Troy Weaver - Witchita Stories

I watched Faces of Death exactly one time with my friends when we were teenagers. There were a lot of overblown, laughable, fake-out deaths, and then there were the others, the truly disturbing and horrific ones, the ones that come home with you, leave a bad taste in your mouth. The public suicide of Budd Dwyer is the one that stuck with me. At the time, I didn’t know who he was, or why he did what he did — I just knew that this one was real, a man blowing his brains out on camera, and that I was sick with that knowledge, the fact that I wanted to look. Turns out he was a Pennsylvanian politician who had been accused of taking a bribe. He set up a press conference. After the cameras started rolling, he started in on this speech, declaring his innocence for about four minutes, and then he took this big-ass handgun from a manila envelope and said, Don’t, don’t. Look, look this will hurt someone. He put the gun into his mouth and blew the top of his skull off. I took the image home with me and slept on it. It invaded my dreams for a few weeks, and then, just as quickly as it came, it left me. Could it be that my brain couldn’t handle it? Was it repressed? Who knows? Anyway, I hadn’t thought about Budd for years until a few weeks back. I was in my car, that Filter song “Hey Man, Nice Shot” came on, and I saw Budd shoving that gun into his mouth all over again. It was the first time in my life that I felt like he must have had his reasons. If we had only questioned the image, interrogated our bias and opted out of the popular notion that he was just an insane man who was at his breaking point, we would have discovered the truth, whatever the truth might have been. Instead, we sensationalized what, when looked at in a different light, could arguably be considered the last public execution in American history — and then we watched it on a loop.

My brother’s out of prison and staying at our parent’s. I’m living there too, when I’m not out partying, gone for days on end. I come home one day and go upstairs to shave before going out for the night, my ride parked out front and waiting. I hum some stupid song, ignoring my dad on my way up to my bedroom. On my way out, my dad calls me in to talk with him for a minute. He’s engulfed in a cloud of cigarette smoke when I get downstairs, watching the news. He tells me to have a seat. I sit down. Then he says, Your brother’s old roommate called . And I’m like, Yeah, so what? What’s it have to do with me? And then it starts. He tells me about how this roommate of my brother’s said that one of the guys my brother used to share needles with had recently been diagnosed with HIV. We’d been sharing razors since he’d been back, out on parole, and, being the clumsy fucks we were born to be, we always ended up with blood on our faces — to this day I massacre my face when I shave. My dad says, Your mom took him to get tested. He says, Don’t share razors or anything until after we know a little more about what is going on, and all I can think is, Too late , but I don’t tell him that. Instead of staying at home to brood, I leave to go out for the night, a scalding clump of fear in my chest like a cannon ball, and keep thinking, My brother has just sentenced me to death. He has finally done it. He is killing me. Two days later, I make another trek home and my parents tell me not to worry about it, he tested negative. Your brother is going to be okay . My relief is astounding, like, I can’t even explain it. I guess it was a thing like quasars or black holes or the universe expanding — incredible, nearly extraterrestrial, something you can hardly scratch the surface of before being forced to confront just how small and inconsequential your entire existence is and has been and will always be. And in the midst of all of this, I’ve been having revelations about my future. I’m in love with a good friend of mine, maybe the best I’ve ever known, and what a feeling it is to love someone more than you’ve ever loved yourself, or anybody else for that matter— something I find difficult even now to describe. If I were infected, I wouldn’t date. It would be unfair. But now, now that I know for certain that I’m not infected, the gumption to spill the ooze is bubbling. It’s scalding. Maybe my new love and I will build something beyond us. I want to live with her in the middle of the forest, in a tiny castle made of wood.

Freshman year of high school I’m in a band. They are new friends with mutual interests. Knowing how to play music is secondary to everything. Being in a band, that’s what matters. We play crappy covers of nu metal songs, sometimes grunge. We suck, but who cares? We alternate between each other’s houses for practice. We don’t even have a drummer. The first time they ever come over to my house, my brother tells us to come into the basement and hang with him for a while before we start. When we get down there he has all this cocaine cut up and in lines on the end table. He asks if we want any. I say no right away, and then look at my friends, hoping their responses echo mine. They look nervous as fuck. I get it; they’re trying to play it cool. I tell my brother, Fuck that, we aren’t doing that shit , but he’s determined to get somebody in on it, either because he’s the loneliest person I’ve ever known, or because, if he has some company, maybe he’ll feel less guilty about doing it by himself. Oh, c’mon. It isn’t that bad. It hardly even does anything, he says. I leave the basement, calling for my friends to take my lead. But they stay behind, feigning small talk, as I walk up the stairs and into the kitchen. Not five minutes later, they emerge, all jittery, with young hearts about to pump out through their chests and onto the floor. This is the first impression, the thing that stamped our friendship into the battered thing it was destined to become.

My brother wanted me to do acid with him, but I was only thirteen, and I was too scared, so I told him I didn’t want to do it, and he shook his head and said, Fuck you, then . He liked to mess with me, so he told me if I was going to be a pussy about it and not do it with him, be careful about what I touched or ate or drank for the next few days. Liquid acid , he said. I can put it on anything and you’d never know it was there. Next you know, the carpet’s licking at your feet and the walls are dripping sweat into your eyes. For some reason, an irrational fear, I was convinced that he’d smeared it on the telephone receiver. This was back in the time of landlines, and it was the only phone in the house. I’d have to touch it sooner or later, I knew that, but I already felt like a crazy person and I couldn’t afford to be any crazier than I already was. It was all a grandiose setup, a trick. I left the phone alone for nearly a week. I was trying to preserve my sanity.

The first time I inhaled I was thirteen or fourteen. I’d smoked cigarettes before, but I’d been faking it, I’d never inhaled. It burned like hell, that first time. I hated the way it felt, the smell, the burn, I hated all of it. But I kept doing it anyway. I had something to prove. We chain-smoked a whole pack, me and two of my friends, late one night after spending a few hours out and about in various neighborhoods, breaking into cars. That’s how we got them, the cigarettes and the lighter. We’d been getting into unlocked cars for a few months already, because that’s what the boredom of this town bred, but one time we actually came away from it with something more than just our shame. We got forty dollars, a Walkman, some shitty CDs, and three packs of cigarettes — all from one car. Afterward, we lay out on my friend’s trampoline in his backyard. It was a summer night, clear, and we admired our loot in the moonlight, filling our lungs with smoke and talking about all the girls at school we couldn’t stop thinking about, how we’d love to sweat into their palms, feel our saliva swath across their tongues, and, if we played our cards right, tremble inside them in the comfort of their homes while their parents worked nights to put food in their stomachs and meat on their bones.