse said as he pushed his way to the wall behind the stage. Rene and Tim followed him and they started kicking the wall together.
Butch and Dale joined in and the five members of The Divebomberz began kicking the wooden wall with all their might. It didn’t give an inch. The drywall inside was on two-by-four studs with thick plywood and siding on the outside. Smoke was getting thicker by the second. Jesse could hear his bandmates choking. They were running out of air. The screaming panic of the trapped crowd sounded like all the evil from Hell.
Jesse knew it was time to organize his troops. “Come on guys. Get in sync. On four, ready? One, two, three, four.”
The band kicked together on four. Their collective impact felt superhuman.
The wall didn’t budge an inch.
Dupre and another Wheeler joined the kicking. Everybody was screaming out the four count and kicking as one. It felt like the wall was giving way a little.
Jesse’s right foot was getting sore by the tenth kick. He changed over to kicking with his left foot and yelled at the others to alternate their kicking feet. Smoke was beginning to overwhelm the crowd. Jesse put his head between his legs to keep from fainting. Standing up, he could see people falling to the floor. The roof was nothing but flames. Escape began to look more and more impossible. Jesse hoped the Voodoo voice was a spirit he could trust with his life.
A few more Wheelers and crowd members joined the desperate break out attempt. “One, two, three, four,” they yelled together and kicked on the four count.
Jesse couldn’t hear the wood cracking but he could see the wall beginning to break out. On the fifteenth kick, a crack in the wall could be seen about eight feet up. The band kept kicking until a four-foot section of the wall began to give way. One more mighty, collective kick and a small section of wall fell down and out and onto the porch outside.
The blaze was roaring as flames engulfed the rafters. Smoke and dust poured into the club from the new opening in the wall. People stampeded over the bandstand, attempting to get out through the hole, crushing instruments and amplifiers underfoot. The hole wasn’t wide enough. Another human logjam prevented escape.
Amy was pushed to the floor and started getting buried by bodies. She disappeared except for one arm, waving wildly. Jesse grabbed her hand and felt his way down her arm until he could get a firm grip under her armpit. He yelled at Dupre for help. The biker pushed people aside as Jesse pulled her up and back on her feet. She came up choking and bruised but far from defeated.
Her face was so blackened that her teeth looked extra white as she shouted at Jesse, “I couldn’t get up. They wouldn’t let me up.”
Jesse kept his arm around Amy as he yelled at his crew. “Let’s go. We need another hole. We need another hole.”
The band sprang back into action and kicked out another section of the wall, and then another. Each section came down easier than the last. Once the band knew they could do it with their synchronized kicks, they became a Rock and Roll, kung fu wrecking ball.
One, two, three, four! Ten people kicked on the four count with a collective and concentrated force far greater than their number. Never had the power of four-four timing been so well demonstrated and utilized. The room full of trapped people took notice and began kicking their own holes in the wall on the other side of the hall. Coughing people poured out into the parking lot like rats leaving a sinking ship.
The building was totally engulfed in flames by the time the last stragglers stumbled out to safety. The Safari Club went up in a blaze so tall and bright it looked like a towering-inferno rocket ship blasting off into the full moon night. Giant sparks shot up into the blackness to dance with the stars. The fire was so hot it melted cars and motorcycles that couldn’t be moved in time. Jesse saw people standing way back from the intense heat, staring at the fire as though hypnotized by the miracle of their escape and survival.
The Gypsies were long gone. They had left when the fire started. It wasn’t part of their plan to incinerate five hundred people. At least the disaster postponed all-out gang warfare.
Miraculously, no one died in the blaze, although thirty-eight people ended up going to the hospital. They had suffered smoke inhalation, burn injuries, and broken bones. Fifteen people were in serious to critical condition from being nearly crushed to death. The Gypsy biker that Big Ben tackled was taken away on a stretcher by ambulance. He was expected to live.
Big Ben was black as a coal miner. He had a broken right hand. His beard and hair and eyebrows had been burned off. He looked like a cancer victim. The injuries hadn’t stopped him from pulling people out the back door.
The reluctant bartender, who helped get the party started hours earlier, was one of the last persons carried out of the club. A woman with half her hair burned off told Jesse the bartender had hooked up a hose to his water faucet and was spraying down an escape hole in the wall until a flaming beam fell and knocked him unconscious. Two women with no shoes and badly burned arms and backs dragged him out of the building just before what was left of the wall collapsed behind them.
Fire trucks from surrounding communities arrived, mostly too late to do anything but watch the biggest bonfire anyone had ever seen.
Dupre was limping badly. He had broken his foot kicking the wall. He refused medical help. He was too busy rounding up Wheelers to charge out into the night in search of Gypsies.
The band was covered in soot and coughing up smoke and ash as they stood near the bayou, watching The Safari Club burn. Flames shot into the sky a hundred fifty feet. The heat was so intense they had to back further away from the conflagration.
Jesse held Amy close. He had nearly lost her. The smell of smoke in her hair made him want to take care of her forever. He was beginning to realize what a great team they made. Slowly, but surely, her happiness was becoming as important to him as his own.
She tried to wipe the soot from her eyes. “You saved me. You and Dupree.”
“Hey, you saved a few folks yourself.”
“I wouldn’t have been any good to anyone if you two hadn’t gotten me off that floor. I have never been so terrified in my life. They weren’t going to let me up. I couldn’t move. I was being buried alive. Remind me to thank that big goon, Dupre.”
Butch embraced Jesse. “I can’t believe we made it out alive. Great call on breaking down the wall, Jesse. We were all goners until you made that move.”
“We did it together,” Jesse said.
Dale coughed out a cloud of smoke. “We’ll probably be the first rock and roll band to win the Medal of Honor.”
Nobody laughed.
Rene had Polly on his arm. “How much did we make at the door?”
“My guess is the cash went up in flames along with the door and the floor and everything else about the Safari Club,” Butch said.
Dale passed around a large bottle of water. “They’ll be talking about this night forever.”
Staring into the blaze, Jesse felt the spirit behind the voice. He could have sworn he saw the giant features of a man wearing a horned buffalo hood. laughing. He wondered why the voice would be laughing.
Butch shook Jesse by the shoulder to bring him out of his reverie. “What made you think we could break down the wall?”
Jesse wasn’t about to reveal the source of his inspiration. He’d learned to keep quiet about the voice. At least now he knew the voice wa
s on his side.
He tried to shake the soot and ashes out of his hair. “Pure desperation.”
They had been too busy evacuating the crowd to save their equipment from the supernatural force of the conflagration. The only gear they managed to salvage was Butch’s guitar and Tim’s fiddle. The drums and all the amps and microphones and cables and speakers and monitors and the soundboard—lost.
Butch wondered aloud about the gear they’d lost. “I don’t know how we’re ever going to replace everything.”
As they sat along the bayou and watched the fire burn madly into the night, Tim was the only one to speak. He recited a line the band all recognized. “Smoke on the water, and fire in the sky.”
Somehow, the band, as only a band can do, came together in perfect time to chant, like Buddhist monks, the Deep Purple guitar riff for the hit song, “Smoke on the Water.”
Dun, dunn, da
Dun, dunn, da da
Dun, dunn, da
Dunn, da da
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SEA SHELL
Three days after the fire, the band met at Jesse and Amy’s apartment. Butch was first to state what had been troubling everybody since the fire. “We can’t go on without our gear and I don’t see any way we can afford to replace it.”
Dale stood up to give a pep talk like a football coach whose team is trailing by thirty points at halftime. “We’re going to get jobs as waiters. We can make good money and put half of what we make into an equipment fund.”
“I didn’t come to New Orleans to be a waiter,” Tim said.
Rene cut the conversation short. “Hold on. No need for all this. I already talked to my father and he said he’ll help us get a loan to buy new gear.”
Jesse did not like the idea of the band becoming more dependent on Rene and his family. “Getting a loan sounds well and good until you remember we have to pay it back with interest.”
The comment caused a thoughtful silence among the band until Rene responded defiantly. “You got a better idea?”
Jesse held his hands up and shrugged his shoulders to admit he didn’t have a better idea. He hated being backed into a corner, especially by a drummer who was trying to be the leader of the band.
Rene’s father helped arrange a loan to replace the musical gear lost in the fire. The loan provided a major equipment upgrade, but the band was now completely dependent on the financial backing of Rene’s family. Jesse may have saved the band from the fire but Rene put them back in the frying pan.
Jesse tried to look on the bright side. The new microphones were better, the drums were bigger, the mixing board got a few more channels and the P.A. got so big it couldn’t fit in Jesse’s van and Rene’s truck. The band would need a U-Haul trailer to haul the new gear. They would also have to come up with seven hundred and fifty dollars a month to pay on the equipment loan. Jesse didn’t think about the monthly payment when he was in the music store in New Orleans, picking out a better sound system than he ever dreamed of having.
Rene tried to make nice. “What do you say, Jesse? Are we having fun now, or what?”
Jesse was realizing how grateful he should be. “Your father’s being great about all this. I don’t know what we would have done without him.”
“We would have thought of something,” Rene said. “This is a band of destiny.”
Jesse gave Rene a big hug. “Yes, it is, my brother. And it’s all built on the drums and bass.”
“You got that right.”
News of the fire at the Safari Club made headlines in the New Orleans Times-Picayune Newspaper. The story focused on the many fire code violations that contributed to the tragedy. The band’s life-saving heroics got no ink. Even so, word spread quickly among music lovers about the band that saved its crowd from a terrible fire in the middle of a war between two motorcycle clubs.
The band’s agent was now able to book them three or four nights a week, making at least three hundred a night and sometimes as much as seven fifty. On a good week they could make three grand, which sounded great until fifteen hundred was deducted for travel, meals and lodging, loan payment, and trailer charges. That meant take home pay of three hundred a man before taxes, which nobody was about to pay. On a bad week, there was no take home pay. On a worse week, they went in the hole.
Jesse knew the band was lucky to find steady work in an era when Disco Music had nearly wiped out live performances by flesh and blood musicians. Even so, the money got even better when they started playing Mississippi Gulf Coast towns like Lakeshore, Long Beach, and Gulfport. Beach clubs still wanted live bands.
The Divebomberz were working hard and partying harder. It wasn’t exactly naked showgirls falling out of hotel windows, but women came out of the woodwork to be with the band. They were ready for anything. Beach parties occasionally turned into naked fire-jumping contests. The band found itself on the front lines of the sexual revolution. There were casualties. Jesse did his best to be faithful to Amy, but sometimes his best wasn’t good enough. The women were aggressive and completely entranced by rock musicians.
Amy was not pleased about Jesse being gone for more than a week at a time, suspecting the worst from the wicked excesses of the road. She had taken a job teaching high school art so she was stuck at home during the week. One Friday night, she made a surprise visit to a bar on the beach in Gulfport called The Sea Shell.
Her timing could not have been worse for Jesse. Amy caught him after the first set, on break, outside the club, on the beach, with a flirtatious and curvaceous young woman who was in the process of stripping down for a skinny dip.
“Hey, you! Asshole!” Amy screamed at Jesse over the roar of the surf and a fierce wind.
A storm was blowing in fast and hard. The National Weather Service had issued hurricane warnings. The gale force disaster was nothing compared to what Amy was about to unleash on Jesse.
“Hey, I wasn’t going in with her,” Jesse said as the young woman began trying to dress herself. The wind blew her shirt into Amy’s face. Jesse stepped between Amy and the bare-breasted girl.
Amy threw the woman’s shirt to the sand and glared at Jesse. “Don’t tell me you’re defending this little whore.”
“Watch your mouth, bitch,” the girl said as she jumped around Jesse, grabbed her shirt and pushed Amy to the sand on her butt.
Jesse bent down to help but he was way too slow. Amy had already regained her footing, launched into the girl and plowed her into the surf like a defensive end sacking a quarterback.
The mostly naked girl was not ready for the sudden attack. Her legs went out from under her as Amy took her down into two feet of choppy water and held her head underwater. All Jesse could see of the girl was kicking feet and flailing arms. Amy wasn’t letting her up for air.
“Amy, let her go,” Jesse shouted as he ran into the surf. “I don’t even know her name. Nothing was going on. She just got drunk and dared me to go swimming in the storm.”
Amy didn’t even look at him as she kept both hands on the girl’s head. The flailing was getting weaker by the moment.
Jesse had to tackle Amy into the water to keep the girl from drowning.
Once the sputtering and choking girl got to her feet, she fled the scene as fast as her legs would take her. She grabbed her shorts, sandals, and shirt and ran down the beach in her wet panties and into the darkness, still coughing up salt water and gasping for air.
Amy pointed her finger at Jesse as they squared off in waist deep water. “You’re the one I should be holding underwater.”
“Well, you managed to get us both soaking wet. Come on, let’s get inside the Sea Shell. This storm is about to hit.”
“You go on back to your precious band. If you think I’m going back into that low rent joint with a bunch of raging drunks, you’ve got another thing coming. And who names a club The Sea Shell?”
Jesse ignored the sarcastic question. “It’s a hurricane party. They’re just having fun. You need to come with me. You
’re all wet. It’s not safe out here.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Amy said. “You’re the one who’s not safe. One week, you almost burn me up in a fire, and now you want to drown me in a hurricane. Why should I be with you? All you care about is yourself. You don’t care about me. You asked me to marry you before I even came down here. Now, you won’t even talk about getting married or even setting a wedding date. I traded in my TR6 so your band could have a van. I loved that car. I took a job teaching school so we could keep our apartment. I do the band t-shirts for free. I follow you around like some kind of groupie. And what do I get? I get to meet your new groupie.”
Jesse winced and shook his head. “She’s not my groupie.”
Amy’s tone amplified to hysterical anger. “What do you call it, then? She’s getting naked with you on the beach.”
“I wasn’t getting naked.”
“One more minute and you would have been.”
She started to cry as she waded out of the waves, pounding the water for emphasis. “You’d rather be a rock star than be with me.”
Jesse tried to grab her but she wouldn’t let him. She slipped out of his grasp. She wasn’t crying anymore. The rain was starting to come down hard enough to hurt.
“Come on, Amy. We’ve got to go inside. I’ve got two more sets to play.”
Amy walked away from him. “You go on. I’m going home.”
Jesse followed her. “Don’t go, Amy. I’m glad you came. Honest, I am. I need you to stay. We’ll have fun. You need to stay. You can’t drive home in this storm.”
Amy stopped and turned on him. “What you need, Jesse, is a good shot of reality. If you think I’m going to wait around forever, waiting for you to grow up, you’ve got another thing coming. I should have known all along you would never marry me.”
Jesse backed up a step. “Wait a minute. I love you. I really do. Don’t forget that.”
“You don’t love anybody but yourself,” Amy said as she poked him in the chest with her right index finger.
Rock and Roll Voodoo Page 9
