A Tale of Two Coats

She said later, “Champagne and vodka do not mix.” She was at the club to see her friend perform and was there with a group of friends. She was kind of drunk and having a great time. She “dropped her wallet 17 times”. After her friend performed, she went to the coat rack, grabbed her coat – a big puffy long black down coat – and left with her group of friends. They went to a nearby restaurant, sat around, and ate and drank and talked.

Meanwhile, down the block, at the club she had just left – I was also kind of drunk and dancing around like a maniac with my friends, draped in Mardi Gras beads, singing at the top of my lungs.

At the restaurant down the street, the vodka flowed. Life was beautiful! Eventually, she got up with her friends to leave, to head home. She put her hands in the pockets of the coat and suddenly … felt confused. Wait … there’s an iPod in here? Whose iPod is this? Wait … is this MY coat?

She and I had identical coats. Literally. We checked later, when we finally met. Same Land’s End brand. Same hood. Etc. The coat rack was over to the side of the club – and she went, saw what looked like her coat, put it on, and walked out. I danced around, oblivious. I wasn’t there to see her friend, who went up at around 9:30. I was there to see the headliner, who was going up at 10:30, 11.

She came back down into the club, replaced the coat onto the rack, found HER coat and left with her friends. Thinking all was well.

10 a.m. the following morning, I am deep in a black pit of slumber, seriously it is as though an anvil was tied to my ankle at 4 a.m. and took me down down down into the dark ocean deeps. But somehow … I was called up out of that blackness … by a loud sound. It was surreally loud and had nothing to do with anything that was familiar or known to me … It was the Ghostbusters theme. Blaring through the ocean depths. My eyes were stuck together with sleepiness – It took me forever to figure out what was happening. Did my phone’s ring somehow magically change to the Ghostbusters them? I groped about for my phone but no … twas not ringing. I thought … could somehow my iPod be … playing? But … the sound isn’t muffled, it’s not coming through iPod headphones, it’s LOUD …

Eventually all became clear. I had somebody else’s phone stuck in the inside pocket of my coat. I never use that pocket – so that’s why I hadn’t noticed it the night before. I had gotten almost zero sleep so I was disoriented – I tried to figure out if it was one of my friends phones … did they stash it in my pocket, or … I flipped through the “photo gallery’ on the phone and recognized nobody. Then I checked the number of the phone itself – knew that I did not recognize that number. So however it all came about, I had no idea … but I called that phone, and said, knowing that she could call into her own phone and get the messages, “Hi … you don’t know me … but I have your phone … it was in my coat … I was at the Ace of Clubs last night … and somehow … I have your phone …” I still had that anvil around my ankle, so I probably sounded insane. But I left my number.

Within moments, my phone rang. “Hello??” “Hi … uhm … you have my phone??” Then began an amusing conversation where we re-traced our steps – and she told me that she had basically gone out to eat wearing my coat (which … would have been a disaster if she had gone home wearing it, unaware that it was not hers. It was freezing on Friday night. And, like a total asswipe – I had my iPod, my own phone, and my freakin’ house keys in the pockets of my coat. If she had walked off with my coat, I would have been so fucked, in so many myriad ways.) So she told me about leaving wearing my coat, and I gasped, “Oh no!!” – then she told me about the discovery of the iPod – and the dawning realization (“through the champagne and vodka haze”) that … Hmmm. This ain’t my coat.

So. BLESS HER. She came back to the club, returned my coat to the rack, found hers, and left. Yes, she had left her phone in the pocket by accident … but BLESS HER. And of course she was thinking on her end the whole morning: “Oh God. I just hope that I can believe in the goodness of people … I hope whoever has my phone is a good person … and tries to get it back to me … you know, you just want to believe that most people are good.”

And then I call. So she was like: BLESS YOU for tracking me down!

We were laughing about it. I said, “If someone found MY phone, I would hope that they would do their best to get it back to me.”

I told her where I would be on Sunday … and it would be early … but if she wanted to meet me at Grand Central … would that be totally a hassle?? She said, “Oh God, seriously, whenever is good for you. You’re saving my ass here. If you need to meet me at 8 a.m. at Grand Central, I’ll be there.”

So that’s what we did. We knew that each of us would be looking for a woman wearing an identical coat.

I stood by the clock in Grand Central, our meeting place. And I saw her approaching – and the second we saw each other’s coats – and she also was a redhead – we both just started laughing. I held out her phone – and that sweet woman gave me a Starbucks gift card!! For keeping her phone safe. She didn’t have to do that! I thought that was the nicest thing. Seriously.

We stood there and laughed about our various drunken bacchanals that Friday night – and her drunken shenanigans, strolling about in the East Village wearing my coat, and my drunken shenanigans, staggering across the icy sidewalks with somebody else’s phone in my coat pocket.

“It’s just nice to know there are good people in this world, you know?” she said to me.

Yes. I know.