Troy Weaver: Witchita Stories

Crime and Punishment —Dostoevsky

Nausea —Sartre

Ham on Rye —Bukowski

Green Eggs and Ham —Seuss

The Journal of Albion Moonlight —Patchen

The Loser —Bernhard

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories —Hemingway

The Easter Parade —Yates

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute —Paley

The Lover —Duras

Malone Dies —Beckett

The Catcher in the Rye —Salinger

The Immoralist —Gide

Cannery Row —Steinbeck

Tropic of Cancer —Miller

Wise Blood —O’Connor

The Stranger —Camus

Anti-Oedipus —Deleuze and Guattari

The Satyricon —Petronius

The Passion According to G.H. — Lispector

Miss Lonely Hearts —West

The Sickness unto Death —Kierkegaard

Airships —Hannah

Closer —Cooper

Ficciones —Borges

ad astra per aspera

My sister’s seventeen and dating a guy with a pitchfork tattooed on his chest. He has blue eyes and prep-length dirty-blonde hair, plays the guitar, mostly old hair-band rock from the eighties, and looks a little like a child molester with that little tuft of hair above his upper lip. He smokes Marlboros and plays the occasional game of pool. I went with him and my sis to the Bingo Palace one night. An old lady with curlers won the first round. As for the second, I wouldn’t know; we left before they even started, and when we got in the car, I could smell liquor on someone’s breath. Whether it was hers or his, I’ll never know. But this boyfriend of my sister’s, he’s in his twenties. She met him in rehab. Now she’s six months pregnant, working at Sonic, and driving around town in an old Chrysler New Yorker. He’s a junkie, alcoholic, and soon-to-be father who works at the Casey’s General Store out in Maize. Everybody is really scared about what the future holds for them, my sister and her beau, especially my parents, but I’m happy about the news. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. There’ll always be time to worry, won’t there? Can’t we do that later? But damn it, I’m worrying now — and it is later. The baby was born seventeen years ago. The baby’s in high school now. He’ll be driving soon. In just a few short years he’ll outgrow me. He’ll be a better man than me. He’ll open my eyes, pour in the 3D pinks and blues, and show me how he turned out is all the ways I should’ve been.

I crawl into the strangeness of some books and movies just to feel something familiar, something normal. I leave my fiancé’s house to go to my apartment. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m driving a piece-of-shit Dodge Diplomat, a relic of the eighties. It’s the color of taco meat. It’s only about six miles home, but three miles in, the halfway point, I pull around the car in front of me, into the center lane, and stop at the red light. I feel like an ass for tailgating the guy, but I’m a nervous person, so I do what anybody would do and look over. Our eyes lock. A gun points at me through an open window. I press hard on the gas and peel through the light.

Did I learn anything?

No.

Has tailgating ever warranted a death?

The world is full of possibilities.

At any rate, when I got home I read the rest of Funeral Rites by Jean Genet and took a shower. I couldn’t decide which was better: I’m lucky I’m still alive or that should have been it.

(Age thirteen)

Q: What’s the difference between a large pizza and a black man?

A: Large pizza can feed a family of five.

(Age sixteen)

Q: What’s more enjoyable than stapling a dead baby to the wall?

A: Tearing it off.

(Age eight)

A: Knock, knock!

Q: Who’s there?

A: Little Boy Blue.

Q: Little Boy Blue who?

A: Michael Jackson.

My brother pulled his dick out in front of me. It was hard. He tried folding it in half, then realized it hurt and tried an up and down stroke instead. When he discovered he liked that, he didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop — would never stop. As soon as I left the room, I thought that that looked like a fun thing to do too, so I went into my bedroom and gave it a try. I started out, limper than all hell, by making shapes with it — a circle, a crescent moon — and then I made it serpent-like, thought it looked like the Loch Ness monster. I was scared, though, doing it. My heart pounded so hard it felt like there was a small animal in there trying to eat its way through my solar plexus. Then, slowly, the fear turned into excitement, turned into joy. And after a few proper tugs, when things started to harden up, I feared I too would never stop doing it. And I didn’t. A year or two later, I ejaculated all over the carpet, my first orgasm. For two whole years I’d been stopping just short. I looked down at the mess on the carpet, my butthole in a knot, and yanked my jeans up around my hips, feeling accomplished. There was a dirty towel in the laundry basket, which I used to clean up the mess. Then it came, out of nowhere, all these feelings I hadn’t really felt before — not that intensely anyway. I felt guilty, I guess, for feeling so good, like I didn’t deserve it or something, even though, deep down, I knew that I’d earned it. I mean, I was sweating like a gross-ass pig spun on a spit for days and my arm, Charlie-horsed through and through, was like a dead otter sewn onto my shoulder. There was guilt and shame swimming their circles inside me, but I convinced myself that they were just a couple of stupid little feelings that I would have to learn to live with. If only everybody in the world did the tug-pull and the rub-rub, and all at once, every single one of us, slow and synchronized, guilt-free, then we would finally have some sense of a peaceful world — and possibly, however momentarily, we would feel ourselves free from the shame of living.

The time K and I rode the roller coaster and he took the seatbelt off and I was afraid he was going to die.

The time I kissed a girl on that white train that went back into the wooded area and down near the go-cart track.

The time I rode the Log Jam, got a nosebleed, and started to cry.

The time the guy on the lawn crew was mowing the ground under the roller coaster before the park opened for the day and then stuck his head through the slats at the wrong moment and got his head cut off by the roller coaster car coming down the main hill on a practice run — reading about it in the newspaper.

The time the park closed one last time, and we all silently wept.