Dead Guy

The dead guy lay in a small alley behind the French restaurant Moulin Rouge. His back was against a large, green, industrial garbage can that the restaurant used for throwing away the scraps from their kitchen. A small crowd of holiday revelers had drifted in from Bourbon St. and stood in a quiet circle, staring at the dead guy. The dead guy had not been homeless or destitute. Only in his lack of breath did he differ from his audience. An overweight, white guy on vacation from Akron or Dallas or Detroit drunk on Tom Collins' and Mardi Gras. His white pants were loose around his waist as if he had slipped into the alley intending only to take a pee before returning to the carnival. The alley was damp and ripe with deposits from the bladders and stomachs of similarly intentioned travelers. The puddle spreading between his outspread legs revealed that the dead guy had not yet succeeded in his task when something, possibly a heart attack, had taken him by surprise and forced him sit down for a minute and collect his breath. The dumb look of surprise at his body's betrayal still popped from his drunken, red rimmed eyes.

An approaching ambulance siren caused me to blink away the dumb look of surprise from my own drunken, red rimmed eyes. The noise of the crowd came into the alley and filled what I thought had been silence. It seemed that I had been with the dead guy for a long time, but really we had only just met.

Twenty minutes before I had been in Tom's Market, one of the half a dozen original homes of the Hurricane-a noxious drink made with watermelon flavored snow-cone syrup, shaved ice and vodka, or rum or tequila or whatever clear well liquor was handy. A toxic slurpee and the official drink of Mardi Gras.

Tonight Tom was selling his progeny cheap. A dollar bought a half-liter Hurricane served in an attractive plastic souvenir cup. Nobody could accuse Tom of skimping on the booze either. Each was industrial strength. He did not need to. No one except drunken sorority girls from Chapel Hill could drink more than one of them. I walked outside to get some air and saw a guy wearing a Michigan sweatshirt. I was a little drunk, so I went up and asked him if he went to U of M. He told me that his brother went there. He was majoring in engineering, blah, blah, blah. I was all ready bored and he must have sensed it because he asked if I wanted to see a dead guy. I was a little drunk so I said, “Yeah, I’ll go see a dead guy.”