Real-life Friday the 13th Manhattan Horror Story

Oh f*ck! Where’s my phone?

Photo by Antoine Barrès on Unsplash

Like all good horror stories, it started off in a cheerful upbeat setting. Two old friends sharing a favorite past-time, swigging Martini’s in a mahogany-lined midtown Manhattan bar. The dirty pickle Martini, made with McClure’s pickle juice, was a hit.

To digress, pickle “juice” is what pickling brine turns into after cucumbers soak in it long enough to become pickles. Some use the terms pickle juice and pickle brine interchangeably, those people know nothing of over-priced drinks in Gotham City. But, as I said, I digress.

Was it three? Was it four Martini’s later? Whose counting? What are numbers anyway? These old friends decided to leave the mahogany lined establishment, and after negotiating a second mortgage for the bar tab, to take the Subway to each of our respective homes, parting ways at the first transfer point.

This is where the incident took place.

I was old friend number one, numero dos’s name is withheld, to protect the innocent.

I turned around at the top of the stairs, assuming my companion was behind me, and she wasn’t. I looked back down the stairs and saw her still on the subway I had just exited, rummaging through her bag. The doors were about to close, and she looked up, saw me and exited the subway. The subway doors closed, and it left for the next station, Hudson Yards, end of the 7 train to the west.

She paused again at the bottom of the stairs and said “I don’t have my phone.”

“It must be back at the bar, right?”

“No, I used it to get on the subway.” One can do this in NYC.

Oh fuck, if she didn’t have it, was she pick-pocketed? We were certainly a prime target, two drunk Boomers, howling at the moon while we waited for the subway. Any competent NYS pick-pocket would be on us like white on rice, and we were standing in the Times Square subway station, pick-pocketing central.

I whipped out my phone, this companion shared the location of her device with me so I could spot it on the FindMy app on my iPhone. Sure enough, it was in Hudson Yards, the next and last stop on the Subway in the direction we had been travelling.

I pull her into the next train and we ride to Hudson Yards. The train we were originally riding is across the platform. We hurry over there. I know which car we were on. It is empty. In her buzzed anxious panic, my companion disappeared into other cars on the train, not sure we had searched the right car. I knew we had, so I started to look for MTA personnel.

The location of her phone wasn’t updating because we were deep underground at this point so I couldn’t get updated information. But, now I had another problem. I lost her. She had no phone, no money, no credit cards, and no way to contact anyone. It was rush hour on a busy subway line. There were at least 400 other people on the platform.

She was carrying the phone in a small purse, and all that other stuff was in it, along with a small wad of cash. She had none of that now.

Go home! I said in my mind to her after I determined I couldn’t find her, I resumed my search for the phone. I had no way to find her, contact her, offer her help at all. As a NYer of 45+ years, she was on her own. I didn’t like that, but I knew she could handle getting home safely, even with sheets fluttering in the wind. New York City is like a small town, if you know which levers to pull. She does,

I came up to the surface and got a lock on the phone’s location again. Now it is back at Penn Station, about half a mile away.

Someone has it.

I went back down into the Subway and got back on the train to chase the phone using the Subway system, which seemed comic, because of course, at that moment someone was injured on a train and the entire line was shut down. No one was going anywhere.

But the phone was on the R Subway line now and headed to Queens. F*ck, someone stole it, I thought to myself. I called it. Someone answered, but all I could hear was the very loud sound of a running subway, as if someone was standing with it between two cars. After waiting long enough to conclude they weren’t going to answer I hung up.

I found a Subway porter.

“Hey, I just lost a phone on the train, if you guys found it, where would it end up?”

“Lost and found in Flushing” came his deadpan reply.

“But we just lost it, like five minutes ago, is there a booth or somewhere it might be first?

“Lost and found in Flushing.” he looked at me directly in the eye, like he was doing it for emphasis, as if I didn’t really understand his words.

“So, no one would wait until the end of their shift or something? Is there someone I can ask?

“Lost and found in Flushing.” Ok, I wasn’t going to get any other answer from him.

“Thanks for your help, just checking.” I expected him to repeat his instructions again, but he just looked at me in the eye again and walked away. His look wasn’t menacing or judgmental, it was more like I’m giving you the answer.

I looked again at the FindMy app in my phone. The lost phone was now back on the 7 line, headed to Flushing. Whomever was carrying it had changed from the R to the 7 at Queensboro Plaza. That’s not an easy or obvious in-system transfer, I thought to myself, someone knows how to ride the trains.

Right at this point, the part of the 7 I was on started running again, so I hopped on and sat down for a ride to Flushing on the off chance it wasn’t stolen and headed to the lost and found. Most of the 7 is on an elevated line in Queens, so there’s great cell service, and I could see in the FindMy app that the phone was in Flushing now, at the train station, and it had stopped moving. That was hopeful.

Of course, I had hopped on a train that was going to Mets-Willets Point, not all the way out to Flushing Main St, so I hopped off and stood on the platform to wait for an express. I thought of OJ Simpson’s low-speed Bronco chase. Here I was chasing down a stolen phone, on the subway, maybe I could find it this week…

When I got to Flushing I asked the man in the booth how to find lost and found.

He looked at me quizzically “Lost and found? There’s no lost and found out here.”

“What? Why did they tell me in Hudson Yards to come out here?” I held out my phone. “I can see the phone. It is here, in this station, and it isn’t moving.”

He looked at my phone and shrugged his shoulders. “No one has turned in anything here. There is another booth, but you have to go up to the street to get there.”

I knew that, so I thanked him, and walked out into a brisk Chinatown evening, bustling with holiday shoppers and people on dates, and went back down into the same station at the other end of it. I approached the guy in the booth and asked about lost and found.

“Well, there’s not one, not really, but sometimes people turn stuff into the booth. What was it?”

I described the phone and bag to him.

“Nope, haven’t seen it.”

I walked away from the booth and looked at my phone. I was about 250 feet from the phone, seen from overhead. Another MTA employee in an orange vest was standing by a stairwell, he saw that I was distressed, so he offered to help. I explained my situation to him.

“Oh, lost and found is down these stairs, at the control booth at the west end of the 7 platform. Just knock on the window and tell them that you lost something.”

A great relief washed over me. I wasn’t going to have to confront someone about a theft. Maybe someone did turn it in. Why the f*ck didn’t other MTA employees know this? Oh well.

I walked down the stairs and then to the far end of the platform, found a control booth, and knocked on the window. A young East Asian man leaned in so he could hear me as I shouted my message over the din of subway trains. When he understood, he motioned for me to come around to the door of the office.

He opened the door, and about a dozen smiling transit workers greeted me in unison. There were certainly a jolly group. There were several Asians, a collection of African-Americans, and another cluster of people of Hispanic origin. NYC’s melting pot.

One of them, an older East Asian man, pulled out a desk drawer. I looked down at what must have been more than a hundred cell phones piled in a drawer. I know what my companion’s phone looked like, so one glance was enough, it wasn’t there.

I pulled out my phone again. I could get a signal. I was right on top of the phone. I could not be any closer to it. I showed it to another smiling transit worker, a black woman with an easy manner.

“No shit, it is here. Are you sure it isn’t in the drawer?” She pointed back the drawer, the jolly east Asian man pulled it open again.

“No, it is in a red folding case and in a black bag, why would someone steal the bag and turn in the phone?” He closed the drawer

She shrugged her shoulders “Weird shit happens out here, but I get your point.”

Right then, I heard a voice from an office next door. “What’s your name?”

“Richard DeWald.” I answered, wondering why he asked.

“What’s the young lady’s name who lost the phone?”

I gave him her name.

“Ah, I have it, I haven’t had a chance to put it in the drawer yet.” He went on to explain that he wanted my name to confirm that I was the person who had called the phone while it was in his possession. He handed me the phone and I looked him in the eye.

“What’s your name?”

“Christopher.”

Ah, named for the Saint who protects travelers. How apropos. I shook his hand and told him I was very happy to meet him. He thanked me, and congratulated me on tracking down the device so quickly.

I then boarded a Manhattan bound train and returned the phone to my companion. It isn’t often that a horror story has a happy ending. This one does because of good Samaritans working for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. Good bless them all, each and every one.

Happy Holidays.