As I pulled into the parking lot of the little strip mall, I was somewhat concerned about the nature of the pizza restaurant at which Jessi had asked to meet. Four of the ten storefronts in the shopping center were vacant, and other than Joe's Pizza Shack, which is where I was headed, the other businesses consisted of a laundry mat, a comic book store, a pawn shop, a thrift store, and last, but not least, a bail bondsman. The whole place looked more than a little dilapidated to me, and I noticed that only about a third of the lights in the parking lot were illuminated.
The pizza restaurant was located between the laundry mat and the comic book store. I found a place to park, pulling in next to a large, bright blue late 60s or early 70s American-made convertible. I thought it might be a Buick, but I was not sure. After seeing the incredibly large doors of the old car, I backed out and parked in a spot further away, even though it meant being out in the bitter cold a few steps longer. I could only imagine the damage one of those huge doors could do to my car had someone carelessly flung one open.
As I exited my car and hurried toward Joe's Pizza Shack, I saw a man quickly leave the pawnshop and rush two doors down to the bail bondsman. As I quickened my step toward the door of the restaurant, I wondered if that were a common occurrence, and if such occurrences were the reason for the pawn shop being located in this strip mall.
Inside, the pizza place was warm, and the delicious smell of baking pizza hung in the air, but I was amazed to find that the inside of the restaurant was not as much brighter than outside as I might have expected. It appeared that only about half of the lights in the restaurant were on. As I walked through the gloomy corridor between two rows of booths, I activated my phone. Although I knew what Jessi's text had indicated, I still read it as I walked toward the back of the restaurant.
"In booth - back left," she had written, and sure enough, that is where she was.
The booths had high-backed benches, making it impossible to see if a particular booth was occupied until one was almost beside it, especially if the person in the booth was sitting with his or her back to the front of the restaurant, as Jessi was. I did not even know if she was in the booth until I was right alongside her.
"Hi Jessi," I said as I slid into the booth so that I was sitting opposite of her, the table between us. Jessi was wearing a large, green sweater and her red glasses, which I had not seen at all the prior two times we had been together. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore little to no makeup. She looked very pretty, but also quite young. Had I not known better, I might have thought her a teenager.
"Hi Mark," she said, our eyes meeting before she dropped hers.
It was obvious why Jessi had asked to meet here, at Joe's Pizza Shack. Not only was it dimly lit and sparsely populated, but the way the booths were constructed and arranged gave us almost complete privacy. Unless someone sat in the booth across the way from us, no one would be able to see Jessi at all without coming back to where we sat, and I doubted anyone could even see me unless they were within a few yards of our booth.
"I ordered the pizza already," she told me, glancing up at me briefly. "I got peperoni, onion, pineapple and half jalapeno -- I remembered that you said that'd be the perfect pizza."
"I did say that, didn't I?" I commented, smiling at the young blonde woman sitting across from me even as I wondered what I would do about the jalapenos. When she had offered me cold pizza our first evening together, I had told her that jalapenos would have made her peperoni, onion and pineapple pizza perfect, but my comment was not meant as an expression of a true preference; rather, it had been intended as a way of heading toward a joke about her being both sweet and hot. However, Jessi had commented on the sweet and hot aspect before I had the chance to say anything, thus nullifying my attempt at humor. I had never told her that I had meant it to be playful.
"Yes," she replied. "The pizza I had then was from Joe's."
"Do you come here often?" I asked.
"Sometimes," she shrugged. "It's nice and private back here. But usually I just pick it up and take it home. My apartment's just a few blocks around the corner."
Jessi had looked at me once while she was talking, but the rest of the time she looked down at the table. I could tell she was nervous. I did not know whether her nervousness was caused by being with me at the restaurant, by the conversation we had come here to have, or by some combination of the two. I wanted to reach out and take her hands to comfort her, but she had put them in her lap while she spoke. Instead, I nodded and smiled at her when she was done speaking.
Several seconds went by, and it seemed as if Jessi was not going to say anything else. She did not look at me even once during that time, and her hands remained out of view. Unfortunately, I was struggling to find any words myself, and I was worried we would just remain sitting in silence, despite the fact that both of us had indicated, not more than an hour before, that we wanted to talk to each other.
We were saved when a voice came through the speaker above us.
"Jessi, sweetie, your pizza is ready," the male voice said.
Jessi looked up at me, and for the first time that evening, she locked her eyes with mine in that somewhat disconcerting, typically Jessi stare.
"Would you mind going and getting the pizza, Mark?" she requested. "Please?"
"Sure," I agreed, standing up.
"Tell Joe you need a glass for your drink too," she added.
"Okay," I told her, walking toward the front of the restaurant, wondering about Joe. Jessi had told me she only really connected with other people through sex, but she seemed quite familiar with whoever Joe was, and furthermore, he had called her sweetie. As I approached the counter, I could feel the jealousy creeping through me. I imagined Joe as a young man, one who likely could better keep up with a sexually aggressive twenty-year-old than I could.
"I am here for Jessi's pizza," I told the very large man at the counter.
Joe, as it turned out, was a 6'5", 350 pound Samoan man in his late thirties or so. He grinned at me and said, "You the one Jessi was waitin' for, huh?"
"Yes," I replied. As I was not sure what else to say, I asked him for a glass for my drink.
Joe set a red plastic cup, two plates, and a handful of parmesan cheese and crushed red pepper packets on the pizza box that he handed to me. He then grinned again.
"I don't know how you did it," he confided with a wink. "It took me almost two years just to get her to say more than 'hi', and that had taken a couple of months itself. She just recently started giving me a smile or two. I never thought I'd see her eat with anyone else. When she said she was waiting for a date here tonight, I thought my hearing was going."
"We just hit it off, I guess," I told him self-consciously, wondering what the big man was thinking about the age difference between the blonde and me.
"Okay. Well, have a good dinner, man," he said as he headed back into the kitchen.
