The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  “I get it,” Zibby snapped. “I drank too much and don’t remember the night. I was pissed that the guy I thought I’d see totally ghosted me and I drowned my frustration in gin.”

  “It was vodka, but still a nice self-diagnosis,” said Tara.

  Zibby walked home after brunch and fell backward onto her bed. The greasy breakfast food and the digesting liquor battled it out for stomach-wide domination. She stopped herself from checking her phone, knowing that even if there was a text waiting, it wasn’t from Ben, and instead moseyed over to her desk, flipped open her laptop, and checked her homework schedule to see what needed to get done.

  The schedule just said Citations, at the bottom, as far at the bottom as possible, as if hitting Return repeatedly would have made the assignment feel neglected and somehow vanish from her schedule entirely.

  So students would be able to cite their sources in their legal writing with ease, Loyola imposed a program on all 1Ls that implemented a series of exercises that required an attention to detail only previously demonstrated by the mosaic artists of classical antiquity and whoever chiseled the Arabic calligraphy lining the walls of the Alhambra. The third time Zibby accidentally italicized the comma after the case name—remember to italicize everything up to, but not including, the comma—she stifled the impulse to put her fist through her laptop screen.

  She checked her phone. Text from Ben 3L: Hey! Sorry about last night. Hope you still had a good time.

  Zibby knew better than to immediately respond. It took him sixteen hours to get back to her; surely he could wait an hour or two before receiving the ballast of a response text message.

  Zibby began to type: Text to Ben 3L: Oh yeah no worries. Met up with friends. Forgot you were even coming.

  She smirked, embracing her laptop and the sadistic citation exercises with a newfound confidence and control.

  Text from Ben 3L: Yeah, sorry again. Just got lost in writing and was exhausted by the time I was finished.

  Zibby held her ground this time; she turned on Do Not Disturb and flipped the phone over—make him sweat it out.

  Text from Ben 3L: If you’re still interested I’d be happy to make plans for this weekend.

  Text from Ben 3L: Or even Thursday night?

  Text to Ben 3L: Ya don’t have to do me any favors.

  Text from Ben 3L: I’m losing you here. Let me try again…

  Text from Ben 3L: Hey! Sorry about last night. Want to meet up Thursday?

  Text to Ben 3L: Yeah okay. But it will cost ya a Crim Law outline and a beer.

  Text from Ben 3L: Done.

  Dio

  At first, only gaggles of gay French Quarter explorers would congregate on the riverside sidewalk of Bourbon and Governor Nicholls Street, hoping to catch a glimpse of the folk legend. But within the first few days of Dio’s move, rotund tourists from across the heartland and French Quarter locals joined the sightseers, inquiring whether a movie star or saint had moved into the fabled neighborhood.

  “I’ve got you all set up for your first shoot tonight,” said the King, poking his head into Dio’s room. “It’s a bachelor party from Austin. At least three have already put down deposits and I told them it’s double the price if anyone decides to have a go on the spot. You cool with that?” Dio flipped a page of Quiet in the Alley and took a sip of wine from an oversized, souvenir Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane glass. “And yeah, sorry about the glass. Not really a wine drinker myself. I’ll pick up a few tomorrow.”

  “…”

  “Oh, a couple of girls are going to be coming through later tonight. Don’t want their friends to know. Ya know how that goes. So if anyone buzzes and I’m in the shower or something, just let ’em up.”

  “Have you been acquainted with this scribe?” Dio turned the cover so the King could see it. “Clemmons Ruiz,” read the god. “I believe he inhabits a dwelling in this same vicinity.”

  “Never heard of him. Yo, so, do you have like a bank account or anything?”

  Dio looked around the room and pointed to an empty French Market coffee tin. “Put the money in that. Spend the rest on wine.”

  Under the cover of darkness, the King’s appointments surreptitiously made their way down to the docile fringes of the Quarter, so perfectly timed that the two girls passed each other on the apartment staircase.

  The bachelor party, however, was a drunken ball of shouts and whistles that grew louder as it disembarked from the nexus of Bourbon Street and St. Ann. When they reached the apartment, they started shouting from below the balcony.

  “Sierra! Hey, Sierra!” one started to shout from the middle of the street.

  “It’s ‘Stella,’ you idiot!” shouted another. “You’re the only gay man in America that can’t accurately quote Stanley Kowalski.”

  They tumbled and fumbled up the staircase and crashed into the apartment. The King had bottles of cheap champagne and vodka sitting in ice and the flatscreen TV replaying nineties techno music videos.

  “Gentlemen,” the King greeted the group, hair still wet from the shower. “Make yourselves comfortable. I have three sessions booked with ‘the god.’ Who are they?”

  Four raised their hands, but the flawed thespian was derided for not paying ahead. “I changed my mind! As long as you don’t tell Luke.”

  “No. We love Luke. We wanted to invite him over you!”

  “And which one of you is getting tied down?” asked the King.

  “Oh, honey. If that’s what you’re into, I’ll volunteer.”

  “How come all of the cute ones are straight in this city?”

  “Well, gentlemen, unfortunately I am straight…”

  “We still love your work.” The one with the infinity scarf of iridescent Mardi Gras beads winked.

  “…but I think you’ll be more than happy with Dio. They don’t call him ‘the god’ for nothin’.”

  “Well where is this hunkasaurus? I’m dying to meet him.”

  The King knocked on Dio’s door and cracked it open when he realized it was unlocked.

  “Hey, the group is here. You ready?”

  Dio put down the book, revealing that he had changed into a makeshift toga of plain white bedsheets.

  “I see you’ve changed into something a little more comfortable,” said the King, peeking over his shoulder before shutting the door behind him. “Oh, I get it now—‘the god,’ a toga. Greek-chic. Well done. Anyway, they’re all here. I’m gonna send the first one in. Ya ready?”

  The god sat up in the bed and grabbed the souvenir glass of wine from the nightstand and downed the remaining three fingers. He looked at the camera atop the tripod and the handheld camera used for the popular POV angle sitting on the nightstand next to the empty bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

  “If you’re not ready, you don’t have to use that one,” the King said, motioning with his chin toward the handheld. “Just try and have a good time tonight. These guys are drunk and already talking about how great you are. Your reputation precedes you.” The King laughed, but cut it short when Dio failed to react. “All right, then, if you’re all set, I’m gonna send the first one in.”

  Dio began to twist off the top of a jug of mass-produced “Burgundy” when the King turned back around in the doorway. “Hey brother, and remember, just fuck the pain away.”

  The God of the Vine turned on the tripod camera and didn’t turn it off for two hours, collecting the day-of premiums for the rest of the group in the French Market coffee tin.

  Zibby

  “Stella!…Hey, Stella!”

  Zibby shot upright in her bed, only to fall back onto her pillow after a moment of lightheadedness. Her neighbor, an aspiring thespian of “Hollywood South”—a moniker designated to the city so producers could evade paying those California taxes—had moved in next door and appeared to be practicing his Stanley Kowalski shout for the Tennessee Williams fest. The festival was slated for March…

  “Hey, Stella!”

  Zibby flung off the covers. “I
told him last year…ugh!”

  She threw on a pair of jean shorts she picked up off the floor and a t-shirt draped over her computer chair and stormed out of the house, slipping into sandals sitting on the porch. She flew through the unlocked iron gate to the pink cottage and banged directly on the wood. From the inside, Zibby could hear the overweight graduate student inhale to deliver his line.

  “Hey!…”

  “Hey!” Zibby shouted in harmony.

  “…Stella!”

  “Hey! Randall! Enough already!”

  Randall opened the door but couldn’t make eye contact with Zibby. He was dressed in a plain white t-shirt that was two sizes too tight and blue jeans cuffed around the ankles, certainly in an attempt to summon his inner Kowalski.

  “Hey, sorry, Zibbs. I…I shouldn’t’ve been up so early.”

  “We said not before ten during the week or eleven on weekends, right? And I thought we decided only after the New Year? That gives you two…two and a half months to shout your head off like a goddamn lunatic.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

  Zibby took his apology as genuine and backed off.

  “All right then. Well, ya sound good.”

  “Yeah?” The oaf lit up.

  “Yeah, what’d you come in last year?”

  “Third! Some jerk from Georgia won.”

  “Aren’t you from Georgia?”

  “Exactly.”

  They both laughed.

  “Hey, I read your story in Bayou Magazine last week. There were some old copies at school. I really enjoyed it. Powerful stuff.”

  “Oh…” Zibby blushed. This time she couldn’t make eye contact with her neighbor.

  “Yeah, I mean…I’m not sure if it’s autobiographical. I mean, I hope you didn’t go through all of that…”

  “Hey Randall, you sound great. I think alls ya need is two more months of practice and you’ll win that title.”

  “Really, ya think? Gee, thanks, Zibbs. Hey! Have you written anything else? You should submit it to the festival. A Nola girl with a powerful story about Hurricane Katrina probably has a great shot at winning.”

  Zibby had written a couple of unpolished stories since her surprising publication of “Neverhome” in Bayou Magazine back in college, followed by a vapid first chapter to her Zanzibari novel filled with so much abstract metaphor and Western cliché it made her sick. After the high of her publication, she had worked on a follow-up story, where the protagonist flies out to California to confront her delinquent mother who has yet to return to New Orleans since the storm, but Liv read it over and considered the voice “distant” and “forced,” then said she’d be happy to revise another draft—Zibby hadn’t looked at it since.

  “Oh, ah…yeah, maybe. I’ll see ya later, Randall.”

  As Zibby walked back across Randall’s front lawn to her own, she remembered a short story—or the first few handwritten pages to a short story—she had begun the night her future with Ryan vanished. That had been a gin-filled night, and as Zibby opened her bedroom door, the metal sign that read No Paparazzi clinking against the wood, she feared perhaps those couple of pages didn’t see it through till morning—a fire may have been involved.

  She threw open beat-up folders and desk drawers like a fugitive searching for a counterfeit passport. In the back of a bottom drawer, crumpled like an accordion, were the first two pages to her untitled story that she had saved from the blaze after all; she flattened them on the desk. She could still make out where the teardrops had landed on top of wet blue ink.

  Zibby minimized her working Torts outline and Crim Law case briefs for class and opened a fresh Word document, justified the margins, and began to transcribe her prose. When she had come to the end of the handwritten text, she continued to type, Randall’s words of encouragement replaying in her head, only breaking for an intermittent “Stella!”

  When she came out of her fervor, Zibby had written 3,304 words, leaving a trail of fire and ash behind them. She was happy with her characters, plot, arc, and somber ending that left the reader questioning whether the narrator had been guileless—and whether it mattered.

  The adrenaline rush seeping out of her pores, Zibby had to finish a Contracts practice problem and briefing Crim cases for LaSalle but fought the urge to hop back into bed. She switched on “Buku Jamz” and went into the kitchen where she poured herself a tall, ice-filled glass of cold brew coffee. The bass from the bounce music rattled the hardwood floors and Zibby expected her father to roar into the kitchen, denounce “This god-dang crap,” and rhetorically ask his daughter why she couldn’t be into the music that made this city famous, like Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, Dr. John, or Louis Armstrong, all in one uninterrupted breath. But the man didn’t even get up from the couch.

  When Zibby checked on him in the living room, half his body was hanging off the couch in that position only dads get into when they’ve had too much to drink—an empty carafe, with the sediment of an unrefined red wine forming a ring at the bottom, sat on the coffee table like a flowerless vase.

  She went back to her room and turned down the music, plopped her Criminal Law casebook on her desk and opened to City of Chicago v. Morales, a paramount case, considering the rainbow of highlighted text and stars and REMEMBER THIS! IMPORTANT! scribbled in the margins. Even still, Zibby could barely concentrate and opened her new short story three more times before getting through Justice Stevens’s opinion. She cut herself a deal: I’ll just case brief the next…three cases and skip the explanatory stuff from the army of authors at the end. She turned to her 27 Club poster for verification. Guys, how does that sound? Good? Good.

  She burned through the cases and began the self-edit of her short story to submit the next day.

  Zibby almost flew by the John Kennedy Toole house without rubbing her finger across the shining bronze metal. Perhaps, subconsciously, she had already blossomed into the adept writer she’d always wanted to be and didn’t need any hoodoo trapped inside the dead author’s plaque—or perhaps it was that very hoodoo that had given Zibby her wordsmith abilities. The bike screeched to a halt.

  There were no cars in the driveway, but three takeout menus for local restaurants were crammed between fence spikes and a SOLD sticker had been slapped diagonally across the FOR SALE sign that was affixed to the front gate. She ran her finger over the “Kennedy” in the plaque and got back on her bike. As she pedaled away, she imagined forging a lasting friendship, or even a mentorship, with the inevitably successful writer who had bought the house to escape the frigid winters of New York or Chicago and come to New Orleans for some slower pace and joie de vivre.

  At school, Zibby was still in the meat of her daydream—for some reason, she kept imagining a tender, elderly black woman whose family had left the South during the great migration—when LaSalle threw open the lecture hall door, the weather still warm enough to warrant an extra-large cold brew coffee covering a mountain of ice. Zibby snapped to attention when the Criminal Law professor dropped her briefcase on the floor and had to scramble to get her case briefs up on her laptop and textbook flipped to the proper case before the Socratic assault commenced.

  The class eased into a case-briefing rhythm and LaSalle didn’t jump on a single blemish or imperfection—she even gave Jafaris a break when he couldn’t articulate the crux of the dissent, which Zibby considered the first sign of the long-awaited LaSalle metamorphosis Ben had promised. But with the minute hand on the mounted analog clock acutely approaching the three, signifying that their hour and fifteen minutes would soon be at an end, signifying to any sane, humane, merciful law professor that there was definitely not enough time to begin a new case, LaSalle flipped over the yellow legal paper on her pad and said, “Okay, Smith v. Ritter, what happened here?”

  There was that palpable, surprised frenzy that Zibby had only felt while watching horror movies when the moment came where the killer was “dead”—at the end of the movie, when it was safe to rest on such assurances�
�only to reemerge for one final attack. And by the forlorn looks the rest of the class shot each other—“Which case? Hey, what page?”—they were stuck in the same movie theater.

  “Ms. Dufossat, can you help us out? Smith v. Ritter.”

  “I, uh…” Zibby slammed her hand over her mouth. LaSalle didn’t bite, but she stood tapping at the legal pad.

  Zibby hit Ctrl + F: Ritter—nothing. She desperately flung chunks of her textbook back and forth, as if by some miracle the case would appear at the top of a random page.

  “Ms. Dufossat?”

  “I’m sorry, Professor. I can’t seem to find the case…”

  “Why isn’t it in your notes?

  “I must’ve…”

  “I require that you not just book-brief, but actually case brief all assigned cases.”

  “I know, it’s not that. I mean, I do case-brief. It’s just…”

  “Then why am I not hearing the facts of Smith v. Ritter right now?”

  Zibby looked up and had the sinking feeling of incompetence as hands, here and there, sprouted up around the classroom.

  “I apologize for not being prepared, Professor. I thought I…” She scrolled up and down her notes, even though she knew she hadn’t read the case—more out of habit, a mechanism to avoid appearing completely pathetic. “…that I had read all of the assigned cases.” 2Ls for the next class—Louisiana-specific Successions—peeked in through the window. “I would be happy to be on call first for our next class.”

  This was a classy move. A voluntary plunge into the gauntlet—the law school equivalent of Bruce Willis staying behind on that Earth-destined asteroid. Jafaris even looked over his shoulder and nodded his head as if to say, “That Zibby Dufossat, she’s all right.”

  But LaSalle ignored the plea bargain, and while she gathered her belongings, said, “To be a great lawyer is to be so prepared that you could put on a better argument for your opposition than they can for themselves. If you do not possess the drive or attention span to realize such an endeavor, I have heard that Loyola now offers an MBA program.” And she left the room, the air with her.