The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  Many of the Dungeon regulars like to pretend that they are the dog-collared masters of the night instead of diabetic cube dwellers who have trouble getting laid because of how much alcohol and fried food they consume on a daily basis. The rest of the crowd is made up of stupid tourists and drunk high school boys with fake IDs who are lured off Bourbon Street with rumors of S&M cage sex—which, let’s be clear, if fat people with open sores and choke balls, slapping their fupas together does it for you, well, good luck with that. By 4 a.m., the shit show is in full throttle, and things go beyond the bar-sanctioned gothiness and sad chubby sex acts. And this is when Yanko’s contact walks in the door.

  “Ah! There he is,” Yanko says to me and then waves him down. “Gay André!”

  And yes, Gay André is his real name—as much as any name is real. His Christian name is Gay Costello the Third, but somehow this supposedly “made man” looks just like a teacup version of André the Giant. So André got tacked on over the years. Gay André is the name the city of New Orleans gave the petite mobster. It’s what everyone calls the Fairgrounds bookie. Himself included, often in third person, like he’s doing right now:

  “Yo! Gay André don’t play that way! Don’t be a stingy bitch unless you want Gay André to bust a cap in your ass!” Gay André shouts at the overly pierced bartender. This is Gay André’s idea of a joke. Fortunately for Gay André, the overly pierced bartender pretends this is funny, instead of treating it as the ass-whippable offense that it is.

  “Gay?” I say.

  “I hate to disappoint you, but I ain’t no queer. Gay is my birth name, ” Gay André says. “Faggots ruined a perfectly wonderful word. Gay used to mean happy. In my book, still does.”

  “Well, that’s ironic,” I say. “Seems to me with a name like Gay, you might be, you know, more open-minded.”

  “Fuck you. Who are you anyway? Alanis-fucking-Morrissette? This shit ain’t ironic. Gay was my daddy’s name—and his daddy’s name. Before the faggots stole that word to mean something horrible, just like they stole The Wizard of Oz and the goddamn rainbow. When you see a rainbow, you should think of Noah’s Ark and all the animals getting on two by two.” Gay André taps a shiny black matchbook to his temple and smiles. “Not butt-fucking.”

  “Wow” is all I can say. What an asshole.

  “Gay, it’s me. Yanko Melançon,” my brother finally speaks up.

  “Oh shit, boy, didn’t recognize you with that stupid hat on.”

  “This is my brother, Duke,” Yanko says.

  He shakes my hand. “What the hell kind of name is Duke?”

  I just stare at him.

  “Sorry to hear about y’all’s Mama.” Gay André fidgets with his matchbook. “She was a good woman. Looked after me like she was my own mama.”

  Yanko smiles. “You hear anything?”

  “I hear the police ain’t lookin’, but what you expect?” he says. “They ain’t gonna get off their beignet-eating, killing-poor-people asses to look for somebody like your mama.”

  “You been talking to the cops?” Yanko says.

  “Maybe.” He nods. “Buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Let me translate this for you from Gay André speak. Just like gay still means happy to this bizarre little homophobe, “Buy me a drink” means “Sit here and match me shot for shot until we both go blind.”

  “I’m not doing this,” I whisper to Yanko.

  “He wants to drink,” Yanko spits back in my ear.

  So I give the bartender my credit card, and I begin buying drinks, and just as Gay André promised, the more we feed him drinks, the more he talks. Gay André talks about oyster boats and cocaine lords, about banana kings and sex slaves, coffee shipments and Colombian cartels, about bad cops and waste management kingpins.

  Gay André is talking so much and so fast that he’s hard to follow. Between all his manic slurring and fast talking, Gay tells me crazy things, impossible things. He tells me that Mama told him that Donald Trump will be president in 2017, and Britain will abandon the European Union, and when that happens, all hell will break lose. The world will be primed for the end times.

  So she told Gay André to take his money out of the banks and to put it all on a horse—a gelding so fast it was named after Walter White, the speed dealer off of Breaking Bad. The tea cup mobster says that Walter White will one day win the Kentucky Derby, and it won’t matter who is president because that horse will make us millions, and that my mother promised him all of this.

  He claims that this is the last thing Mama told him before she disappeared. All the while, he worries this shiny black matchbook between his fingers. Some kind of hand washing compulsion. Some kind of firebug tell. He keeps opening and closing it, opening and closing to make sure the matches are still there. It makes me think of the passage in Mama’s letter:

  Give matchbook to fishwife.

  “So what do you know about The Unseen Hand?” I ask.

  “I know I ain’t near drunk enough to talk about anything like that.” Gay André throws back his whiskey and slams his empty glass down on the bar for me to have refilled.

  So I keep the drinks coming, and I steer the conversation back towards my mother’s long list of enemies within Gay André’s “Family.”

  “Who did this?” I hold up Mama’s gold coin necklace.

  “Oh, the raccoons.” He taps the matchbook on the bar. “That had to have been something to see.”

  “How do you know about the raccoons?”

  “Crazy shit like that travels fast.” He takes a shot of bourbon and then sticks his tongue into the empty glass, like a bee searching for the last drops of nectar.

  “I haven’t told anybody but my family.”

  “Bobby Faucheaux likes the horses.”

  “So who did this?” I hold up the necklace to Gay André.

  “My family is full of crazy motherfuckers, boy, but ain’t nobody I know got time to go find all those raccoons and put them in your house. Seriously, where you even find that many raccoons? Why not just leave a fucking note? Know what I’m saying?”

  “I need to know who did this.” I shake the necklace in his face.

  Gay André takes another shot of bourbon. “Look, I don’t know nothing about no raccoons, but…”

  He pulls my head close to his mouth, almost French kissing my ear, and whispers, “There’s this guy over on the West Bank. He’s friends with Stanky Franky Esposito. Everybody calls him ‘The Loup Garou.’ Got all the dirty cops looking for him. Sure enough, The Loup Garou knows where your mama is.”

  “Loup Garou?” I push him off me. “Like the werewolf-Loup-Garou?”

  “Shut up! Don’t say that so loud!” Gay André’s bottom lip trembles. “You can’t be saying that name so fucking loud in here.”

  “Seriously?”

  Gay André doesn’t answer. Instead, he trips over his bar stool, trying to get away from me as fast as his short legs can carry him.

  “We’re not done!” I say.

  “Oh, yeah, bitch. We done.” He walks out of the bar.

  I look over at his empty glass. He left his precious matchbook.

  I pick it up and inspect it:

  Chris Owens Club & Balcony.

  It’s my mother’s unmistakable handwriting:

  “There are no coincidences, only the chess moves of The Unseen Hand.” Mama’s tired old saying rings in my head.

  15

  7:00 AM

  Snuck up on me

  When I walk out of the shadows of Ye Olde Dungeon, I have to cover my eyes from the stabbing sunlight. I open my fingers, bit by bit, to let my pupils adjust to the street. I smell piss. I look over at Yanko, and he’s soaked in urine, and somehow I know that the urine he is drenched in is not his own. But that’s what he gets for eating his weight in “Cherry Bombs”— Everclear-soaked maraschino cherries. Being the big-time celebrity that Yanko is, we were fed Cherry Bombs like peeled grapes by tattooed Goth girls after Gay André ra
n away.

  One of these girls sucked a huge hickey on the side of Yanko’s neck: It’s a purple hematoma that goes yellow and brown and green on the edges.

  “Nice hickey.” I point. He shoves my hand away.

  As we stagger through the Quarter, trying to stay on the shady side of the street, I begin to remember who I was before Gay André insisted that I match him shot for shot, drink for drink.

  Emily!

  I pull out my phone to text her, but it’s dead. She is going to kill me.

  “I need to borrow your phone.”

  “I’m out of data,” Yanko says.

  “How are you out of data?”

  He holds up his flip phone. “Pay as you go.”

  “Why don’t you have a real phone?”

  “We’re going to miss the trolley.” Yanko takes off drunk running, his feet like eggbeaters beneath him. I chase after my brother, down the street, and onto the St. Charles Streetcar. I sit down on the wooden seats and catch my breath. We trolley our way through the palm trees and oaks. I am beginning to sober up—in that I can remember where I live now, who I am, and I am starting to feel kind of woozy and sick, not just woozy and drunk.

  “Come on. I’m thirsty.” Yanko points to the Rite Aid across the way. “I need some Gatorade and Tylenol. My head is killing me.”

  “You don’t need Gatorade,” I say.

  Yanko ignores me, and instead hops off the streetcar and walks out into the street and in front of a racing red Honda Civic that screeches and swerves to miss him. Yanko just stands there in the middle of St. Charles, wobbling and weaving, completely unaware that he was just the recipient of a miracle. He staggers into the grass.

  I hop off the streetcar to where Yanko has now fallen into the grass.

  “Oh, shit! Ants!” Yanko swats at the crawling red velvet that is now covering his arms and jeans.

  Yanko jumps up and down, and I do my best to help him brush off the red ants without getting them on me, too.

  “You okay?” I ask. “Didn’t you see the ant hill right there?”

  Yanko doesn’t answer me. Instead, he looks up at a plane flying overhead and wanders into the Rite Aid parking lot, laughing and singing his own songs to himself.

  “Yanko! Where are you going?” I shout.

  “I want some motherfucking Skittles!”

  * * *

  This Rite Aid, like all Rite Aids in this city, used to be a K&B. In fact, this is the K&B where a pharmacist tried to turn Mama in for prescription fraud back in the late nineties.

  “The pharmacist is from Shreveport. Too bad no one has told him not to disrespect the Lady.” Mama was remarkably placid throughout the whole investigation. She seemed almost delighted by the trial and the DA’s lack of preparation.

  “Did you see that fatso? His pants aren’t even zipped.” She pointed to her prosecutor. “That one, he grew up here. He knows better.”

  The day the K&B pharmacist was to testify against Mama in court, he was hit by the St. Charles streetcar and broke his hip. Coincidentally, just hours after the pharmacist’s hip was shattered, Rite Aid announced that it was buying K&B Drugs, a venerable institution that had shined its purple sign on New Orleans street corners for the better part of 90 years. Within a matter of weeks of the announcement, all of K&B’s beloved purple signs were erased from the streets of New Orleans.

  The citywide disappearance of K&B purple along with the hobbled pharmacist’s sudden refusal to testify against Mama created a firestorm of rumors and front-page stories in The Times-Picayune. To make things even weirder, the prosecuting attorney, the one so fat he couldn’t keep his pants zipped, fell dead of a massive coronary while eating Oysters Rockefeller at Galatoire’s the day before closing arguments.

  The case was dropped against Mama due to lack of evidence and, to be honest, because the judge was now terrified of Mama’s evil eye. This fear spread into a backlash from a very vocal minority. Five to six very angry and very religious Protestants from Uptown picketed our house with signs warning Mama that “Only God Knows the Future!” However, the protesters didn’t bother Mama. She loved the attention.

  “So much better to be feared than loved,” Mama would say just before she would walk out the front door to the grocery store to buy her cigarettes. As soon as her shoe hit the porch, the protesters scattered like mercury from a broken thermometer. They were as terrified as they were outraged. Mama ate this up like gumbo, but for me, all that secondhand scorn ruined any hopes I ever had of making a real friend in high school, much less ever getting a date.

  The weight of these friendless days in the nineties is upon me as I stand here in the middle of this old K&B drug store, looking for my drunk brother up and down these aisles of candy, pills, and tampons.

  I lose it.

  I weep, like so many drunks do every morning in New Orleans. I wander onto the antacids and the laxatives aisles, crying like a lost child.

  * * *

  “There you are. Let’s go,” I say.

  “Why are you crying?” Yanko says.

  The hickey on his neck is almost black, and the teeth marks are swollen and red. He looks bad. And just when I don’t think Yanko could look any worse, his mouth and tongue swell. He gags. Last night’s Cherry Bombs explode. Yanko spews everywhere. The bright red vomit splatters onto the linoleum floor.

  “Ah, man.” This Rite Aid clerk stops as he’s walking by. “Hipster-looking motherfucker puking all over my goddamn floors.”

  Maraschino cherries and undigested alcohol flood out of Yanko in a tide as unstoppable as my tears.

  The Rite Aid clerk brings us a mop and bucket on wheels.

  “You don’t clean this up, I’m calling the cops,” he says.

  “For what?” Yanko wipes a long thread of drool from his chin.

  “Public intoxication. Destroying property.” The clerk hands me the mop. “You name it. They can throw your drunk ass in jail for it.”

  “We’re going to need some paper towels.” I point to the red splatter.

  The clerk turns around and walks over to the paper products.

  “Let’s go!” Yanko takes off running.

  Yanko runs out the front door, and I do the same. I’m not going to jail because my idiot brother threw up in the middle of Rite Aid.

  Yanko eventually runs out of breath just past Constantinople.

  “Wait up!” I pick up the pace and try to walk beside him.

  “Walk faster.” Yanko shoots a snot rocket out of his nose.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “What Gay André said last night.”

  Yanko keeps walking faster.

  “Look.” I hold up Mama’s gold coin necklace. “He said some guy who calls himself Loup Garou knows where Mama is. That’s who did this to me!”

  “That thing is cursed! Get rid of it!” Yanko grabs the necklace out of my hand and tosses it long and far, towards the Mardi Gras bead-encrusted trees that line the street. Mama’s gold coins jangle and twist, turning over and over, into the French-blue sky. The gold coins hurl towards the branches of an ancient oak tree that is dripping in plastic beads.

  The necklace crashes into the top branches.

  “Asshole!” I walk over to the tree.

  “Leave it!” Yanko raises his left hand and gives me the middle finger as he keeps on walking.

  The necklace dangles high in the air. I grab a garbage can and prop it against the trunk. I climb into the lower branches. I pull myself higher and higher until I am teetering above St. Charles.

  Just beyond my grasp, the necklace sways.

  I touch the coins with the tips of my fingers. Maybe if I get a broom handle or a football or maybe an old beer bottle I can knock it down. But before I can concoct a plan, a blue jay swoops down, squawks and flutters. It flaps and flies away with Mama’s necklace.

  Just like that. Physics be damned; that blue jay just flew off with a gold necklace three or four tim
es its body weight.

  Blue wings on the blue sky, the gold coins glinting in the sun.

  Gone.

  “Goddamn it!” I pull on the plastic beads that are dangling over my head. I yank on them and break the strand. The beads bounce off of me. They ping onto the ground like purple hail.

  I am losing it. I am having a full-blown panic attack about these goddamned Mardi Gras beads. These plastic tears come from deep beneath the ocean, from wells like the Sub-Ocean Brightside, and they will return to the sea, swept up by the rains, rushed down the storm drain, and pumped into the Gulf of Mexico, where they will be swallowed by schools of tuna, grouper, and red snapper, and then the plastic will be pulled from the open stomachs of dead pelicans and sea gulls that are so full of toys and Mardi Gras beads that the rotting birds will look like some kind of fucked-up piñatas to the children who find them.

  16

  8:42 AM

  May 11, 2010

  I am just trying to figure out how to get home, how to get out of this fucking sun and not throw up all over my shoes like Yanko just did back at the RiteAid. And right when I think I have figured how to walk back to The House of the Neon Palm, a muddy yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser pulls up and stops right in front of me, blocking me from crossing the street.

  “You got to be kidding me,” I say under my breath. I want to slam my fist on the hood but don’t.

  These are stupid tourists—lost and about five seconds from rolling down their windows to ask me directions to John Besh’s new restaurant. But they don’t roll down their windows to ask me for directions that they could have just as easily looked up on Google Maps. They open their doors, and they come at me with shiny chrome guns in their hands.