The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

by Paul Carr

  1213

  After passing through the metal detector, I ended up in a large waiting area that looked much like every government waiting area you’ve ever been in. I was given a printed ticket with a number on it and asked to wait to be called. Having been told to expect long delays, I settled down with my book.

  No more than ten minutes later, I heard my number being called. I was being fast-tracked!

  No I wasn’t. The first call simply took me to a glass window where I handed over my paperwork so the embassy staff could begin their background checks. Up until then I hadn’t even been in the system. Now the real waiting could start. And so I waited.

  And I waited.

  And waited.

  Two hours passed – it was approaching noon and I was making significant headway through Bill Bryson’s folksy tales of regional post offices and the perils of taking children on long car journeys. But the numbers on the huge digital display seemed to be moving quickly enough: I was number 373 and I’d just seem numbers 350 and 351 be called. I estimated maybe another half-hour at most.

  Half an hour passed.

  Then four more half an hours. It was 2.30 p.m. Numbers 372 and 374 had been called over an hour ago, and now they were calling people in the high 400s. Had I missed my number? I was sure I hadn’t: I’d been sure to look up every time a number was called.

  I decided that all was probably lost. Obviously they’d looked at my police record and had spent the past four hours deciding the best way to break the news to me that I’d never be allowed to travel to the US again. They’d probably called up all my American exgirlfriends and asked them to come down and help them do it, perhaps in the form of a song. This was the moment the entire American nation took its revenge.

  And then.

  Buzzzzzzz.

  ‘Number 373.’

  1214

  I don’t know what I was expecting – a special interview room, I think. One with a door and a table with an interviewer on one side and me on the other. Ironically, I think I was imagining something like the interview room at a police station.

  That’s not what visa interviews are like. Instead, I was directed to a row of windows made of what looked to be bulletproof – or at least incredibly thick – glass. In front of each window was a low plastic chair, and behind each sheet of bulletproof glass sat a man or woman in a US embassy uniform.

  ‘Take a seat, Mr Carr,’ said the first American voice I’d heard in my whole time at the embassy. Everyone up until that point – the security guards, the policemen, the people who took my forms and who directed me to take a seat – had been British.

  ‘So…’ began the interviewer. I glanced down at his name badge: Charles Dickens. I started to smile but stopped myself. This was surely a man who spent his entire day hearing people say, ‘Oh, wow, your name is Charles Dickens’. Adding to their numbers would not help my case. It was an enormous challenge, but I returned my focus to the interview.

  Charles Dickens – ha! – launched into his questions. Why did I want the visa? What would I be doing in the US? Did I have family there; friends – a girlfriend? I answered truthfully, except for a tiny white lie about how, sadly, I worked too hard to have time for girls. No sense in making him think I was on the hunt for a green card. He seemed happy with my answers, and we even shared a joke about my use of the visa waiver. I can’t remember what it was, though. I was running entirely on panic and adrenaline.

  And then came the moment. He’d worked through all the forms I’d filled in, and put them neatly to one side in a tray. Just one remained. The ACPO certificate.

  ‘Now,’ he said, with a definite sigh, ‘tell me about this.’

  I could sense the sick feeling making its way up my throat. ‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘an embarrassing story, actually.’

  And I told the whole story – every embarrassing detail, about my most recent arrest and caution. The fact that I’d had too much to drink, the fact that the police had kicked down the door and – yes – the fact that it was the second time it had happened. ‘It’s not on the certificate,’ I said, ‘but I want to be entirely honest with you.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ he replied, not smiling.

  Once I was done, Charles Dickens – hee! – was frowning. This was not good news.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘that’s all I need. You’ll need to leave your passport at the courier table by the door and we’ll have it back to you in a few days.’ He reached for a large stamp and punched some red ink on to my form. I couldn’t read what it said.

  I sat there, waiting for him to continue.

  He stared back through the bulletproof glass.

  ‘You’re all set,’ he said.

  I stayed sitting.

  Finally he spoke again. ‘Do you have any questions?’

  ‘Um … when you say “I’m all set” …’

  He laughed. ‘I mean, that’s all fine. Your passport and your visa will be returned to you in a few days. Enjoy the United States.’

  ‘Uh – I – OK … thank you.’ I couldn’t believe it. I had so prepared myself for disappointment, so psyched myself up to be banned from America for ten years, or the rest of my life, that I simply couldn’t process the idea of being approved for the visa. I’d told the truth and everything had turned out fine.

  I had to get out of there before they changed their mind. Clearly this was some kind of hideous administrative error.

  I walked slowly to the courier desk, got the receipt for my passport and walked, still slowly, to the door. I walked out of the building, back through security and across Grosvenor Square. I didn’t look back – just kept walking. I felt like I’d just committed the perfect heist. I stood calmly on the escalator down into Bond Street tube station and on to the waiting train, heading towards my hotel. Only when the doors slid closed did I smile. And then I laughed and laughed and laughed. I looked like a lunatic, but I didn’t give a shit. I was moving to America.

  Chapter 1300

  Trending Downwards

  1 March 2009

  The two weeks since my visa arrived had passed with significantly less chaos than would normally accompany a move to a new country. To move to a new country, one would ordinarily have to move from somewhere else. Not me. I wasn’t packing up an old house and arranging for things to be shipped to a new one, I didn’t have to say goodbye to friends or leave a job or any of that crap – I’d done that more than a year earlier. Really, my arrival at San Francisco International would be no different from the half-dozen other ones I’d made in the previous twelve months, except that, instead of filling out the green visa waiver card on the plane, I’d be carrying a five-year visa in my passport. I was even checking into my usual hotel.

  When I told friends that I was moving to San Francisco, most of them assumed it meant the end of my living in hotels. They couldn’t have been more wrong: if the rates offered by hotels when you stay for a month are impressive, then the discount for a three- or sixmonth stay is insane.

  My first stop would be the Vertigo while I got my bearings – they were offering a rate of $65 a night if I stayed over a month – but I’d also sent emails to the reservations departments of all of the other decent independent hotels in San Francisco and my inbox was full of replies. The global economic downturn was my friend.

  According to the San Francisco convention and visitors bureau, the average San Francisco hotel room rate in March 2009 – including everything from no-star hovels to five-star palaces – was $160.25 a night. The Steinhart Hotel next door to the Vertigo (averaging 4.5 stars out of 5 on Trip Advisor, with 91 percent of guests recommending it) offered me a suite for $55 a night – $1650 a month – while the brilliantly named ‘Gaylord Suites’ down the road (averaging 4 out of 5 stars, 83 per cent recommendation) was willing to go even lower. None of which would incur any additional tax, of course, because I’d be staying more than thirty days. Those rates would include wifi, maid service, heat, light, power and all other amenities in a city
where the average downtown rent was a little over $2000 a month, before amenities. Given those numbers, I’d be an idiot not to keep living in hotels.

  All the visa really meant was that I would be free to spend a few uninterrupted months in my favourite city, getting to know the place even better and, more importantly, making a start on writing my book about living in hotels. After the usual negotiations over advances and royalties and delivery dates, the contract with W&N was finally signed. My agent had pitched the book as a sort of blagger’s guide – telling the stories of life in hotels, but also giving tips on scoring cheap rooms, getting into parties through – well, lying – and all the other things I’d learned in the previous year.

  The manuscript was due in December – nine months’ time – and, if I had any hope of making that deadline, I’d have to stop travelling for a while and actually focus on pulling together something resembling a narrative. I also still had to write my weekly column, promote the previous book and continue blogging adventures often enough to keep everyone interested in me. San Francisco seemed like the perfect place to achieve all of those things.

  1301

  There comes a point after making any irreversible life decision – usually a couple of weeks in – where one of two things hits you. Either a feeling of euphoric disbelief that you didn’t make the decision sooner, or a gut-wrenching realisation that you’ve made such a gargantuan error that no number of mitigating factors will ever douse the flames of regret tearing through your brain. You’re on a road to heaven or hell, but either way there’s no turning back.

  My own moment of realisation came halfway through my first month in my new home, at a little under 90mph, with Rob Dougan’s ‘Clubbed to Death’ cranked up to eleven, just after Scott and I had pulled on to the Pacific Coast Highway in our (borrowed) convertible Porsche Boxster. We’d just had brunch at Buck’s in Woodside and were heading down the coast for no reason other than to enjoy the clear skies and the view. That was how I spent my weekends now.

  Glancing down at the date on my phone, it suddenly occurred to me that a year ago – very nearly to the day – I was on this exact same road, driving an equally convertible 1971 Dodge Challenger from LA to San Diego for ETech. And I couldn’t believe it had taken me twelve whole months to decide to move here.

  As the weeks passed and I became more settled in my new home, I kept expecting the novelty to wear off. But that didn’t show any signs of happening. There was literally nothing about the move that I regretted; in fact, the only downside was that, just two weeks after being a California resident, I’d gone from being a hard-drinking cynical Brit to a hard-drinking sunny and optimistic expat. Even something as mundane as opening an American bank account filled me with joy – to the point where I was in danger of turning into one of those writers who moved to the US and spent the rest of his career churning out trite nonsense about the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

  Indeed, every day brought at least one such trite observation, which I dutifully wrote down in my notebook, ready to be deployed in a forthcoming column. Or book …

  Trite Observations about America, from the Point of View of a British Expat

  • At some point in America’s linguistic development they apparently decided that herbs should be pronounced as ‘erbs’ and fillet as ‘fill-ay’, like French people do. To compensate for this, they call a cafetière a ‘French press’ and a croissant a ‘crescent roll’.

  • There is nothing funnier than hearing an American order a Cock-burn’s after dinner.

  • Each hour of American television can be broken down as follows: 10 minutes of commercials for junk food, 10 minutes of commercials for prescription medication (which can be further broken down into one minute of benefits, nine of side effects), 10 minutes of commercials for lawyers who can help you claw back money to pay for more junk food and medication, 13 minutes of an announcer telling you what you are currently watching, 13 minutes of an announcer telling you what’s ‘up next’, two minutes of cop show reruns, two minutes of a family-based cartoon series.

  • Seeing advertising banners on the international version of the BBC website is like seeing your dad giving Satan a reach around.

  • Opening a bank account in this country – even if you’re not a citizen – is a joy. Ten minutes, two forms of ID, in and out. And when you walk through the door, a nice lady says hello to you. This is very unsettling.

  • They also set up Internet banking and your ATM pin while you wait. To a former Barclays customer, this is like witnessing magic.

  • If anyone’s looking for all the chrome, it’s on the fire engines.

  • Apparently there is a newspaper in the world called The London Times.

  • And tea can be served with cream.

  • Tea served with cream tastes like a baby has been sick in it.

  • Perhaps in response to the fact that I keep giving cab drivers $50 bills instead of $5s, the US Treasury has slowly started to add tiny flashes of colour to distinguish between different denominations of bill. At the current rate, money will be full-colour by 2096, like the world’s longest remake of Pleasantville.

  • For some reason, when San Francisco shopkeepers or bartenders hear a British accent, they feel the need to use the word ‘cheers’ instead of ‘thanks’. This sounds as odd as a Brit using ‘bucks’ as slang for dollars or an Australian speaking French.

  • Cab drivers in San Francisco have no idea where anything is. If you asked one to drive you to one end of the road and back again, you’d still have to tell him the cross-street.

  • But even if you made that journey back and forth till the end of time, it would still cost you less than taking a black cab halfway down the length of Oxford Street.

  • Even using a British debit card, and with the pound in the toilet, you can still fill up a Porsche Boxster and have change from thirty quid.

  • Except over here the pound isn’t ‘in the toilet’; it’s ‘using the restroom’.

  • American service is astonishing. You could give a Labrador puppy a hand job with a Prozac glove and it still wouldn’t be as pleased to see you as the staff of the Leland tea shop on Bush Street.

  • There are more than 80,000 kinds of American toast, seven hundred ways to cook an American egg but only one way to make American bacon. And it isn’t pretty.

  • In restaurants, it is impossible to finish a glass of water before it’s refilled. The state of California is permanently in the grip of a water shortage. No one seems to have connected these facts.

  • Free universal healthcare is tantamount to Communism. Free soft drink refills are a basic human right.

  • Newcastle Brown Ale is a delicacy.

  • Adoption of new technology here is highly selective. Minicab drivers have Priuses, hookers accept PayPal but the idea of a three-pin plug is only just beginning to catch on.

  • The Onion newspaper’s headlines are brilliantly satirical, but the body of its editorial often stretches the joke into unfunniness. The Fox News Channel does the exact opposite. Both are still wonderful.

  • Almost no one here has heard of Father Ted, Jonathan Creek, Yes Minister or Blackadder. And yet they can all hum the Benny Hill theme tune.

  • Thanks to Frost/Nixon, when you mention David Frost to an American, they picture Tony Blair doing an impression of Austin Powers.

  • ‘Double the tax’ sounds simple in theory but only natural-born Americans will ever understand the rules of tipping.

  • See also: American football.

  Another huge difference between Britain and America is their attitude to drinking. Of course, this was hardly news to me but there was something about actually moving to the place that really drove it home.

  During the time I was applying for the visa, I’d started to pay attention to Robert and Sarah’s concern about my drinking, and had made a concerted effort to cut down. But now that I’d actually made it to San Francisco, my intake had started to ramp up aga
in. Part of this was cockiness – getting the visa despite my record made me feel invincible – but there was also a practical reason: to get enough material to a write the column each week without leaving San Francisco I’d had to throw myself wholeheartedly into the party scene.

  Every night was the same: I’d grab my notebook and head to whichever of the town’s maybe five big venues was hosting the best party to promote some dot com company or other. Then I’d avail myself of the free bar while talking to partygoers and taking notes of anything amusing they might say. The parties would generally wind down about eleven, and it was at this point that the difference between Brits and Americans would make itself most apparent. In London, 11 p.m. is the time when my friends and I would head on to a late bar or a club to continue drinking, basically until one or more of us fell over. We’d do this six or seven nights a week: I tended to hang out with journalists and entrepreneurs; groups of people who can set their own hours and so are unafraid of hangovers on a school night.

  In San Francisco I was partying with entrepreneurs and journalists too, but, for reasons I couldn’t understand, come 11p.m. they’d go home. Some of them were still so sober that they’d actually drive; in fact many would drive even if they weren’t sober – Californians obsess over pilates and frown at the notion of eating carbs but their attitude to drink driving is straight out of an episode of The Sweeney. Occasionally I’d be able to convince someone to stay out for a late drink – but, even then, California’s licensing laws meant that even the late bars were closed by two.