Rosalinda's Eyes Ch. 01

Story Info
Dancing in the dark, and maybe a little salsa picante, too.
8.4k words
8.4k
6
2

Part 1 of the 3 part series

Updated 06/08/2023
Created 03/30/2017
Share this Story

Font Size

Default Font Size

Font Spacing

Default Font Spacing

Font Face

Default Font Face

Reading Theme

Default Theme (White)
You need to Log In or Sign Up to have your customization saved in your Literotica profile.
PUBLIC BETA

Note: You can change font size, font face, and turn on dark mode by clicking the "A" icon tab in the Story Info Box.

You can temporarily switch back to a Classic Literotica® experience during our ongoing public Beta testing. Please consider leaving feedback on issues you experience or suggest improvements.

Click here

I grew up on the doorstep of wild dichotomies, yet my parent's never really tried to help us come to terms with the divergent world all around us. There were my four sisters and -- me -- the lone brother, the oldest -- but not by much. My parents went into a kind of reproductive frenzy in 1945 and didn't stop for seven years, and I think my father paused then only because he was trying to figure out how was going to pay for all those yearning mouths. The picture I had of my mother, by 1952, was of a terrified woman who lived in fear that her husband might come home from work -- in the mood. The thought of one more childbirth sent her into paroxysms of scissor-wielding rage -- as if my father had even remotely expressed interest in doing the hunka-chunka, scissors would magically appear from behind her back -- and she would begin snipping away at his testicles.

"Get that thing away from me!" she'd shout, and those of us in the house old to know would have this vision of Van Helsing holding up a crucifix to ward off Count Dracula.

We lived in the shadow of Elysian Park, on Academy Road, on the east side of the park, an area just north of downtown Los Angeles -- and the seminal event of my childhood involved baseball. The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to LA just as I hit my teens, and a new stadium was being built for them hard by the park. In time, we each graduated from Cathedral High School, the Big Catholic School near the park, and we went to St Peter's every Sunday, too. And there was something weird about all that, too. In a city dedicated to the proposition that you needed to drive at least a half hour to find a quart of milk, we walked everywhere. To school, to church, to the local market -- everywhere. Dad drove to work out in Santa Monica in those days, to the Douglas Aircraft Company, where he was an engineer. He designed several parts of the old DC-3, but what I remember most growing up was his work on what would become the DC-8. He would bring these colossal drawings of the cockpit home and we would go over them, and we would daydream about the places you could go in such a machine. How fast! More than 3000 miles! As work progressed, we would drive out to Long Beach on weekends and look at the first working mockups, then the first pre-production airframes as they came down the line. I stood by his side and watched the first one take off, and later that day we went to our first Dodgers game together. Nirvana...

Anyway, I grew up wanting to be just like him. I wanted to draw airplanes and have kids, raise my family near the park and go to St Peter's, send my kids to Cathedral High, so I did just what dad did: I went to USC and started on my degree in aeronautical engineering.

But there was already talk about Vietnam. About how maybe they'd start drafting kids 'any day now.' Recruiters were all over campuses all over the country in those early days of the war, and that proved to be one of the earliest divergent dichotomies I ran into. Kids with crew cuts, like me, and the kids who were beginning to look more and more like John Lennon and the rest of the Beatle-haired acolytes invading the country. Kids with football posters on their dorm room walls, and kids with day-glow posters celebrating peace, drugs and rock 'n roll. And the poster above the bed in my dorm room was of a DC-8 main panel. Annotated. And I knew the function of every button and dial on that panel before I graduated -- from high school.

Need I say more?

Two days after graduating 'SC I swore an oath and got in a bus headed north, to Seattle, to OCS. Officer's Candidate School. The whole Officer and a Gentleman thing Richard Gere would make famous twenty years later...that was my life that summer. Then another year learning to fly. The the real deal. Getting shot off a pitching carrier's deck at three in the morning, in gales, dropping bombs all over Vietnam on multiple tours over the next three and half years. Then the arm twisting: please, re-enlist! No more combat, just training the next generation of pilots for combat -- and just like that two more years disappeared -- and I literally left the Navy as Richard Nixon waved good-bye that last morning, as he boarded Marine One in disgrace and fled to California.

I was never "anti-war" -- or anti-anything -- for that matter. I was for designing airplanes, then flying them, and that was about as far as my political engagement went. To say I didn't care about politics would have been an understatement. I voted Democratic because my parents voted that way, and so did everyone else we grew up around. I barely knew what "abortion" was all about because no one ever talked about it -- at least not in polite society, and I literally had no idea what homosexuality was until my third year of college. I never smoked anything growing up because my father didn't, and the first time I smelled pot I thought someone was burning manure in the dormitory bathroom. My father drank one or two beers on Saturday afternoon, usually listening to a game on the radio while he worked on the yard or stuff in the garage, and so later, if I drank anything at all it was beer, and always in moderation. My father's college grade point average on graduation was 3.88; mine was 3.89, and I tried not to gloat. He was very proud, however.

We were Irish Catholics, and we hung out with other Irish Catholics; blue collar, hard working men and women who either built LA or patrolled her streets. Tons of cops, in other words, and with the LAPD's academy just up the street from our house, ours was arguably the safest neighborhood in LA County. It also had the most well behaved kids.

The extent of the 'diversity' I knew of growing up was simply this: in my world there were Irish Catholics, and there were Italian Catholics. If we had a common language it was Latin, and maybe English. And that English would be replete with old world accents. The only thing I knew for sure was that Italians were different because their last names ended with vowels.

My reality changed little in the Navy. I was a serious pilot and I took the meaning of the oath I swore to the Constitution seriously. I held the words "we, the people" to mean just that. Not we the white people, but all us, as in: we're all in this together. I thought that way because, by and large, my father did. Because the people in our church did. My teachers did, and even the cops who came over for my mother's corned beef did. Well, most of them did. I think the first racism I experienced came in the form of scorching expletives a few of those cops would let slip when talking about the negroes down in South Central, or around the Rampart Division.

The only negro I knew growing up was the old man who came by twice a week to mow lawns in our neighborhood. If there was a family that had only daughters, or no kids at all, they got their lawns mown by Mr Thomas. I'd hear his push mower spitting away, cutting across those little patches of grass on those infrequent afternoons, and sometimes I'd watch him work. He'd have to stop every now and sharpen those turbine like swirls of blade, or pump some grease into the single axle, then off he'd go, pushing his mower across the grass. Fifty cents a lawn in those days, and he was as regular as clockwork. Always smiling, always whistling some tune or another. I think for a dime or two he pruned bushes or weed gardens, so he kept busy.

When I came home in '74 I went to work for United Air Lines, moved to San Francisco for a few years, then to New York City, and I flew DC-8s for a couple of years, which was a blast for both me and my father, but we grew apart, finally, and that was something new for all of us. And I know I haven't talked much about my sisters, and that's because I think their lives were almost peripheral to both my father and I. All but my youngest sister, Patricia, that is. PJ. I barely knew her at all back then; she was not yet ten years old when I went to USC, and she grew up in the height of the counter-culture wars that defined the second half of the 60s. She was in trouble all the time, doing drugs, pregnant -- twice -- before she got out of high school. She was this red-headed lust bomb that wanted a father's attention and never got enough, so she went looking elsewhere. Everywhere else, and so, of course, in due course she broke my father's heart and he did exactly what he shouldn't have and threw her out of the house.

When I moved to San Francisco after the war, into an apartment on a hill overlooking the airport, I'd not seen her since '68. My parent's had neither seen nor heard from her in two years, yet one morning, very early on a Saturday morning, I was coming in after an overnighter from JFK and there she was, curled up on an olive green army surplus duffel bag -- on my doorstep. I'd have never recognized her but for the shocking head of wavy red hair she had, and those freckles.

I knelt down and lightly brushed her hair aside, saw her face and wanted to laugh and cry, all in the same breath. She weighed maybe ninety pounds and the insides of her arms were covered with tracks; she smelled of beer and urine, and -- of all things -- patchouli. I opened my door and dropped my bag on the floor, then went out to rouse her.

Which turned out to not be the easiest thing I'd ever tried, so I picked her up and carried her to my bedroom, laid her out -- and after I carried her duffel inside I called father.

"PJs here," I remember saying before I'd even said hello and, as he'd been most upset about her behavior -- and his own -- I think he started crying. My mother was on the phone in an instant and I told her what I'd just found, and she wanted to know what they should do. "I think consciousness and coffee first, Mom. Let me talk to her, see what's up. As soon as I know something I'll call."

I figured if coffee and bacon didn't wake her nothing would, so I went to the kitchen and started in on breakfast, making more than enough noise to wake the dead, and sure enough, about ten minutes later in she came. Even looking half dead she was as seriously gorgeous as ever, and she walked over to my breakfast table and sat, rubbing her eyes first, then looking at me --

I was still in uniform, of course, looking every inch the figure of upright moral propriety -- which, ahem, of course I was -- and she grinned when I looked at her and said: "Well, there he is, ladies and gentlemen, Roger Ramjet!"

To which I replied: "Two eggs, or three?"

"You know, I could eat three, maybe more."

"How long since you had something solid?"

She shrugged. "I passed out with some guys cock in my mouth last night. When I came-to he was passed out and his dick was still right where he'd left it."

I was aware of staring at her, at the extremity of her behavior, and her need, and that until this very moment the contours of her existence had been a mystery to me. I remember thinking how shocked I was, how almost outraged I was, then how scared I was. In two years no contact with any of us, and now here she was. Of all the people in the world she could have gone to, she chose the man most like the father who had cast her aside, adrift...to wander in the wilderness.

Why? I mean, really? Why?

To perpetuate a cycle that would put her right back on the street? To make my life a living hell, if only to validate her own low opinion of herself?

"So, what else have you been up to?"

"Taking classes, at Berkeley," she said.

That figures, I wanted to say. "Oh? What in?"

"Physics and cosmology."

And I looked at her again, really more of a double take. "Really?"

"Yeah, ya know, I've been trippin' out there for a few years so I figured I ought to study some of the things I've seen."

And this was said with a straight face, mind you.

"Timothy Leary's dead," I sang.

"No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in," she sang back to me, and we had a laugh while I put on a skillet full of eggs.

"I can't remember how you like yours cooked."

"Over easy."

I poured her a cup of coffee and took it to her, and for some reason I bent over and kissed her forehead. "It's sure good to see you," I said, then I ducked back in the kitchen to turn the bacon again.

When I turned back to her she was staring out my window, at the runways laid out below. "You like it? Flying, I mean?"

"I do."

"I think I'd like the travel part. See new things all the time."

"I see the panel most of the time, then a lot of strange hotel rooms, but I know what you're saying."

"Think I'd be a good stewardess?"

"I think you'd be good at whatever you decided to put your back into."

"Is that a yes?"

"Yes."

"Could you help me? Get there, I mean?"

"Of course."

I carried our plates out and sat next to here, and she turned, stared at the plate. "I think I need to turn my life around, Tommy," she said, her voice hovering someplace under the rainbow, so gentle I almost couldn't hear her.

"Well then," I said, "you came to the right place, didn't you?"

"Yeah," she said, and she looked at me just then in a way I'll never forget, and in a way I could never describe, not in a million years.

I called the parents, told them what was up and what was down and that she wasn't ready to see father just yet, and I heard some peace in the old man's voice for the first time in a long time. She asked if I had a car, and I didn't, not yet, but I was thinking of getting one. She said she had stuff from the pad she'd been hanging out in, over in Oakland somewhere, and she'd need to get it soon or risk lose everything, so I rented a van and we drove over, collected her things from three different apartments and I had to laugh. A few pairs of jeans, a few books and phonograph records...maybe fifty bucks worth of "stuff" -- and that was her lot in life. She'd been traveling light, that much was certain.

We passed a Porsche dealership on the way home and I pulled in, had a look around. There was a Targa on the lot, white with a blue interior, and she went right to it, fell in love with it on the spot. I filled out the paperwork, my first loan ever, of any kind, and it was approved two days later. She went with me to pick it up and we drove down Skyline Drive and over to Half Moon Bay, ate artichokes above the beach and looked at the Elephant Seals basking on the sand.

And to tell you truth, I'd never been happier.

Need I say more?

+++++

She graduated from Stew School a year later, and she snagged a posting in San Fran and started helping out with the rent. She'd taken my bedroom a long time ago; I was sleeping on a fold-out sofa-bed in the living room, sore back and all. On the rare occasion we were home together, we'd sit up and watch non-stop Star Trek re-runs all night long, or go out for a burger and a movie, and time sort of slipped into this unexpected sequel.

When she graduated she bid for this crappy route -- SFO to Orange County to Sacramento and back to SFO -- and of course she got it, if only because nobody else wanted it, but she was home every night. I was home every other night, so we had a lot of time together. One afternoon I was in early and doing some housecleaning when she came in, dragging her ass in the usual early October heat, and she plopped down on the sofa and told me to "sit down, immediately!"

So I sat.

And she flipped off her pumps and dropped her feet in my lap.

"Foot rub! Now, before I die!"

"Peej, you need a boyfriend. Bad."

"No. I need a foot rub. Now please."

And now of course I must backtrack. Explain that not only did I not have a girlfriend, I'd also never, and I mean not once, given anyone a foot rub. Not once. And not only was I a foot rub virgin, it had never been in my game plan to give any of my sisters a foot rub. Not one of them.

Yet I could see her feet were wrecks. Red, puffy in places, almost blistered in others, her need was acute, and real, so I got down to it -- and she fell instantly asleep. I kept at it for a few more minutes then ran the bath and carried her in, told her to soak for a while, and that I'd find some lotion to rub on them. When she came out we resumed, and the first thing I mentioned -- again -- was that this was a far better activity for a boyfriend to manage for her, not her brother.

"I know," she said, "but the thought of being with a man again revolts me."

"Well," I said -- jokingly, I'm sure, "what about a girlfriend?"

And she looked away. "And what if I have a girlfriend? What then?"

"Do you?" I asked.

"Kind of." And she explained how she and one of her dorm mates at the academy had had much the same experience she had with boys, and how they both felt 'over the whole boyfriend thing' by then.

And of course I asked if she had done anything with this girl.

"Like what, Tommy?"

"You know...whatever girls do with one another."

"You mean, like..."

"Yeah, whatever."

"You want me to tell you about it, Tommy? What that excite you?"

"No, as a matter of fact it wouldn't."

"Oh," she said, and she'd sounded a little disappointed, too.

"I have some interesting news," I said. "A chance to move over to 747s. First officer. A few months of training, then a posting to Kennedy. Probably JFK to Paris or Frankfurt."

She brightened immediately. "Any chance I could tag along?"

This wasn't surprising. When she'd mentioned wanting to travel, Sacramento wasn't exactly high on her list of places to visit. Paris was, and this was the opportunity of a lifetime. I, for my part, had already looked into the possibility, and yes, it wasn't a stretch, but she'd need another year or two under her belt before she could bid on one of those routes.

It was a logistics nightmare, getting her moved to New York and settled in a new apartment while I spent months in training, but father drove across with her, and I think the time was important for them both. I arrived expecting to find her in a one bedroom close to mine, but no, she'd picked out a really nice two bedroom place and so our life together continued -- with little changed.

With Paris my first bid run, I found myself away much more than I had been, and she was locked into a JFK to Denver Stapleton run for at least a year, so we really were lucky to run into one another more than a few times a month. I came home one afternoon and found her in bed with another flight attendant, a woman, and I let it go without comment. Pretty soon almost every time I saw her she was with this woman, and I started doing a little research on her.

She was almost forty, and considered a hard case. She was curt, I learned, and often abrasive, but she was by any other measure an excellent flight attendant. She was routinely passed over for plum assignments and, I assumed after reading between a few lines, this was most likely the result of her sexual proclivities. The few times I ran into her she seemed almost suspicious of me, yet she was nice enough, in an offhanded way. And, I had to admit, with her around I'd never have to give my sister another foot rub -- and that was a very good thing.

Yet when PJ did indeed get a Paris run that was too much for this other gal. She'd put in for the run countless times, and had been turned down countless times, so when PJ nailed it on her first try the woman lost it and disappeared. Fearful that I might have to resume foot rub duties, I asked what her intentions were now.

"I think I'm ready to jump back into penis infested waters," she told me, and we laughed at that.

"What changed your mind," I asked.

"Dildos never come in your mouth," she said -- with a straight face, "and I'm kind of missing that."

"I'm sorry I asked," I sighed.

"When's the last time you popped your cork, Tommy?"

"Bangkok, 1970."

"Dear God."

"I know. Awful."

"Want me to get you off? Just a one off kind of thing?"

"PJ, shut the fuck up, would you?"