Heartthrobs, by Joan Jobe Smith

My Aunt Louise subscribed to Photoplay,

wrote fan letters, and kept a movie star

scrapbook for so long that she began to

hallucinate. Boldface lie, my father said,

but I believed my Aunt Louise’s story that

the movie star Richard Egan had fallen

head-over-heels in love with her, drove

all the way from Hollywood to Colton,

California to meet her on Saturday afternoons

at the chili dog stand on Mt. Vernon Boulevard.

Just to hold her hand, nothing else, my

Aunt Louise, only 16, swore to her daddy,

a hot-headed Texas railroad man, who got out

his pistol and cleaned it and loaded it and

tried to sneak up on Richard Egan at the

chili dog stand to catch him in the act

with his little girl. But he always

got there too late, Richard Egan just

having driven away, just moments before,

back to L.A. in his red ’54 Coupe de Ville.

Someday, someday, my grandpa would say,

I’m gonna get that slippery son of a bitch

and my father would say, Jesus Christ, if this

don’t beat all, and go outside and grind his teeth.

Later, on our way back home to Long Beach

my father’d say if Louise were his girl,

teen-ager or not, he’d get out his belt and

wallop some sense into her butt, and I

knew that he would, so I never told him when

Robert Wagner began peeking into my

bedroom window on nights the moon was full.

From “Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond” edited by Suzanne Lummis and Charles H. Webb. (Red Wind Books: $10.95; 244 pp.) 1995 Reprinted by permission.