The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

by Paul Carr

  And then, less than a week before I was due to move out, a fifteen-year-old kid called Stuart turned up at my flat. He’d brought his mum with him because – it soon became clear – he couldn’t understand why some guy would sell a Fender Stratocaster guitar and amp for fifty quid, and so assumed the advert was a trap.

  Still, after listening to my ridiculous explanation of why I had to get rid of everything I owned by the end of the month, Stuart seemed satisfied that I wasn’t planning to rape and murder him. He picked up the guitar, handling it like a doctor might pick up a donated kidney – confidently but respectfully. Five minutes of tweaking and plucking and tuning later, he cranked up the volume on the amp, paused for some dramatic effect … and then … blaaaaaaaaaang … the first chord that my hatstand had ever played. I don’t know anything about music, but I know when I hear someone playing the shit out of a guitar. And Stuart played the shit out of the guitar. ‘Wow,’ I said when he was finished. ‘I didn’t know it could do that. Maybe I’ll hold on to it after all.’

  Stuart looked horrified. It was a trap!

  ‘I’m kidding – I’m just glad someone is going to get some use out of it finally. Hey, you don’t by any chance want a free flatscreen television do you?’

  ‘What – for nothing?’

  ‘Yeah. Help yourself, it’s by the door.’

  I’m not sure if Stuart learned anything that day about the value of money, but I certainly did. After waving him and his mum off with the last of my possessions, I went to the kitchen drawer where I’d been keeping the proceeds. I slid the drawer from its runners, tipped the contents – a small pile of notes and a few coins – on to the worktop and started counting.

  Ten seconds later, I finished counting. My entire life was worth £540. I laughed. I laughed partly because it was such a tragically small amount of money for almost everything that I’d spent nearly three decades acquiring. But I also laughed because £540 was precisely the cost – including tax and booking fees – of my plane ticket to New York.

  Fate had given my plan its stamp of approval. It was time to go.

  Chapter 200

  Naked Brunch

  Wednesday 20 February 2008. Virgin Atlantic flight VS045 from Heathrow to JFK. I remember it vividly.

  I arrived at the airport with less than an hour to spare, dropped off the suitcase containing my entire life, and headed towards security. I’ve never understood the ‘arrive two hours before your flight’ thing, especially if you’ve checked in online – but even so, given that my flight was due to take off at 2 p.m. and it was now half past one, I was cutting it a little fine.

  Luckily there was only the merest hint of a line at security and, after the usual twatting around with shoes and belts and laptops, I was walking – maybe jogging slightly – down the jetway on to the plane.

  ‘Paul!’

  I almost never turn around when I hear my name shouted in public. The odds just aren’t in favour of reacting; nine times out of ten, you end up waving, through reflex, to a total stranger. But then came a jab from behind; right in the spine. I reacted to that. It was my friend Zoe, out of breath, having clearly made it to the airport even later than I had.

  ‘Hey! What are you doing here?’ I asked idiotically, given that we were on a jetway, a few feet from the door of a plane, and Zoe was also dragging a suitcase. ‘Well, obviously you’re flying to New York. But why?’

  ‘Oh, just some interviews, publisher meeting – they’ve arranged a reading, I think; usual bullshit. You?’

  ‘Long story. Sort of an extended working holiday.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Zoe. ‘You got the I or the O?’

  For some reason, my friends love to talk about visas – partly, I think, because they can never quite believe any country has been stupid enough to give them one. Zoe was travelling under the I Visa – granting ‘representatives of the foreign media’ access to America for anything up to five years. For reasons that probably have nothing to do with freedom of the press, journalists are the only people not eligible to enter the US for professional reasons under the Visa Waiver Program. Many have tried, hoping they could just lie their way through immigration; most succeed but several have ended up in handcuffs, a holding cell and then back on the next plane home. If I was planning to do any reporting while in the US, I probably should have had an I Visa.

  The O Visa, on the other hand, is for ‘aliens of extraordinary ability’. Rock stars, actors, E.T. – people like that. I most definitely should not have had an O Visa.

  ‘Nah, I’m just on the waiver. I’m not really going for work – more of a holiday. During which I might do some writing. For which I might get paid. But I’ll just blag it at immigration; pretend I’m not really a journalist. Which won’t be difficult, given that I’m not.’

  Zoe isn’t really a journalist either. But she’s definitely a writer, and a successful one. A year or so earlier, her blog – a candid diary of her sex life – had been turned into a book: Girl with a One Track Mind. The UK edition had sold a zillion copies and now the US edition was doing well too. As befits Zoe’s status as a hugely successful author, the words ‘Premium Economy’ were printed on her boarding card, while I’d be sitting in economy. The memoirist feudal system, as illustrated by airline seating. As we boarded the plane I glanced to the left, half expecting to see Dave Eggers enjoying a glass of champagne in Business Class.*

  Realising that Zoe was on my flight gave me a momentary twinge. The same twinge that I suppose minor celebrities have when they find they’re on the same plane as Bono or George Clooney. The realisation that when – inevitably – the plane plunges into the sea or plummets nose-first into a field in Pennsylvania, they’ll just be a footnote in the coverage. Does it work the same way for writers, I wondered. If we skid off the runway on landing and burst into flames, would The Bookseller magazine mourn Zoe’s death and forget about me?*

  201

  As it turned out, we didn’t crash, giving me the full seven-hour flight to go over my plans, and to become increasingly excited about them. From the airport I’d take a cab to Manhattan, and the Pod Hotel on East 51st Street. I really like staying at the Pod: not only is it centrally located but it’s inexpensive in the off-season and has flatscreen TVs, iPod docks, rainhead showers and free wifi. And for all of those reasons it’s incredibly popular with young foreign travellers, making the place one giant pick-up joint.

  With just a couple of emails to their reservations department, I’d managed to negotiate a double room for $89 a night – less than £45.

  I’d decided to set my accommodation budget at £50–$100 – per night: about equal to the amount I’d be paying to stay in London if I’d accepted the increase in rent. I’d also agreed with myself that savings could be carried over, day to day, month to month, so each night I stayed at the Pod I was saving £5 that I could use for wherever I went next.

  After my month at the Pod, I planned to head south. Although I’d visited America a dozen times or more, I’d only ever been to the coastal states – New York, California, Florida: the usual. Like an overgrown back-packer, I wanted to see the ‘real America’ so, like that same back-packer, I’d bought a book at the airport bookshop called USA by Rail with the intention of plotting a journey that would take me to all of the places I’d seen in films but never visited. Places like Utah, which I’ve always imagined is like a safari park filled with Mormons.

  Flipping through USA by Rail, I was sucked straight into the dream. In the UK, travelling by train has lost all its romance – no one will write a love song about taking the 6.15p.m. from Nottingham to London St Pancras but in America the love affair lives on: the book listed routes with names like Texas Eagle, California Zephyr and Empire Builder.

  My plan was to take the two-day Crescent service from New York Penn Station down to New Orleans, arriving in time for Mardi Gras at the beginning of March. I feel horrible admitting this, but at the back of my mind I figured that after Hurricane Katrina the city’
s hotel prices had probably gone down a bit.

  After New Orleans, I’d hop on the SunsetLimited service and head west to Los Angeles. March was off-season on the railways too, so I’d booked a one-month rail pass for $470 which would allow me unlimited travel throughout the whole of the US, and some of Canada, for thirty days. I’d only have to spend five nights on the train rather than in a hotel before the pass paid for itself.

  In fact, I’d become so intoxicated by the idea of seeing America by rail that, by the time I landed in New York, I’d planned a journey that lasted for the whole month of March. A huge circular route that would take me from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Salt Lake City (Mormons!) to Denver to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Washington, DC, and back to New York. Almost half that time would be spent on the train: a travelling hotel for less than $30 a night.

  As we began our descent into JFK, passing low over Long Island and the tightly packed houses with backyard swimming pools that seem to cluster on the approach to every airport in America, I remember feeling happy, and strangely organised. Like a schoolboy beginning a fresh exercise book, I had neatly copied my two-month travel and accommodation plan on to the first page of a brand new Moleskine notebook. As the year progressed, I was planning to use the book to plan each successive stage and to track how well I was keeping to my £50-a-day accommodation budget for the year.

  The numbers looked good: assuming I didn’t stray too far from my plan, February and March were going to come in well under budget, giving me plenty of flexibility for accommodation costs in April, May and into the peak season. Which was good, as I was past the point of no return: the last thing I’d done before going through to departures was to drop the key to my flat in the post to my (former) landlady along with a letter, politely but firmly telling her where to stick her rent hike. Now I had no ties, no fixed abode, and no responsibilities beyond a nightly hotel budget and the travel plan scribbled in my little black notebook.

  The final plan I’d made, in the cab to the hotel, was to cut down on drinking for a while. London had given my liver a thrashing. I’d read online that one of the signs of liver failure was a yellowing of the eyeballs and horizontal white lines across the fingernails. The fact that I’d looked up those symptoms in the first place, let alone that I was now checking for them every morning, suggested a month on the wagon might not be a bad thing. Instead of boozing, I’d drink orange juice and eat salads and go for long walks around the city. I’d get healthy again.

  Oh yes, I remember that all very clearly. The airport, the flight, the planning, the cab, the plan to stop drinking.

  I remember checking into the hotel and putting my bag in my room. I remember having a shower and changing my shirt. I remember deciding to head out for a walk to orientate myself – to get a feel for where the local dry-cleaners and restaurants and bars could be found. I remember – ah, here we go, yes – I remember finding an Irish pub that looked friendly, Something O’Something’s – there was a plastic leprechaun, I definitely remember that – and I remember noticing the pretty brunette with the ponytail, wearing a CUNY sweatshirt and sitting on her own. She was reading Down and Out in Paris and London which I remember I’d used as my opening line. ‘I’ve always found the Rough Guides to be more reliable than Orwell …’

  I shook my head, hoping it would hasten the return, if not of my memory then at least of the rest of my vision. I had a dim recollection of a bottle of wine and a conversation about how she was studying Contemporary World Literature. I’m sure I found a way – after we’d drunk, I think, shots of sambuca – to mention that I was a soon-to-be-published author, but at the same time to shrug it off like it was no big deal. I’m pretty sure we left the Irish bar and went to another place down the street where her friends were celebrating – what? – something. There was a bottle of champagne. But after that – nothing. I can’t remember how I got back to the Pod. And I have absolutely no idea what possible set of circumstances led to my being slumped on the floor, head leaning against the closed door of my room.

  I shook my head again and slowly I started to focus on how long my hotel room was. And narrow. Weird.

  And that’s when I realised the first of my two problems. I was slumped against my hotel room – I had that right – but, rather than being inside the room, I was outside, in the corridor. The second of my problems – and certainly the most pressing – was that I was stark bollock naked.

  202

  Think, think, think … how the hell had I got there? Were my clothes inside my room? And, if so, had I made it into the room, undressed, and for some reason walked outside again? And if not – oh God – had I walked naked through the hotel?

  My brain simply wasn’t capable of processing all of these questions. All I knew is that I had to get back into my room before anyone saw me.

  I tried the door. Locked, obviously. I gave it a half-hearted shove with my shoulder and immediately fell back down to the floor, still drunk. ‘Hmm,’ I thought, ‘maybe that explains the slumping.’

  I had no other option: I’d have to go down to the lobby and ask someone to let me in. I looked up and down the corridor. When this happens in movies, there’s always some appropriately-comedic piece of bric-a-brac that can be pressed into service as a covering: a moose’s head, a vase, something like that. Not in real life. The corridors in the Pod don’t have windows; there weren’t even any curtains.

  No windows also meant I had no way of figuring out what time it was. What if I’d been slumped there for hours? What if it was 10 a.m. and a nice family with young children was checking in and the first thing they saw was a naked Brit emerging drunkenly from the elevator into the lobby, not-so-proudly cupping his genitals in his hands? That’s no way to start a holiday. It is, however, a great way to start a lawsuit.

  My only lucky break was that I’d been given a room right opposite the elevators. I pressed the call button and the door opened straight away, which was good – it meant less time in the corridor – but also potentially bad as it meant someone had arrived at my floor not long before. I prayed that person had been me.

  As the car made its way downwards I caught a glimpse of my pathetic reflection in the elevator’s mirrored walls. ‘Dear God, Paul, you’re a mess’ I thought out loud.

  Finally, the doors opened and I peered out into the lobby, trying my best to keep the rest of my body out of sight. All was calm and still, thank God; the clock behind the reception desk said 4.25 a.m. The only witness to my humiliation would be a solitary night porter sitting behind the reception desk, reading a magazine.

  ‘¡Ay Dios mío! ’

  And a tiny Hispanic cleaner, mopping the floor right next to the elevator. I hadn’t noticed her.

  ‘Lo siento,’ I said. My two words of Spanish.

  ‘Don’t worry, Maria, I’ll go.’ said the night porter, looking up boredly from his magazine. It was an interesting choice of words, ‘I’ll go’, as if this kind of thing – naked men walking out of the elevators at four in the morning – happened at the Pod every night. He picked up a master key from behind the desk and ambled towards the elevator.

  Even though I was still shit-faced drunk, the next thirty seconds – which took the form of about three and a half years – were the most embarrassing of my life. I stood at one side of the elevator, still naked, arse pressed against the wall, genitals still cupped in my hands, while the tall night porter – I think he was Russian – stood as far on the other side as possible.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ I said.

  He didn’t say a word.

  203

  A few hours later – 11a.m. – I woke up in my hotel bed and, for a few blissful minutes, I completely forgot about my naked elevator adventure. I don’t normally get headaches with hangovers, but this morning was different. My skull felt like it was full of burning sand – burning sand that was leaking down my throat. Stupid sambuca. I stood up and walked to the bathroom. Must drink water. Lots of water.

  I turned on the tap abo
ve the sink and put my face in the bowl, letting the stream of water run over the back of my head and down the sides of my face. Then I tilted my head upwards and started lapping from the tap. Forget Evian or Perrier: there is no more delicious water than hangover water. After gulping down about half my body weight of the stuff, I shut off the tap and stood back up, gripping the sides of the sink for support, water dripping from my hair down the rest of my body. That’s when I caught a glimpse of my naked self in the mirror.

  And that’s when the first flashback came.

  ‘Oh fuuuuucccccckkkkkk.’

  There was no other mature course of action; I had to get out of there. There was simply no way I could face another thirty nights in the same hotel, with the same Russian night manager and the same small Hispanic cleaner. I was still drunk and I already felt sick with embarrassment. God knows how I’d feel when I sobered up.

  204

  A significant advantage of hotel stays over apartment rental contracts is that they’re easy to renegotiate or cancel. Most hotels insist that you give twenty-four – or occasionally forty-eight – hours’ notice if you decide to leave early. If you can’t give notice – say, because you hadn’t planned on waking up naked in a corridor – then you’re still free to leave early but they’ll usually charge you for the notice period. But that’s all they’ll make you pay. Some will try to insist on a small ‘early check-out’ penalty but the trick to getting rid of those is to be extremely apologetic, and to make it clear that you’re looking forward to coming back to the hotel in future.

  The only way you can find yourself trapped – financially at least – is if you’ve paid for the room up front – which some online booking sites force you to do to get their best rates. Paying up front can actually be a great idea if you’re only staying for a couple of days and you’re paying with a debit card. When a hotel preauthorises your debit card for incidentals at check-in, the amount is immediately taken (or ‘held’) from your current account. For short stays, the hold might be more than the total cost of the room, and it can take as long as a week for it to be released and your money returned. By paying for the room in advance you can legitimately refuse to hand over your card for pre-authorisation at check-in as long as you’re not planning to raid the minibar. The worst they can do is ask for a cash deposit, which they’ll hand you back on departure.