by Paul Carr
THE
Upgrade
A Cautionary Tale of
a Life without Reservations
PAUL CARR
For Robert and Sarah –
I’m still alive, and it’s all your fault.
‘What you probably don’t yet realise about Paul Carr is that he is a pathological fantasist with full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He is extremely charming, smart, disarming, but he is also a chronic liar who has carved a swathe of misery and confusion through a small corner of the UK New Media world.’
Email received by the publisher,
prior to publication of the author’s previous book
The following is a true story.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 100
Chapter 200
Chapter 300
Chapter 400
Chapter 500
Chapter 600
Chapter 700
Chapter 800
Chapter 900
Chapter 1000
Chapter 1100
Chapter 1200
Chapter 1300
Chapter 1400
Chapter 1500
Chapter 1600
Chapter 1700
Chapter 1800
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Prologue
I don’t notice the man in the grey suit taking my bag.
I mean, I do notice him – but in his smart grey Savile Row suit and his patent leather shoes, he looks just like any other hotel guest. I’m dimly aware of him gliding past me as I’m signing the guest register but, by the time I turn around, he’s gone. And, with him, my bag.
A professional.
I smile.
The receptionist hands me back my debit card, having preauthorised it for any incidentals I might incur during my stay. In other hotels they take as much as two or three hundred pounds. But the Lanesborough – the most expensive hotel in London – has just swiped a grand from my current account, just in case.
Given the cost of a room at the hotel, the pre-authorisation wasn’t too outrageous. The standard – or ‘rack’ – rate for my suite is a little over £800 a night. I do the mental maths. £6000 a week. £312,000 a year. Plus tax and gratuities, of course. No wonder the Lanesborough is one of the few hotels in the world where they don’t charge you extra for the in-room pornography.
Another thing they don’t charge for is your butler. Mine is called Marcus and he’s entirely at my disposal during my stay. If I need a copy of The Times or a pot of tea, Marcus will fetch it. If I should suddenly desire a Dalmatian puppy, painted green, Marcus will paint it. Marcus will do anything I ask him to do, providing it’s legal. He’ll also do lots of things that I haven’t asked him to; hence my disappearing bag.
Room 237. I slide my key into the electronic lock, and once the hotel’s elaborate security system is satisfied that I’m me – tick, tick, beep – the door swings open. I smile again. In the few minutes it took for the receptionist to electronically cut me a spare room key – it’s cheesy as hell, but girls love being given their own key – Marcus has been hard at work.
My clothes are hanging in the walk-in wardrobe, except for a creased shirt that he’s taken to be pressed, ahead of tonight’s party. My razor and toothbrush have been removed from my overnight bag and placed on a little folded towel next to the sink. The book that was stuffed into the back pocket of my laptop bag is now on the table next to the gigantic bed with a bookmark placed where I’d folded down the corner of the page. My laptop is on the desk in the living room.
The living room. On the table sits an ice bucket and two half-bottles of champagne, compliments of the manager. Perfect. There’s an unexpected touch, too: a dark chocolate cake with a message piped in thick white icing.
‘Happy 30th Birthday.’
Aww. Sweet.
I sit down in one of the two leather armchairs and tear open the envelope that had been waiting for me at reception, but, before I can remove the card inside, there’s a knock at the door.
I know it isn’t Marcus – I’d been careful to flip the Do Not Disturb switch as I walked through the door. After ten hours on a plane I need to get some sleep. In a few hours I’m heading to Adam Street – my club, just off the Strand – for my birthday party. It’s going to be a long night; especially if the girl I’ve invited to fly in from Italy shows up. She better had, given all the trouble Marcus is taking to press my shirt. That’s going to cost me a twenty-quid tip.
Another knock.
‘What?’ I shout through the door.
‘Open the fucking door, you twat.’
I do – and before it’s even fully open I’m grabbed by two enormous arms and pulled into a crushing bear hug.
‘Happy birthday, darling!’
‘Robert! Thank you so much,’ I gasp. ‘Broken ribs. Really, you shouldn’t have.’ I force myself out of his grip. ‘How did you know which room I was in?’
‘Your butler sent me up – but I wrote down your room number wrong. I just nearly barged in on some Arab guy and what looked suspiciously like a hooker.’ He paused. ‘More importantly – you have a fucking butler.’ Another pause. ‘Congratulations. Your life is officially ridiculous.’
Robert Loch knows all about ridiculous. This is, after all, the man who the Financial Times – of all papers – once called ‘the Hugh Hefner of London’ after he rented a penthouse in Leicester Square and spent a whole year sitting in his rooftop hot tub, seducing Brazilian models and Russian ballerinas while building his latest online business.
And yet, right now, as he looks around my room, at the antique furniture and the fully stocked bar and the television – full of free porn – rising from the top of the bureau at the touch of a button, there is no mistaking the look in Robert’s eyes.
Envy.
Envy for me – a loser who, less than two years earlier, had lost everything: my business, the love of my life and my home. Me, who has been fired from every job I’ve ever had, including two where I was technically my own boss. Me, whose only marketable skill is an ability to humiliate myself in ever more creative and entertaining ways.
And now here I am. My weekly outgoings aren’t any more than they were two years ago – probably less, adjusted for inflation – and yet now 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 a villa in the Spanish mountains, with more of the same across most of Europe.
I arrived at the Lanesborough in a limousine from Heathrow, after flying in from San Francisco. The previous evening I’d been out on a date with a pretty blonde journalist called Charlotte who wanted to profile me for some magazine or other. After dinner and drinks, we’d ended up back at my hotel with a girl we’d met in the bar. My real birthday celebration, though, is tonight at Adam Street, surrounded by nearly a hundred of my closest friends.
Then, tomorrow morning, while those same friends drag themselves bleary-eyed back to their desks and the forty-hour week that allows them to afford their exorbitant London rents, I’ll hop on the Eurostar to Paris where I plan to complete my entire week’s work in less than two hours, sitting in a café on the Champs-Elysées, eating foie gras and watching pretty French girls go by.
For me, this isn’t 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 it’s all because of my membership of a very unusual club. A club with no joining fees and where anyone is welcome �
� even losers like me. All I had to do was to make one simple, life-changing decision.
What follows is the story of how I made that decision. It’s a story of fast cars and Hollywood actresses; of Icelandic rock stars and six-thousand-mile booty calls. It’s a story of eight hundred female hairdressers dressed only in bedsheets. It’s a story of nights spent in prison cells; of jumping out of cars being driven by Spanish drug dealers and of trying to have sex with a girl knowing there’s a dead woman in my wardrobe. And, more than anything else, it’s a story of booze.
Lots and lots and lots of delicious booze.
Chapter 100
Walk Softly and Carry the US Pacific Fleet
‘Eight fucking quid for a rum and Coke.’
A little less than two years earlier and my life was not going exactly according to plan.
It was a few days into 2008 and Robert and I were sitting in a dark corner of Jewel, a bar just off Piccadilly Circus. Robert was listening, somewhat patiently, as I railed against the cost of killing myself with booze in London. I’d just turned twenty-eight.
Following a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to start a dot com business with my ex-girlfriend – so unsuccessful that I’d ended up writing a Schadenfreude-packed book called Bringing Nothing to the Party* about how I’d lost them both forever – I had been forced back into freelance writing to pay the rent on my tiny London flat. Fortunately the latest instalment of the advance from the book just about covered the cost of drinking myself into a coma every night of the week to numb the pain of failure. Just about.
‘I wouldn’t mind but it’s not even good rum.’
Jewel is that most vexing of things: an overpriced dive bar. A place where you go if you’re a visitor in town and you think you’re too good for the Cheers theme bar across the street. It’s also something of a magnet for American girls, which was the sole reason I had insisted we move on there after spending most of the evening in a pub in Soho. My most recent ex-girlfriend was American (as was the previous one) and there was still something about the accent that made me fall instantly – and temporarily – in love whenever I heard it.
‘Seriously, Robert, everything – absolutely everything – in my life is shit.’
‘If you say so. What happened to life being great now that you’ve decided what you really want?’
Robert might as well have put the words ‘great’ and ‘really’ in airquotes. Like all of my friends, he was bored of hearing me complain. Even though my book wouldn’t be published for almost six months, he’d read a preview of the Epilogue in which I bragged about finally realising that all I wanted to do was be a writer rather than some rich and famous entrepreneur. He knew I’d been paid a decent amount of money to write a book about being a loser. He knew that thanks to the book my freelance earnings were up as commissioning editors asked me to write stories about genuine dot com millionaires. And he knew that I was slowly but surely getting over my ex-girlfriend,* even if I was doing it by picking up a succession of almost identical American girls in dives like Jewel.
‘Yeah, it’s great – objectively,’ I explained, draining my glass as the Eastern European waitress approached with another overpriced round. God, even I was tired of listening to myself. ‘But I’m just bored. This time last year, all these ridiculous things were happening – I was writing a book, crazy American girls were setting up websites about my being shit in bed,† I was being fired from yet another company, I was being thrown in jail!’
‘But you were miserable.’
‘I know. But at least I wasn’t bored. In less than two years I’ll be thirty. That’s the age when you’re supposed to put away ridiculous things and start being responsible. But I’m twenty-eight – I’ve fallen into my rut two years early. Nothing ridiculous happens to me any more.’
And with that – exactly as would happen in a film, if there were a film shit enough to be filmed in the Jewel bar – something ridiculous happened.
101
Had the man who had just walked in been dressed normally, the first thing Robert and I would have noticed was his size. He was fucking enormous. But he wasn’t dressed normally; he was wearing full US Navy dress uniform complete with a chest full of medals and a white hat pinned under his arm. He swaggered – that’s really the only word for it – up to the bar, laid down his hat and ordered a drink. Turns out if you want to get served straight away in a crowded London bar, you should arrive wearing full US Navy dress uniform.
‘Jesus. Look at that cunt,’ I half slurred, pointing my rum and Coke towards the sailor. There was no doubt in my mind, of course, that he was a cunt. Only a cunt would walk into the Jewel bar wearing full naval dress uniform. Hell, only a cunt would walk into the Jewel bar. Robert and I were cunts, but at least we weren’t in fancy dress.
He was also clearly not a real sailor. American naval officers tend not to hang around in Piccadilly Circus dive bars on their own, especially not wearing medals and with gleaming white hats under their arm. No, I’d read about his type: pick-up artists who prowl bars dressed in attention-seeking costumes, picking up vulnerable divorcees or drunk girls from the provinces who would buy their ‘sailor-on-shore-leave’ crap, despite the fact that they were 120 miles from the nearest US naval base. I had to give this guy style points, though – most fraudsters just slip on a dog tag from Camden Market and knock up a fake ID – they don’t bother renting the full costume, complete with medals. Kudos, fraudster. Kudos.
Ah well, at least it would be good for ten minutes of fun. I knocked back my drink and marched over to the bar. Robert, reluctantly, followed close behind – all the better to drag me away for my own safety once the fists inevitably started to fly. He’d spent enough time around me drunk to know how this would end. I just couldn’t help myself.
‘I’m Paul,’ I said, extending my hand to the costumed giant, ‘who are you?’
‘I’m Mark,’ replied the man, taking my outstretched hand in a vice-grip and shaking it just once. His accent was unmistakably American and, oddly, he didn’t seem fazed by the fact that he was shaking hands with an angry looking drunk stranger.
‘Mark what?’ I demanded, refusing to let go of his hand. With his free hand he reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a business card. It looked like it had been produced on one of those vending machines you get in motorway service stations. Minus one style point.
‘Mark Kenny.’
That proved it. Never trust a man with two first names.
‘Oh please,’ I said.
‘What’s the problem, sir?’ he asked, his face a picture of innocence. The cocky bastard.
‘Oh come on.’ I said. ‘Look at you, dressed like that in the fucking Jewel bar. We both know you’re not really –’ I squinted to read the job title on his card as the last rum took its grip. ‘The US Navy Commander for the Center for Submarine Counter-Terrorism. Ha! Does that job even exist?’
‘I hope so, otherwise I’ve wasted a lot of training,’ he lied.
‘He’s good,’ I said, turning to Robert, ‘I’ll give him that.’ Robert was tapping away on his phone, presumably looking up the name ‘Mark Kenny’ on Google – or Wikipedia, or something – to prove that the guy was lying. Without looking up from the screen, he asked the question that would clearly prove to be the undoing of this ‘Mark Kenny’.
‘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.’