“James, I have read Taboo You and Your Trojan Whorse. It seems you had something of a harem or a stable of mares in your younger years. In Your Trojan Whorse you gave much advice on managing the four personality types: Whore, Priestess, Manizer and Slavegirl. But, assuming you have become something less of a womanizing Khan, how did you manage your own personality type in contact with so many opposites—I mean dealing with multiple women at the same time sounds exhausting.”

-Jubilee Early

…

Sir, I once had a stable of mares as a counterfeit stallion. It was simple attrition as I hit 40 and found myself in peak fitness as a reconstructed fighter and newly single just as most men in my age group and from the younger boomer stock just ahead of me, began to suffer from lack of performance.

-There was the lawyer babe who used me like a slave on Friday night,

-There was the airline stewardess who flew in one weekend a month to get what she could not from her pro hockey player boyfriend,

-There was the married lady whose husband drank a handle of vodka every day and was disabled, who knocked on the door on Monday and Thursday morning,

-There was the psychobitch divorce who hit me on a regular, who I stayed with two nights a week,

-There was Megan who signed up as my cook and won me away from three of these ladies through her devotion and cooking skills and we remain close friends to this day, me being her granddaughter’s surrogate grandpap.

After being kicked out by my wife, much of what I was missing was family, as my wife and I had not really had a close relationship but my son and I did. I had also never had a woman cook for me other than my sister on occasion. Most of all, I discharged most of the stable of mares to be there for Megan as she struggled through tough life changes, all the while willing to shoulder any responsibility for her daughter, her mother, her granddaughter and the younger ladies under her supervision at the supermarkets where she worked, women who always came to her when they were threatened or attacked. She had the kind of “sand” in her soul that permitted her to stand up to men for weaker women even when she admitted that she couldn’t handle a man in a fight.

The psychobitch threatened Megan, so I let her go.

The lawyer wanted me to be her “houseboy” so I walked away.

The Daisy Duke look-alike stewardess popped into town and expected me to drop a dinner date with Megan to have sex with her. Well, I chose pot-roast over model-quality companionship.

Megan knew about these other girls, she fielded their phone calls for me at work. When she found out that I was leaving the general manager job to become a writer [as the owner’s personal assistant she was not under my supervision and was the only chick in the building I could ethically date] she came down to me in the stockroom, handed me a post it note with her number on it, and said, “You have four girlfriends, so you obviously know how to treat a lady right.”

I didn’t call her. She called me when I was sparring with Adam one day and said, “I know the other ones are probably cuter than I am—but I cook. How about a movie, pan-fried chicken and perogies?

There you go—and I started getting fat and found 2 to 3 women to be ideal.

How did I make this reduction?

In looking at this I recall being unable, mentally, to add the sixth mare to the stable. There were some sexy ladies who applied, including LaLa the ebony bombshell who I could not take my eyes off of...but, one spsychobitch is all I could handle at a time. That was my limit, I suppose my estrogen immersion tolerance. Not sleeping had been a big part of my training and dating, making time as an overtime worker for these activities. As my stamina failed on the approach to 50, rather than give up training, I gave up some girls, a couple times down to one for a few months.

Now, as my stamina crashes on the eve of 60, I find that women are mostly nice people to speak to, to help me develop realistic female characters for my fiction.

Mentally, this is how the stable worked on me:

I always feel an obligation to protect a woman who has been intimate with me. So there is a certain amount of stress associated with having a stable. The only deal breaker, the only reason why I ever dumped a chick, was if she threatened one of the others, because permitting that threat violated my prime directive of protection for submission.

I have found that there were five elements of attachment, from least to most important:

-5. Least demanding [that was the lawyer, this is good for the fifth girl] manizer

-4. Best looking [stewardess, this is good for the out-of-town girl] manizer

-3. Best in bed [the psychobitch, of course, the rockiest road] slave girl

-2. Most respect for Me, as a man [the drunk’s wife] slave girl

-1. Most devoted [Megan, a heroically self-sacrificing woman, who would have stood up to a man for any of these other girls and would have told the stewardess how beautiful she was, and complimented the lawyer on her accomplishments.] priestess

So that quality of devotion trumped more superficial qualities. Megan knew all this. When I left Baltimore in 2019 and Emma, her granddaughter was in tears over me only having a backpack to live in, and Erique [who Emma called The Big Brown Bear] waited in his car, Emma demanded that I prove to her that I wouldn’t “be sleeping in some tree” by naming my travel itinerary, the pets that lived there, etc.

Understanding me well and somehow sensing that Erique was dropping me off at the retired belly dancer’s house, [1] Megan inserted with a whisper in my ear as Emma stood with fists on hips barring my access to the backpack, “How about skipping the slut you’re staying with tonight, Poppy—I love you you bastard, and so does she.”

…

-1. This lady respected Megan a lot, made presents for me to give to Emma, and one time, when Megan called me to let me know that an African that was threatening the register girls at the market where she was head cashier was waiting for her to get off work, I said, “Babe, some African is threatening Megan. I know this is our night, but I need to go,” she insisted on driving me there so that I didn’t get arrested for stabbing some other negro mugger on the way and would be there to “kick that African’s ass!” Actually, if polygamy were legal, I could have married these two and they would have got along famously.