The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  But when Dio craned his neck to get a view of which conquering hero stood atop this column, he was surprised to see a meager, slender man exuding none of the grace nor might of a Roman legionnaire or deity. What really grabbed Dio’s attention, however, was not the unimposing man with his gaze fixed back the way they came, but the circle of citizens chanting around the column’s base, each side amplified by megaphones and annotated with signs.

  “Who are they?” Dio asked, pointing to the two groups respectively corralled in chant. “Their ardency is reminiscent of the Blues and Greens during the Nika revolts. A terribly bloody affair.” His gaze stayed upon them as the streetcar completed the semicircle turn around the monument.

  “They are protesting the removal of the Lee statue,” she said, pointing to the group congregating underneath a canopy of Confederate Crosses and hand-painted signs featuring slogans like Heritage is NOT Hate and Monuments Don’t Equal Murder. “And they are protesting their protest.” She pointed to the other group waving American flags, the New Orleans fleur-de-lis, and the Louisiana mother pelican. Dio mouthed a few of the signs he could read before the streetcar rumbled into the bosom of Downtown: Take ’Em Down! Bury White Supremacy! Idols of Jim Crow Have to Go! and Don’t Celebrate Treason!

  “I was actually supposed to go to that,” she said, turning to face the front of the streetcar, her brow furrowed. “It’s only been a couple weeks of law school and I’m already losing track of time.”

  Dio watched as a helicopter hovered high above the statue until it disappeared behind the shielding skyscrapers of the CBD, the hollers and chants vanishing along with it.

  The streetcar made its final stop at Carondelet and Canal before turning around and doing the whole trip back uptown again. Dio and Zibby followed the sweating gaggle of tourists and Viet-Fabio out the back of the streetcar, having to push through a heavy door that Dio compared to Sisyphus’s boulder. They crossed bustling Canal Street, one of the city’s main arteries, which had its own line of box-shaped streetcars painted red and yellow more similar to San Francisco cable cars than their Uptown-venturing army-green brethren, and landed at the mouth of the most fabled street in the country. If Las Vegas is America’s playground, Bourbon Street is her hypodermic needle-ridden, sewage-dripping, rot-gut-filled, pornographic opium den—but that doesn’t have as marketable of a jingle.

  As Dio crossed the far side of Canal and reached the mouth of the infamous street, his eyes watered and lips curled and he had to drop to his knees to catch his breath. “What is that putrid scent of death!”

  Zibby started to laugh.

  “I have fallen into the sulphuric waters of the River Styx and have not experienced such an appalling stench!” He clutched his chest. “I have traversed towns of the European countryside stricken with the bubonic plague, whose decaying populations were strewn about the streets, and still, I assure you, still I have never experienced such a mind-numbing, stomach-churning fetor as the reek that haunts this very street!”

  “You get used to it,” Zibby said, hopping on the sidewalk and side-stepping a tourist who was pulling along a wheeled suitcase with reckless abandon.

  When Dio finally composed himself, tucking his nose into his tank top to block the polluted air, they continued down Bourbon Street, which itself sliced through the geographic center of the French Quarter.

  Like a Sherpa guiding Western bravehearts up and down Everest, Zibby kept Dio close at her side, pointing out puddles of steaming goo that had funneled into the street’s cracks like landmines and warning him of an upcoming turn where, on especially hot days—days precisely like this one—an alley that housed the garbage for a row of bars and a middle-tier hotel coalesced a stench so rancid that the corner of Bourbon and Canal would seem like a Provençal field during the lavender bloom. Dio heeded her warning and sprinted along the sidewalk, nose plugged with his shirt, barely avoiding a set of kids drumming on the bottoms of plastic paint tubs.

  When Zibby finally caught up to him, the scantily clad girls enticing gentlemen to attend their strip clubs—one wearing a tight belly-cut t-shirt that stated I Party’d wit da King—the trite daiquiri shops, and the monotonous fried chicken joints had passed, and Dio stood in a sea of men.

  Every shape, every color, and every accent—from Southern drawls to Downtown Yat to that Great Plains wholesome Americana—was buzzing from bar to bar, many shirtless, most with beads, on the corners of Bourbon Street and St. Ann, the epicenter of the French Quarter’s “gayborhood.”

  “Pretty great, huh?” Zibby said, watching Dio turn a full three-sixty, drinking it all in. “Oh! Bourbon Heaters is perfect, it’s a fireman-themed joint, and they have a sexy-ass bartender. But of course, he’s gay. Let’s see if he’s still there.”

  She took Dio by the wrist and dragged him through the sweat and skin and he came out of the inebriated morass with a film of glitter coating his cheek. Zibby wrestled her way to the front of the bar and before Dio could ask for their finest vintage, an alarm sounded and hunky shirtless men in suspenders unraveled a hose that was snaking its way directly toward the god.

  “Don’t worry!” Zibby laughed, rushing to his side. “They put on a new nozzle and there’s barely any alcohol in the stuff that comes out. It’s like a rite of passage.”

  Dio felt all the eyes in the bar descend upon him, some descending and ascending from his sandals to his beard, so he gripped the hose at the base of the nozzle, wrapped his lips around the spout and waited as a pink liquid rushed through the translucent hose and erupted into his mouth.

  “Kronos’s crown! What is this dreadful pink swill?!”

  “Oh, relax! I mean, if we’re gonna rage on Bourbon, might as well do it like tourists!”

  A brooding man with a thick coif of auburn hair that matched the forest tunneling down his collar picked up the hose and handed it to Dio and said, “Here, I just bought you another.”

  “Come on! It’s Decadence!”

  So Dio relived “the hose” three more times. And like the daiquiri he’d tried uptown, and like the other neon drinks clutched by paunched tourists from the Midwest and Texas that would haunt their heads and stomachs the next morning—the Hand Grenade, the Hurricane, the Shark Attack, and the Resurrection, to name a few— that pink liquid became palatable, then delicious, then as complex as the finest Côte de Beaune; Bourbon Street was a mad scientist.

  After establishing a liquid base at Bourbon Heaters and accumulating a handful of pink and purple beads, Dio and Zibby bounced around the bars that lined the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann until they ended up at a cozy joint with just enough disco lighting to annoy and just enough customers to signal the place wasn’t closed.

  “Why are we even here,” said Zibby, resting her head on Dio’s exposed shoulder. “This place isn’t poppin’ at all. I mean, they have a great spot here on Bourbon, but I always forget it even exists. They really need to change their name, too. ‘Raised Manholes’ isn’t going to attract any stumbling tourists who don’t know where they are. I mean, look at this place…”

  Dio took note of the brown tile floor and the mosaic of brown and slightly less brown tiles lining the stairs.

  “…Either they’re like fifty…”

  A balding man in a leather biker jacket with no undershirt pulled out his straw and winked at Dio.

  “…or like seventeen.”

  Dio scanned a group of young boys who reminded him of this hairless band of auletes that would regularly serenade Apollo before his afternoon nap. The Sun God would typically choose one or two of the musicians and have them remain with him while the rest of the band left his quarters. But Dio learned that pederasty, a practice that was not only normalized but celebrated in the Ancient World, had been entirely shunned and criminalized in the world he now wandered, even in modern Greece. Zeus was even pursued by Albanian police after a SWAT bust on a youth bordello revealed the deity in bed with two young boys. Of course, the Olympian patriarch engaged in the chase for his
own amusement, as he had the power to instantaneously change his appearance and could never be caught. Locals in the cafés and bars of Tirana still like to share with tourists the story of the pedophile who vanished while driving his convertible—Zeus had merely morphed into a butterfly and flown to the open field next to the highway.

  One of the boys met Dio’s eyes and signaled with a tilt of his head, hand remaining on the straw of his drink, for the god to join them.

  “They’re kids,” Zibby said, breaking Dio’s gaze and pulling him back into the bar that appeared as if it was decorated with used furnishings from a Motel 6. “How are they getting served? I mean, if that’s what you’re into, fine, but check IDs. Don’t want to get locked up for…”

  “I’m quite aware of your puritanical laws,” he snapped.

  “Puritanical? Sex with a minor is…”

  But Dio had already left for the bar to see what liquid came out of this current establishment’s hose.

  “The one with the long tube and pink elixir,” Dio said, resting on the bar.

  “You’re in the wrong bar, honey. You see any firemen here?” said the bartender, who returned to muddling mint for a mojito.

  After a quick scan, which did not reveal any firemen present, Dio turned back to find Zibby, but she had vanished like Zeus.

  “Hey there, let me buy you a drink?” said the boy, who had detached from his group, his shirt more unbuttoned, his fingers still holding the straw.

  “Wine,” Dio said. “Wine is perfect.”

  Zibby

  Zibby had rushed out of the bar and into the sweaty Bourbon Street debauchery when she saw her friend Tara, another Lusher girl who, after going away to the University of Wisconsin, succumbed to the pull of New Orleans and accepted a scholarship to Loyola for law school.

  “Tara!”

  “Zibbs!”

  The girls embraced and Tara introduced her to a gaggle of friends from states bordering the Great Lakes who were visiting for Labor Day weekend.

  “Hey T,” said the tall one draped in a rainbow of beads, “we’re going to grab daiquiris from that place. What do you want?”

  “Y’all better slow down,” she said. “These aren’t Miller Lites, farm boy.”

  “First of all, I was raised on a dairy.” Tara and Zibby burst into laughter. “I’ll get you the orange one.” And he and the others disappeared into the crowd.

  “You didn’t tell him we only wear beads during Mardi Gras?” Zibby asked.

  “Trust me, if it was up to Jonathan, he would wear beads every day of the year. He thought they would hand them out at the airport like those hula girls hand out leis when you land in Hawaii.”

  “Well, too bad he’s gay. He’s boy-band beautiful.” Zibby tried to find him in the crowd, but he and the others had already disappeared into the daiquiri shop.

  “I know, I know. We did get drunk one night and fool around freshman year, but I don’t think he was like, out-out yet. He was raised on a farm after all.”

  “Dairy,” Zibby corrected.

  “Oh, excuse me. Dairy. And the other one…” She took a sip of her gin and tonic. “Tyler, he’s also gay. I don’t know what it is. If I’m attracted to them or they’re attracted to me. Anyway, why are you here? You hate Bourbon Street.”

  “Oh, duh. Speaking of striking out, I’m here with this guy…”

  “Is he cute?” Tara interrupted.

  “He’s gorgeous.”

  “But gay?”

  “Like…yeah?

  “What do you mean ‘like yeah’?”

  “Like, he definitely is attracted to men. He has this heartbreaking story about this guy he used to…”

  “So he’s gay?”

  “No, because he has sex with women, too. He has a kid or had a kid…”

  “So he’s bi?”

  “Isn’t it like, ‘heteroflexible’ now?”

  “Like gender fluid?”

  “I think that’s more like, what you are, not what you’re attracted to.”

  “Honestly, Jonathan and Tyler have tried to explain this to me like a thousand times and I can’t get it right. Anyway, where is the stud?”

  Zibby turned around expecting to see Dio surrounded by a group of shirtless men but couldn’t find him in Raised Manholes or in Oz, the corner bar across the street.

  Tara’s friends caught up to them, double-fisting daiquiris— complete with the ill-advised extra shot of grain alcohol—and they cooled down underneath a gallery while Zibby took out her phone.

  “Wait…he doesn’t even have a phone,” she said, staring into the screen.

  “Doesn’t have a phone? What is he, some hippie?” asked Tara.

  “Sounds exotic. I bet he’s like, super environmental and stuff,” said Jonathan, sucking down the orange slush. “By the way, this is amazing. You like, can’t even taste the alcohol.”

  “Did Zibby lose her cute friend?” asked Tyler. “Bummer, they always get away.”

  “Who doesn’t have a phone?” asked Tara, rhetorically.

  “This guy. He’s…honestly, I don’t even know what he is. He’s not from here, I can tell ya dat.”

  “Oh my god, is he European?” Jonathan perked up. “I met the cutest guys when I was backpacking in Europe. Even though a lot of them were Australian…”

  “We’ll def run into him. Oh! Zibbs, did you see LaSalle’s email?”

  “What email?”

  “She sent it this morning. Added a bunch of reading and this assignment.”

  Zibby snatched the daiquiri from Jonathan, took a formidable gulp, peered into Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo across the street and said, “I know it’s all bullshit, but I’m really considering getting a voodoo doll of that bitch.”

  Dio

  Dio flailed awake to the sound of brass at eight in the morning.

  He grasped his head in an attempt to stop the throbbing pain and aimlessly searched for the chalice of water Adonis always placed next to his bed.

  “What savages perform at this hour?” he asked the body that lay motionless beside him.

  The slender back and shoulder blade of a milky-white body lay exposed in the sun that trickled in through the filthy glass windows—it eventually moved on the god’s third nudge.

  “Mmmm…Hey, good morning, gorgeous,” he said, wiping drool from the side of his mouth. “Oh, is the parade starting already? Ya know, I heard they were going to have a small one before tomorrow’s. It’s so cool, ya know, to wake up to music like this. We don’t have anything like this back in Wisconsin.” The young man ran his hand along Dio’s naked shoulder. He had bright-blue eyes and a hoop nose ring in his left nostril. “By the way, you were freakin’ incredible,” he said. “Let’s hang again before I leave.”

  Dio’s memory of the night before was fogged with the taste of sugary drinks and the scent of hot flesh. He turned on his side and didn’t respond to the naked reveler who kissed and licked his shoulder and neck.

  “What’s the matter? You weren’t shy last night,” the boy said as he rubbed his hand up and down Dio’s body, twirling and swirling his fingers in the chest hair.

  When Dio didn’t answer, the young man got defensive.

  “Fine. It’s not like you were my first anyway. Ya know, I’ve been with a bunch of guys before.” He started to get dressed. “Yeah, so what if you were good. I bet you’re one of those in-the-closet Southern boys who’s afraid to accept themselves for who they are.”

  But Dio wasn’t contemplating his own sexuality, as he was quite comfortable with it, more so than the average contemporary American or European—he had the uncontrollable thought of his first homosexual encounter with Prosymnus after his return from the Underworld.

  The shepherd Prosymnus rowed Dio out to the portal that sat in the middle of the Alcyonian Lake so the deity could retrieve his mother from the Underworld. During the trip, Prosymnus, never having encountered a god from Olympus, fell in love with the deity and begged that, when he returned, D
io make love to him as repayment for his services. The god obliged, as he was desperate to retrieve his mother and took pity on the shepherd. But when he returned to the banks of the lake to find Prosymnus and demonstrate his gratitude, he learned that the shepherd had died. Another villager took Dio to the grave, a mound of fresh unearthed soil, and there the god carved a piece of fig wood into the shape of a phallus and stuck it into the dirt, thus keeping his promise.

  This innocent gesture of homosexuality opened Dio to sexual exploits with half of the world’s population. He spent nights on the eve of battle with Spartan generals and the commencement of triumphant parades with Caesars in Rome; if the Nymphs of Nysa taught Dio how to properly make love to a woman, trial and error in the lavish candlelit chambers of the Ancient World taught him how to properly make love to a man.

  “Oh my god. You’re just like my ex,” the young man said as he straightened out his beads. “But like, way, way better, I’ll admit.”

  “Did your love find someone else?” Dio said.

  “Look at that! He speaks! Someone else? Yeah, he ‘found Jesus’ and hasn’t spoken to me in over a year.”

  “Jesus would not wish for you to be hurt.”

  “Oh don’t even…Are you one of them, too? Do I attract it or something?” The boy crossed the room and looked out the window. “My goodness, have you seen this view?” He opened the French doors that offered access to a balcony overlooking the surging drunken orgy of Bourbon Street. “I can’t believe that shithole downstairs opens up to this!”

  Dio yanked the covers over his shoulder and pulled his knees into his chest.

  “Okay, okay, not into pillow talk. I get it. The post-sex self-loathing stereotype.” The boy waited for Dio to speak, but when the god remained silent, he continued on. “But I had a good time last night, so I’m leaving my number.” He scribbled on the back of a bar promotion flyer and left it on the desk, the only piece of furniture besides a weathered loveseat and a twin bed that looked like it belonged in an army barracks. “Don’t ghost me, ‘Wine God.’” He laughed, then knelt down beside Dio, kissed the side of his head, and left.