Robbed of my Cellphone and Wallet

In the space of a minute my trip was turned upside down.  Yesterday on the Mexico City Metro I was robbed, and deprived of both my cellphone and my wallet.  With my wallet went, among other things, my bank cards, credit card, and driver’s license—everything, in other words, of importance short of my passport (thank God I carry that in a more secure place).

I’ve spent the last two days scrambling to put my life, such as it is, back together.  I’ve put a stop on my cards (though not before I incurred two fraud charges that I’ll have to pursue) and requested new ones, I’ve had my phone shut off, and I’ve learned how to get a replacement driver’s license sent to me.  Meanwhile, since most of my cash was in my wallet, and without a bank card I can’t get more, a good friend of mine in the States (you know who you are!!) leapt into action and wired me some money, which I’ll be able to pick up tomorrow morning when the banks open.

Another enormous act of kindness came from my hostel, which is giving me all the time I need until I can pay them for my current week.  Tonight they had the pleasure of running in with the first of several envelopes to be received for me there: my replacement Chase Bank credit card, which unbeknownst to me had been overnighted by Chase; I wasn’t expecting it for a week.

So it’s with some amazement that, as I write this at 7:30 pm, I’m starting to realize that I’ll be all right, and that, moreover, I’ve actually functioned pretty well in the emergency, considering that my impression of myself over the last two days has been of a lost soul wandering aimlessly through the streets in a daze of shock.

This is what happened.  Forgive me if the following description runs long, but I need to write about it.

I should start by saying that I’d been warned about theft on the Metro; several instructors at my Spanish school had had their cellphones lifted there.  So it’s not like I wasn’t on my guard against pickpockets; indeed, I made a point of being extra alert on my rumbling, crowded journeys.  Still, my phone and wallet had to be in SOME pockets, and it’s like what the Secret Service says about assassins: the maximum possible alertness still won’t stop a dedicated professional.  What hit me was quite a professional operation.

It happened in the instant of boarding an already crowded train.  Behind me there was a sudden violent shove of several people acting together, as if a group was determined to squeeze aboard, but with a vicious sloppiness like kids storming a concert gate.  A bunch of people were shoved inward, and I have no idea how many others might have been victimized, or if the target was only me.  But in the force of the multitudinous push and impact I felt absolutely nothing as my pockets were picked.

I was taking this Metro only one stop—I was going after school to the Palacio de Belles Artes museum in the Central district—and for that time I was squeezed too tight to take stock of myself.  It was when the doors opened and a bunch of us disembarked that I instinctively felt for my cellphone and realized it was gone.  For an instant I stared hard at the people in front of me on the platform, but there were at least a dozen and I had no idea who might be the thief, or thieves—and the next instant they had all melted in different directions into the general crowd. 

I was still counting up the first ramifications of losing my precious cellphone when I realized my wallet was also gone.

Then I really did wander about in a daze, up on the street.  It is a particularly sick feeling to reach for your wallet and feel a morning-empty pocket expand around your fingers down to the lint at the bottom.  It occurred to me that I was at that moment penniless, my pesos gone, unable to use an ATM, without even enough change on me for a Metro back to my hostel, which was miles away, in some direction that without my cellphone Maps app I couldn’t know.

For a good minute or two I had no idea what to do, as the crowds of the busy bright Belles Artes plaza surged around me.  I kept having the urge to sit down on an isolated bench in the park, but I told myself that that was the LAST thing I should do.  I needed a plan.  Finally I started to piece one together.  The first step was to remember, and then extract, my secret stash of US bills from my money belt—which required sitting down on an isolated park bench.  Then I got directions to a bank that would change them into pesos.  From there I went to a Starbucks (I had been to this neighborhood before and knew of a good one with comfortable private booths), where I opened up my laptop and used their wi-fi to find the address of the US Embassy.  And then I walked there.

My experience at the US Embassy was two-fold.  They were, in the end, very helpful, but not quite in the way I imagined.  I think my little heart dated itself when, in the distance, I saw the red-white-and-blue flag flying and felt an uplift of relief and gratitude.  Drawing even with the address revealed, not, of course, the broad stone steps and oaken entry of my imagination, but not even functionally a door; the faceless building was shielded from the street by sandbags and serried posts, and from the sidewalk itself by a blank grey ten-foot metal wall with locked gates and a window of bulletproof glass through which one had to make, several times, to different people, over a bad intercom, one’s petition. 

When finally admitted from the street, to an area still outdoors full of locked gates and grey steel doors, I had to (further) empty my pockets and pass through a Security scanner, then hand over my suspicious backpack for safekeeping, before waiting on line at another bulletproof window for a visitor badge.  I like to think it was the slippery slope of these impressions that made me add as another disappointment the fact that the US Embassy employees behind the windows were all Mexicans struggling with English.

Eventually, however, I found myself upstairs in Room 101, where I found my sympathetic ear and the help I needed.  Even here, the ear and the sympathy were behind another wall of bulletproof plastic, and help was in the form, on my side in a bare, dirty fluorescent-lit half-room like a bus station, of a PC and a phone that I could use for remedies of my own devising.  Well, since they had taken my own laptop away downstairs I needed the PC, and as long as I was awakening from my dream of instant Republican succor it was time I started acting like an adult.  So I looked up the phone numbers for my banks on the PC, and used the phone to call them, and after something like an hour and a half had stopped my cards and arranged for the new ones to be sent to me at the hostel.  Given the successful outcome (and the fact that the clerks did print out a Metro map for me and slide it through the window) it’s perhaps overkill to report that I couldn’t dial said phone myself, but for each number had to knock on the plastic and call a clerk over to dial it on her side and transfer the call to my side.

The trickiest card to replace is my driver’s license.  WSDOT had no number to call, but rather a PDF form that I had to fill out and MAIL IN, together with a check for $20.  I first tried a regular Mexican post office, where I was told that the outbound letter alone would take a month to reach Seattle, before coming to my senses and looking up FedEx offices.  Tomorrow I’ll send that off, but something tells me it will still be a long wait before I’m able to drive my Miata again.

As the shock wears off and the various practical amputations are slowly restored—revealing in their absence exactly what crutches we unthinkingly use to walk about in this world (I’ve been inexplicably LONELY without my cellphone)—what’s left is the sense of victimization, still heavy upon me.  One can easily make the effort not to “blame Mexico,” as robberies happen everywhere and I’ve met by and large with great kindness here.  It’s a harder effort to avoid blaming oneself.   If the first day was driven by the simple question “What do I do?” the second has been haunted by the question “What should I have done?” with retrospective fantasy remedies ranging from Kung Fu berserks to John-Goodman bellowing to simple pocket redistribution.  I fully expect the comments to this post to include lengthy security tips, to which I’ll dutifully attend; the struggle will be to consider them, as applied to my person, worthwhile.

But in terms of being a so-called victim I will say that I’m awake enough to recognize not only with irony but reluctant appreciation, dad-gum it, the connections: I am, you know, currently writing a novel that celebrates a perfect crime.  At the Embassy I was asked if I wanted to file a police report, and it wasn’t entirely to avoid the hassle that I declined.