Read Online The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed - Free Book Online

doorframe, you could feel vibrations from the air conditioning so powerful it felt like a plane was about to take off through the wall. “It’s an old house,” was Eddie’s stock response. I told him I didn’t think it was age that was also causing every vent in every room upstairs to gush so much water they looked like mini waterfalls. “It’s normal condensation,” he said. “It’s because the doors are open so much.” I could only assume he thought I was blind, but then it dawned on me that he actually believed his own bullshit. Working under that theory was enormously liberating; I quit begging him and called his air-conditioning guy myself. When he finally deigned to turn up, he found that the clumsy, roly-poly Felipe had stomped on the ducts months earlier when he sprayed insulation in the attic and most of the airflow had been drastically restricted. Within an hour the waterfalls were staunched and the vibrations quieted.
    It wasn’t until May that I completely lost it, and then it was over the comparatively minor debacle of wrongly installed doorknobs. I had spent literally hundreds of hours looking for the perfect doorknobs and thumb-turn locks, and when they finally came I walked in to find that Abel and Tony had installed them all upside down, which is the way, they said, Eddie had told them to. This meant that they would have to take them out, Bondo all the holes (we were starting to have more Bondo-ed surfaces than wood), sand and repaint the doors, and reinstall the hardware. I knew it was not the end of the world, and if Eddie had not condescendingly informed me that it was not the end of the world, I wouldn’t have snapped. But he did. When I called him he said, “It’s not like the roof fell in, Julia.” No, that would come later. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be thrilled it wasn’t a catastrophic mistake, just yet another one that was unnecessary, stupid, destructive, time-consuming, and expensive. (I had now found my own very meticulous, but insanely pricey painters who charged by the hour.)
    Then came the clencher: “You told me to do it that way.” I didn’t care if this was more of the bullshit he believed or not, I knew it wasn’t true, and I also knew that if he repeated it I might actually have a stroke, so I asked him please not say it again. Then he told me he was coming right over, and I told him that if he did I would kill him. More than anything in the world at that particular moment, I did not want to have Eddie in my line of vision. “I’m coming,” he said again. “Eddie, I don’t think you get this. If you come over here, I swear to God, I will kill you. I am not kidding.” I was standing on the front porch, screaming into my cell phone, giving the neighbors another show, and I knew I should stop but I couldn’t. By the time I had assured Eddie that I was serious, cars were slowing down and front doors were opening.
    I called John. Eddie called John. And John, in the end, went downtown and smoothed over what Eddie described as his “hurt feelings” with several cold beers at Lafitte’s. My own feelings—along with my nerves, our bank account—were shot all to hell. I had waited all my life for what I thought would be the privilege of creating the home I wanted. And while I still felt as though it was a privilege, it was also all-consuming slow torture and there was more than one moment that I longed for the occasional unencumbered loucheness of my long-ago life on Bourbon Street. Eddie, on the other hand seemed perfectly fine. A few days after John defused our standoff, his partner asked me if would I provide a blurb for their CD; Eddie himself asked if I thought maybe the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, whose board I had recently agreed to join (more commitment), would be interested in a virtual reality tour of their collection. I did not tell him to dream on; in fact, I told him I’d see what I could do. Both John and I had obviously lost our minds, or maybe we