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

were suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. It was the only explanation. A sane person would have fired our “captor”—hell, our torturer—the night of the doorknobs rather than appeasing him. His mistakes, the ones we knew about, that is, had already cost us a literal fortune in paint alone.
    In fact, it was the painters we should have consulted—they had better insight into Eddie and the increasingly sloppy way he and his subcontractors did business than anyone. They were the folks I called in to repair the messes; they heard the daily conversations and witnessed the daily screw-ups. I was the novice—they were far more familiar than I with how a professional job is done. Their boss, Billy Dupré, was a light-skinned Creole who was such a gentleman that months passed, and many, many dollars changed hands, before I could bring myself to call him anything but Mr. Dupré. His guys—Byron, PeeWee, Sean, and James—were really good at what they did and they respected each other, but I could tell they did not have much use at all for Eddie. Unfortunately, they were also polite and minded their own business. None of them, Mr. Dupré included, told me what they really thought until it was way too late.
    So we stayed the course, and in early July, ten months after the process began, the third floor was ready enough for us to occupy. We bought a box spring and a mattress, said good-bye to Elizabeth, Lizzy, and Honey, the loyal yellow lab to whom I’d become hopelessly attached, and toted our suitcases “home.” Two weeks later, a dead body was found a block and a half up the street, shot in the head, and dumped on the curb. In August, four weeks after that, came the biggest natural disaster in the country’s history. So much for a settled life.

5
     
    L IKE MANY PEOPLE in New Orleans, I had not paid a whole lot of attention to the increasing likelihood that Katrina was heading our way. I was, as usual, far more focused on the house: There was the refreshing fact that my new team of outside painters, the hilarious Joe Wallis and his right-hand man, Freddy, was doing an excellent job, and the enduring fact that Eddie’s team was not. (On the Friday before Katrina’s arrival, his outdoor guys had laid the stones for the front walk—but at the wrong elevation, a fitting, for them, swan song, which meant it was no longer possible to open the front gate.) Also, we had already been through one hurricane (Cindy, who arrived in early July was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane after the fact), and evacuated for another—but only as far as the downtown Marriott. Even before we checked in, it was clear that Dennis would bypass New Orleans and bear down on Pensacola instead, but we had paid in advance (the rule during hurricane season) and I was eager to try out the hotel’s heavily promoted new down bedding. It did not disappoint—our weekend on Canal Street was the closest thing to a holiday we’d had since the renovation began.
    As pleasant as that particular “evacuation” turned out to be, I remember thinking: There is no way this city can keep beating these odds. Just one season earlier, the Florida Panhandle and the Alabama coast had been pounded with no less than four catastrophic storms—Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne—and now Dennis was dealing another blow. In the years since I’d first arrived in New Orleans, we had dodged the bulk of Andrew’s heavy artillery, and Opal and Georges had missed us altogether. Since then, the warmer waters in the Gulf had made hurricanes not just more plentiful but a lot more powerful. My father, a successful but prudent gambler, had warned me long ago that the house always wins. In this case the house was nature and there was no way our luck could hold.
    As moments of clarity go, it was a brief one. It had taken me more than twenty years to decide to commit to a city—the daily imagining of its destruction (not to mention the destruction of a house into which