by Paul Carr
More importantly, it turns out that American girls are big on the whole “reformed drunk” thing. A few minutes after I posted my blog link, a girl called Amelia from Los Angeles sent me a message—“That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever read ”—and suggested I look her up next time I’m in town.
In the days and weeks that followed, several similar messages followed—including one from Jenny, the girl who is flying into town for my birthday party tonight. I still don’t quite understand why being a recovering alcoholic attracts women but, as rewards for sobriety go, it’s hard to fault.
As I’m putting my phone away, I notice that Sarah posted a message on Twitter: “Massive happy birthday to my best friend Paul. Wish I could have been in London with you tonight.” Given that Sarah is one of the two people responsible for saving my life, I wish she could be here too, but I’ll forgive her absence just this once: she’s in Chile, researching another chapter of her next book.
And, anyway, after Paris, I’m heading to her hometown of Memphis where she and Geoff have planned a couple of days of gorging on local food and seeing the sights. Sights including the city’s famous Peabody Hotel, with its family of trained ducks which swim around a fountain in the lobby all day, before being led back along a special red carpet to their very own mini hotel on the roof. Even ducks are starting to realize the benefits of living permanently in hotels.
I’m looking forward to seeing Sarah and Geoff, just like I’m looking forward to seeing all of my friends—Hannah, Michael, Michelle, Zoe and a few dozen others—who will be at Adam Street tonight for my birthday party. I’ve finally become a bona fide member, and it didn’t cost me a penny: the club’s way of saying thank you for the flurry of prospective members who joined their waiting list after reading about Adam Street in my last book.
For a long time, I really believed that alcohol was the common factor in every fun adventure I’d had. Since quitting, though, I’ve realized that the real common factor was my friends—Michael and Michelle in Vegas, Scott in Spain, Zoe in Austin, Eris in San Francisco and, of course …
“Open the fucking door, you dick.”
I let Robert in and show him around my room with its crystal decanter minibar, hydraulic television and free pornography. There’s no mistaking the look in his eyes: envy.
“Your life is officially ridiculous,” he says. But his jealousy only goes so far—after all, he’s enjoying an equally ridiculous existence. His next stop after London is a luxury villa in the mountains overlooking the Cote d’Azur. It has all the facilities he’s come to demand from his temporary homes—swimming pool, bar, amazing view—but as an added treat this place is set in the middle of a private twenty-acre forest.
“I’ve always fancied my own forest,” he said.
The villa is far too big for just him, but that’s not a problem. He’s just launched his latest business: the YesAndClub—an organization for people who don’t let practicalities get in the way of a good idea. The business has a mission statement that’s amusingly close to that of the Kings of the Road Club, and its first event just happens to be a two-week retreat in the mountains overlooking the Cote d’Azur. The attendance fees from members will cover the villa’s rental costs twice over, and, of course, attendees are expected to keep the fridge stocked with food and drink.
Whether I’ll be able to join Robert in France will depend on how quickly I can finish writing this book. My deadline is now less than a month away, but I’ve been making good progress since I threw away my first draft and decided instead to tell the whole story of the past two years, not just the part that suited my image.
I have no idea what my publisher will think when he reads the resulting manuscript—between the arrest and near-arrest, the slumming it in Easy Hotels, the near-death experiences and the painful hangovers, it’s not exactly the feel-good blagger’s guide he had in mind.
And yet, and yet … somehow it still satisfies all the criteria of a successful lifestyle guide. The past two years sound great on paper—a story of luxury hotels, pretty girls, fast cars and drunken adventures. It was all perfectly affordable too; at the end of my first year of travel I added up all my hotel bills and found that I had actually come in under budget. In fact, I’d saved about $1600.
But, like all good lifestyle guides, it wasn’t sustainable. Not even for me. Through trial and error, though, I’ve managed to figure out which aspects of life as a high-class nomad are sustainable. And the surprising answer is that, without a crippling drink problem, almost all of them are.
My income may have taken a sharp upward turn now that I’m actually taking my work seriously, but my monthly outgoings are still about the same as they were two years ago—possibly less, adjusted for inflation. This despite the fact that, through a combination of rate-blagging and a ridiculous spiral of long-stay upgrades, I now keep a permanent suite at an amazing hotel a few blocks from San Francisco’s Union Square. A suite that’s costing me just a shade over $75 a night.
And whenever I get bored with San Francisco, I know I can just hop on a plane. Thanks to the secrets I’ve learned these past twenty-four months, I know I have my pick of fully staffed accommodation in every major city on earth, a fleet of luxury cars at my disposal night and day and year-round access to villas in the Spanish mountains, and across most of Europe.
For me, none of this is a break from the pressures of my normal, everyday life—a nice birthday treat before returning to the rat race. This is my normal, everyday life. And all I had to do to start living it was to make one simple, life-changing decision.
The golden rule of the blagger.
I had to decide when to stop.
Coda
Las Vegas, Nevada, December 29, 2011.
Two full years have passed in the time it took you to turn that last page. Two years since I made the decision to call time on a decade of drinking and madness and blagging and bullshitting and of being the worst possible kind of friend to people who, unlike me apparently, cared whether I lived or died.
Given all that’s occurred in those twenty-four months, it’s little wonder that my US publisher demanded, on pain of money, that I write a coda to the manuscript. A few thousand words to answer the questions I was forced to leave hanging in the original. Questions like: am I still off the booze or, like most people who write these kind of alcoholic-makes-good memoirs, did I gradually slip back into old habits once the publicity benefits of sobriety became less marked? And if, remarkably, I did stay dry, how had it affected my life and my relationships with those around me. Am I still living in hotels?
No sense in burying the lede: I’m still sober. As I write this, the counter of ispauldrinkingagain.com is ticking towards 800 days. The public self-shaming has worked, so far, and I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four months. Even today, the support of friends and strangers steadfastly refused to subside even though, honestly, I struggle to remember what all the fuss was about alcohol. Much of that is down to the clear and present benefits of sobriety. Six months after quitting, I’d dropped 42 pounds in weight and was walking ten miles a day. A lack of hangovers gives you that kind of energy, and time. And once you start to feel better, you’re driven to eat better and walk further and … well … not drinking is addictive too, it turns out. Two years sober and I’m in the best shape of my life, and I’ve never been so happy. I’ll get to a couple of the other reasons for that happiness in a moment. But before that, let’s tick off the hotel question. Four years after giving up my London flat am I still living a nomadic life in hotels?
In hotels, yes. Nomadic, slightly less so.
I’m writing these words from the Plaza Hotel in Downtown Las Vegas. I love the Plaza, not just because it’s a nice hotel with large rooms available for $50 a night, but also because, like me, it figured out a way to profit from the thorough hiding dealt out to the hospitality industry by the global financial meltdown.
One way or another, every city in America was affected by the bursting of the housin
g bubble, but Vegas—a city where risk is encouraged, and frequently rewarded—felt those effects harder than most. Before the crash, house-flipping had become something of a local sport, with first-time buyers and existing homeowners snapping up new houses and condos as fast as they could be churned out across the limitless desert land surrounding the city. As house prices continued to rise, the buyers would “flip”—and flip again—their property, using the proceeds to buy more and more and more real estate, despite having no real idea who would ultimately live in all these houses. It seems remarkable now—or fitting, perhaps—that even the inveterate gamblers of Vegas didn’t realize that no lucky streak lasts forever. The bubble burst, the flips turned to flops and the entire town went broke. Get into a Vegas cab today and there’s roughly a one in three chance that the driver will be a former construction worker—lured here by the plentiful building jobs and, of course, the cheap housing. And now they’re trapped, paying off an underwater mortgage—or flat-out homeless. Commercial property suffered too, albeit on a grander and more tragi-comic scale. A couple of miles south of the Plaza lies the 75 percent completed shell of the Fontainebleau hotel. Even unfinished, it’s an impressive sight: a 69-story, 3,889-room tower of shimmering blue glass. But the cranes are no longer moving; the recruitment center across the street has stopped hiring. For the time being, the Fontainebleau is destined to remain a $2.9 billion building site—the banks having refused to make good on the final chunk of loans needed to complete construction. Finally, three months ago, the Fontainebleau’s owners auctioned off all of the hotel’s unused fixtures and fittings. Seeing the opportunity, the Plaza bought all of the room furniture, paying pennies on the dollar. Which is why I’m sitting in the newly refurbished Plaza, on a $400-a-night chair, at a $400-a-night-desk, next to a $400-a-night bed, all for less than fifty bucks.
Why I’m in Vegas—particularly Downtown Vegas—is a slightly longer story: one that began as a direct result of the book you’re holding. Last May, I decided that it would be fun to spend an entire month here, staying a single night in each of the hotels that line the Strip.
“Ugh. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
It would be fair to say that Sarah didn’t share my enthusiasm for my trip. Moreover, it turns out her opinion was shared by the majority of my American friends. “You’re an idiot,” said another, when I explained my brilliant plan. “Are you fucking kidding me?” wondered a third.
Even my insistence that the trip was “for work” fell mainly on deaf ears, except in the case of my friend Kate, who snarkily enquired if that meant I was planning on becoming a prostitute. Why else would I want to move to Sin City for an entire month?
Actually, Kate wasn’t far off the mark: the naked commercial truth was that my UK publisher—in the form of my new “publicity manager,” Jess—was badgering me for idea on how we could promote The Upgrade in the old country.
“I could spend a month dicking around in Vegas hotels and writing about them,” I suggested, without really thinking through how much work that would actually entail. “And this will be my first visit to the Strip since I stopped drinking. Thirty days sober in Vegas might actually kill me.”
Jess’s reaction to the idea went way beyond mere professional approval: she was positively bouncing with excitement, while also seething with jealousy. British people who have never been to Las Vegas really want to go to Las Vegas: Jess’s enthusiasm and envy were shared by every one of the Brits and other Europeans to whom I mentioned the plan. My friend James from London promptly canceled all of his meetings and booked a plane ticket to join me for a week.
I’d expected a mixed reaction, but not one so neatly divided along nationality lines. My non-American pals couldn’t imagine a more fun place to spend a month than Vegas, while my American buddies would rather put their eyes out with the blunt end of a cocktail umbrella than set foot in the Bellagio or the MGM Grand.
So what gives? Why do so many Americans turn up their noses at Vegas, while we foreigners can’t get enough of it?
For a start, Americans’ familiarity with Vegas has matured into the mother of contempt. Forty years have passed since Hunter S. Thompson and his “Samoan” attorney jumped in their red shark and began the journey that would forever brand Vegas as the global center of decadence and depravity. In the four decades that followed the publication of Fear and Loathing, Las Vegas has swollen unrecognizably wider and taller and brighter and costlier and pornier. Compared to Thompson’s bleak and gritty Vegas, today’s Strip is like Disneyland—if Disneyland doubled its prices and paved its streets with badly-Photoshopped hookers.
Hollywood hasn’t helped: 2010’s most popular movie—The Hangover—told the story of a gaggle of man-children who travel to Vegas and nearly drug themselves to death. Indeed, every single Vegas-based movie or TV show from the last couple of decades—Fear and Loathing, The Cooler, Showgirls, Leaving Las Vegas, Honeymoon in Vegas and every episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation—has delivered broadly the same message: Vegas will mess you up good. And certainly my own history with the city would appear to bear that out.
Then there’s the mounting economic argument against celebrating Las Vegas. Writing on The Daily Beast, Meghan “Daughter of John” McCain blamed Vegas’ reputation as a den of reckless abandon for the fact that her father is no longer able to visit—lest Democrats accuse him of possessing poor judgment.51
Why, then, are we foreigners still drawn the place? Aren’t we supposed to be the cultured ones? Well, yes. And that’s sorta the point: we love Las Vegas for precisely the same reasons that we love America. The town is the living, breathing embodiment of the phrase “only in America.” Frankly, no other country but the USA would have the solid brass balls required to build the place; to see a patch of desert and declare “what this place needs is a bunch of casinos, hookers and a big, glass, Egyptian-themed pyramid with an American flag suspended from the ceiling!”
Sure, the Chinese have the money and the love of gambling, but they lack the showmanship: there’s a reason the Triads have failed to produce their own Sinatra. The Saudis love to waste their oil money on giant playgrounds surrounded by sand, but their squeamishness over booze and naked women takes them out of the running. Europe? Please. The Germans lack the sense of humor; the Spanish would never get it finished, we Brits don’t have the space—and the French? Two words: Disneyland Paris.
No, Vegas is as quintessentially American as a teenage kid pleasuring himself with an Apple Pie, and in the past half-century or so it has grown to reflect all of the best and worst of the land of the free. The impossibly beautiful women; the love of risk-taking and the life-changing consequences those risks can bring; the sense of well-pack-aged fun; the really freaking amazing weather. Hell, the town even has its own Statue of Liberty, just like the one that has beckoned so many immigrants to a new life on these shores. Except, of course, the Vegas version has its own roller coaster. Tired and huddled masses? Not any more!
In a final ironic twist, while various American editors were interested in commissioning me to write a one-off piece about my trip, it took the Greek-born founder of what is now the content arm of America Online to see the full potential of the adventure. “You have to write a daily diary, daahling!” cried Arianna Huffington in that way she does (she really does). “And take this Flip Cam! Get video!” God bless you Arianna: the American Dream is you.
My plan was to start out in LA, where I’d rent a suitably American car, and drive three hours across the desert until I hit the Sahara hotel—the one-time home of the Rat Pack that was now just weeks away from closing permanently after a lifetime of service. From there, I’d just follow the best deals along the Strip, writing about whatever fun occurs along the way.
More importantly though, I wanted to spend the bulk of my trip away from the bright lights. To meet some of the people who work and play in Vegas, with no less hubristic a goal than to figure out what modern Vegas can tell us about the state of the Ame
rican dream.
I wanted to spend one day with a Vegas cop, and another with some kind of sex worker (“FOR WORK”). I wanted to find God in a casino chapel and ask a real-estate expert to explain why the Vegas housing market is so screwed that people have to live in storm drains. I wanted to meet someone who lives in a storm drain. I also wanted to get married to a cocktail waitress dressed as Elvis, shoot an assault rifle, jump off a building and talk to fat people in the Burger King at the Luxor. God, I hate the Luxor, but I’d lay money that some interesting stories pass below its stupid pointy roof. And one more thing: 5 percent of Las Vegans are members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints—maybe, finally, I might meet a fucking Mormon.
Thirty-four days later and, of those lofty goals, I’d achieved precisely two. I’d spent a downlifting afternoon in the company of two foreclosure lawyers who painted a picture of the greed, misfortune and human stupidity that was neither limited to the bankers nor the punters. And, yes, I’d finally met a Mormon: a spa consultant who invited me to join her for a “couples” massage treatment that she had designed for the Cosmopolitan. Four hours naked with a sexy female Mormon: done and done.
My final few days on the Strip were a curious whirl of press—TV, radio, magazines, newspapers of various stripes—all of whom asked the same question in a different way: how has 33 days in Las Vegas changed my opinion of the city?
As I stood outside Caesars Palace, being interviewed by Fox5’s Elizabeth Watts, it occurred to me that there’s probably no other city on earth in which a man wanting to stay an entire month would constitute headline news. But Vegas, of course, is unlike any city on earth: it’s a place where, so the popular narrative goes, out-of-towners like me fly in in our millions, drink our body-weight in alcohol, accidentally fuck a hooker and go home with enough “crazy” stories to get us through the rest of the year.
Embarking on the Vegas trip, I expected—and received—a lot of cynicism from Las Vegas locals. Blogs with names like Vegas Chatter and Vegas Tripping crowed that I wouldn’t last a week let alone a month. And I get it: for people who call Vegas home, the idea of yet another journalist coming to their town and living out a Hunter S. Thompson fantasy on the Strip might be cause for rolled eyes and cynical sighs.