Free The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed Page B

where we slept like babies in a new down-covered bed of our very own.
    The next morning was not so jolly. Eddie failed to materialize and sent Abel instead, who stayed just long enough to nail some plywood over the big sunroom windows before jumping into his truck and roaring away. I closed and lashed all the shutters, dragged ladders in from the balconies, and cleared the flat roof of the many jagged pieces of marble that surely would have punctured the roofs of half our neighbors, while John got started in the yard. By the time we were done, we had tied down at least a dozen more ladders and filled the shed with random pieces of lumber, wheelbarrows and shovels, piles of brick and pieces of stone. There was not a whole lot we could do about the Bobcat or the cement mixer. We just hoped they wouldn’t end up in somebody else’s living room.
    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