After a few weeks of AOL chats and phone conversations, Myz and I decided to actually meet in person. When I knew my days off from Walmart a couple of weeks in advance, we started making plans for me to drive up. (While you never knew way in advance when your two days off each week were going to be at Walmart, they were almost always consecutive.)
One issue was that she had a massage therapy class the night I had planned to drive up and wouldn't get out until after 9pm. This didn't really give us much time for a actual date. Since it was going to take me about eight or nine hours to drive to San Jose from San Diego, it meant that I was going to have to spend the night there. I didn't have enough money for a motel, so she said I could sleep in the living room where she lived. (She lived with her cousins.)
We also made plans to drive down to Monterey the next day so she could show me where she used to live with her parents. (She didn't have class that day.) I expected that I would be leaving around 3pm to get back home in time to be at work the next day. It seemed like we were going to be cramming a lot in such a short time frame.
This was the plan for meeting: I would arrive in San Jose, call her and leave a message that I was there. I would then wait for her to call me. We would meet in the Chuck E. Cheese parking lot off Highway 101 and Tully Road. After that, we would figure out where we were going to go for our date. We were probably just going to get something to eat.
There was no guarantee that any of it was going to happen. She could have decided not to meet me after I'd gotten there. This was going to be a big risk.
But for me, there was an even bigger risk. With what she had said about her brother being in a gang and what I had read about there being a problem with Vietnamese gangs in San Jose, I started fearing that I was being set up to be beaten up and have my car stolen. I was also afraid that I was going to get murdered, or at the very least, left unconscious with no one to help me get to a hospital. Even though I was willing to take this risk, I needed to take measures to ensure that someone didn't get away with it.
I wrote a letter that I would leave on top of my computer in my apartment. If someone was going to investigate my murder (or find out why I was in a coma), I knew this was the first place they would go. The letter included instructions to turn on the computer. The first thing they would see was a photo of the suspect. The letter contained as many details as I could provide. One problem was that while I knew her first name, she never gave me her last name. I included her age, phone number, a description of her car, with the possibility that it had a license plate that read something like "AUSTN 316." (You can only have up to eight characters on a California license plate, so I knew there was no way it actually said, "Austin 3:16.")
I also took a copy of the letter to Abed and Pesd. When I told them them that Myz was 21, Pesd said, "Wow, she's younger than me." (And I need to go off on a tangent here: Pesd had a lot of really cute friends. I was always disappointed that she never thought to try to fix any of them up with me. Maybe she didn't think I was interested in anyone that young. But one of them was a single mother. She couldn't have even thought she was appropriate?)
I knew I might be walking into the biggest mistake of my life. But I also knew that it would be an even bigger mistake if I didn't follow through on it.
There will be more tomorrow.
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