Troy Weaver: Witchita Stories

I think I’m in love.

What if the diviner tells us that when he holds the rod he feels that the water is five feet under the ground? or that he feels that a mixture of copper and gold is five feet under the ground? Suppose that to our doubts he answered: “You can estimate a length when you see it. Why shouldn’t I have a different way of estimating it?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

The only black friend I had growing up was a guy who could skateboard better than anybody I’d ever seen. I envied him. For a brief time, he was a hero of mine. Another kid I used to skate with called him a “nigger” one day, face to face under the shade of a maple. Dude’s a nigger with white nipples, he said. It was crazy. I froze where I was, back against bark and with my heart all choked up into my throat like a fist, waiting for the violence to come on like a warm blanket of phlegm. But my black friend only smirked and moved away from the tree branches, laughing. He could’ve killed the kid if he’d wanted to. Apparently he wanted for deeper things. He wanted the things in being you can never even come close to touching — the things there are no words for.

My Bloody Valentine (self-titled)

John Fahey’s Death Chants, Breakdowns, and Military Waltzes

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures

Under the Pink —Tori Amos

Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate

Here Come the Warm Jets —Brian Eno

Bowie’s Diamond Dogs

The Cure’s Disintegration

Tupac Shakur’s Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.

Moonpix —Cat Power

Hey Bro,

When you’re on meth you get to looking like a hag in no time. Pretty soon you start terrorizing your family with thefts. Threatening phone calls slice through the wires almost every other day. Sometimes you chew your fingernails down to where they nearly bleed and, when there’s nothing left, you start chewing pens and DVD cases and cigarette cartons and toenails. You spit the bits all over the floor. One time you got pistol-whipped and punched in the nose. You pick at your face and wonder why you’re ugly. Sometimes you masturbate for hours, so desensitized to your own touch that you wouldn’t feel a needle tunneling the canals of your urethra, too busy jostling the shriveled thing in your fist to even notice, watching outsized twat flutter on the television screen like some kind of obscene butterfly fading into light. Your bedroom smells like a mildewed shoehorn, or ass, I can’t really tell the difference. If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t tell you this, but when you came back home after months of street-life, the way you looked actually made my stomach feel all kinds of fucked-up. I don’t know if I was disgusted or relieved, but you looked like a skeleton vacuum-packed in cellophane, ready to strike a pose beneath any ghetto streetlight. I wanted to thrust a bucket of lard at you and hand you a spoon. I wanted you to have something thick and meaty around your bones so you’d never get cold at night. It was striking, the way your tiny arms shivered. I thought the streets had killed you. Yet there you were, sifting through me like an apparitional thing. I thought about reaching over and searching your wrist for a pulse, anything, mud, but I pulled back. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to see the look on your face when I told myself the news.

Love always and forever,

Your Baby Brother

P.S. Please don’t tell Mom I was with you.

We found a dead fisherman at the lake. He was sitting with his head thrown back, fishing pole held tight and upright in his hands. His skin was red and flaky from sun exposure. I couldn’t tell if it was him or the lake that smelled like shit. We circled around him like flies, observing the stillness of his body. Then I saw a finger move. Well, it didn’t really move, just kind of vibrated. Then I realized the pole was moving, not his finger, and I tried to pry his fingers apart to get the pole free but couldn’t even budge them. I looked out and watched the bobber go all the way under, the pole arching with the weight of the fish. I tried to get to the pole again. My friends wanted to leave. Dude, let’s get the fuck out of here. C’mon, man. Let’s go. I didn’t want to leave. I said, Hold it. Just hang on a minute. I wanted to see if the fish would free itself, but the bobber never came back up, and we left the dead fisherman there, all alone, to reel it home.

The last time I thought about death, it was only a dream.

I went ice skating with a midget once. Not a real midget, just this kid I knew who suffered from some kind of full-body deformity, more like Simon Birch than Wee Man, and he wore these amazing glasses that made his eyes look swollen huge in his tiny head. He was only about three feet tall. He lived in a trailer park and smoked pot. I went to his birthday party in eighth grade. Everybody was getting high while scoping the junkyard. He had a rattail that fell down his back like dirty curling ribbon. His chest was all puffed out, a bowling ball berthed under his ribcage. I remember hearing Kid Rock float out from his trailer and into the driveway. He always seemed to be smiling, weasel-like laughter frothing from his crooked teeth, when he wasn’t putting on a mean face to look tough. He presented himself as the type of badass figure you might find in a novel by S.E. Hinton. His birthday party is seared into my brain. I think he only made it to one or two more. Later that year, they did full-body surgeries on him, breaking and resetting bones, trying to stretch him out with machines and braces so that he might be a little taller someday. They succeeded in making him just shy of four inches taller, and he seemed to be on top of the world for a while, showing off his newest strut and stature, finally feeling that sense of equality with his fellow boy that he’d always yearned for. But he only lasted another year. He wasn’t meant for the tall life. It was those extra few inches that killed him.

The first was early sophomore year and I didn’t really know the guy that well. I only knew that he was nice, and that everybody loved him. At the funeral, everyone wore yellow windbreaker pants and jackets in honor of his choice of Halloween costume the previous year: a Chiquita banana. Guess it was a real hit.

The second was just a little after the first. But it was a girl this time, a girl I actually kind of knew a little, an acquaintance I’d talked to a few times during lunch. We were just getting to know each other. She always seemed sad even when she was cheerful. She hung herself from her ceiling fan. At least that’s what I was told.

The third was a kid I knew pretty well. I’d skated with him a few times around town, and we had Technology class together during third block. One day he just stopped coming to class. A few weeks later somebody explained to me what had happened. He used a gun. I’d been under the assumption he had transferred to another school.

The fourth wasn’t suicide per se: dude did too many drugs, drank too much alcohol, passed out at a party and never woke up. His funeral drew more people than the previous three combined. I guess his suicide was accidental, unlike the others, so his funeral boasted a more apologetic feel.