by Joe Roissier

Created on: June 03, 2008   Last Updated: June 04, 2008

Take Me Home with You, Inez Garcia It was a case of mistaken identity. I was driving a stolen car in downtown Dallas, Texas. I was on a local city street after an evening out with a new girlfriend. We were celebrating our completion of a training program for an insurance company, having started the first job of our post-college careers together. We were getting ready to leave on a road trip the next day to San Antonio to meet her family. Before I knew it, a black-and-white pulled up close behind me, its flashing gumball machines casting an alternating blue and red glow across the inside of the car. I heard the brief chirp of a siren and a Texas drawl booming over the loudspeaker. "Pull on over now, boy, and stay in the car." Six weeks earlier, Inez Garcia caught my eye on the first day of class. I didn't notice her right away, and she wasn't the type of woman who would have stood out in a crowd. But when she met my gaze across the classroom with her wide brown eyes, I couldn't help but notice her jet black hair, and her smooth, dark skin, the color of sun-baked adobe. She smiled me a smile that would have lit up Times Square during a blackout. I smiled back at her and from that moment, I knew I would be with her. Inez Garcia was born into a family of 8 children in San Antonio, took to learning at an early age, and got a lot of book smarts to go along with her street smarts. She had just graduated from Princeton, back where I grew up. I always had this fascination with ethnic women who, through hard work and gutsy determination, made it to the top. Looking back on that time in 1977 from where I sit in California today, eight years into the new millennium, I'm not sure if I fell in love with Inez because of her Ivy League mystique, her tight 5'2" frame or the smart-ass attitude she picked up back east that she would spice up with her own brand of jalapeno sauce. Her intelligence and her street-wise humor were infinitely alluring. Inez had a lot of both and her good-natured wisecracks became the starting point for most of our conversations. Inez seemed to sense this common ground from the moment our eyes met in that hotel conference room in the Dallas Marriott where our six week training program was just beginning. I think we both knew at that moment we would end up in one or the other's bed, but Inez knew how to draw out the chase and turn it into a study in artful seduction. "So how's a Ginzo from Trenton, New Jersey, end up deep inna heart o' Texas?", Inez

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