Charlton Heston, a Teenage Lament

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To a Gun Toting Man
a poem by Cindy Marabito

 I fell in love with you the first time I saw you
I was living behind Mrs. Lombardo’s house on Hazel Street and my mother and I watched you in The President’s Lady with Susan Hayward.
You played the part of Andy Jackson and you were in love with a scorned woman.
We stayed up late and I was lost in your Mount Rushmore chin your massive Cro-Magnon jaw structure that belongs on a large mountain of its own jutting itself out to all those liberal disbelievers who don’t know you like I know you.
They’ve never seen you turn against everybody in the whole United States and risk bigamy for the woman you love.
They’ve never seen you in that movie stars at home book lying nude in a clear lucite hammock with a very large grin and a magazine.
I love you Moses even though that’s sacrilegious to lust for the leader of the Jews who led them into the desert and who parted the Red Sea for Cecil B. deMille.
Who was cast for the part because he looked like the real Moses to Cecil.
It’s hard to love Moses.
He’s so pure and so focused, but in the Naked Jungle I was lost to him even more.
His handsome fifties manly wiles angry man stuck down in South America in the jungle on a plantation when a tainted mail-order bride played by Eleanor Parker shows up to mate.
He doesn’t want somebody who’s already been used in this movie, but he can’t overcome his needy manhood and lusts for her deep into the night when the man-eating ants attack havoc on the plantation and he covers himself in oil to walk across the jungle through the ants and kisses a lusty man kiss on Eleanor and blows up the bridge.
And then you were the last man on earth in Planet of the Apes and the sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
And Soylent Green.
I love you Charlton Heston.
You’re the man.
You’re the man.
Tall and muscular with a dominant physical presence and a strong-jawed patrician facial bone structure suggesting intelligence and dignity.
They say it far more eloquently than I.
Bye bye, Charlton.
And, in Hawaii when you told the leper man, ‘Good luck.”
Goodbye.

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