Troy Weaver - Witchita Stories

When I was into skateboarding and punk music, our neighbor helped me build a quarter-pipe out of wood we stole from various construction sites around some new housing developments in the area. It was about four or five feet high and the same in width. It took a few days to build it. It was hot, the summer sun scorching through civilities, making people cranky and fiendish for a breeze. When we finished tapping the last nail into place, we stepped back and admired it. He felt proud of his handiwork and tried running up it in his cowboy boots. On his way up he slipped, but he caught himself on the coping with his ribcage, cussing like mad into the heat. Thing is, he didn’t spill a drop of his beer, and there was the cigarette, still clenched between his lips and smoking up into his eyes, so now he had something else to be proud of. See that, he said, didn’t spill one fucking drop . He had two broken ribs. For the next several weeks he taped his chest up at night, drank during the day to keep the pain away. Shit, he did that anyway, the drinking, but the tape — the tape was something to get used to.

I couldn’t fall asleep because my brother and his girlfriend were fucking in the other room. She was really loud, sounded like she was being murdered and liked it. I put the pillow over my head. I could still hear her though. She was something. It got my dick hard hearing her like that. She was a good-looking girl. It made me feel guilty getting boners directly linked to her voice, her image, her body under my brother’s pumping, but I couldn’t figure a way to get it out of my head. They were just rubbing it in, night after night. I was surprised my parents couldn’t hear it, but they were downstairs and the way that house was set up, noises seemed to keep to their own levels.

One day, while my brother was in prison for theft, I went to the mall with his girlfriend. Afterwards, we found ourselves in his bedroom when my parents weren’t home. She had just bought him some clothes for when he got out of prison and she wanted me to try them on, model them a bit. So I did. I modeled the shit out of those clothes. And that’s when it happened. She grabbed the waist band of my jeans and pulled me close, unzipping. She grabbed my dick, which at that point was harder than marble. I let her touch it a minute, and then, even though I’d been dreaming about this for nearly a year, I pushed her back onto the bed and zipped my pants up . I think you should leave, I said. Please, I said, blushing, would you please leave. And she wasn’t even upset. She understood what was what and left without a word. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I kept it inside of me. Who was she kidding, anyway? She never wanted me — never, not once. She missed my brother. She wanted to feel our shared blood throb into her through the motions of my body — and I blew it. After she left, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would have been like. I could’ve shown her something, something she probably should’ve known. I could have shown her just how hard it is for a person to fit inside my brother’s skin. It’s a dangerous game. I didn’t want to risk anything.

I don’t recall having ever worn a matching pair of socks.

My dad would go through bouts of depression so bad some days I wouldn’t want to leave him alone. It was at its worst when my mom wasn’t home. He would hang his head, silently, and mope about the house. He would cry easily about the littlest things he viewed on the television. Sometimes he would leave the house when he got like that and I’d worry that he’d never make it back home. I worried he’d leave us for another family in another city, in another state. But mostly I worried that he would just flat out get up and leave us for another world. I’m not alone in this thinking, either. My sister had the same thoughts, and I’m sure others in the family did, too. Sometimes he’d talk about life like it wasn’t worth living. Most of the time, I believed him. He’d take off in the mornings to go drink coffee with his friends, and I’d think, This is it. He’s going to drive off a bridge or overpass. He’s going to noose up in a gas station bathroom or take a blade to his wrists in the parking lot at Braum’s.

Burt Cobain

Crotch Rockets from the Crypt

Attaché Death Mask

James Weave and the Pumpkin Splatters

Joy Addition

The Fairies

Out of the Blue Balls, Into the Black Sacks

The Liver Spots

Las Haggis

Sombrero Ninja Hotplate

Shitty Kitten

Twisters and Twizzlers

The Refried Bean Conspiracy

The Twelfth-floor Escalators

Troy Division

My brother used to use my dad’s credit card to call places like 1-800-BIG-TITS so that he could jerk off to faceless fat chicks and their heavy-handed breathing techniques. The phone and credit card bills would come in the mail. They would be in the hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. I’ve seen my dad beat the crap out of my brother for doing shit like this. I won’t lie, it happened sometimes. It was hard for me to feel bad for my brother or my dad. They couldn’t control themselves. My brother had to listen to women breathe into the phone to achieve orgasm and my dad had to beat him to feel like he had a handle on the situation. I usually hid in my room, turned up some music to drown out the noise. It started happening more frequently — the phone calls, the punishments, the in-my-room-all-alone-with-the-music-up hour — and then, one day, my mom and dad instigated a new rule. There would only be one phone allowed in the house and when they went to bed at night they would unplug it and hide it in their bedroom. What kind of shit is that? This sucks , I thought. Just because my older brother couldn’t stop playing with his dick, I had to suffer for it. Imagine that. I used to spend endless hours on the phone — now, not so much. And there was another problem, too. I always worried about the receiver. Why does it feel so greasy? Is that a pubic hair between the 2 and the 3 on the dial pad? Can I catch something? Where’s the Vaseline?

My brother and sister got along for the most part. But they also had a crazy streak. I remember one night. Summer most likely. Full moon, possibly, I mean it would make sense. My sister and her best friend are hanging out upstairs. There’s either some early-nineties rap or some pseudo-hippy shit on the stereo. Anyway, it is a night like all the others — my dad at the dining room table chain-smoking, my mom reading in her bedroom, me on the couch watching Dracula. Things are normal. There is this quietness to the air. My brother isn’t home. I am petting the dog, admiring the tumor on his back, when it happens: a scream like someone had just been stabbed with an electric turkey carver pulses through the wood and sheetrock and pipes of the house. I perk up and look at my dad. My dad looks at the ceiling, looks back at me. His look is a look of worry, but he still doesn’t get up from his chair. I think: That’s strange, Bela Legosi isn’t biting anyone at the moment , and then I hear water rushing through the pipes. The faucet to the upstairs bathtub — laughter mixed in with the wetness drifts through the sheetrock. Sometimes I wonder if my sister isn’t a lesbian. She and her friends hold hands. They seem so close. Now I imagine them taking a shower together. You can hear them. They’re both in there. What about the scream though — the laughter? Suddenly the water stops, the laughter stops, heavy feet quick across the floor come rushing down the stairs like a fall, and my sister and her best friend present themselves before us, ready to explain it all. And out it comes, no filter. The story goes something like this. My sister’s friend wanted to try on my sister’s Doc Martens. My sister said: Sure. Try them on . And she did, she tried them on — well, kind of. See, here’s the problem. When she got her sockless foot into the first boot, a room-temperature, dog-food-like mush slowly oozed between her toes. Gag, gag, gag, gag, gag . She pulled the boot off immediately. The smell of it, I can only imagine. It was shit all right. But it wasn’t from a dog or cat. This is human , she said. Human shit. My dad laughs. How can you tell? And she says: I can just tell, man. It’s human. I’m telling you. It’s human. And it is human. It’s his own son’s shit, my brother’s shit. When my brother catches wind of what happened he’s oh-so-proud of himself, like he thinks he’s done something good with his life with this stunt. He could make a living at it, maybe, if he applied himself. She deserved it , he says. And see, that’s it, he’d given my sister some money to get him some weed or something and she spent it all or smoked it all — it still remains a mystery — but he never got his money back or his weed or whatever it was, but shit in her boot, that’ll make it even. I think it is a well-played prank, but I am young and stupid and don’t know shit. And that isn’t the end of it, either. My sister and her friend wipe the pee off their vaginas with his pillow case the following weekend, and my brother, he doesn’t suspect a thing. There are a lot of things that happen in this world — bad things, strange things, gross and despicable things — but this one, the piss on the pillow, every time I think of it, it makes me smile.