The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

by Paul Carr

  Then, in the corner, I noticed a guy standing on his own. He looked just like Hayden Christensen, who was apparently in Star Wars but who I’ve only seen in Shattered Glass, the movie about the New Republic journalist who got caught faking his stories. It was a great movie, and his performance was hugely underrated. I decided to go and tell him this.

  ‘Hi, I’m Paul,’ I said, extending my hand.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ben Mezrich’ said Hayden.

  Ah. I looked back over at Jim Sturgess and Jeff Ma, both surrounded by admirers who wanted to get close to the famous actor and the man whose life they’d read about or seen on screen. And yet the guy who actually did the research and wrote the story? Just standing on his own in a corner, alone and unloved. This is why I only ever write about myself, I thought, and headed off in search of an Olsen.

  At some point I must have left the party. I remember there being an after-after-party downstairs where Jeff Ma told the story of the time when he and Caroline had spent a weekend in Vegas. David Copperfield had tried to pick up Caroline’s friend Meredith, apparently, but with limited success. I also remember a vague feeling of panic at about 2 a.m. when I realised that I still hadn’t arranged a hotel room, or collected my bags, but with my drunken confidence I was sure I’d fix the problem. Anyway, I’d been distracted by someone who I’m sure was Ben Mezrich walking past, towards the toilets, with a Victoria’s Secret model on his arm. Maybe he wasn’t such a dork after all.

  703

  ‘Housekeeping!’

  I looked at the clock beside the bed. It was 11a.m. A maid was knocking on the door, loudly.

  ‘No thank you,’ I shouted. Obviously I’d forgotten to put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I looked around my room. Wait – was this even my room? My laptop bag was on the floor, as was my suitcase, still with its Amtrak label attached – but there was no sign of anyone else’s belongings. I must somehow have found a hotel, checked in and climbed into bed. That was pretty impressive, given that I’d have had to hand over my passport, fill in a registration card and swipe my credit card. More impressive still was the fact that I’d somehow remembered to reclaim my suitcase. Ah well, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about doing that hungover today.

  I sobered up enough to realise that I needed water. I looked across the room to the bathroom door. It looked familiar. As did the flatscreen TV and the iPod dock alarm clock next to the bed. No wonder I’d been able to find this place and check in while drunk – I’d done it a dozen times before.

  I was back at the Pod. And the guy who had checked me in must have been the night porter.

  ‘Oh fuuccccccck.’

  I had to get out of there.

  Again.

  Chapter 800

  I Left My Heart, Liver in San Francisco

  ‘You’re really coming?’ Eris was delighted.

  ‘Yeah. I’ve decided I probably shouldn’t stay in New York more than one night at a time.’

  ‘Great! I’m going to take some time off work to give you the tour.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’

  ‘Just get on a plane and leave everything to me.’

  801

  When Eris said she was going to take some time off work to show me San Francisco, I assumed she meant a morning, maybe even a whole day. In fact she took an entire week – unpaid – to act as my personal tour guide.

  In the morning we’d go for breakfast in a different part of town: the Mission, Union Square, the Castro, SoMa, the Tenderloin, Nob Hill …

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nob Hill.’ I explained why, with the same relish I’d felt the first time I explained to an elderly American woman in Florida why ‘fanny pack’ was so hilarious.

  ‘Then you’ll love what we call the area between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill.’

  ‘Surely not …’

  ‘Tendernob, yeah.’

  … and then we’d spend the rest of the day exploring; drinking tea in Delores Park, riding cable cars and browsing books in City Lights, the bookshop noted for its relationship with beat poets like Alan Ginsberg and where, in the fifties, owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti had famously been arrested for publishing and stocking Ginsberg’s Howl. Eris is another Hunter S. Thompson fan and so much of the tour took us to places made famous in his writing, including – of course – the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre, the strip club where Thompson claimed to be night manager in the mid-eighties. Today the club still advertises itself using a quote from Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear where he called the club ‘the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America’.

  Eris recommended that I stay at another piece of San Francisco history: the York Hotel, where in 1958 Hitchcock filmed the Empire Hotel scenes from Vertigo. The hotel was in the middle of being renovated and so, for guests who didn’t mind some building noise, it was offering double rooms for $65 a night. I asked reception to cut an extra key for Eris and she moved in on the second night. I joked that she should expand her range of services to other cities: people would pay handsomely for a pretty tour guide during the day, especially if that same guide also stayed the night. We disagreed on how amusing the idea was.

  802

  I’d been in San Francisco two weeks before it occurred to me that I should probably do some work. The thought wasn’t prompted, you understand, by any sense of guilt at having spent fourteen days laying in parks and getting drunk in dive bars – all in the name of sightseeing. Rather it was because an easy story landed in my inbox.

  The subject line of the email read simply ‘Webmission’, and attached was a press release explaining that a group of British Internet entrepreneurs were flying into San Francisco to meet their American counterparts, sponsored in part by UK Trade & Investment. Would I like to sit in on their daytime meetings, and attend their after-parties?

  Figuring that, at worst, I’d be able to get drunk on the British taxpayer’s shilling at the after-parties, and at best I’d get to write about it afterwards for a newspaper back in the UK (‘As a recent transplant to San Francisco …’) I quickly agreed.

  Webmission was an event that divided opinion among British web entrepreneurs. For those whose companies had been selected to attend, it was a hugely worthwhile initiative; an opportunity for Brits to build business relationships with US companies and for Americans to come to parties where everyone had an accent and the British government was picking up the booze tab. For those who hadn’t been chosen to attend, it was just a piss-up at the taxpayers’ expense. As far as I could tell, both sides were right.

  Looking at the attendee list, I was pleased to see a few names I recognised: much as I was loving my time in San Francisco, I was starting to miss the British cynicism of my friends back in the UK. I was half hoping that Robert’s name would be there, but his newest company – a site allowing people to recommend books, films and other things to their friends – was too young (‘early stage’ in business speak) to make the cut.

  It was with no small measure of surprise then, that I opened the door of my hotel room on the morning Webmission began and found him standing there. He was wearing a set of plastic beads, plastic sunglasses and a bright pink baseball cap with the words ‘San Francisco’ emblazoned across the peak.

  ‘Rob! What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘I was missing you, mate. And I wanted to meet this Eris girl you keep blogging about. I convinced Scott that it would be a sensible use of company funds for us to fly over to take part in Webmission.’

  Scott – Dr Scott Rutherford – was Robert’s business partner, and basically the polar opposite of Rob. A former particle physicist-turned-web programmer who also had a sideline as a professional DJ, Scott wouldn’t be seen dead in a set of plastic beads, or at least not since his Ibiza days. Scott was definitely the sensible one in the company. And yet somehow their partnership worked – Scott doing all of the technical work on building the site while Robert focused on what he called ‘big thinking and net
working’. Which in this case apparently meant flying halfway around the world to get drunk with me in San Francisco.

  It was by total coincidence that Robert had booked himself into the York Hotel: it was only when he checked in that he realised it was the place I’d been writing about on my blog. Receptionists never give out a guest’s room number, but Rob had switched on the accent and had quickly been able to get the information that had led him to my door. Kryptonite.

  It’d only been a couple of months since I’d last seen Robert, but, given the adventures I’d had since leaving London, it felt like a year. I gave him a hug.

  ‘Let’s go and drink some wine in the sun,’ I said. ‘Eris finishes work in a couple of hours. I’ll tell her to come and meet us.’

  It really is amazing how much alcohol it’s possible to drink in a little under three hours, if you set your mind to it. And we did. By the time Eris caught up with us, at a wine bar off Union Square, Robert and I had worked our way through the best part of four bottles of cheap pinot grigio, and a couple of beers. I’d told him all about Michael and me in Vegas with the toga girls; about the road trip, about South by Southwest and Dallas and New York. He was suitably jealous.

  ‘I have to say, mate, this nomadic lifestyle sounds like it might be the perfect way to live. My lease is up soon on my place in Leicester Square – I think I might give it a go.’

  ‘You absolutely should. In fact, everyone should.’ I explained how much I was paying at the York – well under my $100 budget – and how the favourable pound-to-dollar exchange rate – still hovering around the 1:2 ratio – meant that my food and drink budget was far, far smaller than back in London. ‘These bottles of wine are costing us less than six quid,’ I said.

  Robert looked at the small row of empties. ‘The amount you’re drinking, that’s fortunate,’ he said.

  He was joking, but he had a point; I noticed that I was drinking twice as fast as him. I’d put it down to the fact that he’d just flown in from London and so was too tired to concentrate on hard drinking. But I had definitely been drunk more often lately; waking up not remembering the night before and, even with the exchange rate, discovering that I’d spent a fortune on booze. I realised that I’d been basically living in ‘holiday mode’; the mode that Brits tend to go into when we leave the country for a fortnight in Spain. But this wasn’t a holiday; it was my everyday life. Just because I could do my entire week’s work – a couple of freelance columns and maybe a bit of time thinking about what my next book might be – in a day didn’t mean I could spend the rest of the time paralytic. My liver was already a mess before I’d left London; God only knows what it must look like now. I glanced down at my nails – relieved to see there were still no little white lines – and, although it was hard to tell with the suntan, I’m pretty sure my skin hadn’t turned yellow.

  The clouds parted and the California sunshine hit us again, glinting off my empty glass and Robert’s half-full one. I topped them both up, enjoying how the sun made the yellow liquid light up as if I was pouring out pure magic.

  ‘So tell me about Eris,’ said Rob.

  ‘Oh, she’s delightful,’ I said, ‘she’s given me the grand tour and she’s moved into the York with me.’

  ‘So you like her then?’

  ‘Well …’

  Of course I liked her – she was great: cute, smart, funny – all the stuff that girls you like are supposed to be. But the more time we were spending together, the more I realised that it was only ever going to be a fling. For a start, she’d just split up from her long-term boyfriend and wasn’t looking for anything serious, but more importantly she clearly wasn’t that into me. A few nights earlier we’d had a huge fight after she disappeared with some guy at the end of a party and didn’t turn up back at the York until the next morning. ‘We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend,’ she’d pointed out, quite reasonably. But as well as denting my ego, it had also reinforced what this was: a bit of fun for both of us. Of course when I explained all of this to Robert, I was careful to make it clear that, while Eris was hugely into me – possibly even entertaining thoughts of marriage– I wasn’t going to be tied down by some girl.

  ‘Well – yeah, she’s fun and all, but I’m not sure I fancy her enough for it to be a serious thing. You know, she’s cute – but there are some amazing women in California. Really amazing – you really have to see them …’

  Robert wasn’t responding. He was just looking at the girl who had sat down next to me while I was busy explaining all the flaws with Eris which meant that I wasn’t interested in getting serious with her. I think I’d just got to the part about preferring girls with bigger breasts when I realised something was amiss.

  ‘You must be Eris,’ said Robert, finally breaking the silence.

  ‘You must be Robert,’ said Eris. ‘And you,’ she said, turning to me, ‘must be drunk.’

  I was absolutely plastered. The drunkenness hit me as if someone had emptied a cement mixer over me, starting from my head, and slowly trickling down over my entire body. I should have reined it back, told her I was only joking, apologised – anything. But I didn’t. My brain was going into alcoholic shutdown and the only thing I could think of doing was pressing on.

  ‘Let me finish,’ I slurred, and then continued to explain, to both Eris and Robert now, why she was far from being my ideal woman. Looking back, it was ridiculous – I fancied the hell out of her and in a different set of circumstances – had she been looking for a relationship with anyone, let alone me, for example – I could probably have started to fall in love with her. More than any of that, though, spending the previous week with her had made me fall in love with San Francisco. For that at least, she was one of the best things that had ever happened to me.

  803

  Waking up fully clothed in a bathtub wearing a pair of plastic sunglasses is better than waking up naked in a hotel corridor. That much we can all agree on. It is, however, still a far cry from waking up in a bed. Through the bathroom door I could just make out the time on the television clock. Eight a.m. Not bad, I thought, until I realised that my last memory was from seven o’clock the previous evening where I’d knocked over a whole bottle of wine during what I think was a very public argument with Eris.

  I scrambled out of the bath and called Robert’s room. He answered on the third or fourth ring.

  ‘Hello, darling’ he said, correctly reasoning that I was the only person who could possibly be calling his hotel landline at eight in the morning.

  ‘So, meeting Eris last night was wonderful,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for breakfast.’

  We sat in a booth at the Pinecrest Diner down the street from the hotel – a place where, thanks to Eris’s tour, I knew that in 1997 a cook had shot a waitress in a dispute over poached eggs. Sure enough, the menu now contains a prominent notice: ‘we regret that we are unable to serve poached eggs’. Probably wise. Over scrambled eggs and crappy American bacon, Robert explained that my night had ended when – at about eight or nine o’clock – I’d finally finished lecturing Eris on why we could never be a couple, despite her making it clear that nothing could be further from her mind. Robert had at last convinced me to go back to my hotel, while he spent the rest of the night trying to do damage limitation.

  ‘I think I convinced her that you weren’t normally such an arsehole and that you were just very drunk.’

  ‘I was very drunk.’

  ‘I know, mate, but even by your standards you were impressive. Do you remember telling me – in front of her – that her breasts weren’t up to your standards?’

  ‘Oh God, really? Where the fuck did that come from. I like her breasts!’

  The old man in the booth behind us tutted loudly. I lowered my voice.

  ‘So do I,’ said Robert, barely able to conceal a smile.

  ‘Exactly, so … wait … what do you mean ‘so do I’?’

  ‘Well, after you left, she was really upset by what you said, so she asked for my opinion. Ju
st took me to the corner of the bar and flashed me.’

  I choked on my scrambled eggs and then couldn’t stop laughing. Robert was right: Eris was brilliant.

  ‘Now all I have to do is convince her ever to speak to me again.’

  But making things up with Eris would have to wait. Robert had more news. The previous week back in London he’d been asked to arrange a networking event for a visiting American journalist who was in town meeting dot com entrepreneurs in her role as columnist for BusinessWeek. Robert had recognised her name, and a quick visit to my blog had confirmed where he’d heard it before. The journalist’s name was Sarah Lacy.

  ‘She’s actually great fun,’ said Robert. ‘In fact I think you’d like her. You and she have similar senses of humour.’

  ‘Uh, I don’t think she’d agree with that if she saw what I wrote on my blog.’

  ‘Oh, we talked about that,’ said Rob. ‘She doesn’t read stuff people say about her online anymore, but I told her – more or less – what you’d written. She said you sounded like a dick, but I vouched for you and said you guys should meet when she was back in San Francisco. I emailed her yesterday; she’s getting back to town tomorrow and is going to come to one of the Webmission events – a barbecue at some PR guy’s house.’