~The 'Ol man's Entourage~

For as long as I have known him, my 'ol man has been surrounded by men. When he and I lived in the horse stables in Missouri, there was a group of Missouri guys with thick Missour accents and big Missouri laughs. Here in Idaho it is a different group of guys with thick Idaho accents and big Idaho laughs. When you see someone everyday for months on end, you tend to form a relationship; my relationship with Martin's enoutrage is that they come to the house and sometimes I feed them and I ask them uber-personal questions.

For as long as I have known my 'ol man he has been saying to me, "You gotta stop fucking with my friends." And he doesn't mean in the biblical sense, he means in the sense that I have to stop asking uber-personal questions. He has suggested that I make his buddies uncomfortable. I have suggested that if his buddies can't take the heat they should stay out of the kitchen.

Let me tell you about the first time I alineated myself from a member of the posse: We were in Missouri living in the stables and Martin had a bunch of guys working with him. Some of them would show up in the wee hours of the morning, I am talking in the 5:00am area of the day.

The situation was this: It was summer time. Martin and I lived in a horse stables at the end of a dead end road. Our neighbors were horses, and they would start pawing the floor before the sun came up. This sound woke me up every morning and it reminded me of two things: I had to go potty and I needed to put some clothes on before the entourage arrived.

Back in those early days, I slept nude because it was always sweaty hot and I was in bed with a sweaty hot man, and there was just no reason for clothing.

On the morning of the incident, I was walking from the bedroom to the bathroom, which was through the living room and kitchen. It was still dark outside and I was schleping my naked ass towards the bathroom. I am relatively sure I was yawning and scratching my scalp when I glanced towards the window on our back door.

And there he was. The fella. He had his hand up as if he were about to knock and his mouth was hanging open. I froze. We made eye contact. I turned to run to the bedroom, took a few steps then realized the bathroom was closer, so I turned around again and ran to the bathroom.

After relieving myself and digging through the dirty laundry to find suitable covering, I set on the toilet with my head in my hands for about fifteen minutes, utterly humiliated that I had been spotted naked and devasted at the fact that I had been spotted and I probably wasn't sucking in my gut or practicing good posture. When I deemed it safe to come out of the bathroom, I cracked the door open and found the apartment just as it had been, and Martin still sleeping.

The fella had gone back to his vehicle, where he stayed until Martin went outside to find him. And ya know what? That guy never made eye contact with me again.