CHAPTER 131

Rachel Feinstein: This other thing happened, I don’t know if this fits in with anything, but it gives you an idea of what it was like on the road. I went to Harrah’s. I flew across country. I got to the casino. It’s this long awful week. It’s, like, Tuesday through Saturday, you know? Comics hate that long Vegas weekend. It’s just so lonely and isolating. And so I get there Tuesday and my room key isn’t working. I walk back down, all the way down, bring my luggage up and down. They give me another key and then I walk back up again and it’s not working, that second key, so then I walk back down again I was like, ‘My key’s not working.’ And then they said … It turns out it was like the magnetic thing on the door, you know, and there wasn’t an extra room, so they sent the mechanic up to fix it. So I was sitting in the hallway of the hotel while the mechanic was fixing it, and he’s chatting with me. He was really nice and he was like, ‘Oh, that must be lonely, just like being this woman on the road.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s hard,’ and whatever. We talked a little bit. He was really overly friendly to me. And then he leaves. Then the next night my boyfriend at the time came to visit me and at four in the morning this mechanic walked into my room. Like, open the door, walked into my room, standing over the bed, you know.

Author: Your boyfriend was there?

Rachel: Yeah, but think if he wasn’t. I would have been assaulted. So I got up. I screamed. He got up and grabbed the guy, pushed him out of the room. The guy ran down the hallway. So we called downstairs and the mechanic tried to claim that he thought there was a call from my room. First of all, even if there was a call, why would you walk into the place, you know? And then I tried to call everybody and, like, try to get them to take this seriously, because I don’t want this guy to do this to somebody else.

Author: Yeah, it’s really psychopathic.

Rachel: Finally, one person at the casino was like, ‘Yeah, well maybe he didn’t … maybe he …’ I said, ‘I want to know the calls. I want to know all the calls he had that night because there’s got to be a record of which room.’ And so he finally told me, and when I was like hassling them they just wanted me to shut up about it, give me like a nicer room, and then he’s like, ‘Well, you’re right, the last call was in a different tower, hours before, on a different floor. So there’s no way that he was called to your room.’ And he said, ‘We’re going to look into this.’ And I told everybody that would listen, but it’s like … But they all just kind of quietened it. But it just shows how vulnerable you are. If my boyfriend hadn’t been there I don’t know what would have happened to me that night. I really don’t.