INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER: As you might have gathered from the title and description, its time for a trip back to 1957, and the long-gone days of poodle skirts, bobby sox, pony-tails, diners, drive-in movies, classic cars, rock & roll music and juke boxes.
Robbie is a young man who escaped from his awful family and rents a room from a married couple, when they take in another boarder, a pretty college student named Paula. Things get interesting from this point.
Please note that as this story is set nearly 60-years in the past, views expressed by some characters about the disabled and homosexuals are written to reflect those common at the time, and for plot development and background. They are not the opinions of the author, nor should they be taken as offensive.
All characters who engage in sexual activity are aged 18 years and older, and all characters and events are fictional, with similarity to real persons living or dead coincidental.
Please enjoy, and check out my other retro stories.
***
When the end of the long Maryland summer of 1957 drew near, 19-year-old Robbie McKinley didn't let a day go by without thinking about how great things were for him, and how the past 12 months had been the best of his life to date. Robbie's life was as close to perfect as he could envisage.
Robbie, a tall, dark-haired handsome young man, wasn't a rich trust fund kid, who lived a life of luxury without having to work. Robbie worked hard every day in construction, was learning to become a qualified builder, and for the past year had rented a room from a couple aged in their 50s named Mr. and Mrs. Collins. His landlords lived in the suburbs of Baltimore, not far from a college campus, and after their own three kids grew up and left home, rented out two of the bedrooms to young people. Robbie shared a car with his friend Tommy, and was saving hard to buy his own automobile. So why did Robbie, with a life that on face value appeared to be a humble, hard-working one, consider that he lived in Utopia? The answer was that he did not have to put up with his family's shit any more.
Robert McKinley, Robbie's father, was an overbearing, authoritarian stentorian, quick to anger and impossible to please. Robbie was embarrassed to share the same name as the man, who was not so much a man as a German Shepherd dog that could speak English. The father and son had no time for each other. When Robbie had studied hard, his father asked why he was wasting his time with stupid book learning and not out listening to music like normal kids. When Robbie neglected to study, his father would say he was a loser who would achieve nothing in life. And when Robbie attempted to join the army when he turned 18 and was rejected due to having a very rare type of the already rare AB negative blood, his father assigned the reason to his son being 'some sort of homosexual'. He blamed most of the problems in the world either on homosexuals or communists.
Martha McKinley, Robbie's mother, was a woman with a heart as cold as the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean in winter, the mothering instincts of a fish and a tongue as sharp as a razor and as poisonous as a Black Mamba snake. Mrs. McKinley rarely paid any of her children any attention, and when she did it was only to punish them.
Robbie's sister was Lorraine, two years older than him and a teenage tear-away with a bad reputation at school and in the neighborhood. Lorraine had gotten herself knocked up at the age of 18 to Billy, a local greaser hoodlum whose most significant achievement in life was getting himself kicked out of high school for vandalizing a bathroom. Now Billy and Lorraine were married with their twin son and daughter, living opposite her parents, with the kids a pair of uncontrollable brats who screamed incessantly and perpetually misbehaved.
Wrapping up the family was Lorraine and Robbie's younger brother Patrick, now aged 16. Patrick was born with major intellectual deficiencies, and his father referred to him as 'the spastic'. Robbie always told himself that his brother could not help the way he was and that he should not speak nor think badly of him, but it was impossible not to be embarrassed when Patrick went around impersonating an elephant or a rooster in the town's main street, or chasing a car while barking at it.
Patrick never spoke properly, instead pointing at things and grunting, impersonating animals or screaming when angered, something that happened often. Patrick had gone to a special school, or 'spastic school' in the words of Mr. McKinley, until he was expelled in his mid-teens after smashing twenty windows, this a violent reaction to being punished for cutting school and chasing old ladies while pretending to be a bull. Now Patrick spent his days in the front yard, playing with empty cardboard boxes, pretending to be a wide variety of animals and chasing people who came to the house, again while making animal noises most frequently roaring, growling, mooing and hissing. The postman especially dreaded visits to the McKinley house, and salesmen and Jehovah's Witnesses avoided it altogether.
Naturally, Robbie was happy to escape the chaos of home and make a life for himself. Mr. and Mrs. Collins were a nice couple, and Robbie looked forward to coming home from work every day. At first, there had been another young man renting the other room; a guy called Eric, who had moved out in July when he had married. Robbie was sorry to see him go, as Eric was a nice guy and provided Robbie with somebody to talk to about sport and music.
Mrs. Collins, a slim, gray-haired woman with glasses, had sourced another tenant, mentioning to Robbie that a college student would be coming to live with them. She had made a note of this on the calendar for the last Saturday morning in August, in her usual indecipherable scribble - 'Paul, arrive 10 a.m.'
Mr. Collins, a tall, bald man who like his wife wore glasses, always complained about her terrible handwriting, and often said that his wife could have worked in intelligence coding during the Second World War. Mrs. Collins would always retort that her writing was perfectly legible, and that Mr. Collins should get stronger glasses.
On the Saturday morning Paul was to arrive Mrs. Collins, especially house-proud, made sure the house was spic and span, and told her husband to wear a tie. Robbie got himself ready, checking his hair in the upstairs bathroom mirror, applying gel to get it perfect. He was wearing a white tee-shirt, blue denim jeans and black shoes, and decided that Mrs. Collins would probably prefer that he wore a shirt with a collar when greeting the new arrival. Robbie went into his room and changed into a light-blue shirt with a collar instead, and went downstairs.
At 10 o'clock, Robbie looked out of the window as a maroon car pulled up in the driveway and a middle-aged man wearing a brown suit and a hat got out of the driver's seat. Out of the front passenger seat emerged a slim, middle aged woman with her hair tied back in a bun. The dress she wore looked like it was from 1947 rather than 1957, and she cast nervous glances around her.
Out of the left rear seat emerged Paul. Robbie looked at him, confusion on his face. Paul wore a cream-colored shirt and brown trousers, had red hair and wore a Davey Crockett hat. Most puzzling, he looked no older than 14-years of age. Was Paul some sort of child genius, who graduated high school four years earlier than most kids? And even if he was, surely he should be living with a parent or guardian?
He looked at his landlady, confused that she would have taken on a kid to rent a room from her. Mrs. Collins looked out the window and said, "Oh there she is, what a pretty girl."
Robbie again looked outside, and saw stepping out of the car a most beautiful young woman. She wore a white blouse and a blue poodle skirt, with her long red hair tied back in a pony-tail with a blue ribbon. On her feet, the girl wore white bobby socks and pristine white shoes.
"She?" asked Robbie, confused.
"Yes, her name is Paula," said Mrs. Collins. "Paula is starting her first year of college, and will be living with us from now on. I wrote it on the calendar, didn't you see it?"
Robbie shook his head at Mrs. Collins terrible writing. Paula. Not Paul, but Paula. A girl would be moving in. Not just any girl, a very pretty girl. The young boy must be her brother. It all made sense now, unlike Mrs. Collins' penmanship.
Mr. and Mrs. Collins went out to greet the family, and Robbie, keen to greet Paula and assist her with her things, went out too.
"Doctor and Mrs. O'Donnell, I'm so pleased to meet you," said Mrs. Collins, extending her hand to the middle-aged couple. "I'm Heather Collins, we spoke on the telephone, and this is my husband Howard."
"We're pleased to meet you too," said Doctor O'Donnell, as he and his wife returned the handshakes, Robbie noticing that Mrs. O'Donnell wiped her hands on her dress after doing this. Doctor O'Donnell indicated his two kids. "I'd like you to meet Paula, and her younger brother Joshua."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Paula and Joshua," said Mrs. Collins. "We're looking forward to you staying with us Paula."
"Thank you, Mrs. Collins, and it's nice to meet you too," said Paula politely, shaking hands with first Heather and then Howard Collins, before looking at Robbie.
