20

Standing Up for Myself

I ALWAYS GOT A LOT of grief from Linda’s brother, who used to be a chef but then switched to construction work. He had always acted like a dick towards me; I guess he felt I wasn’t good enough for his sister. In-laws often aren’t fun at the best of times — at least mine weren’t. During a visit to the in-laws’ place after work, I would tell Linda’s brother that we’d had a pretty hot fire during the shift, and he would say things like “You don’t know heat until you’ve worked in the kitchen of a large hotel.” He had no idea I’d been in fires as hot as the oven he used to bake his muffins. Sure, his job involved working over hot stoves, but my job meant crawling inside them.

On Christmas Eve 1989, I drove up to Linda’s parents’ home after my day shift at Regent Park. Of course her brother started slagging me. “What did you do today, hero? Play cards and sleep?”

“No,” I said. “I spent the day pulling burnt bodies out of a building.” Asshole. The night before, Toronto had suffered its largest mass murder — the Rupert Hotel fire.

The fire had started at about five in the afternoon on December 23. A series of events made things a lot worse than they needed to be, and the fire turned into a perfect storm of destruction. The Rupert Hotel was a rooming house that had been built in the 1880s and, as we’ve seen over and over again, rapidly took a turn for the worse as the neighbourhood went downhill. It was filled with people who were down and out, most of them older men who had fallen on hard times and were barely eking out an existence. To them, optimism was just a word in the dictionary. The ones who managed to acquire regular employment moved out of the hotel as soon as they could.

A disgruntled tenant fed up with garbage being tossed into the hallway took it upon himself to teach the pig who was doing it a lesson. He took a lighter to the bags of garbage in the hall.

The building was just a block from Station 7, less than two minutes away, but at the time the Rupert Hotel fire started, the station was battling a blaze north of the fire hall, at another rooming house. There was a lot of smoke and people were trapped. A second alarm had been called in, bringing extra trucks from a good distance away. Since the crews on the scene were using up air cylinders for their breathing apparatus, a support vehicle, Air Supply 1, was dispatched with extra bottles.

On its emergency run, with its lights flashing and siren blaring, Air Supply reached the corner of Parliament and Queen, where the Rupert Hotel was located. The driver saw heavy smoke billowing and people hanging out the windows. Some were bailing out, landing on the bus shelter below.

The driver of Air Supply radioed in to dispatch to ask if a fire at the Rupert had been called in. Not yet. “Make it a second alarm! We have victims hanging out the windows!”

The driver ran in to help, leaving the truck’s siren blaring — a very clever thing to do, because there were residents who didn’t know their building was on fire, and the noise drew them to the windows to see the danger they were in. This driver’s action saved many lives. But many more were not so fortunate; the fire moved fast and the smoke was lethal.

With all the closest trucks assigned to the other serious fire up the road, it would be several minutes before the next available crews would be able to save anyone. When they arrived, they had an enormous task ahead of them: multiple casualties, and victims still trapped by the fast-moving fire. When it was over, ten souls had lost their lives.

At 6:30 the next morning we arrived at work and immediately went to the still-smouldering building. The fire had required millions of gallons of water to extinguish, and the once-elegant hotel was now an ice-covered tomb. The tenant who had set the fire had got out while the going was good. He was charged with ten counts of manslaughter.

The fire had burned through the roof of the building, and a section of the roof and the third floor had collapsed into the second. We on Aerial 7 were tasked with going in alongside the police to photograph and extricate the victims. A foot or more of ice covered much of the interior. Getting those bodies out was going to be a tough job physically — but mentally even more so.

The human mind does many strange things when under stress. I don’t know if it’s a survival mechanism or what, but what I did that day horrifies me when I think back on it. One of the things a layperson has to understand is that any scene where people die a horrible death is our “office.” It’s where we work. The perspective of someone who sits behind a computer in a climate-controlled environment will be different from that of someone who regularly finds himself covered in human tissue.

My partner Mark and I accompanied the police “ident” team, taking photographs of the scene before we chopped the victims out of the ice and placed them in body bags for removal. The first victim we worked on was a man who had died face down in his bed. All his clothes had burned off and the mattress he was lying on was now just a bunch of tangled wire.

Photos were taken. We needed to place him in a body bag. Mark and I grabbed the victim to roll him over. He was stuck to what was left of the mattress. We tugged again — no go. During the fire his skin had melted and then cooled as it dripped down through the coils. We were going to have to rip his skin to get him off.

I came up with the idea of flicking him off the bed. So Mark and I each grabbed an edge of the mattress and began flapping it violently, trying to remove the guy from the wire as if we were old-time housewives shaking out linens in the morning sun. But it wasn’t working, and the absurdity of the situation soon began to set in. We started giggling as we tried over and over again to get the corpse off the mattress.

Remember, context is everything. Context, plus the emotional stress the person has to deal with. A reporter once asked a machine gunner during the Vietnam War how he could shoot women and children. “Easy,” he said. “You just don’t aim as far in front of them when they run.” Context. Emotional stress. In this sort of context, the emotional release doesn’t always match the emotional input. The mind defers to a more pleasant emotion to take you away from the pain of what you’re seeing.

A woman overlooking the operation from her balcony next door saw us struggling, her hand over her mouth, horrified. We finally got the man off the mattress and tried to place him inside the body bag, but he wouldn’t fit. His arms and legs were curled up so we couldn’t zip the bag closed. Mark and I had to break the cartilage in his arm joints to make him fit. By then my mind was getting pretty fucked up.

In the next room there was another man who had succumbed to the smoke. His body was on the floor, leaning up against the bed. The top of his head had bubbled out from the heat of the fire. The smell, like burnt pork, still hung in the air. As the police took photos, I crouched next to him, my fingers stuck up behind his head like a prank in a class photo.

We could lift up his upper body, but his legs were under the ice. We would need an axe to cut through it. After a half-hour or so I had the majority of the ice chipped away and then had to cut out the floor beneath his legs. The chunk of wood had to go in the bag as well; hardwood flooring that might once have supported a young couple on their honeymoon a century ago was now stuck to the burned legs of a corpse going to the morgue. Again we had to break his tendons and cartilage to flatten him out.

We were at it all day. Cold, wet, and emotionally numb from what I had seen and had to do, I stood silently next to a pile of bodies. I was still functioning, but all I wanted was to get the hell out of that fucking place. As I was walking up and down the second-floor hallway trying to stay warm, a police officer told me to watch out for the body. What body? She pointed, and under all the snow and ice and burnt timber, I saw the top of a head and a shoulder. I had been walking on that poor guy for hours without realizing it. My stomach, which had been so brave all day, finally let go. Most of what occurred on that day escapes my memory. I’m glad — no one needs to revisit those images.

So on that Christmas Eve, when Linda’s brother snarkily asked me what I had done during the day, I let the ignorant jackass have it.