Troy Weaver: Witchita Stories

I got really paranoid and lazy with life. I dropped out of school, thinking there was something contagious there. Who knows, maybe I’d be the next one to go. Of course I wasn’t, but you can never get that kind of stench off you. People kill themselves all the time, in every country, on every fucking continent I in the world. They don’t feel any guilt about it. Why should they? They leave that behind for the living. I feel guilty all the time.

they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times, they were told.

Here comes the walking dead, one of my ex-best friends, freshman year of high school, cutting his wrists over girls who never loved him, no matter how hard he tried. With the pools of blood on the linoleum, the white bandages with the rose-petal patterns, the ambulance rides the one or two times he came too close, all those weeks spent in hospitals for observation, the Velcro shoes and the five-o’clock shadows, he never even came close to getting what he wanted from these girls. He wanted a companion, a force of two as one, a tenth-grade bride — no traitors allowed. He’d haunt your days with scars, reminding you of your betrayal, if you ever left him. He wanted you for life, something to stuff and put over his mantel, into his head, a laurel, a trophy, a model of your car, the last thing you touched, the one he followed home in his fantasies, driven into his heart with the sharp point of obsession. It wasn’t about love with him, really, nor sex. I think more than anything all he ever wanted was a little piece of a life he could try-on, lace-up, and call his own, even if it wasn’t and never would be that simple. Resistance was the only common ground between what he really wanted and what he wanted even more. One time I asked him to go ahead and tell what’s wrong, because I could tell that something was wrong, you could see it in the shadows under his eyes, but he just stood there blank-faced, mouth hung like a trapdoor, a hole full of dirty tiles in pink mud, and nodded. He couldn’t control his lips, just as he couldn’t control those girls and their bodies, and they quivered, his breath carving sculptures of everything he’d ever felt, seen, remembered, and dreamed into the folds of the wind. All he had to do was breathe.

My intro to serious literature, sixteen years old and freshly dropped-out of high school, was The Picture of Dorian Gray . It was fine, I liked it okay, and then I forgot about it like it never happened. A few weeks later, I sat down to watch TV with my dad. I was disappointed with his choice, totally bored, and wanted to turn the channel. But then my mind snapped into place, focused in, and I was fully taken in by a young, attractive Angela Lansbury. She mesmerized me. It was the movie adaptation of Wilde’s book, the old black and white one, and of course Lansbury was striking in every human way. She looked so pretty and innocent, but at the same time she looked as though she’d lived, had understood the hard times in life and come out the other end. I watched the whole thing, no commercial breaks, from start to finish, didn’t even take a breather to piss or sneak a cigarette in the upstairs bathroom.

I thought about her a lot after that, especially at night while I was trying to become a writer. A few months later, I bought a book of poems by Jim Carroll. To my surprise, there was a poem in there that said something about Angela Lansbury sneezing under the ocean, signaling the whales or some sap-shit like that. I can’t tell you why, but I thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever read, at the time, and thought about her even more after that. She visited my room at night, an obsession. I thought about how my mom used to watch Murder, She Wrote and bite her fingernails into nubs, just shy of literally sitting on the edge of her seat, when I was a child, and how the old woman on the TV was the same person I’d once thought about sexually as a teenager. They weren’t even the same person anymore. The older version was even better.

Arkansas in late July is like being wrapped in cellophane and stuffed inside a tanning bed. We are staying in a cabin near Beaver Lake. Everybody is swimming down at the pool, but I stayed behind to give my muscles and skin a rest after a long day of canoeing on the White River. I have burns all up my legs and down my arms. My face looks raw. I’m out on the deck, drinking a can of orange soda and eating chips. It’s getting dark, but it’s hard to tell because it’s always darker in the woods. The branches creak in the heat. I’m waiting for a creature to come out of hiding and be discovered. Nothing comes. Thirty minutes later, still nothing. Sometimes nature cheats you in that way. There are plenty of bugs though — spiders the size of the palm of your hand and flies as big as jelly beans. The bugs are thick, like walls. I get to thinking about things, while watching these bug-clusters, and I’m still thinking about them now. I’m thinking about all the things my life accumulated to a certain point. Let’s say the point right before I met my wife. All before her, all of it, seems like just a bunch of shit I can throw out there and tell for the sake of telling and at the same time it’s all so much more than that. I’d like to say that none of it matters, but these are the things I had to experience to experience myself as me in the now. Throwing them out with such carelessness would be like pimping out my past on Maury, but forgetting, that would be even worse, like keeping my skin on a coat hanger after pawning my bones for a few scraps of meat.