AlterEgo
A-List Customer
- Messages
- 320
- Location
- Southern USA
grundie said:
Very interesting, grundie. The only hat ever stolen from me was also by drunk girls. The consequences were far-reaching.
It was New Year's Eve, and my girlfriend and I were going to a party at Barbara's, her best friend and a good friend of mine, as well.
We were all back home from college for the holidays and looking forward to catching up with the old gang from high school. Barbara, though, had just transferred back to a college in our home town, where her family wealth had enabled her to buy her own house. That's where the party was.
As soon as we came in the door, a couple of obviously very inebriated chicks I didn't know snatched the hat off my head, tried it on, and goofed around with it. It was one of my favorite possessions. My grandmother, who was too sick to get out and buy me anything for my birthday, had sent me some money my freshman year in college with instructions to buy myself a present with it.
I looked all over Atlanta, and finally decided to get this sharp hat at Neiman-Marcus. It was a rust-colored alpine style, in pure suede leather, made by Churchill. I loved that hat, wore it all the time in cool and cold weather. This was the late 70s, when few young men wore hats, so I quickly became known on campus as "the dude with the hat." I'd had it a year or so by the time of the party.
Though I was pissed at the pooty-faced gals, I managed to get the hat back from them without too much of a ruckus and placed it, along with my and my girlfriend's coats and scarves and gloves, on the bed with everyone's else's cold-weather raiments in the back bedroom.
She and I helped Barbara clean and straighten up her place and so were the last people to leave. All our other clothes were on bed, but my hat was missing. I knew who'd got it and asked Barbara to get it back from the two chicks, who were new friends she'd made at the college to which she'd recently transferred there in our home town.
Barbara took issue with my use of the word "steal" to describe what had happened to my beloved hat, saying rather that they were probably just so drunk that they'd "accidentally walked out" with it. Now, I've put on some benders in my day, but never have I unknowingly left wearing another's article of clothing!
Whatever she wanted to call it, Barb reluctantly agreed to contact the chicks and do her best to have my hat back at her place by noon the next day. I thought that was the best way to handle the situation--they were her friends, strangers to me, and she would serve as the intermediary without any direct confrontation with me.
Even so, I didn't have a good feeling about Barb's follow-through, so I gave her a phone call about 11:00 AM. No answer, so I drove to her nearby house in person. Just in time, too, as I was able to block the drive where she was backing out in her big 1960s Mercedes 600 limousine.
Barb was all dressed up--said she was en route to have New Year's brunch at the country club with her family--and became irate when I reminded of her hat hat retrieval obligation and wouldn't move my car hemming hers in.
I tried to reason with her--explaining that this was a wake-up call to so-called friends who very well might "borrow" some of the valuable antique collectibles her house was chock full of--but she would not come around.
As a last resort, I told her that since it appeared that she was not only protecting the thieves but might also actually be complicit in the theft, I was calling the police unless she immediately got in my car and we went together to the larcenous ladies' abode.
Huffing, she got in my Buick and directed me to their place, only a few blocks away. I stood to the side of their apartment door so that only Barb could been through the peep hole. Well, guess what? The blonde chick answered the door, in panties and bra, with MY HAT on her head! As soon as she spotted me, she tried to slam the door shut, but I already had it blocked with my foot and adroitly snatched it off her head.
The hat had been seriously crushed to the extent that the crease never would come completely out, and the striking feather was gone. But I had my hat back and wore it for many more years. Just a few years ago, I got it out of its original box for the winter, only to discover that moths had munched the soft suede precisely along the line where the crush-crease was. Though it's really not wearable, there are so many memories associated with that hat that it remains one of my all-time favorite possessions.
And Barbara? She never spoke to me again. Because she and my girlfriend were best friends and their families close associates in the social elite, that was the end of our relationship, as well.
As for me, well, I'm still a tenacious middle-class hat-loving guy who learned that it sometimes takes the dispensation of an object of affection to reveal people's true colors.
