Troy Weaver: Witchita Stories

Blue Velvet

A River Runs Through It

Un Chien Andalou

Days of Heaven

Sometimes a Great Notion

Wise Blood

River’s Edge

The Lost Boys

Dumbo

Jurassic Park

The first time I kissed a girl I was in fifth grade. I was staying the night at a friend’s house. We set his tent up in the backyard. This would be where we would spend our night and eventually fall asleep. Earlier, we had hung out with two eighth-grade girls down the street. They smoked cigarettes and swore a lot. My first two kisses were with them. They snuck out of their houses in the middle of the night and came to our tent. The taller one with streaks in her hair pulled a plastic pop bottle from her purse. We began. They set the bottle down and I spun it, watching nervously, hoping it didn’t land on my friend. I didn’t want to kiss a dude. And I got lucky. It landed on the shorter girl with brown hair. I started with a quick peck. She took over and showed me how it was done. She shoved her tongue in my mouth. It tasted bad, probably from the cigarettes, but I didn’t mind. I stuck my tongue in her mouth. This was happening. I looked over and saw my friend and the tall girl were kissing, too. I felt happy and nervous and dangerous. I kept thinking about how my parents would be really disappointed if they ever found out. But then I just stopped thinking altogether. Fuck it. We switched. I was kissing the tall girl now. She had bigger boobs. She put my hand on her boobs and brushed her hand across my penis a couple of times. After a while I was back with the short girl, the one I really liked. She was sweet, and I felt at home there in her arms, licking the smoke off her tongue. For a while, I convinced myself that this was what love felt like. I never saw either one of them again, can’t even recall their names, but they meant enough to me that I’m putting them right here, on this page, so they can remain here, with me, forever, even in this small way.

The summer I turned twenty, my brother was out of prison for a few months and we got drunk with my dad one night — Jack and Cokes. I can’t remember what happened or what was said, all I know is I ended up madder than hell and went after my brother with a steak knife.

Several minutes of struggle ensued.

When they finally got the knife free from my fist, I bolted up the staircase, trying my damnedest to get away from my brother’s incredible prison bulk. But I wasn’t quick enough. I could smell him behind me. His palm dwarfed my shoulder, and before I knew it I was thrown down the stairs. Every hard angle of the steps entered my body like a dull knife.

So there I am, sprawled out in a daze, thinking: I deserved that, and my brother is over by the table, trembling, saying you deserved that, you fuck , and my dad is back in his seat, sipping on his liquid and looking at us like we’re crazy.

Fact is, my brother wasn’t some little Goth kid anymore, but a prisoner, with shitty tats to boot, and every year he was looking more and more like the ones you catch late at night on Discovery Channel, when you can’t seem get into the groove of your couch right.

When I miss him I fall asleep to the riots on the TV.

I remember putting a fishhook through his thumb when we were little kids, before all that ink and bars came between us, and feeling so bad I kissed it: the hole, the blood — and I’d do it again. In a heartbeat, just give me that goddamn thumb and I’ll know and you’ll know how much it is I really love him.

What’s that boo-boo lip out for? Suck it up, I’d tell him. Be a man.

It’s hard to say exactly when my brother started wearing my sister’s clothes. There was a moment there when everyone clearly ignored the fact that my sister’s shirts and pantyhose were popping up around the house with ripped linings, loose threads, pit stains, runs. For a while nobody had the courage to confront this. Everybody kept their questions in that tight space inside their skulls. But gradually, as the weeks went by, it became clear to all of us that somebody much larger than my sister was certainly wearing her clothes. There could be no other explanation. Nobody could come up with a better one. It couldn’t be Dad, he hated queers, and I was too small, unable to produce such damage, but my brother, my brother — he was the only explanation we could force from our denial-ridden lips.

If I’m not mistaken, he was wearing one of my sister’s tight shiny shirts when he got caught sneaking back into the house one night. It was tight on her, so on him it was like a second skin. He had sweat all over him, stinging his eyes, coming out through his pants and running into her shirt, streaks upon streaks of sweat. It was summer. He had on scuffed Doc Martens and had both ears pierced, loop earrings, a dangling cross. He was always pushing those types of boundaries with fashion. To me it was some type of gay punk look with a slightly gothic spin. The sadness was there, the deep depression that manifests itself most poignantly through the lyrics of The Cure. As a younger brother, sometimes you take a look at your siblings and almost admire them for their boldness of vision, however borrowed it may be.

My brother was into witchcraft for a time, the occult of Crowley, the unholy trickery of the tarot. He started wearing black and plaguing himself with pentagrams, lipstick smears and eyeliner. He read books by Anton LaVey and produced poetry so dark it made Baudelaire seem like a pussy. His clothes became baggier and raggedy, only washed if my mother insisted. Some of them looked like mere rags. He wanted to look like a lowlife, and this fact didn’t go unnoticed by anybody in the family, let alone the neighbors.

Our treehouse still stood in that outcropping of trees just minutes from our house. Little did I know that it was still a sanctuary for my brother — an incubator for his dabbling in perversities. But I had always been a pretty lonely kid, always seeking affection, and so when my brother invited me to his tiny castle in the woods, I went, not really caring one way or the other what we found ourselves engaged in there.

When we got out into the field near the creek, my brother produced a plastic bag, a big old Ziploc, the biggest I’d ever seen, and said: We’re frog hunting. This actually wasn’t an odd thing for me to take part in. I was an outdoorsy type I was when I was young, so I went at it fast and furious, scooping up frogs by the fistfuls down on the muddy banks and throwing them into the bag, not questioning the fate that lie ahead of them.

We must have had twenty in there by the time we made it up to the treehouse. It was about thirty or forty feet up, with foot-long scraps of two-by-four nailed into the trunk as a ladder. When we got inside my brother produced some kind of evil book of rituals and rites, slapped it on his lap and searched for the right page. I was observing the bag of frogs, holding it up, twisting it in the light, when he promptly ripped it from my hands. He had a kitchen pot up there, all scorched on the inside, and he started filling it with lighter fluid that he’d pulled from some secret compartment in his fortress. What are you going to do? I asked him. Just watch, he said , and hold this book open, so I can read it. He pulled out a match book, laid it beside him. My god, I thought. We have to be quick about this, okay, he said. Now, just hold the book up so I can read it. I didn’t want to, but I held it up anyway. He lit a match and threw it into the pool of lighter fluid. The fire was a lot bigger than I had anticipated. Then he had the Ziploc bag open, dumping the frogs in before I could do something to stop him. I closed my eyes. The sound was indescribable — popping, hissing, tiny little screams — and the stench, the stench was unbearable. I opened my eyes in time to see a couple of them hop out of the flames, but they hadn’t put themselves out, no, they were slow dying balls of fire. My brother hurriedly read from the book, words that would never mean anything to me, and then he clapped the lid over the flame and stomped out the few frogs that had escaped beneath his shoe. I wanted to cry, I wanted resurrection, but I also wanted my brother to love me, so instead I asked him, What kind of spell did you cast? And he tells me: There’s this girl at school I want to fuck.