by Paul Carr
Fortunately Sarah, Robert and I share a similar sense of humour so – given my hideously misogynistic comments about her South by Southwest interview earlier in the year, Sarah seemed to think Robert’s choice of venue strangely appropriate. ‘Maybe you could wear a short skirt and flirt with me?’ she suggested.
‘Maybe you could fuck off,’ I retorted, cleverly.
And now, according to her email, Sarah was heading back to Vegas in January, to appear at the Consumer Electronics Show – the gadget industry’s biggest event of the year. Finally prepared to risk another encounter with Drunk Paul, she wondered whether I was going to be there too, given that it seemed like my kind of event: booze, booth babes and cheap hotel rates.
I hadn’t planned on being in Vegas, but I was definitely overdue a trip to San Francisco, given that it had been – oh – at least two months since my last visit. It occurred to me that going to Vegas would also provide the perfect excuse for a stopover in my favourite city on earth.
By now I was head over heels in love with San Francisco, partly for work reasons, partly because it’s a beautiful city, but also in large part because of the women. As a British writer, covering technology, for a famously liberal newspaper I represented a pretty good trifecta for the huge number of liberal, arty girls who worked in and around Silicon Valley. There was one girl in particular, Kelly, who I’d been seeing quite a lot of on my regular visits; a few days with her in January would be a pretty good way to start the year.
I was looking forward to seeing Sarah again too. After London, she’d just about forgiven me for my behaviour on the first trip to Vegas, and if I could prove that I was able to return to the scene of the crime and actually behave myself, then hopefully the incident could be put to rest for good. It was strange, especially given my occasionally misogynistic attitude towards women, but I really wanted her to respect me.
I took another look out of my hotel window, at the snowy gloom of December in Reykjavik and hit the reply button on Sarah’s email. ‘Sure,’ I wrote. ‘Overdue a trip to SF, and Vegas is always fun.’
Chapter 1200
Change I Could Believe In
I flew into San Francisco, after an overnight stay in London, on New Year’s Day 2009. I’d decided to catch the 10 a.m. flight from Heathrow knowing that, this being the most hungover day of the year, the plane would be almost empty.
I had a six o’clock wake-up call so had decided to go easy on booze the night before. But – who was I kidding? – it was New Year’s Eve in London so I’d finally fallen into bed at about 4.30 a.m., with a Canadian girl called Alana who I’d first met a few months earlier at my book launch. I decided to let Alana sleep as I finally stumbled out of the door and into my cab to the airport at 8 a.m. It was a classy move, taking a girl back to my hotel and then fleeing the country a few hours later.
I wrote her a note on hotel stationery; I have no idea what it said, nor do I remember the cab ride, check-in, security or take-off. In fact, I didn’t sober up until I was at 36,000 feet when an angel of a flight attendant shook me on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said. ‘There are three free seats up front if you’d like to lie down across them.’*
That’s how ill I looked.
Ten hours later, I’d made it through immigration and checked into my usual room at the York Hotel. Except now the hotel wasn’t called the York, and my room looked anything but usual. After six months of renovations, the whole place had been restyled as ‘Hotel Vertigo’, complete with décor themed around the movie. Swirls in the paintwork evoked the look and feel of the opening titles, original movie posters adorned the hallways and, just in case the theme was lost on guests, the movie itself played on a constant loop on the lobby’s flatscreen TV. The new rooms were beautiful too, with gigantic king-sized beds and Egyptian cotton sheets, free Voss water and high-end toiletries. Two freakish, but somehow beautiful, porcelain lamps in the shape of horses’ heads stood beside the bed. Wrong movie, I thought.
What with the hangover, the early start, the jet lag and the flight time, I couldn’t wait to climb into one of those new beds. I unpacked my suitcase – taking exactly five minutes, as always – and checked my email. There was the usual mix: spam, messages from readers of the column, questions about the book – but one email in particular looked like it might be important. Not least because the subject line simply contained the word ‘IMPORTANT!’ in capitals. It was from Anna, who I hadn’t seen since I generously bought her and Drew a new door.
I clicked to open the message, hoping there wasn’t a problem with the door. There wasn’t – unless you count the fact that a few hours earlier a policeman had knocked on it, asking whether Anna knew of my whereabouts.
Why the police were looking for me, Anna had no idea, nor could she understand why they thought they might find me hiding out at her house.
Still, Anna is a loyal friend and, as it turned out, the perfect criminal’s moll, cunningly palming the policeman off with the truth: that I didn’t live in her house, that I was out of the country and that she hadn’t seen me in months. This failed to satisfy him, though, hence her email. The policeman had left a number. ‘If you hear from him, tell him he’s in a whole lot of shit’ were (Anna swore) his exact words.
Hmmm.
Obviously the police had gone to Anna’s because that was the address they had from when they arrested me there – but why in the name of fuck were they looking for me now? I racked my brains for any possible way in which it could be good news. Did the police come round to deliver news of lottery wins? No. Had I lost a dog that they might be returning? No. Also, none of those scenarios would explain the words ‘he’s in a whole lot of shit’.
Shit.
Shaking with a combination of tiredness, hangover and absolute terror, I dialled the number Anna had given me in her email. It was a mobile number, but as it was already 11 p.m. in London I wasn’t expecting anyone to answer.
‘Ello …? Ello?’ said the voice on the other end. I swear that’s how the policeman answered the phone. If I hadn’t been in such a panic, I’d have laughed.
I laughed anyway.
‘Ell … er … hello,’ I said, ‘this is Paul Carr. I think you were looking for me earlier?’
‘Oh yes, Miiiissster Carr,’ said the policeman in a way that reminded me rather too much of my old headmaster just before he was about to give me a detention. There was a rustling of papers. ‘My name is DC Jamieson from Bethnal Green police station, and I’m investigating a burglary two weeks ago in east London.’
A burglary? What the hell?
He continued: a month or so earlier, a flat near Liverpool Street had been robbed while the owners were out of the country. The police had dusted for fingerprints and, much to DC Jamieson’s evident glee, they’d found mine all over the place. What with me having now fled the country, it was pretty much an open and shut case. Except for the slight detail that I’m not a burglar, and was pretty certain I’d never been to the address he gave me – I don’t know anyone who lives near Liverpool Street. Oh, and at the time of the burglary I was in Iceland, getting drunk in the company of Magni Ásgeirsson.
‘I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong person,’ I said. ‘I’ve never even been there.’ Which in hindsight was exactly the wrong thing to say, given that they’d found my fingerprints on every surface. How, I wondered, could they not find my police record that night outside Karen’s house when they had my full name and date of birth, but apparently they had me bang to rights over fingerprints in a place I’d never been to?
‘Well, clearly you have been there,’ said the policeman, ‘and also, are you sure you’re not in the UK at the moment?’
I looked out of the window at the San Francisco bus trundling by. Somewhere in the distance I think I heard a sea lion bark. ‘Pretty sure, yes.’
‘Well then, how,’ – he paused for what I imagine was dramatic effect, but could equally have been a sip of tea – ‘do you explain the fact that you’re calling m
e from a UK mobile number?’
I took a minute – more like five minutes, actually – to explain the concept of international roaming to the detective constable. He seemed unconvinced at first that one could make transatlantic phone calls on a mobile, but when I finally offered to call him back from the hotel landline he went back to his main line of questioning.
‘So if you’re so smart, how do you explain your fingerprints being at the scene?’
‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I honestly can’t think when I might have been in a flat in that part of London – unless – wait, what did you say the place was called again?’
Another rustling of papers. ‘City Reach …’
I typed the words into Google Mail’s search box, and a few seconds later I laughed again.
‘I don’t see how this is a laughing matter.’
‘I do.’ I also knew why the name seemed familiar. Back in November, America had elected Barack Obama as their new President. I’d been back in London on election night and my friend James and I had hosted a live 24-hour webcast covering the voting and results. City Reach wasn’t a private flat at all, but, rather, part of the serviced apartment block – a pseudo hotel designed for business people who want a more homey environment than a Marriott or a Hilton – that we’d used as our base of operations. Of course my fingerprints would be there: I’d spent more than twenty-four hours in the place, writing, filming and occasionally sleeping. ‘Did the owner happen to mention that their ‘flat’ was basically a hotel?’ I asked the still confused policemen.
More rustling. ‘Uh, no … he didn’t. It’s registered as a ‘dwelling’. OK, well, if what you’re saying is true then all we’ll need you to do is come in next week and make a statement so we can check out your story.’
‘Uh,’ I said, ‘I’m about six thousand miles away, and will be for a few weeks, so unless you’re planning to come and pick me up by private jet, that’s probably not going to happen.’
‘Well, until then it’s just your word against the evidence. Do you have any witnesses to back up your story about why you were in the … dwelling?’
I laughed for a third time. The whole election coverage had been broadcast, for twenty-four hours straight, on the web. Not only did I have the footage on my laptop, but about a few hundred thousand witnesses watching online could back up my story. And then there was the small matter of an Icelandic rock star who could give me a cast-iron alibi for the night of the robbery, a night I’d written all about in the Guardian. It was like an episode of Columbo, I had so many public alibis.
DC Jamieson wrote all of this down and promised to call me back once he’d checked my story. He never did.
After I put down the phone, I was still laughing. All of this was happening because I’d been wrongly accused – not once, but twice – of deliberately dodging cab fares. Now, because the police had my fingerprints on file, I was being wrongly suspected of burglary. It was a classic story of wrongly accused criminality: from not committing petty crime, I’d graduated to not committing increasingly more serious crimes. In a few years, unless I seriously didn’t change my ways, there was a real risk I’d end up not in jail for not committing arson – or perhaps even not-murder.*
1201
Two days later, I took the short flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s a two-day event and my plan was to spend the first day avoiding the conference, getting happily drunk and generally doing everything I needed to do to write my column. The second day I’d do the actual writing of the thing, leaving me free the second night to catch up with Sarah for dinner before maybe heading to one of the after-parties. By limiting most of my drinking to the first night, I could safely avoid a repeat of my last time in Vegas, or at least avoid Sarah witnessing it.
That part was critical.
1202
‘I was down at the New Amsterdam, starin’ at this yellow-haired girl …’
I’d been in town less than twelve hours and my cocktail of feelings as I stood in the nightclub at the Luxor Hotel was hard to break down precisely. Perhaps one part déjà vu, to one part heartbreakingly nostalgic, to one part trapped, to two parts what in the name of sweet Jesus am I doing here?
‘Mr Jones strikes up a conversation with a black-haired flamenco dancer.’
Déjà vu, certainly. It was, after all, the second time in a month that I’d heard someone giving a live rendition of ‘Mr Jones’ by Counting Crows.
‘You know, she dances while his father plays guitar …’
As for the heartbreaking nostalgia, as I said, the song is one that always reminds me of my ex-girlfriend. An ex-girlfriend who frequently made it clear during our relationship that if Adam Duritz, the band’s lead singer, was to so much as glance at her, she would dump me like a hot shit-covered potato and retire with all haste to his hotel room for the rest of her life. Combine that fact with how badly our relationship had ended and, unless I’m paralytic on burning wine, the merest note of one of their songs is enough to make me want to throw myself off a bridge.
‘… and so, she’s suddenly beautiful …’
And I was certainly trapped. Whereas in Iceland I was standing at the back of a bar, this time I was right at the front, pressed hard against the low stage and unable to move in any direction. The room was full to bursting point and I was wedged in so tightly that escape was impossible. And as if all that wasn’t weird enough, on this occasion, rather than being serenaded by a bald Icelander, the person doing the singing – standing right on the edge of the stage, not two feet in front of me – was my cooler, richer, more talented nemesis: Adam fucking Duritz himself.
Which just leaves the question of what in the name of sweet Jesus was I doing there?
1203
The Luxor is an odd hotel: from the outside it looks amazing – a gigantic pyramid of black glass, with a bright white spotlight bursting from the top: bright enough, they claim, that one could use it to read a newspaper two miles up in space. The shape of the building means the elevators have to travel up and down the sides at a forty-five-degree angle. It’s all very impressive.
Inside, though, it’s a slightly different story. For a start, the Egyptian theme collapses almost immediately when guests are confronted with the enormous – and I mean enormous – American flag hanging from the ceiling. It’s as if the designers were concerned that, without the flag, American guests would stay away, worried they were somehow supporting terrorism by booking into an Arabthemed hotel.
Beneath the flag, a big section of the lobby is taken up with a food court including Starbucks and a McDonald’s, each with a line of obese tourists waiting to pay inflated Vegas prices for food they could buy in any other city on earth. The rooms themselves are fine – decent even – but once you take away the fact that you’re in a pyramid in Vegas, there’s nothing in them that you wouldn’t find in a mid-range Holiday Inn. Still, I hadn’t chosen the Luxor for its rooms, I’d chosen it because it was the venue for several of the CES after-hours parties, including the main Intel-sponsored one at the end of the first day which – according to the online chatter – was the must-attend party of the conference.
I’d spent the whole of the first day, as planned, doing absolutely no work whatsoever. I’d watched a Monk marathon on TV in my room at the Luxor (only $95 a night, even with the conference going on – viva Las Vegas) before ordering room service for lunch and spending the rest of the afternoon drinking champagne while idly checking Twitter updates from actual attendees to see if there was anything I might possibly write about. I’d made a few notes, but I still didn’t have anything approaching an angle for the column. Had I actually bothered to go to the conference, I would have discovered that there was actually no shortage of angles: CES was sharing a venue with the Adult Video Network conference – a convention for porn stars. You live and learn.
But, anyway, by the time I left the room it was almost 6p.m. I’d just have to hope I found something useful to write ab
out at the Intel party, assuming I could first figure out a plan to blag my way in. And what better place to come up with that plan – I decided – than over another glass of champagne, in one of the hotel’s bars. I put on my party shoes, which is to say my only shoes, and headed down in the forty-five-degree elevator to the lobby.
The party was due to start at 7.30 and by 7.15 I was almost out of ideas. I’d spent over an hour on my phone, emailing every contact I knew who might be able to help – people who I knew were in town, Intel PR people – but an entry wristband remained elusive. If I didn’t get a reply soon then I’d have to chance it on the door, which, given how exclusive the party was supposed to be – people had been bitching online all day that they couldn’t get on the guest list – could very easily end in embarrassment. There were at least 1000 journalists in town covering CES so my ‘I’m a journalist’ card probably wouldn’t work either. Seven thirty came, then 7.45 … still no replies. It was hopeless.
‘Hey!’
I looked up, expecting to see a waitress pestering me to buy another Egyptian-American-themed drink. But it wasn’t a waitress.
‘Sarah! I wasn’t expecting to see you until tomorrow.’ I looked guiltily at my glass of champagne. I was still almost sober, by my standards at least. Thank God.
‘I’m just on my way to dinner. What are you up to?’
‘I’m trying – and failing – to find a way to crash the Intel party.’
‘Are you kidding? The one that Counting Crows are playing at? Why would anyone want to see Counting Crows?’ And then her face turned to pity. ‘Oh, yes, I forgot about your girly taste in music.’
‘Well, quite.’ Actually, I had no idea Counting Crows were playing, but a column’s a column. ‘I’m pretty sure I’m not getting in though.’