Naked City Story #291,847

I was at Starbucks again late tonight, working on stuff. Around 4am I decided to head home. As I approached the corner of Flamingo and Paradise (where, you may remember, I found a bloody shirt a few months ago), I saw a pretty girl standing on the southwest corner, next to the gas station, trying to hail a cab. She was weaving a bit.

Then she fell over, into the street.

I jogged over, pulling my headphones off, as another man (who was filling up at the station) ran up to help her. She was crying and shrieking. At first, I thought she’d hurt herself, but she didn’t seem to be physically hurt. Her makeup was streaked down her face and she was in hysterics. The man and I helped her to her feet and she clung to him like a baby.

She was tall, very pretty, young, in her twenties. Platinum blonde, well-groomed, or she had been when her night began. But her nose was leaking blood and snot like crazy, and she was completely off the fucking reservation, not to mention wearing a skimpy black and white cocktail dress, impractical high heels and no jacket in 40 degree weather, like she’d been out at expensive places and hadn’t expected to be out in the cold at all. She was shivering and screaming that she had to get to the Hilton or something horrible was going to happen. I looked down and noticed that she had three puppy-dog paw prints rubber-stamped in black ink on the center of her right foot, like something a little kid would do.

The man offered to give her a ride in his van, and we tried for several minutes to get her to climb in. But she was out of her mind. The security guard from the gas station came out and told the man to move or he’d call the police. I discreetly took the man aside and told him maybe he ought to let the cops deal with her. Not that discretion was really necessary — I could have stood two feet from this girl and told the guy we ought to take her out in the desert and sport-fuck her until the sun came up, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

She just kept screaming that she had to go — first to the Hilton, then to the Hyatt, and then to “51 Minds”. I asked her what that was. “It’s near Sahara!” she screamed. “I need to go…oh, my God, I need to go right fucking now…I need to go to the HILTON!”

Eventually, he got her into the van, where she crouched on the floorboard of the passenger side in a fetal position, and they drove off. The security guard told me a cab had dropped her off, and she hadn’t had money and had tried to get money from the ATM inside the station, but couldn’t work the ATM and had finally stumbled out onto the street, which is when I saw her fall down.

“Crazy drunk bitch. She’s lucky that nice man’s helping her,” the security guard, a small grizzled Filipino or Vietnamese guy, told me. “She’s lucky a bunch of niggers didn’t find her. They’d take her home and fuck her in the ass.”

After that, I dunno. And normally I’d just chalk it up to coke or meth. But I’ve seen lots of people on lots of different shit, and I’ve seen raving tweaker lunatics, and this was something else. This girl was genuinely terrified of something — something that had happened, or something that was going to happen if she didn’t get to where she was going. And she didn’t look like a heavy tweaker — she was in good physical shape, none of the usual lines on her face, nothing like that. She was obviously fucked up on something…but I’m wondering if it was something she took on purpose or not. Someone who got dosed with something without their knowledge would act like that, I think.

I Googled “51 Minds” and it turns out it’s a production company that does reality shows like “The Flavor Of Love” and “The Surreal Life”. They seem to film in Vegas a lot, based on random casting company links and production credits, but they don’t have a permanent local office, or one that I can find. And this girl was pretty enough to be on one of those shows. She was pretty adamant about getting either there or the Hilton — I think she said “the Hyatt” by accident, because she only said it once — and I can’t think of any particular reason why a random tweaker would be so desperate to get to some production company’s office in the middle of the night.

I don’t know. I hope she’s alright. If I thought she was just another random coke whore, I’d be more bemused than anything else. But again, I’ve seen people fucked up on everything from crack to PCP, and this was something weirder than that.

I should just start bringing a video camera when I go out for coffee, huh?