Weedeater. Robert Gipe

      Me and Willett met cause Willett played music on a radio station I listened to. His family ran the station. It was on the mountain named for his daddy’s family on the back end of Scott County, Virginia, and it broadcast into Canard. Bilson Mountain Radio was pretty much all volunteers. They played what they wanted. Mamaw and Houston listened to the old music they played. Mountain music. And Mamaw liked the hippie meditation shows from California and troublemaker news shows from New York City they ran.

      Willett’s half-brother Kenny, the one June fooled around with, played lots of punk rock and weird music shows. I listened to them. I liked music my friend Decent Ferguson called “murder music,” old stuff like Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Malignant Growth. And because Willett had to do just what Kenny did, he played murder music. And so I listened to Willett on the radio too.

      Willett’s voice is terrible. He sounds like a clothes dryer needs greasing. He made a lot more sense as somebody to be with when he started writing me. He wrote humongous letters. I still have them. I wont tell anybody where. Pretty soon after we started writing, email started. I have all my emails from him gathered up on a Xena the Warrior Princess flash drive he brought me back from a comic book thing he went to in Chattanooga. I wore that flash drive around my neck for a long time, strung on a shoestring I got off one of Daddy’s mining boots.

      Those emails had stories about Willett traveling to see bands with his friends from college, stories about him being in New York City and Atlanta and Nashville and Massachusetts. There were stories about him being in Italy and London, all the time seeing bands and sleeping in parks and dumpsters. After while he got a scanner and he’d scan pictures of himself in all those places, and the more stuff he sent, the more I could see myself a part of all that.

      Also, he wore me down. When I first met him, I didn’t much care for him. He was sweaty and sticky, still is, even though he doesn’t do much with his body. But he just kept liking me, kept remembering what I told him, kept bringing me things couldn’t help but please me. Like, somehow or other, he was the best at getting me makeup, and good at putting it on me. He’d do my eyes better than I could, which was weird cause in most things had to do with using your hands, he was a total clod. One time it took him an hour and a half to change the wiper blades on the car, and even then he tore them up and Albert had to steal some off another car at the Kingsport mall parking lot and put them on for him. Willett’s dad said Willett could tear up an anvil.

      Anyway, he could do eye makeup. Our best date ever was one Halloween he made me up to be a hot Frankenstein woman, green but hot, and I really was hot. Boys that always made fun of me and call me Lurch and stuff just stood and looked at me all night long at that party and would try and talk and couldn’t think of a thing to say, just ask if they could feel of the bolts on my neck.