I get by with a little help from my friends

Gabriel has turned out to be a Class-A good guy. We´ve been spending a lot of time hanging out at this families tienda. Me looking stupid while he waits on customers. He keeps feeding me juices and beer and cigarettes despite all my protestations and offers to pay. He did let me give him 5,000 pesos (about $2) because his bill for his eyeglasses was more than he expected.

He invited me out to his families finca for the holidays to celebrate with them, but of course I had other plans. And he calls me to check up on me and see what´s what. Yes still very stalker-like, but I think that´s just his overbearing personality. Martha abhors him, but mostly because I think she´s jealous. Colombian women are like that from what I´ve been able to gather.

But for some reason I´m still kinda cautious. I´ve been telling him how I wanted a Medellin National jersey for a while. So he found a friend and got me a deal on a knock-off jersey. Well at least he said it was a deal, I´d have absolutely no way to know. I´m sure there´s a happy middle ground between paranoid and naive, but I have no idea where it is. Neither one of them seem like something I´d like to be. But I think most of us have to lean to one side or another in this world.