The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (7 page)

It was an endeavor that would have gone a lot faster had we been able to avail ourselves of the considerable strength and energy of Antoine Jones. Antoine had worked for me for the past nine years, but for the last four days he had been AWOL, a state of affairs that was not entirely novel. He is an addict and homeless by choice, which meant that he’d be perfectly fine one day, and the next, with no warning—and no way to call him—he’d simply fall off the face of the earth. Sometimes I’d hear from him, hyped up, talking too fast and too loud into a pay phone receiver from God knows where, full of excuses and promises to see me “tomorrow, Julia, I swear.” His mother had died on four different occasions during his time with me, and she may well have been dead to start off with, I will never know. I realize that most sensible people would have long ago dropkicked Antoine to the fates and gone in search of a more reliable helper, but he remains the hardest worker I have ever known—as well as one of the sweetest and funniest people. The truth is that when he fell off the map I missed him. I’d huff and puff and do my own swearing that “this is it, I mean it this time” but after about three or four days, I’d look at Rose and she’d get out the phone book. If we were feeling optimistic, we’d check first with the Quarter Laundrette, a “washateria” on Bourbon, where he hung out occasionally and kept some of his things; the last call was always to Orleans Parish Central Lockup, where Rose was on a first-name basis with the receptionist. More often that not he was in jail, having been picked up for public drunkenness or possession of crack, only to emerge thirty days later like clockwork, rested, contrite, and ready to get back to work.

Antoine had come into my life when I hired him to move me from my Royal Street apartment to Bourbon, and I knew we would get along famously when he didn’t look at me like I was a lunatic after I showed him the big pots of Confederate jasmine on my balcony and asked him to help me unwind every strand of every plant from the iron railings they had taken over. I couldn’t bear the thought of hacking them off at their bases for the sake of expedience, and Antoine, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, was at least as tender with them as I was. But it was a brief honeymoon—by the end of my first week at Betty’s, he had called three times between midnight and two in the morning asking for ten dollars. The third time he told me he needed the money because he had a “berl” (otherwise known as a boil) on his “butt” that required immediate lancing. In a rare fit of good judgment, I told him never to call me again.

I didn’t see him for two years, by which time the house was overdue for a major cleaning and I figured no harm would come from hiring him for a few days at most. I put out some feelers, he turned up, and we worked side by side for a week, after which my long dependency began. Antoine was a year younger than I, and while not as tall, he was wiry and strong, with a sharp, if uneducated mind. (At one point it dawned on me that he could barely read, but he was so careful about hiding it, I never wanted to put him on the spot—the only grocery store I ever sent him to with a list was the neighborhood Matassa’s, whose delivery boys kept half the alcoholics and crazy people in the Quarter alive, and where I knew they would artfully fill the order for him.) Over time, his skill set expanded greatly. He had always been able to lift anything (I once saw him carry a sofa down two flights of stairs on his back); and he was an ace cleaner, but he also learned to repair antique furniture and polish silver, and he became an expert gardener. He was my second set of eyes whenever I hung pictures or rearranged rooms, my enforcer when it was time to straighten up my office and dump files, and he invariably knew what I wanted before I did, handing me this tool or that handbag. Once I even pressed him into duty as a bartender.

He’d turned up at my gate on a Saturday morning after a bender, having been gone for two days, looking like a mess and begging for cash. I was about to throw him out when the phone rang—unexpected friends from New York and London were at the airport and on their way over. As was frequently the case, I went from wanting to kill him to viewing him as a godsend in a matter of minutes. He cleaned himself up first, tidied the whole house and the courtyard, and was done in time for me to teach him how to make Bloody Marys. The guests were rowdy and thirsty and Antoine was doing great, but I had forgotten that he took pretty much everything I said literally. When I told him to “keep the drinks coming,” he thought I meant exactly that; at one point I looked around and saw that everyone had four or five full glasses at their elbows, each one perfectly garnished with a leafy celery stick and a wedge of lime.

On the days Rose came, they laughed and smoked together and flirted like mad, keeping a standing weekly lunch date at Hula Mae’s, where Rose did the laundry and Antoine brought over shrimp po-boys or fried chicken. Between the two of them, they knew every detail of my personal life, which, in the beginning of their tenure, included A., the man they called the “president,” until he was “impeached” by John, whom they had been rooting for. Rose has a very proper common-law husband named Thomas, and Antoine teased her about him relentlessly, but he looked up to her and carried his version of a torch. “That Rose is something,” he’d say, shaking his head and grinning, but after he walked her to the bus stop at the end of the day, they went to entirely different worlds; hers included a stable relationship, an apartment, a close family, and an education. Still, what Antoine lacked in knowledge, he made up for in curiosity. At least once a week, he’d fix me with the quizzical look I came to know well: “Say, uh, Julia, what is that?” Invariably it would be a crazy white-person thing that amused him to no end, like the leftover take-out sushi in the fridge or the mad Mardi Gras headdress I’d made by glue-gunning dozens of butterflies and birds’ nests onto a homemade tiara of branches. But before long, he’d be practicing with my chopsticks and bringing me the abandoned nests he found in the garden.

We buried dead birds together and shook our heads over the frequently broken eggs of the mourning doves, never very smart about the spots they chose to lay them. In the mornings, he brought me coffee and the papers from Matassa’s, and the only things he ever lied to me about are what all addicts lie about—where he’d been and if he was using—but he never stole a thing from me or anybody else and I trusted him with everything I owned, including my car. There were plenty of crack heads in New Orleans who would do anything, steal anything—kill anybody—for a single fix, but Antoine was the equivalent of a social drinker. The problem was that the great majority of his acquaintances, “Spaceman,” say, or “Cowboy,” were derelicts and whenever he ran into them, he was incapable of sharing a beer or two and going on about his business. One beer would lead to ten; one hit on a crack pipe would lead to a serious downward spiral. His shelter of choice, the Ozanam Inn, served as the discipline he knew he needed, which is why he chose to spend his nights there, as opposed to a place of his own, which he easily could have afforded. At the Inn, no one is allowed in after seven
P.M.
and nobody gets past the door high. One missed night in the shelter usually turned into many nights of carousing, which almost always turned into jail time. The police not only recognized him as a small-time drug offender, they also knew he was an easy, nonviolent arrest. Antoine had never even owned a pocketknife. I am convinced they kept their eyes open for him.

It was a heartbreaking routine but one we all, especially Antoine, became inured to. His thirty-day stretches in lockup were like particularly unpleasant versions of the classic twenty-eight-day rehab model; when he was freshly out, clean, and determined not to end up back in jail, the shelter was his halfway house. There were showers, a hot dinner and breakfast, and a TV on which he watched his favorite shows (he loved Andy Griffith and most everything else on Nick at Night) with the other regulars, some of whom he counted as friends of sorts. It was hardly a life that anyone could adhere to forever, but for Antoine it was how he had worked out staying alive. In the beginning, I used to go over apartment ads with him in the newspaper, offering to set him up, explaining—a bit pompously, I realize now—the kind of life he could have. Embarrassed, or maybe just sick of the spiel, he’d smile and say sure he wanted to get a place, but when it came time to follow through, he always dodged the issue.

His worst enemy, other than himself, was Cassandra, a toothless whore and serious crack head with whom he professed to be deeply in love. She was, thank God, behind bars far more than Antoine, but when she was out they often stayed together with one of her dodgy relatives, a state of affairs that prolonged Antoine’s benders because he was mostly hidden from view of the cops. Cassandra weighed maybe eighty-five pounds soaking wet and looked to be seventy if she were a day, but it emerged that she was still of childbearing age when she gave birth to a son she said was Antoine’s while doing time in the women’s prison for prostitution and crack possession. She was aptly named and a master manipulator, and Antoine, who had the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old, was gullible as hell—he never questioned his paternity for a minute. But I was not much smarter. When mother and child got out of jail just before Christmas, I went to Kmart at Antoine’s request and spent a hundred and fifty dollars on a stroller complete with all the latest bells and whistles. He had wanted to convince us both—him and me—of his best intentions, yet a full year later Rose spotted it, still in its box, stashed with the rest of his things at the Quarter Laundrette. When I finally saw the child, he had the tragic wide-set eyes of a crack baby.

On that morning before the storm, I had long since gotten over being mad at Antoine for not showing up. I just wanted to find him and put him in the car with us, or, failing that, to ensconce him on the third floor with plenty of food and water and batteries. While I made turkey sandwiches and cleaned out the refrigerator (a project that took about two minutes since we hadn’t been in the house long enough to accumulate anything besides pickled okra, mustard, and Champagne), John made one last pass by all of Antoine’s usual haunts. I called Rose, but she was long gone, and when I checked on her mother, Roseanna, she had left too. Byron and Cameron called to report that the airport, with mobs of people panicking and begging to get on planes, was a full-blown madhouse—Egan’s 11:30 JetBlue had been the last flight out, and now they were on the road back home to Mississippi.

When John came back, without Antoine, there was nothing left to do but leave. We had a brief back-and-forth about the garbage, which was full of lobster shells: should we put it outside, where it would be another projectile, or inside, where it would surely stink up the place? In the end, we settled on the latter, since we’d already assured ourselves we’d be gone maybe two or three days at the most, the same operating principle that had guided our decidedly casual approach to packing. I had thrown my makeup, a couple of pairs of pants, and some T-shirts into a straw tote bag, left most of my good jewelry in a drawer, and all the things prudent people have at the ready—important household and tax files, treasured letters and photographs—on the floor in the boxes they were still packed in from the move. On the way out the door I grabbed my laptop and a few of bottles of good wine, and John grabbed the cooler with our sandwiches. We left his beloved white Mercedes on the street (after complicated calculations about where branches were most likely to fall), got in my big boat of a Cadillac Deville (a hand-me-down from my father), and pulled out of the drive at one in the afternoon, three hours after the National Weather Service issued a bulletin predicting “catastrophic damage” to the city, and three and a half hours after Mayor Ray Nagin called for the first mandatory evacuation in New Orleans history.

It was in the car that I ceased to be quite so sanguine. Roughly a million people ended up leaving the city before Katrina made landfall and we were traveling with what seemed like half of them. It took us four hours to go thirty-five miles—the evacuation traffic plans from the year before clearly had not been improved much, since inbound traffic lanes were completely devoid of people trying to enter the city, but still not open to those of us trying to get out. In the first hour we split a sandwich and were vastly entertained by the antics of the dogs and cats and birds crammed into people’s cars and trucks along with what looked like a lot more belongings than we had bothered to bring with us. I checked my cell phone messages and found that I’d missed one the day before from the angelic Mr. Dupré. He had gotten hotel rooms in Houston for his family and all his workers—did I want them to come by and help me secure the yard on their way out of town? The call only served to make me twice as mad at Eddie, who was our actual contractor after all—the stuff in the yard didn’t even belong to Mr. Dupré.

When I got done with one of my more inspired Eddie harangues, there remained three more hours of sitting in an essentially immobile car, during which time I discovered all manner of other stuff to freak out about, including an enormous English oil portrait of a young cricket player and a Chinese Chippendale sofa that had belonged to my great-grandmother, as well as the aforementioned Regency benches. Suddenly, irrationally, I was convinced the house was going to flood. “We should have dragged those things upstairs,” I moaned to John, adding that we’d been irresponsible and lazy and that if anything happened to that painting or that sofa, both of which my mother had wrangled from her sister on my behalf, she would kill me. John patiently explained to me what I already knew: that the days of the unfortunate Mr. Livaudais were over and those levees would hold; that like the Quarter and the other parts of the city’s early footprint, the Garden District was on high ground, eight feet above sea level, which is why people had chosen to build there in the first place. Anyway, he said, there is no right answer. If we’d taken the stuff to the second floor, it would surely be destroyed if the roof blew off or even leaked badly.