A terrific walk down memory lane, circa 1947, via Lucius Hutchfield, a precocious, rebellious thirteen year-old who's got clawfoot deformity, an alcoholic father, a semi-prostituting mother, two brothers both in the reformatory, and a job as an usher at the Bijou, one of whose side benefits is fucking girls backstage as he prays for their salvation. But he really loves Raine, a gumchewing combo of all his celluloid heroines, from Gene Tierney to Merle Oberon to Linda Damell, to whom he writes and receives endless, pretentious, hilarious letters re eternal love, most of which are included in this book, plus diary excerpts, plus the rococo romance-adventure he indefatigably sends out to various Hollywood ""talent agencies"" (he thinks of himself as a second Thomas Wolfe; after all, he's from Tennessee), plus the plots and credits of any flick you might have missed on late night TV -- not to mention some of the best adolescent dialogue this side of the Rio Grande. This is a funny, absolutely uncompromising, novel about the stuff our dreams were made of, in the days when we still had dreams.