I first saw her as she walked into a small sidewalk bistro in front of my hotel on Ipanema Beach.
"Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema comes softly, and when she passes, each one she passes, goes "Ahhhh..."
Except for the tall part, Gabriella was all of that. And more.
I was in Rio de Janeiro for two nights before turning around on the USAF Andes Run to return to my base in Panama through Buenos Aires and Santiago. The trip was a military junket of sorts. I was a professional soldier assigned to duties as a provisional staff officer for a contingent mission to storm into South American capitals to rescue American embassy staffs. Such an event would occur in Tehran ten years later. So my mission was to investigate the terrain between the airports and the embassies in six capitals.
At least that was our story. Two friends, Ron (another Captain) and a Major, Joe, were with me on that staff and the trip. For six days we flew down the Pacific coast, over the Andes, and up to Rio. A no frills trip in a C47 (WWII propeller transport without heat and paratrooper strap seats), but free and not even charged with vacation time. It was a great adventure for a twenty-three year-old, going places where I'd never been. What I had not anticipated however, was that those places included the heart and the groin. That's because, unspoken among us at the beginning of the journey, our adventure was intended to include sex on the exotic continent. Three young married men, two bound for war and one just returned, imagined a cornucopia of sensual and sexual delights in Latin America.
I had married two years before, right out of West Point, to a beautiful young woman. She was slender, had natural blonde hair, and had the most perfect breasts – pink nipples straight ahead and soft round shape. We were both Army brats, prepared well for the trials of military life and she was an eminently suitable Army bride. Our marriage immediately after graduation in 1968 was expected – part of the cultural package we grew up with. It was comforting to anticipate a certain tour in combat with the knowledge that someone was waiting at home who cared if I lived or died.
We discovered sex together, if you can call it that. She was my first (at age 19), although I had had three other brief encounters with college women before marrying. That is a euphemism for fucking. Actually, I had fucked two while the third fucked me. But those are different stories.
I was not an experienced lover, by any stretch of the imagination. I knew where to put it and I knew to use my hands and lips (on her nipples) to prepare her before. No oral sex allowed by her, neither giving nor receiving ("dirty"). Then, I knew to last long enough for her to orgasm (with her on top, only and always). I could then cum, after which she would jump up and clean herself.
That was the recipe for screwing a couple of times a week. Sometimes it was more often but always at my initiative and never a celebration. And more accurately, for "sexual intercourse" between a penis and a vagina, to the extent we articulated a vocabulary at all in those intimate moments. It was all I knew. I did not know what I was missing.
I started out wanting and doing sex more often but the ardor began to gradually fade. As fine as was the feeling of being inside her, the excitement of that practiced and one-dimensional act we shared became vaguely unsatisfying. Like many if not all young men, I had yet been unable to discern the difference between lust to acquire regular pussy privileges, with love and marriage. Love is more than a passion for pussy which, by itself, recedes over time.
I had not yet discovered a soaring passion for the woman who owned the pussy, but that was about to change.
The trip became more than an exciting detour. Looking back, it was the capstone of a relatively innocent and naïve chapter of my young adulthood, preparatory to stepping off the abyss into war. Ron and I were on orders to Vietnam within 60 days. This was a last fling – a chance to sow some oats; perhaps to create memories to justify a premature death that loomed as an uncertain prospect. As though we could somehow create a lifetime of pleasurable experiences during that short, anonymous sojourn in foreign lands. It was not likely, but fantasy abounds with young men bound for war. Debunking that fantasy was I suppose, a right of passage for us.
Like most young men who fantasize that sex will somehow fall into their lap, we had no clue how to achieve our fantasies. The only prospects we had initially encountered were the paying kind.
Ron had "scored" first in Lima, Peru, responding to the proverbial cab driver asking whether we wanted to meet his "seester." I was decidedly dubious, especially when he drove us into a carport beside a seedy hot-sheet motel-like whorehouse on the outskirts of Lima. Actually, everywhere was on the outskirts once you get off the two main European style boulevards in Lima. Two teenage girls stepped out of the doorway and opened their robes to display their naked bodies. All I remember is their pointy tits and the shaved pussies they exhibited when they lifted one leg almost to shoulder height against the wall.
Ron was hot to trot but I took a pass. I gave him one of my rubbers and told him I would watch his back from the backseat of the cab. Through the chest high room window, I could see at least the top half of the action. He may have done them both, but I couldn't be sure. I didn't ask. It lasted all of 15 minutes and he was back in the cab on the way to our hotel.
This was the stuff of fantasies?
Our next stop was Santiago, Chile, which was in the cold of winter. It was my turn that night. I met a 30ish woman at a pub we stopped in after a day touring the city and airport. She was almost Germanic in appearance: blonde, blue eyes and pale skin (not unlike an older version of my wife) but quite attractive and well dressed. Her name was Ilsa and as a bonus, she spoke very good English. We struck up a conversation, and I invited her to join us at the hotel bar later that evening after dinner. It really did not occur to me that she was a working girl.
We were seated around the bar fireplace, when I saw her waving to me outside a nearby window. When she wouldn't come in, I went out to learn that the hotel would not allow prostitutes into the respectable bar.
"Oh," was my clever response.
"Would you like to fuck me?" she asked. Presented with what must have been my rather stupid stare, she added, "15 US for sucking, 20 for a fuck, and 25 for both."
Whatever reluctance I may have harbored about paying for a piece of ass totally collapsed when she uttered the magically erotic words "fuck me" while looking me in the eye and smiling. A delicious first for me.
"Where", was the only retort I could manage.
