by Paul Carr
“What do you think about Rudy Giuliani?”
Bit of a left-field question to open with, I thought. To the best of my knowledge the former mayor of New York wasn’t a naval man. And I couldn’t see what this guy’s opinion about American politics was going to prove either way. Still, I had every confidence that Robert knew what he was doing.
“He’s a good man,” replied “Mark.” “I’ve spent a little time with him.”
“Interesting,” replied Robert, his eyes still fixed on his phone.
“Oh, come on, Robert, you’re not really buying this shit? I mean—just look at this business card and what the hell are these medals supposed to be?”
I turned back to “Mark” and yanked at one of the half-dozen or so fancy-dress shop props pasted to his chest. It was pretty well fastened. Plus one style point.
“What did you say your job was?” Robert butted in again, making eye contact with “Mark” for the first time.
“I didn’t,” he replied, “but your friend has it on my card. I’m with the Center for Submarine CT Operations.”
“Yeah, um, Paul …” But I didn’t let Robert finish his sentence. There was no need. This had gone far enough. It was one thing this charlatan lying to gullible women, but now he was lying to me. And I was very drunk.
“OK, seriously … you expect us to believe you’re in charge of submarine counter-terrorism for the US Navy and yet rather than being—I don’t know—on your ship …”
“Boat …”
“What?”
“Boat,” he repeated, “a submarine is a boat.”
“Fine—rather than being on your fucking boat, you’re in the Jewel bar in Piccadilly fucking Circus. Let me guess, al-Qaeda are planning to smuggle suicide swans into St. James’s fucking Park to break the Queen’s neck with their fucking wings.”
“Um, Paul …”
“Wait a minute, Robert. I mean, you’re honestly saying that the US Navy gives out business cards like this and that its captains wander around foreign countries in dress uniform …”
“Actually, I’m not a captain I’m …”
“No, I know you’re not a fucking captain, you’re …”
“PAUL.”
There was something about Robert’s tone—perhaps the fact that he was shouting it right into my ear, with his hand pressing firmly down on my shoulder—that made me pause.
“WHAT?”
“He’s right. He’s not a fucking captain, he’s a fucking rear admiral.”
“Rear Admiral Mark Kenny,” said Rear Admiral Mark Kenny, Commander of the Center for Submarine Counter-Terrorism Operations, former commanding officer of the USS Birmingham and close personal friend of Rudolph Giuliani, extending his hand again.
“You know, you could have just asked to see my passport.”
He reached into another pocket and pulled out his diplomatic passport. Oh. Shit. Plus one thousand style points, Admiral. I sobered up immediately, and started to—kind of—whimper. “Um … I’m really sorry about the medals, man.” I assumed an American would like being called “man.”
“Err … you could probably have me killed, right?”
“Probably,” he said, with a shrug.
“Or I could just throw you to the suicide swans.”
Robert’s hands were on both my shoulders now, steering me towards the door. “Shall we go, mate?” he asked, through his tears of laughter. Yeah. I think that’s probably a good idea.
102
“HA!”
I woke up the next morning with a laugh. Had I really accused a rear admiral of being a conman last night? Yes and—Jesus Christ—I’d even tried to tear off one of his medals. He could have snapped my neck, and then just walked away, claiming diplomatic immunity. I’ve seen Lethal Weapon 2; I know what goes on.
But, still, what a rush, eh? The first ridiculous—ridiculously stupid—thing I’d done in months. It was just like old times. Perhaps things weren’t so bad after all. I grabbed a slice of cold pizza from the night before,4 and scooped up the mail from my doormat.
A whole load of bills, of course—taxes, phone bill, broadband—but also a big brown envelope from my landlord. The lease on my apartment was up in February and this would, presumably, be the contract to renew for another year. Another year in overpriced, dirty London. Memories of ex-girlfriends on every corner, and cold pizza for breakfast. The idea hardly filled me with joy.
But, no, it wasn’t a contract, it was a letter. Due to the looming “credit crunch” my landlord had decided that the “generous” £900 ($1800 at the time) monthly rent I was paying for my tiny one-bedroom in South London wasn’t enough. I had a choice: either accept a 20 percent hike, effective immediately, or I’d have thirty days to find somewhere else to live. A piece of cold pineapple stuck in my throat. First the girl, then the business, and now my apartment—it was like watching a Slinky spring fall from grace. Thlink … thlink … thlink.5
I threw the envelope onto the sofa and took the two steps across the room to my desk. There was no way I was going to be bullied into paying nearly £1100 a month rent for such a tiny place—and not least because I couldn’t afford it. I was earning less than £2000 a month—before tax—from freelance gigs and, on top of my £900 rent, I was paying about £75 a month in local tax; £40 for phone, Internet and TV; £80 for a cleaner; almost £100 on a monthly Tube ticket just to get into the center of town—nearly £1200 a month before I even left the house.
Given the cost of living in London, paying £1100 in rent alone was out of the question, unless I wanted my next address to be a debtors’ prison. I opened up my laptop and fired up Google. There really is nothing more useful than Google at times like this. No matter what major life decision you need to make, you can rely on it to deliver site after site of utterly irrelevant trivia to distract you from it.
On this occasion, the major life decision I needed to be distracted from was which cheaper, scummier part of London I should move to at the end of the month—and Google didn’t disappoint. “London is too expensive.” I typed the words into the search box and hit the submit button. I wasn’t really expecting an answer to the problem; I just wanted to vent my frustration.
On the first pages of results there was a site showing the real cost of living in every major city in the world. From that I was able to see—in stark bar-chart form—that, after Moscow and Tokyo, London was the third most expensive place to live on planet earth; 30 percent more costly, on average, than New York City. Alarming stuff, but, given that I’d paid £8 for a rum and Coke the previous night, hardly surprising.
Click.
More cost of living trivia, this time from a site that was trying to encourage me to buy an apartment in Europe. Did I know that moving to Frankfurt or Madrid would save me a staggering 80 percent in rent and 40 percent in general cost of living? No, I did not, Google, thanks very much for rubbing that in.
Anyway, Madrid might be fine for a weekend break—or at most a few weeks over the summer—but I wouldn’t want to live there. I only speak about two words of Spanish, for a start; also I have no beef with bulls.
But then again, maybe a vacation wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I didn’t have to make the housing decision straight away, after all. If the cost of living was really so much less elsewhere, I could afford to put my furniture in storage and take a month out. Visit another city, check into a hotel for a month and decide on my options.
Perhaps not Madrid, but maybe New York—I had lots of friends there, and I knew from experience that at this time of year I could negotiate a decent room in Manhattan for $100 a night if I stayed more than a week. At the current exchange rate—almost exactly two dollars to the pound—that was £50 a night. £1400 for the whole of February. The amount was a nice coincidence, actually. £1400 was exactly the same as I’d be paying in total if I agreed on the rent hike in London, when taxes, phone, cable TV and all that stuff were factored in. Stuff that I wouldn’t have to worry about in a hotel.
Maybe I could see a bit of the country—outside Manhattan, hotels would probably be even cheaper. And after that—well, what was the rush to find a new place? There were bound to be hotels in Europe, or even in parts of the UK, where I could stay for less than $100 a night. Really I could travel for as long as I liked: one of the perks of being a freelance writer is that I can pretty much work from anywhere there’s a desk and a decent Wi-Fi connection.7
It was at that exact point, as I took another bite of cold pizza, that somewhere deep inside my brain a synapse fired. Tzzziz.
A whole minute passed, although it seemed longer. I just sat, staring at my laptop, paralyzed by the idea. It seemed so obvious, but at the same time so … what was the word … ? Ridiculous.
A ridiculous adventure.
That settled it.
103
I’ve always loved hotels. I love drinking in their bars, I love eating in their restaurants and above all I love staying in their rooms. Which is lucky as, for much of my childhood, that’s how I lived.
My parents have been hoteliers for their entire career—some eighty years, combined. The day after I was born, they carried me, in a little basket, back to their suite at the King Malcolm Hotel in Dunfermline, Scotland, where my dad was the manager.
I spent my first Christmas in a hotel, I ate my first solid food in a hotel restaurant and I drank my first Diet Coke (not entirely legally, I suspect) in a hotel bar. Before speaking my first word, I dialed nine for an outside line.
When I was three, my dad’s job took our family to Luton, a town about an hour outside London, where we lived for two years in the penthouse of the Strathmore Hotel. I did my first piece of homework on a hotel dining table and, while other kids’ parents rented McDonald’s restaurants for their birthday parties, my parties were held in the hotel’s ballroom.
In the absence of a back garden, I learned to ride my first bike on the hotel’s flat roof, a mere ten levels above street level. Even during the few years when we actually lived in a proper house, my dad’s long working hours meant that almost every significant occasion—Christmases, New Years, Easters, birthdays—found us celebrating in a hotel restaurant, surrounded by hundreds of paying guests. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’ve always felt more comfortable in hotels than I do living in a house. It’s also perhaps unsurprising that, when I found myself nearing thirty, feeling stuck in a rut and craving one last burst of youthful irresponsibility, my first thought was to run back to the world of hotels.
Specifically, the idea I had—as I took that bite of cold pizza—was to give up my apartment, pack a few possessions into a suitcase and embark on a yearlong experiment. Rather than renewing my lease for another year, I’d spend that year on the road—exploring whether it was possible to live in nice hotels in other cities for the same cost as surviving on cold pizza in my shitty apartment in London.
The idea isn’t entirely without precedent. Lots of traveling salesmen live in hotels for extended periods: spending most of the year shuttling from Holiday Inn to Hilton, surviving on room service and takeaways and missing their (ex-)wife and kids. But they live that way out of necessity, rather than choice. My theory was that, if you do it through choice, on your own terms, living in hotels—as a kind of high-class nomad—could actually be a practical, and luxurious, alternative to home. And history agrees with me …
America in the mid-1800s was growing rapidly, with hundreds of new towns and cities springing up every year. As each new town was founded, one of the first buildings to be erected was usually a hotel, to provide essential accommodation for new inhabitants. What started out as a temporary housing solution soon became established as a permanent way to live for many of those early city-dwellers. It made sense: even for the relatively well off, the cost of buying a family home and employing servants to run it was prohibitive. A good hotel provided all the comforts of a luxury home—complete with porters, cooks and maids—at a far more affordable cost. Why not make that hotel your home?
The idea took off, and, by 1844, a Chicago census found that one in six of the city’s residents was living permanently in hotels. In New York the number was even higher—according to A. K. Sandoval-Strausz’s book Hotel: An American History, in 1856 nearly three-quarters of the city’s middle and upper classes gave a hotel as their primary address. As hotel living became more popular, wealthier occupants began to demand more and more homey facilities—private kitchens so they could hire their own cooks, for example—while those less well off tried to cut costs by turning their backs on daily housekeeping and catered meals.
These demands soon led canny developers to create a new hybrid living space: centrally located properties with many of the communal facilities offered by hotels, but with all of the comforts of a private house. And so the modern apartment building was born.
If history was on my side, then so was my own experience. Through seeing my parents at work, I know how hotels operate. A hotel bedroom is a highly perishable commodity—if it hasn’t been sold by the end of the day, it’s gone forever. I know the times of the year when rooms are hardest to sell and, as a result, when bargain rates are there for the taking. In most cities, the first couple of months of the year are slow so I knew I’d find some good deals on rooms in New York as long as I didn’t stay much beyond the middle of March.
After that I could head to second-tier cities, or even small towns, where cheaper rooms are available all year round. I also know that the longer you stay in a hotel, the better the deals get. Hotels love long-staying guests: not only are those guests filling a room for a month or longer, but they’re also very likely to use other hotel services like laundry and room service and the bar.
For all these reasons, there isn’t a hotel on the planet that won’t give you a decent discount for a long stay. You don’t even have to haggle: just ask. One little known, but extraordinarily useful, fact is that in most cities you don’t pay local tax (10–15 percent in most US cities) on stays over thirty nights. In the UK, stays over twenty-eight nights are tax-free. Armed with just this basic information—and a willingness to learn more as I traveled—I was confident that living in hotels was a perfectly feasible way to spend a year.
By the end of April I’d have to leave America so I didn’t overstay the visa waiver, but then I could travel around Europe for a bit before heading back to the US once a decent amount of time had elapsed. Friends had told me that, as long as you leave a couple of months between visits, you can pretty much travel back and forth on the visa waiver indefinitely.
Then, by December, I’d head back to London for Christmas and start house hunting in time for January. That would still give me an entire year to figure out what I was going to do with my life before I turned thirty. And if living in hotels didn’t work out? Well, then I’d just come home early.
104
There’s one more thing you need to know about living in hotels for a year. It’s fucking brilliant. It is also “living the fucking dream.”
These are all things you learn when you start telling your male friends that you’re thinking about doing it.
“That’s a fucking brilliant idea,” said Robert when I told him my plan. “Anyone can live in a hotel for a month. That’s just a long holiday. But living in them for a whole year. That’s living the fucking dream.”
I could see his point. It’s hard to see a downside in spending twelve months in a place where a woman dressed as a maid comes to your room every morning, delivers fresh towels, recovers the remote control from behind the bed, replenishes the fridge with beer and tiny tubes of Pringles and leaves a m
int on your pillow.
A place with a bar and restaurant downstairs, and a uniformed man whose whole purpose is to get you things that you ask for, and to call you “sir.” Oh, and an entire television channel dedicated to porn.
The fact that you can have all of these things at home, if you pay enough money, that no one has left a mint on a hotel room pillow since 1972 and that the Internet has all but destroyed the hotel room porn industry does little to alter the perception, for most of my male friends, that living in a hotel is as good as it gets.
For most of my female friends: not so much.
“A year? That sounds like an unmitigated living hell,” enthused my friend Kate when I explained my plan.
Girls, explained Kate as their spokesperson, like to live in their own places, surrounded by familiar things. They like having their own shelves and cupboards and wardrobes to house those things. They like having their own kitchens to cook their own food. Girls like owning cushions. To live in a hotel, they would have to leave their cushions behind: bringing your own cushions to a hotel is like bringing your own salt to a restaurant.
To make things even more interesting, and probably partly to send Kate further into meltdown, I’d decided that my cushions wouldn’t be the only thing I was leaving behind in London.
My original plan had been to pack as much of my life as possible into a suitcase, and then to put all of my other possessions into storage for a year. I may not have been as attached to my stuff as Kate was to hers, but I still wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to get rid of it forever.
Keeping at least my furniture in storage meant I could pick up my life from where I left off when I got back.
Another hour of Internet research, though, showed me that even the cheapest storage company in London wanted £100 a month in rental fees—$200 straight off my hotel budget, to rent a tiny little metal apartment for all of my possessions to live in while I was away.8 It was at that point I determined that, if a ridiculous adventure is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.