The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  “Guess what? I just matched with that guy we were talking about before. The one with the book.”

  “Matched?”

  “Liv, you’re not that old. We’ve gone over this.”

  “That dating app? Yeah, I should probably get on that before I bring another guy back from Maple Leaf.”

  “Wait, I never asked about that tourist. What happened with…”

  Liv put a hand up before Zibby could finish her question. “Honey, let’s just say he ruined Asheville for me.”

  They finished their beers, and Liv left to relieve her mother of watching Portia. Zibby messaged Ben on the app, but he responded with a text.

  Text message from Ben 3L: Guess I can skip the line of asking for your number because the app has a “bad connection.”

  Text message to Ben 3L: Oh is that your go-to?

  Text message from Ben 3L: Without fail. What are you doing tonight?

  Text message to Ben 3L: At Pints right now but gonna leave soon. You?

  Text from Ben 3L: That place is sooo pretentious.

  Text to Ben 3L: I KNOW. Honestly, we just come here because we work right next door.

  Text from Ben 3L: Well I’ll probably go to Vito’s later, if you wanna join.

  Text to Ben 3L: My friend bartends there. Lemme see if she’s working.

  Text from Ben 3L: Okay cool. They have other bartenders though, just in case…

  Text to Ben 3L: Haha. Shut up.

  Zibby texted Tara to clarify that she was working at Vito’s that night and rushed home to shower and change.

  Her father was passed out in the La-Z-Boy recliner with a half-filled carafe of red wine sitting on the coffee table in front of the television—the only source of light on in the house. She rushed her shower, threw on a pair of jean shorts that were frizzled around the hem, and slid into her purple Tipitina’s t-shirt that was a size too small—Vito’s was not a little-black-dress kind of bar.

  Zibby tried not to walk too fast to avoid breaking a sweat, but by the time she reached the bar, located at one of the four corners of Maple and Hilary, the humidity had foiled her plan.

  She rushed into the restroom, giving Tara a wave, who nodded and smiled back as she poured Rolling Rock draft into a pitcher.

  After applying a fresh coat of deodorant and wiping the sweat from her forehead, Zibby grabbed a seat in the middle of the bar and checked her phone.

  “What’s he saying?” Tara asked, catching Zibby by surprise.

  “Hey, uh, nothing yet. But he lives like, right over here somewhere. I think I passed his place on my way over here, actually.”

  “That’ll be convenient,” Tara said with a smirk.

  “Shut up. I’m not gonna fuck him.” Tara took an order down the bar and began preparing a trio of Moscow Mules. “I mean, everyone says not to get involved with someone in law school anyway.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Don’t gimme dat.”

  “Well…” Tara dropped off the Mules and leaned over the bar. “You sure are checkin’ ya phone a lot for some guy you aren’t even gonna fuuuuck.”

  “I’m not! Hey, you gonna get me a drink sometime tonight?”

  An hour and a half passed, and Zibby buckled. She texted Ben, first with a light Hey, I’m at Vito’s hanging with Tara if you wanna stop by. But as another forty minutes passed—accompanied by another double vodka tonic—without a response, she sent the more aggressive ???.

  “Okay, this is bullshit. This guy can’t even answer a text.”

  “This is weird.” Tara started, scrolling through her phone. “Remember my friend Jonathan? It says on Facebook that he just checked into a bar on Bourbon Street?”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I dropped him off at the airport. He definitely would’ve let me know if he was back in the city.”

  Against Tara’s advice, Zibby had ordered another double vodka tonic and was wobbling on the swivel bar chair.

  “Oh yeah, it’s just like…like…. what my roommate had…that quote she had on the wall all of freshman year. ‘New Orleans grabs you and doesn’t let you go.’ She was couillon, I’ll tell ya. This city, just like its moniker suggests, is too easy for that. It wouldn’t extend a finger even if it could. No, you latch on to this city with your fingernails…you grab onto a wrought iron balcony or a nest of Romeo Spikes or…or a branch of an oak tree and suck out as much culture as you can like sap stuck in the wood. And…and if…if you’re lucky, you never have to let go.”

  “Wow, that was drunkenly eloquent,” Tara said, fixing a lime wedge on the side of a glass. “You should write a book.”

  “Don’t fuck with me right now.” Zibby tossed back her drink and a couple of ice cubes fell onto her shirt. “But that’s why Jonathan is probably still here.”

  “Nah, I think it was just a glitch or something. I remember we were at Raised Manholes during Decadence. It prob just uploaded super late.”

  Zibby checked her phone, which didn’t have any new messages, and got up from her seat. “I should just go bang on his damn door. He said he lives across from that new wine bar and the Starbucks.”

  “Hey,” Tara started. “You ever get in touch with that European guy who was staying in the studio behind…”

  “I don’t know,” Zibby snapped, not really answering the question. She swiped her glass from the bar, crunched down on an ice cube coated in cheap vodka, and walked to the digital jukebox mounted on the wall by the door. Tara grabbed a highball glass and filled it with water and slid it down the wood. But her calls to her drunk friend were drowned out by the thumping, repetitive bass of Mz. Champagne’s smash hit “Buku Jamz.”

  Dio

  Hermes rejected Dio’s proffered glass of wine and stood in the center of the room, the sun beginning to set on the September evening.

  “I’m here to guide you back home,” Hermes said, presenting himself as tall as he could.

  Dio took a swig of red wine and leaned back in his recliner. “It surprises me to see you wearing those,” he said, pointing to Hermes’s bright-red high tops with their fresh white swooshes. “You can move freely between worlds, but they still named their shoe after her.” He took another swig of his wine. “I suppose Hermes”—he snapped his upper body into a running manikin—“just doesn’t have the same ring to it. I very much prefer your winged sandals anyway.” He polished off the glass, tilting it toward the ceiling.

  The Messenger God continued with his mission, paying no mind to his younger brother’s aversion. “Hera has guaranteed your safe…”

  “Ha! I will stop you there.” Dio poured himself another glass of wine. “I do not trust a single thing that comes out of that vile harridan’s mouth. Do you remember this?” Dio cocked his head to the side and raised his chin, giving Hermes a view of the ring-like scar that hooped below his neck. “Her Titan gorillas did this to me the last time I returned to Olympus under her assurances of safety.”

  “This time she has promised…”

  “You know why I won’t go back!” Dio shot up from his seat and walked onto the balcony to look out onto the little sea of French Quarter roofs. “I’ll die here,” he said, taking another sip. “If I am to die, why not in New Orleans?”

  “You know you can’t die, Dionysus,” Hermes snapped. “None of us can.”

  Dio looked down onto Bourbon Street, flooded and buzzing with people drinking alcoholic neon slush.

  “Perhaps that’s the predicament with all this, Hermes. I share in the suffering of the mortals, but I myself cannot entirely die.”

  “Then come home. Athena is worried about you, and if I leave here…”

  “I am not going back,” Dio said, cutting him off. “Olympus was never my home.”

  “So what do I tell Athena? That you’re holed up in some…” Hermes slowly scanned the room, spinning in a circle. “…fornication den not even fit for a Scythian slave!”

  But the God of the Vine didn’t answe
r.

  “Fine. Spend eternity in this cesspool of a city. How can you even breathe? It reeks worse than a plague-afflicted Florence!” he said, turning away from Dio.

  “Hermes.”

  The Messenger God stopped in front of the door.

  “Do they love each other?” he asked.

  Hermes took a breath but remained silent. When Dio turned around, he was gone.

  A triumvirate of empty bottles of house red formed a triangle next to the bed—a fourth had fallen on its side and rolled to the opposite end of the room, exposing a slant in the floor.

  The buzz from the street grew insufferable and Dio was forced to hop from the bed, unlock the door, and call for Dominic.

  Bare except for the same ripe, bright-red underwear, Dio stood at the top of the staircase as the security guard hustled up the steps. Bourbon Street revelers who had begun their festivities early rushed to the bottom of the staircase, some craning their necks just to get a glimpse of the nearly naked legend.

  “I need to plug my ears,” Dio said, the cracks in his lips stained purple.

  Buddy Landry, who had fought his way through the crowd and rushed up the steps, held his hands together as if in prayer, begging for a moment of the god’s time. “Please, please. We already have a line. I will cancel for the rest of the week if you just…”

  “I’m not taking anyone today. Bring plugs for my ears, and wine,” Dio responded, rushing him back out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

  Dio avoided the balcony and the pile of books. His knees tucked into his chest, he pulled the stained sheet over his head, forming an acrid cocoon that made him sweat. He had almost fallen asleep, drifting into that cloudy delirium, before the door swung open, causing the god to jump in his bed.

  Expecting to see a groveling Buddy Landry carrying a box of earplugs, eager to please, Dio hopped out of the bed and approached the intruder.

  “How did you get in here?! I said…”

  “I’m not here to fuck you or get fucked by you, brother.” The intruder had a chiseled body and the olive complexion of an Illyrian soldier. “I’m straight as an arrow. I mean, there was that one time in college when I was studying abroad in Amsterdam, but I don’t want to talk about that one time in college when I was studying abroad in Amsterdam.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I paid that big fella at the bottom of the steps probably more than he makes in a week working in this dump. Oh, and the door was unlocked.”

  Dio, lightheaded, moved to his chair, signaling for his guest to take a seat on the stool.

  “Listen, you’re the talk of the neighborhood, and brother, that ain’t a good thing right now. You’re too big. This meteoric rise is going to be the end of you. This kinda thing happens from time to time, a girl or two starts giving below-market BJs at Nicky’s or Satin Dolls”—he pointed over Dio’s head to the upriver blocks of Bourbon Street lined with strip joints—“and every tourist from Kissimmee to Kalamazoo starts lining up at the ATM. All the police gotta do is start counting the johns that head straight for the champagne room. They shut down Missy’s last year for the same racket.

  “What’s your cut here anyway? That grizzly guarding the door told me that fifty gets you up the stairs on a regular day. How much of that are you seein’? I gave him two hundred just to speak with you, brother. I got a business here, just a few blocks thatta way.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder in the downriver direction of Bourbon Street. “And I think we can help each other out. I’ve got this site, KingofBourbon.com, maybe you’ve seen the shirts? I Party’d wit da King! The girls love showin’ that shit off. You only get one if…wait, I haven’t even told you what the biz is. So tons of bachelorette parties come down here to Nola, and partying with me has become like a rite of passage. They even gave me the nickname ‘Mr. Sendoff.’ And get this, brother, they pay me to fuck them. Those are the ones that get the shirt.”

  Dio searched for wine.

  “Right, right, so where do you come in? Well, brother, now that you guys can get married and all, I wanted to expand my business.”

  When Dio didn’t respond, the King started to fidget in his seat.

  “Like…you would take the dudes, and I’d take the girls. I got a guy to change the website and everything. And you don’t have to show your face. I usually shoot everything from the neck down or blur it out. What do ya think? I got an upstairs two-bedroom on the corner of Bourbon and Governor Nicholls. You’d have your own room”—he looked around Dio’s chambers—“which would be a significant upgrade from this dump, no offense, and you can keep sixty-five percent! Come on, brother, that’s a good deal!”

  Knocks berated the door, followed by the whining, desperate yelps of Buddy Landry.

  “I’ll use the other thirty-five percent on rent and food and the shirts and everything for the site. I’ll handle all of it.”

  “…”

  “Who’s in there with you?!” Knock, knock, knock, knock. “Please open the door!”

  “Seventy percent? Brother, that’s a great deal. You get to keep slayin’ dudes and get paid for it. I do the marketing and advertising.”

  “…”

  “Please just open the door!”

  “Okay, okay, seventy-five percent.” He got out of his seat and put his hands in the air. “But that’s the best I can do.”

  “If you just open the door, we can talk!”

  “Will there be wine?”

  The King snapped to attention, ecstatic just to hear the god speak.

  “Wine? You want wine? You got it. How ’bout this? I’ll buy you one of those temperature-controlled mini-fridges for your room as a signing bonus.”

  Dio didn’t completely understand what the King had offered, but he got up from the recliner, grabbed his bag full of books and clothing, and shook the guy’s outstretched hand, and they opened the door and started down the stairs together like a couple on prom night.

  Upon hearing the door open, Buddy Landry rushed back up the steps, pleading that the god remain in the apartment atop the bar.

  “Please, please!” He walked down backward, a step below the god and the King. “Don’t leave. Please. I’ll do anything.”

  The bar patrons slowly closed in on the god, muttering to themselves with outstretched arms, gently touching his exposed biceps and shoulders.

  “Don’t go!” Buddy Landry crawled after them, eventually grabbing hold around Dio’s leg. “Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll give you anything, anything you want.” Dio looked down at the groveling man and paused, giving him a final chance to speak. “I love you.”

  The King put his hand on Dio’s shoulder and slowly pressed the bulbous man off the god’s leg with the bottom of his foot, like a sweating piece of meat off a shish kabob.

  They walked out into the humid evening and down Bourbon as the gayborhood revelers poured out into the street and stood like pioneering townsfolk watching their heroes ride off into the sunset.

  Zibby

  Zibby awoke to the percolating drip of the Phams’ coffeemaker. She had often crashed on their living room couch when she, Brian, and Tara would spend Saturday nights at the sleazy bar on Maple Street across from Vito’s—the only joint that would serve high schoolers—and was too drunk to make it home.

  The side of her face in a scratchy throw pillow, Zibby picked her phone off the carpet and clicked the side button illuminating the home screen. No new texts.

  How could that fucker not text me yet?

  A thick, mucus-filled snore from the adjacent couch made Zibby jump.

  “Psst, Tara, shut the fuck up,” she laughed.

  Tara shook spastically under her blanket and awoke wide-eyed and panting. “What the? Oh, shit, I forgot we came here last night.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened? You got super drunk, feeding the jukebox all night, putting ‘Buku Jamz’ on repeat, and told Brian to meet us at the bar. Then we went to Snake’s…”
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  “We were at Snake and Jake’s last night?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “…”

  “Yes, Zibbs. We ended up at Snake’s and you were taking shots of Hayman’s! I haven’t had that shit since college. I think it ruined whiskey for me. Then we came back here and downed like fifty pork belly spring rolls and pho. Check your shirt. You spilled like half the bowl on yourself.” Zibby lifted up the blanket but was in an oversized New Orleans Zephyrs shirt instead of the Tipitina’s classic she was in when she left her house. “It’s over there.” Tara pointed to a chair with the purple t-shirt draped over the back. “Brian gave you that. Shit, you really did black out.”

  “How you feelin’, Zibbs?” Brian said, popping into the kitchen and pouring out three cups of coffee, leaving the option available for sweetened condensed milk.

  “Holy God, that looks amazing,” Tara said, getting off the couch.

  Zibby checked her phone again—still nothing.

  They sipped their coffee, and when their stomachs started to growl, made their way out to South Carrollton, down to the Camellia Grill, beating the crowd that inevitably formed if you arrived after 10:30.

  “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleeeeeanz?” the thin waiter asked, giving each of them a fist bump and a smile before laying down the menus.

  After they placed their orders and each had sucked down half their glass of water filled with crushed ice, Brian and Tara highlighted the bits and pieces of the night Zibby couldn’t recall on her own.

  “Jesus. I’m scared to even look at my credit card statement,” said Zibby, cutting a sausage link in half.

  “I helped you out at Vito’s—you’re welcome—but you definitely did some damage at Snake’s,” Tara said, running the ketchup bottle over a glistening pile of hashbrowns.

  “Yo Zibbs, did that guy ever text you back?” Zibby pulled the top half of her phone out of her pocket and checked: nothing. “I mean, you were really lettin’ him have it last night. Made some good points about how there’s no excuse not to answer, or to at least send a courtesy text. Not like you’d remember though.”