IHOP, Domestic Violence, and Meth-heads

Seeing as how part of the reason for keeping this blog is to share the strange goings-on in my life with the internet, I feel like I would be sacrificing some of my journalistic integrity if I did not share this little gem with the collective "you". This happened quite awhile ago, but it is still a part of my strange and unusual life. Instead of going through and editing my story to make up for the time lapse between when the event occurred and now, I'm just going to cut and paste the post I made about it at a forum the next day, because...well...I'm lazy.


"The unusual events in my life never seem to come to an end.

Last night, I was driving my friend Lauren home after hanging out with her at IHOP. We were sitting at a red light behind another car. When the light turned green, the passenger in the car in front of us hopped out, apparently against the will of the driver. From what I could tell, the driver had grabbed on to her arm or her clothes or something, and was restraining her. She was yelling and screaming and creating all sorts of fuss.
At this point, I thought what probably anybody else in this situation would have thought: “These people are fucking with me.”
This was relatively late at night, and I really needed to get home and get some sleep. I have to work during the day, after all.
They made a right turn onto the cross-street and got out of my way (with the woman still half out of the car). It was at this point, while sitting at the now-red light, that I noticed that the woman’s shoes were still in the intersection. Someone wouldn’t sacrifice a pair of shoes for the sake of fucking with the head of the driver in the car behind them…
I then made the same illegal right-turn-on-red-from-the-left-lane that they had made previously, and proceeded to follow them for a couple of blocks. All seemed well. There didn’t appear to be any sign of a fuss.
As I continued to follow them, they turned into the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. By the time I caught up with them there, the woman had already gotten out of the car, and was standing at the curb about 15 feet away. I pulled up behind the car, which was stopped in the lane of traffic, and asked the woman if she was alright.
“Can you take me somewhere? Anywhere but here?”, was her only response.
I could tell by her voice that she was obviously very distressed, so I unlocked my doors.
“Yeah, sure. Hop in.”, I said.
As she was climbing into the back seat of my car, the driver of the other car, whom I had lost track of while speaking to her, had gotten out of his car, and now was coming at my the lady/me/my car. I couldn’t quite tell, and I certainly didn’t want to stick around to find out.
I slammed the accelerator just as he had arrived at my car and started to reach into my window. I peeled around his car, and exited the parking lot at about 40mph.
“Jesus Christ, lady. What the hell was that about?” I said to my new passenger.
Catching her breath, she said, “Thank you. Thank you. He’s crazy. He was going to kill me.”
Great. Now I’ve got a psychopath pissed off at me, too.
I didn’t really get all the details, but she explained that he was her boyfriend and he was a very violent person who she was in the process of getting a restraining order against.
She also explained to Lauren and I that she was a tweaker, and really couldn't go to the cops about all of this because she is on probation or some such nonsense.
"Great...", I thought. "I'm going to get car-jacked by the tweaker that I just rescued."
Thankfully, that prediction didn't come to fruition.
I took her to The Cannery, a nearby casino, where she was going to have some friends pick her up. Before dropping her off, I gave her my cell phone number and told her to call me if she needed a witness or anything like that.
After that, I dropped Lauren off, and headed home to bed.
What a freakin’ night."

I never did hear from the lady again.