The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

by Paul Carr

  ‘You can have my wristband if you like.’ She reached into her purse and pulled out the neatly folded strip of paper. ‘I can’t imagine anything worse.’ I could have hugged her – but that would have wasted valuable seconds. It was almost eight o’clock and, assuming Counting Crows would be on stage around nine, I only had an hour left to work the room, getting the information I needed for my column and then escaping before I was punched in the ears by musical memories of my ex-girlfriend. There was no time to lose.

  Fast forward half an hour and my work was done. Sarah’s wristband had allowed me to go straight to the front of the queue and, with a single lap of the crowded club, I’d spoken to half a dozen of the attendees and had scribbled a list in my notebook under the heading ‘everything you need to know about CES 09’.

  Mobile computing company Palm were launching a new phone, apparently, and Microsoft were talking about a new version of Windows. Various companies were launching new flatscreen TVs. All very dull, but enough hard facts to wrap up in some colour about Vegas and the Luxor and my having to escape from the venue before Counting Crows began playing.

  And so that was that: in just half an hour my entire week’s research was done, leaving the whole of the next day free to write up the column before a catch-up dinner with Sarah and then a flight back to San Francisco the next morning. And, more importantly, I’d avoided having to see Counting Crows. I was just drunk enough to be emotional and the last thing I needed was to have to actually watch Adam Duritz singing my ex-girlfriend’s favourite song. I headed for the door.

  And I almost made it. But just as I was passing the stage, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Brian Solis, the PR guy who had organised the party I’d nearly ruined during my last trip to Vegas. The room had really started to fill up in anticipation of Counting Crows, so Brian was saving himself a spot right at the front of the stage; apparently he’s a huge fan. Given my behaviour at his party, I figured the least I could do was to buy him a drink to say sorry. He gladly accepted, we shared an apology-forgiveness hug and I ran to the bar. I reckoned I could still make it out before the show; or at worst I’d have to suffer through one song.

  By the time I’d made it back, forcing my way through the crowd with the drink held above my head, the club had filled to capacity. And that’s when it happened – the exact moment I handed Brian his drink right at the very front of the room, the stage lit up and the whole crowd surged forward, pinning me to my spot. I was right at the front of the stage and I literally couldn’t move in any direction.

  ‘Sha la lalalalalala.’

  Of course they opened with ‘Mr Jones’. But still, as Counting Crows worked their way through a set list consisting almost entirely of my ex’s favourite songs, each of them sung straight into my face by the man she’d have left me for in a heartbeat, I managed to force a smile. This would certainly be colour for the column, and not only had I managed to get through an entire day in Vegas without being thrown out of anywhere but I’d caught up with Sarah – sober enough not to offend her again – and had even had a chance to apologise to Brian. See! I could do it if I tried: have fun, get work done, spend much of the day drinking and still not alienate any of my friends.

  You know what happened the next day.

  Of course you do.

  1204

  The day started fine. I woke up around noon – a slight hangover, but nothing ridiculous – and wrote up the column as planned. I had to start early as the time difference meant that my 6 p.m. London deadline was in effect a 10 a.m. Las Vegas deadline. Having finally filed around 3 p.m. local time – only five hours late – I spent the rest of the day soberly wandering around Vegas, hunting for porn stars, wasting money at the blackjack tables and generally enjoying the most ridiculous city on earth without getting drunk. I was due to meet Sarah for dinner at seven so fortunately I didn’t have a huge amount of time to kill.

  At about 6.30 my phone rang. The caller ID said ‘Sarah Lacy’.

  ‘Hey! Listen,’ she said, without even waiting for me to say hello, ‘I’m really sorry to do this but I’ve been invited to this journalists’ dinner thing that I really should go to. The good news is it’s in your hotel – is there any chance we could meet for a quick drink afterwards instead of dinner? Champagne is on me.’

  ‘Of course, no problem – I’ll just grab dinner somewhere and then find a bar to hang out until you’re finished. Call me when you’re done.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  And it was: the perfect plan. I went back to my room, had a shower, ordered another room-service burger and then fired up Twitter to see where the conference parties were. Mainly because I wanted to avoid them. Instead, I wanted to kill the few hours before meeting Sarah seeing some of the real Vegas; hanging out with some locals, maybe running into a porn star – that kind of thing. There was a bar downtown that I’d been meaning to try out – the Double Down Saloon – where they served a lethal cocktail called ‘Ass Juice’, and according to the chatter online was where some of the stars of the AVN conference were heading tonight. Porn stars drinking Ass Juice: that’s the stuff amusing columns or blog posts are made of. I’d just head down there, have a couple of drinks and wait for Sarah to call.

  1205

  Noon.

  It was checkout time at the Luxor, but my flight back to San Francisco left at 10 a.m. So why, then, was I just now waking up? What the hell had happened last night?

  Ass Juice – that’s what had happened.

  I remembered arriving at the bar – sure enough, it was full of porn stars and creepy hanger-on guys with mullets. I’d ordered a beer and an Ass Juice. I remember it being about ten o’clock and me talking to a girl called – Misty, maybe? Amber? Something porny, for sure – and telling her I was a writer. There was some kind of party going on back at her hotel and I should come. I didn’t go to Amber’s hotel, but I definitely ordered more Ass Juice.

  I think there had been a fight. A couple of the men with mullets had taken exception to a group of locals hitting on the porn stars. Chairs had been thrown – I definitely remember the chairs. At some point between the chairs being thrown and order being restored, Sarah had called. I don’t remember the conversation; just looking at my phone and thinking ‘about bloody time’. It was about midnight. And then – well – that’s about it.

  I reached for my phone to call Sarah. But it wasn’t next to the bed, which is where I’d normally leave it. Nor was it in my pocket or anywhere else in the room. I must have left it at the bar, or wherever I’d gone to meet Sarah afterwards. I looked up her number on my laptop, picked up the hotel phone, and dialled. Straight to voicemail.

  Shit. Had I actually met up with her last night? Had I acted like a drunken dick? I genuinely couldn’t remember. Wait – was she staying at the Luxor too? That would make sense – lots of people from the conference were. I dialled reception.

  ‘Hello, I wonder if you can tell me – do you have a guest called Sarah Lacy staying with you?’

  A clicking of keys.

  ‘We did have a Sarah Lacy here, yes, but Miss Lacy checked out this morning.’

  Shit, shit, shit.

  I threw everything into my bag and headed down to the lobby, and then hailed a cab to the airport where, hopefully, I’d at least be able to catch a later flight. I was still drunk – which was a slight blessing; I suspected everything was going to be much more difficult on an Ass Juice hangover. Arriving, sweating now and smelling of booze, at the American Airlines desk I was told that they didn’t have another flight out of Vegas until late that evening. There was no way I could sit in departures for hours; not with this hangover, not without showering. I looked up at the departures board – there was a Virgin America flight leaving in an hour. I walked up to the booking desk.

  ‘Yes, sir, we do have room on that flight – just one seat, actually – it’ll be $350.’

  ‘Jesus. Just for one way?’

  ‘Yes, sir, would you like the ticket?’

 
; ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  The booking agent printed out my ticket but, before handing it over, scribbled the letters ‘SSS’ in the corner.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said to no one in particular.

  SSS stands for ‘special security screening’ and are three letters you really don’t want to see on your plane ticket when you’re hungover, tired and have less than an hour to get on your flight.

  The fact that I had arrived at the airport looking and smelling like a hobo and was now booking a one-way flight using a foreign credit card, and with no checked bags meant that, in addition to the usual x-ray and metal detector fun, I’d also have to have a full body pat-down and have every single item in my suitcase swabbed for explosive residue. All of which, by the way, would take place in a special zone next to the main security area, in full view of the other passengers. For the hour and a half flight home, I’d be the terrorist suspect on the plane. And that was before I got back to San Francisco and found out from Sarah what behaviour I’d actually been guilty of.

  1206

  I made it all the way back to the Vertigo before Sarah finally answered her phone.

  ‘Well, hello there,’ she said in a way that telegraphed ‘trouble’.

  ‘Um … so I have no idea what happened last night.’

  ‘No, I thought you might not. Do you remember meeting me in the Luxor bar?’

  ‘Uh – no.’

  ‘Jesus. Well, I’m just heading out to meet someone now, but if you want to meet me later for a non-alcoholic drink, I’ll remind you of all the excruciating details.’ She gave me the address of where she’d be.

  ‘So you’re still talking to me – that’s a good sign, right?’

  ‘I’ll see you later.’

  Click.

  I walked into Homestead and Sarah was sitting at a table; in front of her was a beer and an orange juice. She slid the orange juice over to me.

  ‘Good God, you were a mess yesterday,’ she started before I’d even sat down. ‘Do you really not remember anything? I’m amazed you’re not dead.’

  ‘Not really,’ I mumbled, before taking a sip from my orange juice. I felt about two feet tall.

  ‘Well, first of all, you stumbled into the hotel bar, tried to hug me hello, but missed and sort of fell into a sofa, nearly taking the whole table with you. Then you insisted on ordering champagne and trying to tell me about your night with porn stars or something. You were basically incoherent at this point.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah, the barman was ready to call security and have you thrown out, but then you started arguing with him – telling him you were a journalist.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then I left and went to bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need to apologise to me,’ she sighed and took a sip of her beer. ‘Look, you’re my friend and I care about you. But I still don’t understand why you need to get so drunk all the time. Robert’s worried too: he said you seem to think that people expect you to be drunk all the time, and that’s when you turn into, what was it he says? Drunk Paul. I don’t like Drunk Paul. Robert doesn’t like Drunk Paul – none of your friends do.’

  ‘But …’ I started to protest. I wanted to point out all the adventures that alcohol had brought me – all of the fun and the girls and the column for the Guardian and everything else. But this wasn’t the time. She was right; my drinking had got out of hand recently and my friends – including Robert – were clearly finding it less amusing than they once had.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know – you’re right. I really don’t want to lose your friendship over this kind of crap.’

  ‘You won’t,’ she said –’but, well, it’s like a woollen sweater with loose threads. Every time you behave like a drunken asshole, one of the threads of our friendship gets pulled away. It’s fine at first, but pretty soon there’s no sweater left.’

  I knew that my friendship with Robert was made of sterner stuff, but it was true with him too, and with Anna and with all of my friends – my behaviour was starting to pull apart my friendships one thread at a time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. And I meant it.

  1207

  20 January 2009

  As I watched the hundreds of police officers lining President-elect Barack Obama’s route down Pennsylvania Avenue I couldn’t help but make a joke. ‘The police escorting the motorcade are showing amazing discipline,’ I said to the girl next to me at the bar.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘I mean I can only imagine the level of self-control it must have taken for American cops to see a black guy in such an expensive car and resist their natural urge to pull him over.’

  ‘That’s inappropriate,’ said the girl.

  The inauguration of any President is an event that brings America to a standstill, but the inauguration of the country’s first black Commander in Chief was something truly special to witness, especially in San Francisco. Outside Chicago – Barack Obama’s hometown – there wasn’t a place in the country where the change was felt more keenly. The city is the heart of liberal America – a place that had been in a constant state of anger for the past eight years during which George W. Bush had been in office and the rights the people in this city held so dear – gay marriage, abortion, peace in our time – were slowly chipped away by a neoconservative oil monkey from Texas.

  For the people of San Francisco this was not a day for jokes, which is a shame, because the inauguration was ripe for parody, starting with the motorcade but continuing through the President’s inaugural speech – a homily so feel-good I half expected it to end, Oprah-style, with Obama giving each of the assembled crowd a puppy. ‘You’re getting a puppy, you’re getting a puppy …’ And then there was poet Elizabeth Alexander who read an excruciating verse – ‘Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum … A woman and her son wait for the bus … A farmer considers the changing sky’ – which sounded less like a piece of spoken art and more like someone reading out Twitter. And then …

  But no. The more I watched, the more I couldn’t really bring myself to make any more jokes. Not to the girl next to me, in her ‘Hope’ pin badge, not to the bartender who was serving all drinks on the house during the ceremony itself, and not even to myself.

  My hotel was two blocks from Bush Street which, for one day only, had been renamed Obama Street: somebody had gone down the whole street the previous night, changing dozens of road signs. All day, in every café, grocery store, bar and private home, televisions were tuned to the non-stop coverage of the inauguration and the parade that followed. And later that evening, I had been invited to an inauguration party at Eris’s new boyfriend’s apartment, complete with ‘Yes We Canapés’. The pun was my contribution to the festivities.

  The mood was like in Ghostbusters II when the river of evil flowing beneath New York grips the city in collective paranormal madness, except in San Francisco that January day it was a river of change, putting the populace in the grip of hope.

  You didn’t have to be from San Francisco to feel it, of course, or even be an American. Most of the world was watching on television – welcoming an era of what Obama had called ‘change we can believe in’.

  The thought had been rattling around in my head for a while, but this was the moment – sitting in a bar, watching the inauguration – that everything coalesced into a fully-formed decision.

  For all my globe-trotting, the place I kept ending up in was America, and specifically San Francisco. I’d fallen in love with the city at first sight, but with every trip I’d made new friends, discovered new places to visit and bought further and further into the American dream.

  As I watched Obama being sworn in, I realised for the first time that I didn’t want to leave when my visa waiver expired. I wanted to stay here to see what happened next, to witness the effects of an Obama presidency on the most liberal and technolo
gy-savvy city in America. But of course I couldn’t.

  In a few days I was due to travel to Munich for yet another conference, before heading back to London for a week and then a flight to Verbier, where a bunch of successful young entrepreneurs had organised a skiing trip in the Alps. Thanks to the restrictions of the visa waiver scheme and the nomadic lifestyle I’d created for myself, I had to keep moving.

  1208

  I looked at my watch: time to go and get changed for the party. I’d bought socks with American flags on them – adding to my sock inventory was a big deal, but momentous times call for momentous decisions – and Robert’s business partner, Scott, was picking me up at six. Except that Scott wasn’t Robert’s business partner any more – a few weeks earlier he’d been offered a job as chief technology officer for a company in San Francisco, starting immediately. The company was paying for his relocation and contributing towards the legal fees required for him to get an ‘alien of extraordinary ability’ visa on grounds of his scientific qualifications. As a – and, of course, I laughed at these words when he said them – respected journalist, Scott asked if I’d be prepared to write him a letter of recommendation to the US State Department.

  In the car on the way to the party, I listened to Scott talk about his new job and for the first time in over a year I was actually envious of someone with an apartment and a job that forces them to stay in a single city and a single country.

  It’s not that I was ready to stop living in hotels, or to become rooted to one spot – but somehow my constant travelling didn’t feel liberating any more. Rather it felt like I was trapped on a treadmill; unable to stay in the US – and in the city I’d fallen in love with – for longer than three months at a time; forced to keep moving. By the time we arrived at the party, and I saw the outside of the house decked in star-spangled banners, I’d made my decision.