The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  A tiny window unit no larger than a shoebox shot hot air into the apartment with such force it appeared to be compensating for its size. Dio ascended from the bed, the blanket falling off him and exposing his nakedness as he walked to the window.

  He had wrestled naked with Heracles and ran naked when competing against Hephaestus and Ares and Apollo in sport on Olympus, and even frolicked naked on the beach with Adonis as Orpheus played his lyre. But like the withering of bisexual acceptance in the modern world, so too died the tolerance for public nakedness—Dio had learned during a thorny venture in Marrakesh—and so the god put on his pants.

  He plucked the promotion card from the windowsill: 608-555-7432, Jonathan, was written in blue pen in a smidge of white trim. When Dio opened the French doors he was back in the soup. But despite the weight of the Labor Day weekend heat, Bourbon Street was already packed with early-risen revelers—the neon slushes and triple high-octane cocktails masked with fruity elixirs in their cups. In the crowd of beads and tank tops and glistening, bronzed skin, Jonathan pointed to the third-floor balcony from the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann and subsequently waved as if the god were British royalty or Miss America—Dio did not wave back.

  A barrage of knocks erupted on the door and the god turned back inside, crumpling up the promotion card with Jonathan’s number and tossing it onto the floor before answering.

  When he opened the door, a man who reminded Dio of an aging Olympic athlete, with bronze muscles covered in loose skin and dangling chains hanging like medals around his neck, stepped into the room without an introduction.

  “All right, pal, you’ve had your night with the kid. Ya know, I really put my bar on the line for you, letting you shack up here for the night, and I didn’t say nothin’, so I expect, ya know, for your payment to be everything you promised me last night.”

  Dio tried to remember a conversation or altercation with the silver-haired man, but nothing came to him. A memory of two thin twins from Texas who reassured him multiple times not to worry because everything was “still bigger in Texas”—a phrase Jonathan would later explain referenced their allegedly elephantine phalluses—floated through his memory, and the memory of a touchy Kentuckian who wore a cropped t-shirt that read Save a Lollipop, Suck a Dick followed. But he had no recollection of the leathery man whose tight black shirt was stuck above his head, exposing a tan stomach with patches of gray hair sprouting out of the chest cavity.

  “Hey! Will ya…give me a…help me out here!”

  Dio helped the man lift off the shirt, assuming that he, too, was hot and wanted to cool down, and did not see the hand screaming toward his butt.

  Whack!

  The surprise and force of the smack sent Dio flying across the room. The man was already lunging at him when he turned around, and Dio stepped to the side at the last moment like a matador with a fumbling bull.

  The man crashed into the closet, yanking down an empty hanger in his fall to the floor. Dio laughed and drank from a cup of melted ice that sat on the dresser.

  “You’re laughing at me?! Don’t you know who I am? I own four bars on the fucking block!”

  Dio had seen this before, most often with aging Spartan generals and kings whose glory days of deft sword wielding had peaked and who had to resort to attacking defenseless boys in their bedchambers. But unlike the literal substitute of sword for penis, Dio had learned during one of Athena’s expedited Orientation to America lectures that men in the United States substituted their abating phalluses with cars or boats or general gasconades of wealth, and he took pity on the turtling restaurateur.

  When he finally made it to his feet, the man picked up his shirt from the floor and held it like a child who had been reprimanded in front of the class for picking his nose. “Ya know…you told me if I let you bring that boy up here, you’d let me have my way with you the next morning.”

  Dio still did not have any recollection of the verbal contract the man was attempting to enforce, but he reminded the god of a lonely, aging Anatolian king. So he cut him a deal.

  “Bring me a bottle of your finest red and I will make love to you.”

  The bar owner’s finest red was an overpriced California blend that would get dumped into “Sangria Sundays” when it sat for too long on the shelf, but he figured the strange tenant wouldn’t be able to decipher the difference between a merlot and mourvèdre, so he told Dio he could have two bottles if he called him “Daddy” when he fucked him.

  “Whatever you’d like,” the god responded, slicking back his black hair in front of the window unit.

  The request was not an unusual one, not even one Dio hadn’t heard before: an English king battling his way through the Levant asked Dio to call him “the Lion” as the god thrusted into him from behind, and an Afghan warlord wanted him to wear makeup and put on a dance for the entire army. He oftentimes found that the most “devout” to the new God were repressing bubbling homosexuality and would do anything from ask him to wear a mask or women’s makeup to threaten him with death—burned alive at the stake was a common one—if he ever spoke of their night together. These were unobtainable threats, but the god indulged them anyway; it made the sex better.

  The man stumbled back up the stairs and nudged the door open with his shoulder, carrying two wine glasses and a bottle with the cork sticking out of the top. After him followed an odor of stale sweat doused in lip-curling cologne that stuck in Dio’s throat.

  “Quick, quick, the wine,” the god coughed, signaling for the bottle.

  The man hurriedly pulled out the cork and handed the bottle of wine to Dio, his hand trembling.

  After a few glugs that set the wine level slightly past the label, Dio took a deep breath and sat on the bed.

  “The scents of this city will be the end of me,” he said, before standing back up and pouring a glass for the man.

  Dio sat back on the bed, wine bottle in hand, and the man began to stammer before the god stopped him. “Wait.” He took another healthy swig. “Introduce yourself.”

  “I’m…a…I’m a…Bud…Buddy. Buddy Landry.”

  “Crawl, Buddy.”

  He immediately dropped to all fours and scraped on his hands and knees across the dusty wood floor until he reached Dio’s sandals.

  “Are you ready, Daddy?”

  Dio hauled the pathetic man onto the bed and fucked him until he wept like a child, like a king who saw the end of his reign approaching fast on the horizon.

  Zibby

  Zibby sat hunched over her Torts casebook making laser-beam noises with her mouth as she swiped left on Kindling.

  “Sorry, Dustin. If my only criteria were ‘guy who can catch a big fish,’ we’d be Jack and Rose.” Peeew!

  She looked out the window at the empty trailer and the tiny vineyard that had begun to wither from neglect. When her father had asked how much they made off their first Airbnb guest, Zibby lied and told him she was keeping the $150 in a separate account— her dad barely knew how to “use the Google,” so he was not going dive into online banking anytime soon.

  She opened her chain of text messages and scrolled, hoping that, after the three-hundredth time checking, Dio would have somehow texted her with a phone he didn’t possess.

  “I should’ve at least given him my number,” she said, tossing the phone on her desk and attempting to get back into Flood v. Smith, a.k.a. “the eggshell rule.”

  Zibby highlighted the text in her rented book (the line had already been starred and bracketed): The defendant takes his victim as he finds him.

  You need to be able to recite the rule. She heard Ben’s voice in her head and repeated it like a parrot. “You need to be able to recite the rule.”

  She had almost texted him at Decadence between the third daiquiri and fourth round of “blowjob shots” with Tara and Co. right around the time they lost Jonathan for the night.

  “Ya know who would love a blowjob shot?” Zibby slurred over Tara’s shoulder. “My mentor, Ben.”


  “Yeah, that’s a good idea!” Tara shouted over the thumping house music. “If you thirsty, find that friend of yours. I bet if he’s drunk enough you can get it in!”

  “I haven’t seen him since Raised Manholes.”

  “They gotta change that name.”

  “It’s an institution!”

  The defendant takes his victim as he finds him, she recited in her head, returning to the depressing end of the long weekend.

  It was already ten at night and Zibby hadn’t started LaSalle’s impromptu assignment, hoping that if she put it off just long enough, perhaps an email would pop into her inbox:

  Subject: JK!

  Dear Class,

  I’m CANCELING the assignment and commend all of those with the brass balls who waited until the last minute to start it. Bravo. You’re well on your way to a successful legal career.

  Best, LaSalle

  Zibby used to daydream about writing a novel on a Zanzibari balcony or running a ski lodge with Ryan in Colorado, but law school changed all that, and instead she imagined receiving the top grade in the class from a professor she loathed while she stared at the empty trailer in her backyard.

  Tara was buried in her used Crim Law textbook in search of the highlighted holding for North Carolina v. Alford and didn’t see Zibby spin around in her seat and wave.

  The door swung open and hung in the air—the sound of ice shaking around in a cup of cold brew entered the room before the professor.

  The whooshing noise of shuffling notes and outlines set off as the class prepared for the lecture.

  “Mr. Everett,” she snapped, putting down the briefcase, not looking in Mr. Everett’s direction at the far end of the front row. “The facts for North Carolina v. Alford, please.”

  Jafaris Everett, draped in LSU purple and gold, stumbled over the facts of the case. He backtracked on the charges, tripped over the witness statements, and fumbled the procedure.

  Typically LaSalle was a hawk for such offenses, striking at each second-degree murder that had magically morphed into manslaughter, or the affirmation at the appellate level that was actually a reverse and remand. But that morning LaSalle was implementing an alternative method to 1L torture that, if perfected, could be just as humiliating as the most aggressive Socratic method: the flounder.

  In only the second week of class, Zibby had sat through half a dozen cringing flounderings, luckily not falling victim herself. Other professors, like Civ Pro’s Marston or Contracts’ Cannito, would work with a student, acting like bumpers at the bowling alley to get the ball down the lane, if only for the benefit of the class as a whole. But LaSalle did not employ such altruisms and let you suck down irrelevant facts and dicta disguised as holdings like an Opelousas catfish sucking in air on a dock.

  Zibby had heard the stories of racehorses snapping their leg during a heat and how the only option was to put the animal out of its misery, but Jafaris’s attempt of briefing this case was the equivalent of a stallion rounding the bend with its head cut off.

  In his defense—Zibby was already trying to think in those terms—Jafaris had been cold-called last week, and considering the class had over sixty students, it would seem safe to assume that his turn across the rickety bridge wouldn’t come for at least a few more classes.

  “Mr. Everett.”

  The class, expecting the medieval mind torture to continue for at least five more minutes, snapped to attention when LaSalle broke her silence.

  “I cannot listen to any more of this. Clearly you are unfamiliar with the case and have proven that you did not read it. How do you plead?” After this question, LaSalle finally looked at Jafaris.

  “I read the case. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but I swear…”

  A smirk cracked on LaSalle’s face, and Zibby thought she was witnessing history.

  “So, Mr. Everett, are you maintaining your innocence but pleading guilty to my accusation because of the evidence put forth against you?”

  “I guess I am.”

  Muffled chuckles began to pop up in pockets of the room. Zibby heard “Wait, what’s so funny?” whispered in the row behind her. And while she caught what LaSalle was doing, she didn’t laugh along with the others and hoped that Jafaris would receive a bullet to end the wanton spectacle.

  “Well then, Mr. Everett, if you truly did comprehend the case, then you would understand why some of your brighter fellow classmates, including your sister seated next to you, are laughing.”

  “Oh…uh…” He looked back to the casebook as if the answer would rise and twinkle from the page.

  “Ms. Everett. You and Jafaris are twins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get your undergraduate degree?”

  “LSU.”

  “Astounding. Both children raised in the same household, attended the same high school…” She paused and posed a question to Veronica Everett: “You did attend the same high school as your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which was?”

  “McDonogh.”

  “Well I’m happy to see that someone is carrying on the Roneagle tradition of excellence.”

  Veronica didn’t look at her brother.

  “Ms. Everett, could you please take us through the facts of the case? From the beginning. I’m afraid my head is still spinning from your brother’s blunder of an attempt.”

  Veronica took the class through the facts with the ease of a 3L. She laid out the issue and nailed the holding. As she read, Jafaris sank deeper into his seat, realizing that the facts of the case—that the plaintiff wanted to maintain his innocence but plead guilty because the overwhelming evidence against him would surely persuade a judge or jury of his peers—had described his actions precisely.

  “So, next time you’re not prepared, Mr. Everett,” LaSalle began, throwing one last fistful of salt in the wound, “please just hold up a notecard that says ‘Alford plea’ to spare the class your aimless jurisprudential wanderings.”

  She tones it down, eventually.

  Zibby looked back at Jafaris, for whom “eventually” couldn’t come soon enough.

  Dio

  Dio looked down from his balcony at the line that had formed along Bourbon Street from the Raised Manholes doorstep and wrapped itself onto St. Ann. When a few sweating bears saw him high on his perch, they waved and took pictures as if he were a celebrity, and the rest of the line soon followed.

  Knocks came from the door and when Dio turned around, Buddy Landry’s fat head squeezed in through the crack.

  “Hu…Hi, sorry to interrupt you, Duh…Dio, but are you ready for them? We have a line wrapping around the block and I…I have the bartenders promoting a new drink suh…so it doesn’t luh…look suspicious.”

  Landry opened the door a little wider so he could get a view of the god glowing in the sunlight, and when he thought about the time they spent together in that room only a few days earlier, he began to cry.

  “If I could just…” Buddy walked toward the god on the balcony, hand outstretched, mumbling something Dio couldn’t comprehend.

  “That’s enough, Buddy,” he said, snapping the bar proprietor out of his fixation.

  “I…I’m sorry.”

  “Go and send the first one up.”

  “Do you nuh…need anything?”

  “More wine.”

  Buddy Landry took one final look at Dio’s shirtless body, turned, and waddled to the door, still sore from their previous encounter.

  A few minutes later, a svelte man with pale skin that reminded Dio of a Roman’s Dacian slave knocked on the door and smiled when the god called him in. He held a cup with the purple concoction they were selling downstairs. The drink itself was nothing more than cheap grain alcohol and sugar syrup, like an unfrozen daiquiri, which acted as a front for the popularity the prostitution racket was bringing to the oft-neglected gayborhood dive; five bucks for the drink, forty-five to the grizzly guarding the staircase, all cash. If you didn’t have ca
sh, you were welcome to the beat-up ATM that had worse rates than the Mafia.

  He inched unflinching toward the god, smile remaining, and asked, “I’ve never done this before. How uh…how do we start?”

  As the johns filtered in and out of the bedroom, Dio grew bored with the vapid conversations before the sex and the equally trite ones after (typically in high praise and disbelief), so he created a routine to keep himself entertained.

  “Drink the wine.” And the boy picked up the glass sitting on the dresser and drank, down the hatch in one gulp. “On your knees,” Dio said, sitting on the comfortable reclining chair he had made Buddy Landry fetch for him if he were to stay above the bar and not take his talents elsewhere.

  The boy dropped to his knees like a well-trained retriever.

  “Now crawl.”

  And the boy crawled. Looking up from all fours, all he could think about were the gushing reviews different men had shared, almost shouted, as they walked down the stairs of the bar and out onto Bourbon Street—some even got right back at the end of the line. “He was so rough with me. I loved it,” fawned a frolicking twink. “He was gentle and sweet with me. I’m getting seconds,” praised a sweaty chub. “For me, I can’t describe it. But it was just right!” shouted a bear.

  The boy froze when he reached Dio’s sandals and he stared down at the floor, waiting for the next command.

  “Now tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” the boy said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Okay then.” And he started.

  By the time Dio had finished and given the boy one quick tug—all that he needed, to finish himself—he was crying atop the thin mattress that stunk with layers of dried sweat and cum. Dio walked out onto the balcony in his tight red underwear and nothing else.