The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  “What can a’getcha?” asked a broad white woman with more nose rings than Xerxes. Dionysus had already fallen into a trance watching the thick, bright-orange beverage labeled 190 Octane spin in beautiful symmetry. The bartendrix put her fists on her hips. “These freakin’ frat boys,” she said under her breath. “Hello? Can a’getchu somethin’?”

  He snapped to and remembered from Athena’s expedited Orientation to America lessons that he must pay for his wine—a concept the god had found quite comical. He had not paid for anything since handing that curmudgeon Charon the requisite fare for his passage down the River Styx. Athena had also dedicated an entire lesson to the apparent violent nature of the Americans. “They’re no better than the Yemenis,” Ares had said as he passed by.

  But I have battled the Titans! I am hardly preoccupied with some intoxicated Americans stumbling around a swamp.

  “A liter of your finest vintage!” he demanded with a smile, his hand smacking the bar.

  The fed-up bartendrix translated that to mean “a large 190 Octane,” the most popular flavor.

  Dionysus put the strange paper money—a fad he had never quite understood—on the bartop in preparation for his beverage. The bartendrix, seeing that the foreigner had put an ample amount of money on the wood, asked if he wanted an extra shot—of what, the Greek God of the Vine would never know, but he enthusiastically affirmed and took the heavy Styrofoam cup to an empty table near the window. He popped off the plastic lid and swizzled the straw through the thick orange concoction. He had tasted wines the color of the most gorgeous rubies and garnets, green-shining absinthes like melted emeralds, ouzo that was white like a cloud captured in a glass, and Ethiopian honeywine that resembled Apollo’s flowing golden locks. But Dionysus had never in all his travels that inevitably brought him to gaze into a drink seen a libation as invigorating as the electric-orange of his freezing-cold daiquiri.

  Three girls soon joined Dionysus at the table with such stealth he was taken by surprise.

  “Hey there, who’s having a toga tonight?”

  “I think I heard Sig Chi might be having something?” said the one exposing her tight, tan midriff.

  “No, they’re partying with Chi O,” said the one with light-red hair and ivory skin.

  “Why would he be the only one in a toga? He’s way too handsome to be a pledge.” The one who had initiated the conversation leaned in close, letting her brunette hair pour over her shoulders and bounce off her chest. “I don’t know what it is, but I like him.” She pulled out a miniature bottle of white wine, snuck a peek at the row of bartenders busy with the mid-morning rush, and poured a little into the god’s exposed daiquiri. “A little something extra for ya,” she said with a smile and a wink, then overturned the bottle and finished it on her own.

  The Greek God of Wine brought the red plastic straw to his lips and took a powerful sip of the drink. The daiquiri froze his throat as it slid down into his esophagus, and his eyes began to water.

  “Oh, my sweet nectar,” he said, holding the drink out in front of him like Prince Hamlet with the skull.

  His focus left the bright lettering of the Styrofoam cup and met the bulging, bug-like eyes of the three girls. The more of the daiquiri they drank, the more their eyes widened, their breathing accelerated, their chests bounced.

  None of this was strange to Dionysus. Quite the opposite—it had been both his blessing and his curse to cause women to delve into a maddening frenzy whenever his presence combined with their indulgence in the vine.

  The three girls made grunting, groaning, moaning noises as they sucked down their own helpings of the orange stuff.

  He had unintentionally helped turn the tide of another ubiquitous squabble between the English and French when he met a young girl in the countryside while on a self-imposed wine excursion. Experiencing the inspiration of the god, in true Amazonian fashion, the maiden took up the sword and led the armies of men to victory. Dionysus would later raise a glass and toast to her honor when he had learned she was burned at the stake.

  “Where do you want us to go? We’ll follow you anywhere,” said the redhead, who reminded him of one of the enraptured who rode atop the alabaster steed that tore Lycurgus—King of Thrace—into five separate pieces.

  Dionysus leaned back in his chair and sipped the orange slush saturated with grain alcohol. The girls’ fingers dug and clawed at the table, and they spun their hair in tornadoed circles, eventually falling into unison with their chants. After a few moments, their loud antics garnered the attention of the entire daiquiri shop, which began to buzz with concerned whispers. He had promised Athena he would not buttress the fanaticism after he neglected to control a ravenous group of women who tore through the Spanish countryside, killing their husbands and setting fire to the poorly guarded pueblos—they would have marched on Madrid had the Goddess of War not intervened herself, since by then, Dionysus had departed from the mob on the banks of the Duero to imbibe succulent purple wine.

  But the god had been told New Orleans was a city administered by madness and violence and alcohol and neglect, so when he got up from the table and walked out the door of the daiquiri shop nestled in the corner of the city, the three Maenads followed.

  Zibby

  Zibby had tried to put the book down, throw it out, set it on fire, Frisbee it out the window, but it had a magnetic pull—she swore she saw the paperback boomerang back into her bedroom—so once again she would be neglecting her orientation materials with her nose stuck in One L. She had never entertained the idea before, but perhaps this was a sign of sadomasochist hankerings, as it was her third time reading the book.

  She walked down South Carrollton and stopped at Rue de la Course, the coffeehouse on the corner of Oak that used to house a bank. The humidity that day had been particularly brutal, and although Zibby’s house was only three blocks from the neighborhood favorite, her shirt stuck between her shoulder blades and a bead of sweat rolled down her spine.

  She waited in the line of crane-necked mothers with strollers and guys in sandals scrolling and checking and scrolling and checking their phones. Last year, in this same line, she had exited Facebook only to blink, take a breath, and reopen Facebook, like some kind of conditioned zombie that fed on “content.” Zibby caught herself and looked around the coffeehouse only to see the entirety of the caffeine slurpers engaging in the exact same behavior. Since that moment of introspection, Zibby had made a rule: no phone until noon; the mornings would be her own.

  But she couldn’t lie to herself, watching those mothers with one hand on the stroller, the other on an iPhone, gobbling up reassuring articles from the Guardian, Huffington Post, and Jezebel—it looked so damn tempting. But she held steadfast, looking at her watch—9:42—and clutched her book, waving it in front of her face like a debutant with a fan. Then the whispers started and the whispers turned to gasps and yelps and shouts, and Zibby caught herself peeking around the shoulder of a woman with her phone in one hand, the other covering her mouth.

  Zibby scanned the line and the customers already seated with their headphones in and coffee steaming—many of them had their hands in front of their mouths too. One girl in the corner hid a smile; Zibby had to break her rule.

  She opened her Facebook app and didn’t even have to scroll to find the locus of the terror: RABID GIRLS SEND FRATERNITY BOYS TO HOSPITAL: TWO IN CRITICAL CONDITION, THREE ARRESTED.

  She clicked the link to play a clip recorded on a phone from the second or third floor of one of the fraternity houses on Broadway.

  The video was shaky and dark, and at first she could barely see what was occurring on the street below. As the video settled, she could make out bloodied bodies strewn about the sidewalk. “What are you doing?!” the girl recording the scene let out in a cracking, high-pitched screech. “Oh my god! Stop it! You’re gonna kill him!”

  In the video clip, three girls were bouncing around the sidewalk and street in what Zibby could only describe later “as if they were
in a hypnotic trance, a bubbly psychedelic state.” She watched as the girls robotically tied the arms of an unconscious boy with the Greek ΣΧ stitched into his shirt to the bumper of a Jetta and his legs to a Wrangler.

  “Oh my god,” Zibby muffled into her palm.

  Between the screams from the window and the honking of cars, she could make out bits and pieces of a melodic chant, perhaps even a song, coming from the girls: “Oh sweet to think to earth outworn…the wild goat has been hunted…Oh, the joy of the blood and the raw, red flesh!” Zibby even thought she saw one of the girls holding a snake above her head.

  But right as two of the girls tapered off from the song and frolicked to the driver’s seats of the cars, the flashing blue of police lights appeared, followed by officers with guns drawn. And then it cut to black.

  Zibby took her iced coffee and walked down Oak Street, scrolling into that bounded area of the internet that had frequently made her lose faith in humanity: the comments section.

  GreenWaveDad973: I had heard about the atrocious response times of the NOPD, but COME ON! This is a joke. Those boys could’ve been killed! Fire the mayor! Fire the Chief! Drain the SWAMP!

  MzChampagneFan504: ^^^Serious??? Those cops were there FAST. If this had been a bunch of black boys laying on the pavement in the 7th Ward those cops STILL wouldn’t be there. PLEASE. They are LUCKY this was UPTOWN.

  WhoDat09: I’m sick of everything turning into RACE.

  RebelRun88: There goes all that money from them Yankees!!

  PugLuvver: My SON is in that fraternity. He could’ve been one of those boys! How dare you say that BITCHChampagne!

  LSUAlum92: Chalk it up to bath salts. #ThanksFlorida

  Regretting her decision to descend into the comments section, Zibby pushed open the door to Oak Street Books. She received a nonchalant glance from Margaret Atwood, curled up in the Local Poets section, who quickly returned to her slumber.

  “Hey, you start classes tomorrow, right?” asked Liv, making a dent in the pile of Dead White Men in the center of the shop.

  For a fleeting instant, the clip of carnage had served as a respite from the inevitable Monday doom: law school.

  During a moment of weakness, Zibby had filled out law applications to a handful of schools throughout the country—okay, it was more like a couple of months of weakness. But her plans to live in Zanzibar for a year as an English teacher were halted, and subsequently terminated, when the archipelago was hit with a string of terrorist attacks aimed at “Westerners” and the program was canceled. She had read Love and Death in Zanzibar and Ode to Zanzibar and Zanzibar, My Home, and had even reached level 10 in Swahili on Duolingo. But she hadn’t had a backup plan and ended up asking Liv if she could just continue working at the bookstore while she wallowed in early-twenties purgatory.

  She had been accepted at the University of Oregon, the University of Miami, and Villanova up near Philadelphia, but none of them had offered much of a scholarship package, so therefore she had decided to stay local and enroll at Loyola.

  Loyola University New Orleans College of Law had offered her a hearty scholarship package and had excellent social justice programs. And given that the law school campus was even more upriver than the main campus, it would be fifteen-minute walk while she was living at home.

  But Zibby had suspected that there were greater forces at play than terrorist attacks and law school scholarships to keep her in New Orleans. She remembered the sign her freshman-year roommate from Oklahoma had bought down on Magazine Street with the saying You can live in any city in America, but New Orleans is the only city that lives in you—it was the second week of school.

  “Yeah, first day of classes,” she responded to Liv, then looked at One L and shivered.

  “Okay, well, I gotta run soon,” said Liv. “It’ll be slow today. The heat keeps everyone off the street.”

  Zibby reached under the cashier desk and pulled out A Guide to Legal Writing and flipped it open to the bookmarked passage.

  Dicta: There will be components to an opinion that will not embody the resolution or determination of the specific case before the court. Your law professors will oftentimes refer to these passages as “mere dicta.” These passages reflect the authors’ (the judges’) individual views and are not binding in subsequent cases as legal precedent.

  Did I just… Zibby thought, pulling the book down from her face. Did I just read a passage about passages I will read that I will not have had to have read? Once again, she had to clutch a nearby bookshelf to keep herself from falling over. The Legal Guide held special powers that hindered the effectiveness of the caffeine in her cold brew the way a virus attacks a cell, so she shoved it back under the desk until a later, more awakened hour of the day.

  She tossed One L down there with it and yanked up Quiet in the Alley by Clemmons Ruiz, her favorite novel by her favorite writer who just happened to live in New Orleans. He especially won her over with these two passages:

  Somewhere inside me, I always thought there was a Frenchman or Spaniard or some other Mediterranean type pushing to the surface, but I realized I’m something more complex, a Louisiana Creole perhaps, armed with rosary beads and a bottle of bourbon.

  And:

  There are times when I walked down the dimly lit paths illuminated by nothing more than the flicker of hanging lanterns, I would think to myself that the French Quarter had been built just for me, waiting through the fires and storms for me to stroll down its cottage-lined streets.

  Zibby wore her Creole pride on her sleeve—quite literally, when she was wearing her patch-covered army jacket with “Creole Bitch” sewn onto the right bicep—and changed her Facebook profile pic to Beyoncé after she came out with that music video telling the world she had a Louisiana Creole heritage herself.

  Zibby’s father told her their roots extended back to the French, Spanish, and Haitians who lived in the “European” section of the city, Downtown, compared to the “American” Uptown.

  “The Dufossats built this city,” her father would say. “The French mixed wit some Spanish and some of dem Haitian and Cajun, and now you can find us from Gentilly to Lake Charles. Dat’s how you got dem green eyes.”

  Although Zibby wasn’t thrilled with her high odds of matching with one of her distant cousins on Kindling, she knew how much it meant to her father that she attend law school in New Orleans— the party he threw when she gave him the news that she would not, in fact, be going to school in Eugene or Coral Cables, you’d think the Saints had won the Super Bowl.

  She had told herself she wouldn’t reread any of Ruiz’s books for the first month of law school—not Below Water nor Sinister City nor Romeo Spikes—so she could get into a study rhythm that his novels would certainly interrupt. But she had already broken one rule that morning, so she checked Facebook again before flipping open her worn copy of Ruiz’s first novel, and began reading it for the fourth time.

  Dio

  The thundering charge of the streetcar woke Dionysus in a glass-shattering fury. He had grown accustomed to the trickling melody of fountains waking him softly from even his most saturated binges, while lying in a bed of feathers, silks, cottons, and velvets— the god had spent his first night in New Orleans sleeping on the floor, naked, with his toga as a blanket and his head rested on a folded-up pile of cardboard.

  Even after he had consumed liter after liter of the vine’s juices and had woken up with a foggy memory and throbbing head, Dionysus had never cursed the grape nor considered, for even one night, that he would refrain from indulging in the ruby nectar. But as he sat up on the dusty floor and threw his arm in front of his face to block the sunlight that came poking through the Rorschach stains that covered the window, Dionysus made a sweeping and robust condemnation of “the orange poison” that mimicked a Middle Eastern dictator.

  He stumbled to the window and, with his hand acting as a visor, looked out to see where he had ended up. To his surprise—and joy—the neon-pink lettering of the Camell
ia Grill and the rest of the street where he had started his adventure were below him. Another streetcar went roaring by, and he followed it with his eyes until it turned the corner, exposing the daiquiri shop at the fulcrum of the two streets. The god’s stomach turned over and he splattered orange onto the glass, his vomit creating its own Rorschach, making the whole window look like something he’d once seen in an Amsterdam art studio.

  He put on his toga—the crisp white fading into a muddled brown—and walked down the winding, creaking steps. The door needed an extra tug to open, and when he stepped outside, he was greeted with the refreshing sight of tasteful, ionic columns. He walked out toward the street and looked back at the all-white edifice, surprised that such a beautiful building would be abandoned.

  A yellow yard sign was stuck in the grass next to him: Save the Carrollton Courthouse!

  New Orleans is operating without a functioning house of the law?! Athena warned me about the depravity and degradation of this city, but I did not suspect that it was completely lawless! Anarchy is for the Italians and Spaniards! The Greeks created the law!

  “We created the law!” Dionysus shouted at a passing jogger, who had hoped that moving into the East Carrollton neighborhood would have sheltered him from the derelicts that infested Downtown. He picked up his pace.

  Dionysus trudged back up South Carrollton Avenue in the hopes that the wine bar would be open and he could finally take a ruby liter. Customers enjoying their iced coffees in the sliver of shade provided by the huge coffeehouse stared at him as he turned the corner onto Oak Street—an older man offered him a five-dollar bill for something to eat. But the god was on a mission, so he ignored the man and, once again, dropped to his knees at the sight of the dark, empty interior and locked doors of the wine bar. He started to shake, and again his stomach fomented a nauseating bubbling.

  He remembered that the girl in the bookstore with the caramel skin and bright-green eyes had said something about a magical bar that never closed its doors.