Rita & Los Angeles

Poet Romero (Celso) sets these stories in the American West, but not the one of cowboys and open ranges. The appealing title story is a young boy's description of the two women in his life: his mother, Rita, who ``knew Los Angeles before the freeways,'' and his first love, a woman on the label of an orange crate, whom he has dubbed Los Angeles. Although none of the other selections has the charm of this first one, they do make good use of their locations. ``Las Vegas, Las Vegas'' ruminates on the difference between Las Vegas, Nev., and the narrator's (and Romero's) hometown, Las Vegas, N.M. (As a child, he puzzled over why game show contestants seemed elated to win a trip to Las Vegas.) Once Romero's narrators enter adulthood, they become less interesting, and the stories about male-female relationships are flat and grim. A narrator tries (but fails) to avoid a scruffy-looking woman working at Tres Ritos State Park while on vacation from his dull government job in a dull small town. An unfeeling narrator brings women over to the house of his tawdry friend Pito, a dwarf, who then tries to sleep with them. In ``A Good Night for Traveling,'' the narrator cuts off another man's ear in a topless bar when the man muscles in on a woman who resembles the object of the narrator's ill-defined affections. The problem is, what's good here is not good enough to transcend what is truly bad. (July)