The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  It didn’t matter. Her senior year at Loyola undergrad, Zibby received a text from Ryan while she was deep in a Netflix binge: Be ovr in 10 to work that body. Hope u rdy ;).

  He had already been back in Colorado for a year.

  “Raabta,” she said again, entirely out of her control.

  “I thought I asked you…”

  “Who are you?” she asked, snapping back to reality. Zibby didn’t care if this connection was amorous or platonic, or wavering somewhere in the middle—it was the realest, scariest feeling she had ever experienced in her life.

  “I am Dionysus, God of the Vine,” he said, puffing out his chest.

  Great. And she felt it for a schizophrenic.

  Zibby lived on Dublin Street, less than a ten-minute walk from the bookshop. As they walked toward the house, she made sure not to let the stranger fall a step behind and kept her phone recording in her hand.

  “So where are you from?”

  “I was raised in the mountains of Nysa, but have spent most of my life on Olympus.”

  “Uh huh…so you’re actually Greek?

  “Yes, of course. How come you are not as dark as the other Nubians?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Nubians that work in the dining establishment had a much darker complexion. Are you, perhaps, Ptolemaic? Our Greek brethren in Egypt acquired a darker shade. And you have eyes as green as the great pharaoh herself.”

  Zibby was unsure of what to address first. But she soon caught herself repeating, “Nubian. Nubian. Nubian?” and had to ask, “What the hell do you mean by ‘Nubian’?”

  “Your skin is soft chocolate, like…”

  “Listen, I don’t care where you’re from, but here we don’t just talk about someone’s skin like that. Especially someone you just met. Got it?”

  “It was merely a…”

  “Do you got it?”

  The stranger stared at Zibby with a look of astonishment and terror.

  “Fiery, just like her,” he said, more to himself.

  They continued to Zibby’s house down Dublin, a residential street speckled with colorful shotgun homes covered in shade. Zibby and her father lived in such a home, a thin, pale-yellow house with burgundy shutters and a royal-blue door. Three white pillars stood out in front of the porch that burst with foliage and other potted plants.

  “Doric columns! What a magnificent touch. There must be Greek in you somewhere.”

  “Oh…uh…yeah, I guess. So, like, what’s your actual name?”

  “I have told you already, I am Dionysus.”

  “Dionysus?”

  “Yes, God of the Vine.” “The vine?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Alright, well, that’s a mouthful. I’ma call you Dio, for short. Dat cool?”

  “Dio…” The stranger mulled it over with deep contemplation. He walked through the waist-level gate and ran his hands up and down one of the cream-white columns. “Dio, huh? Okay, I like it. Dio it is!”

  “All right, follow me back here.”

  Behind the house, a trailer sat parallel to the street. These space containers were not a rare feature of houses in New Orleans, especially in the Uptown neighborhoods. When times had been good, the extra space would be used as a studio for painting or sculpting or recording or writing or any other form of art that made New Orleans a destination for America’s adroit. But times were tough and the “share” or “gig” economy had sauntered its way down South, so that extra space had to be cleared out to make way for the necessary evil of Airbnb.

  “We could use da extra cash,” her father would say. And Zibby knew he was right. Especially now, when more tourists wanted to escape Bourbon Street and discover “real” New Orleans, where voodoo priestesses cast spells in Haitian patois and everyone greeted each other on the street with a blow from their trombone. Zibby even told her father she’d market the backyard studio as a haunted slave quarters (a term still used by New Orleans realtors) and dress up in colonial Creole garb and introduce herself as Miss Priestess Dufossat: “Hexes on Exes,” she’d call it. Maybe snag a few of those transient soccer-mom-come-poets fresh from the Dallas and DC suburbs.

  She led him to the trailer and opened the door. A plume of heat enveloped them both.

  “Whoa, let’s let that air out first,” she said. “Lemme go get you some clothes. Just…just wait here, okay?”

  The stranger had left the trailer’s threshold and was examining a banana tree that sat in the corner of the backyard. “Okay, Pharaoh,” he called out, bouncing a bushel in the palm of his hand.

  “Pharaoh, huh? I could get used to that,” she said before opening the back door.

  From inside, Zibby gazed out the kitchen window at the beautiful stranger, who had moved on to the lime tree growing in the opposite corner. She already had a plan for how to explain to her father that a handsome young man was going to be living in his backyard.

  “Hey!”

  Somehow her 6’4”, 275-pound mammoth of a father had evaded the creaking hardwood floorboards and snuck up on her to catch her scheming—in reality, he was just grabbing a beer from the fridge.

  “Jesus, you scared the shit outta me, Dad.”

  “Dat da kinda language you gonna be usin’ in front of the judge? He’ll throw your ass in content.”

  “It’s contempt, and I still have to make it through law school before I get in front of a judge.” The beautiful stranger had been a distraction from the reality of tomorrow, at least for a little while, and now the deflating reality began to set in.

  “Who dat out der?” Her father leaned over the sink and glared out the window like a lion protecting its cub.

  “He’s our first Airbnb guest,” she said as she opened his beer.

  “Airbnb, huh?” He glared still. “I thought it wasn’t ready. You got it up and whatnot on dat internet and all?”

  “Yeeesss, Dad,” she said. “I’m still putting the finishing touches on, but he needed a place to stay.”

  “Where he from? And why in da hell is he dressed like dat?”

  “Oh…he’s from Europe. European.”

  “Europe, huh?”

  “Yup.” “French kid?”

  “No! Uh…no, no, not French.”

  Zibby knew her father, despite not being capable of speaking a lick of French, would still try it on the stranger in the backyard. “I got it in my blood,” he’d say. “We all mixed French, Spanish, Haitian, you name it. If it came through New Orleans, dey part Dufossat.”

  Mr. Dufossat still needed a translator to communicate with the Hondurans he worked with every day remodeling houses.

  “Where den?”

  “Greece. He’s Greek. Very little English.”

  “Dat explains da toga.”

  “Right.”

  “What he doin’ in New Orleans?”

  “Visiting friends at…Tulane. You know how cosmopolitan they are over there.”

  “Ha! Makes sense he hangin’ over at da Yankee school.” He picked up the bottle of Dixie from the counter. “Dat school will bleed ya dry. Dey’ll charge ya to breathe over at dat damn…” he began to trail off as he left the kitchen and made for his recliner in front of the TV. “Just make sure he pays up front! Or get one of his rich Too-Lane friends to foot da bill!” he shouted, followed by the creaksnap of the recliner and anchor banter of the evening news. She went to her room and opened the closet. After digging through piles of old Converse—she went through a phase in high school where she wanted a full collection of colors—she came across a cardboard box with Shithead’s stuff written on the side in red Sharpie.

  She could have given Dio her father’s clothes—he must’ve had ten t-shirts commemorating the Saints’ Super Bowl victory—but the man was a giant and wore his t-shirts big and loose.

  Ryan had been about the same size as Dio, a little less filled out, and had left a bunch of clothes in New Orleans that Zibby had planned to ship to Colorado in that same defaced cardboard
box. But after they broke up, she instead planned to soak it in kerosene and light it on fire, make a spectacle out of it—invite friends over, have some food and drinks. But her father had fallen from his ladder while renovating a mansion over in the Garden District, and when Zibby had to nurse him and his “cracked back” back to health the bonfire had been put on hold, and then forgotten.

  She opened the box and unrolled a light-blue t-shirt. In red, it had Keep New Orleans Easy in font reminiscent of the seventies surrounded by a saxophone, streetcar, and Crescent City Connection, a suspension bridge that joined the East Bank with the West.

  It had been a gift for him, a surprise. “The only city that lives in you,” Ryan would say from Zibby’s bed, looking up at her roommate’s poster. “I love New Orleans, I really do, Zib. But I just can’t see myself living here, ya know? It’s a great city for college and to spend a long weekend with the guys, but not for, like, a career.”

  Zibby’s family had “lived” and “had careers” in New Orleans going back to when most of the present city neighborhoods were plantations or swamp, but she was so in love with the guy she didn’t even take offense.

  She draped the light-blue t-shirt over her forearm and grabbed jeans, boxer-briefs, and other odd and ends before going back out to the beautiful stranger.

  The sun was beginning to set, blanketing the neighborhood in August orange. She opened the back door and again noticed the corporeal glow. It was so gorgeous that it took Zibby a few moments to adjust and realize what the new guest was doing.

  “What the…what the shit are you doin’?” Dio had constructed a staff-like tool and was using it to pound holes in the soil. “What is that?”

  “It’s a thyrsus,” he said, not looking up.

  Zibby saw the bright-yellow flesh of a recently snapped branch on one of the backyard oaks.

  “Did you…wait…how could you…” But before she could finish her thought, something happened that left Zibby speechless.

  Dio, crouched down, hovered his hand over one of the freshly made holes. After muttering something that Zibby couldn’t understand, he slammed his staff into the hole, and out came slithering vines, curling around the wood so quickly, it was as if the whole thing was happening in fast-forward.

  “Huh…how are you doing that?”

  As if it was completely routine, Dio left the staff in the ground and walked toward Zibby. “That should do it. I had been advised that nothing could grow in this swamp. But after I saw your trees bearing fruit, I decided to test out the soil myself.” He took the clothes from Zibby, who couldn’t take her eyes off the ascending vine. “‘Keep New Orleans Easy.’ Hhmm. I’ll never understand this dialect.” He took the clothes and went inside the trailer.

  “There’s…a…there’s a shower in the…uh…” Zibby attempted, but the God of Wine had already gone inside his new lodging, certainly an upgrade from the decrepit courthouse on South Carrollton Avenue.

  Zibby tossed, turned, and swirled in her bedsheets; the window unit was on full blast but did little to pierce the thick summer air. She had three classes tomorrow: Criminal Law at nine with Professor LaSalle, Torts at eleven with Professor Hastings, and Contracts at two in the afternoon with Professor Cannito.

  While this Monday schedule would appear completely normal to the vast majority of those who had embarked on the law school voyage, Louisiana, as Stanley Kowalksi repeatedly reminds Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, is the only state in the union to use the Napoleonic Code, or the Civil Code, as it is better known.

  This makes Loyola one of only four law schools in the country (the others being Tulane, LSU, and Southern) to teach an entirely unique legal curriculum. Students enrolled in the Civil Law section take classes with names like Successions, Persons, and Obligations— the last being the civil form of the well-known Common Law, Contracts.

  So despite being born and raised in Louisiana and only having left the state a handful of times in her entire life—one being to seek refuge with family in Houston during Hurricane Katrina—and despite having her heart broken by a Coloradoan, and despite enduring semesters with roommates from Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and Michigan, and despite her mother running off to California with a man from New York, Zibby still elected to take the Common Law over Civil Law classes.

  It was not a guarantee that she would leave Louisiana to practice law, but it kept her options open—this was the reasoning she would give her father, whose fried-oyster-and-shrimp-coated heart wouldn’t be able to handle such tragic news.

  She had been in bed for so long, unable to sleep, that her eyes had adjusted to the dark, permitting the pitch-black to fade to a translucent gray. Across the room hung a collage she had made back in high school. A mish-mash of actors, artists, and musicians—Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse—who all had one thing in common: their untimely deaths at twenty-seven.

  Zibby had been experiencing a time of unprecedented angst right around sixteen, when Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning. The media ran with the “twenty-seven club” angle, as if the age came with a shot of arsenic for whoever could sing or play guitar. Zibby developed such an obsession with this exclusive club that she even dug into the less well-known club members like Roger Lee Durham, a singer and drummer who fell off a horse; Louis Chauvin, a ragtime pianist who died of neurosyphilitic sclerosis; and Joey Cigainero, a keyboardist who died in a plane crash in 1991.

  Adjacent to the morbid collage hung a tacked poster of Zibby’s all-time favorite artist and New Orleans–bred rapper, Mz. Champagne. The transexual rapper wore purple wigs and high heels and carried a purse, but she was built like a linebacker and had a baritone voice that made an entire bar pulsate.

  Zibby kicked out the covers as she turned onto her side, closed her eyes, and tried again to fall asleep—and as if the poster had developed telekinetic powers, the chorus to “Bleeding Louis XIII” played on repeat in her head.

  Dio

  The window unit rattled and shook the trailer as if a stampeding horde of Parthians were tearing down from the horizon all night. Unable to sleep, Dio threw off the covers and stepped outside to check on his crop. The vines had bloomed into healthy green spirals with gnarled roots that would have taken centuries to develop in Old World vineyards. Plump bunches of purple grapes hung from the ends of the vines like Christmas tree ornaments shining in the moonlight.

  Dio bobbed one such bunch in his hand gently, as if it were swollen: “Tomorrow morning we harvest, my friend.”

  But again, Dio could not fall asleep. The night he spent in the abandoned courthouse and the nap he took on the Oak Street bench had been preceded by copious amounts of alcohol, and that night he hadn’t indulged in a drop of the stuff. Zibby had told him not to go into the house, that everything he needed would be in the trailer— but she had forgotten the wine.

  On the walk to his lodgings that afternoon, they had passed a local watering hole across from the station housing the streetcars that thundered up and down the main Uptown thoroughfares. Dio had decided to give the shanty bar a shot, if only for a soporific.

  He threw on the light-blue t-shirt that stretched across his chest and biceps. He had bathed using a blue sludge in a slick white shower that barely allowed him the ability to scrub his filthy feet—a stark difference compared to the simmering baths he’d take on Olympus when Adonis had scrubbed his every inch with tantalizing perfumes.

  Walking a couple of moonlit blocks, Dio arrived at the neighborhood joint, which provided the only action on the docile street. He found his way to the front door after sifting through a haze of smoke and sat at the first open seat at the bar.

  “Hey pal, we’ve got last call in ten. What can I get ya?”

  “How many bottles of your softest red will this permit?” Dio held up a ten-dollar bill like he was a police officer holding up his badge, letting it dangle in the air.

  “Bottles? Soft red? Ten bucks would getcha a bottle of the house red.”
/>   “Does it dance on the palate?”

  The bartender looked to his associate. “Hey Fred, does our house red ‘dance on the palate’?”

  “Like a Brazilian on ecstasy it do,” answered Fred.

  “Like a Brazilian on ecstasy,” said the bartender.

  Dio had taken ecstasy with Brazilians a handful of times while evading Hera’s wrath in Rio but couldn’t recall if the pills made them dance any more voraciously than usual—he took the bottle nonetheless.

  “Don’t you want a glass?” asked the bartender, but the God of the Vine had already left for a tiny circular table nestled in the corner by the front window. He drew stares as he glugged the juice, bottle held high, nearly perpendicular to the ceiling, and wiped a translucent red dribble from his chin.

  “I thought this neighborhood was gentr—getting better?” Dio could overhear from the bar.

  “I’ll have to call my realtor tomorrow,” her friend answered. “Maybe I’ll try the New Marigny instead. It’s very up-and-coming.”

  Dio finished the last sip as the bartender announced last call. He was out of money and hoped that the bottle of red—which lacked any sort of body whatsoever—would be enough to put him to sleep.

  Out of the bar, through a plume of smoke, and around the corner, Dio made his way back to the studio trailer. He stumbled on a hole in the street that, upon further review, was filled with oyster shells. And as he was contemplating yet another strange custom of this city’s inhabitants, a fury of hands rushed him from behind and held him to the ground.

  He was unable to break his fall, and one of those very shells, which had become cracked and sharp from the elements, sliced Dio right above the eyebrow. Blinded from blood and gravel, Dio took shots to the face and stomach.

  “What’s he got? What’s he got?” asked one of the attackers, who had Dio’s shoulders pinned to the road.

  “He ain’t got shit,” said the attacker rifling through his jeans. “This motherfucker ain’t got shit. Doesn’t even have a phone.” And he cracked the god in the face to demonstrate his disappointment.