The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (4 page)

Now, suddenly, I was no longer the wry observer, but heavily invested in the city and its citizens, along with the serious flaws and entertaining foibles of both. There is nothing like a big chunk of real estate to immediately focus the mind, but I had no regrets. The things that had drawn me to the city in the first place were still right here. So that night, our first night as homeowners, McGee came over and the three of us sat cross-legged on the kitchen counters, eating take-out Chinese and drinking more Champagne out of the heavy glass Lucullus flutes I’d brought over from Bourbon Street. McGee had lived in New York for most of the time I had; when she left her husband—and the suffocating confines of Westchester County—she came straight to New Orleans and eventually bought her own house, a lovely Uptown duplex with a garden in the back and a couple of cats. Now here we were, the former Gunga Den-goers, finally (sort of) grown up. I don’t think I’d ever been so content. It was August 2004, a little over two years since we’d married and a month shy of my forty-fourth birthday. Before we left that night, I washed the glasses and put them, a tad prematurely, in one of the kitchen cabinets. I didn’t know it yet, but it would be almost a year before we’d actually move in.

T
HERE WAS A
lot to do, but one of my strengths, which can sometimes be a serious weakness, is that I think I can make pretty much anything happen by the sheer force of my will. Also, my instincts about people are usually on the money. I was convinced, therefore, that I would be the only person in the universe who would have an on-time, under-budget, and stress-free renovation working side by side with a brilliant contractor whom I adored. I’d done it before, in New York of all places—though the job, admittedly, had been far smaller. Also, we had survived the debacle at Betty’s with our marriage and our mutual sanity intact—how much worse could it be?

There was also the fact that our contractor, Eddie, had been recommended by Patrick Dunne, whose taste I respect enormously and who had successfully worked with him on smaller projects in the Quarter. Patrick had brought Eddie to another house we’d looked at but did not buy, and I liked him immediately. He was tall and thin with longish gray hair, a laid-back affect, and what seemed to be a sense of humor—at one point, he told me, he’d been a stand-up comic in L.A. and had appeared in a movie of the week. More to the point, he responded to everything I asked about that day with “doable” or “no problem.” He wore faded blue jeans and scribbled constantly on a legal pad, and I decided he was totally cool. In the car, John’s response, as always, was more guarded—which, as always, irritated me. What is your problem, I wanted to know. I’m the one who’ll be dealing with him every day, he’s clearly the guy, why look any further? In our marriage, the joke—and the truth—is that John’s the tortoise and I’m the hare and when we bought the house I didn’t want to waste another minute on pesky tasks like screening other possible contractors. John didn’t object, so I called Eddie. A week after the closing, he turned up with his crew, and the nightmare began.

The first phase, demolition, actually went pretty well. We had hired my friend Lewis Graeber, a Mississippi architect who had practiced in New Orleans for years and who specializes in period houses, to tell us what to undo. We restored all the interior doorframes back to the same—large—size, gave a 1930s jalousie window in the entrance hall its original Greek key shape, and reopened a second door leading outside from the sunroom that had been Sheetrocked over. Out went hollow interior doors, hollow “brass” doorknobs, and a dozen bad light fixtures. Out went the glass-shelved wet bar in the library, the flimsy French doors to nowhere in a second-floor bedroom, a nook for a sculpture in the second parlor that rendered the powder room behind it so tiny the door barely opened.

Eddie’s guys were great at ripping everything out, mostly because they were so big. The team was led by Abel, a naturalized American fireplug from Honduras who’d gotten thrown out of the Marines for punching his superior officer, and who spent the great majority of his off time at Razoo’s, a Bourbon Street bar known for frequent and occasionally deadly altercations. His most regular helpers were Tony, a sweet teddy bear of a man who had never worked for a contractor before but was strong and very eager, and Felipe, a short, very round kid from Ecuador, who was forever penning caricatures of himself and the others on unpainted bits of Sheetrock and pieces of lumber he left for me as presents. (I still have a particularly well-rendered drawing of himself as a nude sybarite eating grapes and wearing a crown of laurel.)

They ripped out, reframed, and Sheetrocked so fast I was heartily encouraged, so when it came time to tackle the five bathrooms, I told Eddie to go for it. They were all disasters, but originally we had discussed doing over only the downstairs powder room and our two master baths in the interest of “going slow” and “saving money,” two terms that were becoming more and more quaint by the day. Once I saw the dust and general havoc wreaked by ripping out the tubs and toilets and sinks in our bathrooms, I knew the time to do everything was right then. Also, I was armed with an especially dangerous piece of pornography known as the Waterworks catalog. I had already picked out an Empire corner tub, Crystal sponge and soap basket, and Easton étagere for one bathroom, and an Exeter pedestal lavatory, elongated water closet, and Etoile double robe hook for the next. All the showers were going to get elaborate temperature gauges and pressure valves; John would have no less than three different showerheads in his alone. I was on a roll.

Still, when I came home and announced that we were gutting all the bathrooms, we both had a sort of dip in our stomachs. The next morning I went back to tell Eddie to hold off, but it was too late—the guys were in their speedy demo mode and everything was already in a pile in the driveway. I have to say that when I saw all those ripped-out Formica-topped vanities, the bizarre half-tubs, the Hollywood-bulb mirrors, the ancient toilets, and mottled glass shower doors, I was secretly delighted; John, ever the tortoise, told me later that for him, it had been cause for a major silent freak-out.

It turns out that it is just as easy to gut a yard as to gut a house. The same day I called Eddie, I also called my old friend Ben Page, a landscape architect in Nashville whose work across the country I had long admired. I’d wanted a garden for almost as long as I’d wanted a house, but the one we got was almost more than I’d bargained for—there was what amounted to a whole separate lot on the left side of the house and on the right, in the current “parking lot,” there was tons more space to landscape. Ben arrived early one morning, studied the site from every indoor window, and spent another hour walking the grounds before we broke for lunch. By the time we’d finished our first glass of wine he’d sketched the whole thing on the white butcher paper covering the table. There would be separate garden rooms, he said, the front “room” alongside the house, would be a formal lawn; the second, alongside the “porch,” would be a mad tropical “hidden garden” around a central fountain modeled after one Ben and John and I happened to love in the south of Spain. Beyond that, on the site of the infested fountain and a too-small terrace, there would be a spacious stone terrace and a dining pergola; at the back door there would be a kitchen garden, with herbs and fig trees and a pineapple guava, along with a smaller stone terrace where John could put his beloved grill.

The asphalt jungle on the other side would be blasted up and the bricks from the existing terrace would be used to make a semi-circular drive. The space in front of the garage would be green again with flowering trees and bulbs and climbing roses; the garage door would be replaced by two real windows with a garden bench between them. We needed new limestone front steps, new brick back steps, and limestone steps and landings outside both sunroom doors. It was major, major stuff, but we both immediately loved it. What can I keep? I asked Ben, meaning which plant materials still in the ground were worth working with. He didn’t miss a beat: the live oak and the magnolia. Right, the two ancient and enormous trees framing the house in the front that were sort of the whole point of living in New Orleans, in the Garden District, and that was it. A week or so after our meeting, the lunch-table scrap was replaced by a gorgeous hand-colored plan that arrived in the mail in a giant tube. It was accompanied by an a multi-paged, itemized document titled “Opinion of Probable Cost.” Before I got past page two, I had to stop and pour myself a vast tumbler of straight Scotch.

After I recovered, I called John Benton, owner of Bayou Tree Service whom I’d interviewed years earlier for a piece I did on New Orleans’s ongoing infestation of Formosan termites. The termites were eating all the city’s magnificent live oaks from the inside out and they were snapping in two like twigs. He’d been quoted in the newspaper so I’d gone to see him in his office, where he kept what looked like thousands of the nasty little Formosans in an aquarium. To demonstrate their chewing power, he dropped his business card inside and within minutes it had vanished. The termite show was memorable and he was funny, so I quoted him, a lot.

When I called him I could tell he didn’t remember our meeting but his interest was piqued by the size of our job (when you take out whole truckloads of trees and shrubs you eventually have to replace them), and by my mentioning that the piece he was quoted in had ended up in my first book, a collection of essays about the South. When he arrived the next morning, the book was on the dashboard of his truck and he’d already read the whole thing. Right off the bat, he told me he was obsessive compulsive, and given his recent speed-reading, I believed him. As we walked through the yard, he also told me he wanted to be a writer, he’d been reading books about words, was thinking about taking a course or two. I knew, for better or worse, I’d just met my new best friend. Within the week, a team of guys in Bayou Tree hardhats arrived with a fleet of equipment, and just as fast as Eddie’s crew had gutted our bathrooms, our semi-green yard was made into desert.

In the meantime, progress inside had slowed down considerably. We were still living at Betty’s, but I had—hilariously—promised the couple taking our place there that we would be out by the end of October. The plan had been to move into the third floor of the house, which we had refigured into a bedroom, sitting room, and bath, and which the guys would finish first, but we were well into October and it was nowhere close to being ready. Instead Eddie was busy refinishing all the floors and forcing me to choose downstairs paint colors. I did not yet know better, I figured this was some kind of secret contractor logic—maybe it was normal to get the walls and floors in pristine shape while battalions of people stomped in and out carrying things like bathtubs and table saws.

We would end up doing the floors two more times, and we had to do the walls again anyway because the painters had no idea what they were doing. Countless dead bugs, nap from their cheap rollers, spiderwebs, you name it—they were all painted onto my parlor walls along with the gorgeous Farrow & Ball paint in “Sutcliffe Green” I had ordered all the way from their North American plant in Canada. (I spent at least a thousand dollars on shipping and paint before I realized that the local Benjamin Moore store could easily color-match Farrow & Ball, but then, that was before I realized a whole lot of stuff.) At my insistence Eddie fired them and the next round was even worse. One day I walked in to find a guy painting the powder room with a roller that could only have been made with the very long hair of a Tibetan mountain goat. The walls looked like stucco and paint stalactites hung from the ceiling. Nice, neat short-napped rollers were, apparently, very, very difficult to find, and brushes, requiring as they did a modicum of skill, were obviously out of the question. I managed to get my hands on one, but when I held it up to stucco boy, he was blank faced: “
Qué es
?”

When this crack team got done with the second-floor front bedroom I’d claimed as my office, I walked through with Eddie marking the numerous mistakes he had failed to notice with a red wax pencil. About five minutes into it, I was so irritated that I quit making my marks and scribbled instead a big red and very profane message to the painters that immediately became legend. Within days, Benton reported that he had heard about it from one of his clients who had heard about it from one of her friends who happened to be my most ladylike neighbor. After much consultation between Eddie and the chief painter, new rollers were brought in, everybody was going to pay attention. They dutifully sanded down the powder room and reapplied its pretty, rich red, but not just on the walls—they painted the woodwork, the ceiling, everything. The effect was like being inside a bloodbath and I was ready for one. Instead, I marched out of the house, removed the paint contractor’s sign from our iron fence, threw it in the middle of First Street, and stomped on it repeatedly. Shortly thereafter, a paint moratorium was declared.

Even before my street tantrum, we were something of a curiosity. Abel reported frequent sightings of determined ladies in workout suits, walking through the house on uninvited tours. I’m sure they, along with everyone else in the neighborhood, were wondering what in the world we were going to do to the place. By local standards I was an unknown quantity, viewed, I think, as something of a “bohemian,” a journalist who lived in the Quarter and then not even all the time. I was spotted on TV occasionally, at Galatoire’s a lot, and at “nice” parties rarely—in my life so far I’d attended exactly one Mardi Gras ball and that was in the interest of anthropological research. For years the only people in the city I knew well enough to put on my Christmas list were a small handful of close friends, including the McGee sisters, and the gatekeepers at what were then my most frequented restaurants: Arnold at Galatoire’s, Patrick at the Bistro, and Lee at Peristyle, who was also invited to our wedding. During our house hunt I ran into a realtor, a
grande dame
of sorts who knew my mother through the Garden Club of America, and the first thing she asked me was why I had not tried to join the local chapter. I had no idea what to say, but in retrospect I should have been flattered that she thought I might actually be allowed in.

John was far better integrated than I. His musical career had come to an abrupt end when he was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, and though he is famous in very select circles for his late night renditions of “Gloria,” he spends far more time practicing law. He’s the managing partner of his law firm, has served on boards ranging from Children’s Hospital to a group that provides pro bono representation to indigent defendants, and was long ago inducted into one of the city’s oldest krewes. When he was married to his first wife, he went to the balls, wrote lyrics for skit nights at his club (that was, of course, affiliated with his krewe), played tennis at the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club, and was a member of Trinity Church. But after his divorce he went slightly off the radar—unless, that is, the waves were being transmitted in the general direction of the Rib Room restaurant or the Polo Lounge at the Windsor Court.