by Paul Carr
My solution to this problem was twofold. First of all, I would start drinking early. This was the easiest fix, but it also meant that by the time the parties got started, I was already drunk. I was quickly getting a reputation as the drunk British writer at every party, a reputation I did absolutely nothing to counter as it only drew more attention to me, and by extension the columns that I was writing. Wherever I went in the world, people still gave me a pass for my appalling behaviour on the basis that I was a journalist – in America they gave me a second pass because they assumed that being a drunken idiot was just how British people behaved.
My second trick was to hang out more with Brits, which in San Francisco isn’t particularly difficult to arrange. Every week at least one entrepreneur from London would make the pilgrimage across the Atlantic either to meet their Silicon Valley counterparts or to beg for money from one of the valley’s super-rich venture capitalists. And, of course, for those who read my Guardian column, I was the first person they’d email or call. Could they take me for a drink to tell me about their company? Of course they could; and what started as one drink always ended as an all-day binge.
Life was good, work was good and the drinks were free.
1302
April
If my liver had fists, it would have been pounding them on the mat and begging for mercy. I was covered in strange bruises, I had no idea what day it was – and in about half an hour I was heading out again to yet another party.
I hurt.
Webmission week had rolled around again, and the Brits had invaded San Francisco in their dozens. My last vivid memory from the previous evening was watching a British entrepreneur – who should probably remain nameless – standing on a bar, pouring tequila into the gaping mouth of a journalist from the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, across the bar, another entrepreneur – who should definitely remain nameless – was making plans to take one of the barmaids home, as his friend failed to gain support for a belching competition. An hour or so later, with the Brits having drunk the bar dry, we decided to move things on to the Beauty Bar on Mission Street, but not before someone handed me a black bag containing something heavy.
‘What’s in there?’ I asked.
‘A wooden duck.’
‘Why have you put a wooden duck in a black bag?’
‘Because otherwise they’ll realise we’re stealing it.’
I blacked out shortly afterwards.
I woke up the next morning at Kelly’s house. Kelly was one of the few American girls who drank almost – at least half – as much as I did, and so was less put off by my drunken behaviour than most. But still I could tell that even she was starting to tire of the constant hangovers and drinking with Brits until the sun came up. It was only a matter of time before she came to her senses.
I’d become increasingly aware that my American friends had started to give me a wide berth since I’d move to San Francisco. I’d seen Eris and her boyfriend maybe once or twice since arriving – both times it was at a party and I was drunk. We would make vague plans to catch up, but she was always busy, usually with work. Scott was busy with his new company and so had dropped off the social scene, at least as far as I was concerned.
The person, though, who had made her wide berth the most obvious was Sarah. Before I moved, we’d virtually become best friends – emailing most days about book woes, speaking on the phone as often as international calling rates would allow. It was nice for us both to have a friend who could critique our writing and to whom we could vent about editors and publishers. It was Sarah who said that if I ever decided to move to San Francisco she’d be happy to introduce me to people in ‘the Valley’, and generally help me make a start in building a network of professional contacts to rival the one I had in London. At the start of the year she’d accepted a job at TechCrunch – organisers of the TechCrunch 50 conference – as Editor at Large, further increasing her professional profile.
We’d had lunch a few times during my first weeks in town, but she too had since become increasingly ‘busy’ and the few times we’d run into each other at parties – usually while I was drunk – she’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t have time to talk. Frankly, I felt patronised: like I was some errant child who had let her down. I mean, yes, she had a point – in a few months I was going to turn thirty and I should probably be giving more serious thought to my health and my career – but I was also being paid handsomely for writing about being a drunk expat curiosity in San Francisco; the party invitations were showing no signs of drying up, and in a few months I’d finish writing my book about living in hotels and – well – being a drunk curiosity. Be as disapproving as you like, I thought, but, as jobs go, mine isn’t a bad one.
1303
May
Seven months until my book deadline, and I was a little behind schedule. It wasn’t my fault, of course; I’d spent the previous two and a bit months getting used to my new town; slipping into the social scene, making new friends, arguing with Kelly, that kind of thing. She’d started off gently trying to persuade me that waking up every morning with no memory of the previous night was not the optimum way to live – she was worried about me. But soon she too had become frustrated by my complete unwillingness to cut down on booze.
All of that stuff – getting drunk, being dumped – takes up a lot of time, and I had to write 900 words a week for the Guardian, so I could hardly be blamed for slipping a bit when it came to writing my next book. And anyway, I reasoned, all of the parties and the drinking and the girls were technically research, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t done any work. I just hadn’t written as many actual words as possibly I should have done. Which is to say, I hadn’t written a single one.
Of course the story I told Alan, my publisher at W&N, was slightly different. Every so often he’d email to check on progress and I’d happily report that all was ‘going fine’ or that I was ‘ploughing ahead’. My editor at the Guardian would email me every so often too – enquiring why the column was sometimes as much as twenty-four hours late. ‘I’m sorry,’ I’d explain, ‘I’m just racing towards my book deadline – so much going on right now.’
And then I’d close my laptop and head out to meet whichever Brit was in town, and spend the rest of the day getting trashed.
Life was good, as far as I could remember.
1304
June
‘Wait, you’re going to Butt Lands?’ Kelly seemed surprised.
‘Butlins. I’m going to Butlins. It’s a holiday camp in England where poor people who are scared of flying go on holiday.’
‘Butt Lands sounds like more fun.’
She had a point.
It was now five months until my book deadline and I’d finally decided to start taking it seriously. I had loads of good material about staying in hotels, and I was pretty sure I had enough amusing stories to fill a book – but I wanted some extra colour. Having stayed in a villa and a student halls of residence, I decided I needed to try at least one other alternative to hotels. And when my friend Paul Walsh called me from London, I knew I’d found it.
‘Hey, buddy – how do you fancy flying back from San Francisco for a weekend in Butlins?’
Apparently Butlins had hired a new PR person who had decided, inexplicably, that it would do their brand a world of good if they invited a group of ‘influential Internet users’* to travel down to Bognor Regis† for a weekend-long ‘social media party’.‡
I hesitated for all of ten seconds: did I really want to fly 5000 miles to spend three days in Bognor Regis with a group of bloggers, even if it would be a funny addition to the book? Yeah, of course I did – not only was there probably a chapter in it, but there was also at least one column and a half-dozen blog posts.
The deal was sealed, though, when I realised what date it took place on. The trip came a week before the arrival in London of the Traveling Geeks – the American version of Webmission, where a group of entrepreneurs and journalists from Silicon Valley t
ravel to London to, well, I suppose to give themselves the smug satisfaction that things really are better back home. A few of my friends from Silicon Valley would be on the trip, including Sarah.
I missed Sarah. Since we’d stopped talking regularly, I would often find myself stuck with a line in a column, or trying to understand some element of entrepreneurship in the Valley, wishing I could pick up the phone and ask her. I’m sure she’d have answered had I called, but there was something about the change in her manner towards me that made it obvious that she wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to hear my voice.
And yet I couldn’t think of anything specific I’d done to offend her. Maybe if we could catch up in London I could find out what had gone wrong, and how I could fix it. Robert would be in town too, of course, and I knew I could always rely on him to have a good word for me when all those around me had lost theirs.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard from Robert for a few weeks either, but according to the published invitation list he was going to be at Butlins too. That was the final deciding factor. I booked my ticket.
Chapter 1400
Butt Lands
In his book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young writes about his first trip back to London after spending a few months in New York. He talks about seeing England through the eyes of an American: ‘The people, with their sallow complexions and cheap, non-designer clothes, looked so drab … Britain was so dowdy … as if everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.’
As Robert and I sat on the train from Victoria to Bognor Regis – my transatlantic flight having landed only a few hours earlier – I knew exactly what he meant. Even the name Bognor Regis sounds dowdy and British – for years I’d assumed it only existed as a punchline in comics.
We’d decided the best plan, if we were going to survive the weekend – me with my jetlag and both of us with the fact that we were heading to Butlins – would be to start drinking early. Specifically, we decided that the best plan would be to sit in the vestibule between the train carriages, drinking Marks & Spencer champagne from paper cups, as if to underline how ironically we were treating the whole trip.
The decision proved to be a sound one as we’d dramatically misjudged how far away Bognor Regis is from London. ‘I think it’s about half an hour,’ said Robert as the train pulled out of Victoria station. The champagne ran out after about an hour, around about the time the train divided into two halves, somewhere past Gatwick. ‘We should have bought a second bottle,’ said Robert. ‘We should have bought a whole case,’ I replied.
If the point of the trip was to confound our snobbish expectations of Butlins then things got off to a shaky start as we were checking in. Walking towards the reception desk, our way was unintentionally blocked by half a dozen fat men in black t-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Ken COCKS stag’. As if the comedy value of Mr Cock’s name was too subtle, even with the capitals and the missing apostrophe, each shirt also sported a huge cartoon penis, ejaculating over the text. ‘Oyoy!’ hinted one of the men, at the top of his lungs. ‘Ave it!’ suggested a second. The receptionist looked ashamed of herself, as well she might.
Our visit coincided with one of Butlins’ ‘Big Weekends’ (adults only – no children allowed) and, despite the company’s terms and conditions emphasising that stag weekends were not welcome, it would be fair to assume from the COCK chaps that a few had snuck in. Furthermore, each group of men had determined that their coordinated fancy-dress costumes – which they wore for the whole weekend – would be the most brilliantly hilarious in the camp, through a combination of blunt irony and shock value. Accordingly, the whole place was full of drunk 118–118 runners and gangs of overweight Essex boys in drag. The hen-weekend girls, meanwhile, had all taken their cue from American college chicks at Halloween and were resplendent in a variety of ‘slutty’ variations of traditional costumes – slutty cats, slutty soldier girls, slutty ballerinas and slutty nuns, each with her name and alliterative description written on her back (‘Naughty Niccie’, ‘Cute Chantelle’ just two real examples). By far my favourite, though, was slutty Tinkerbell – who, on the second night, we watched having an absolutely screaming row with a man dressed as a fat Peter Pan. ‘You need to fucking grow up, mate,’ she yelled, brilliantly.
The people, it soon became clear, were more entertaining than the actual organised entertainment. On the night we arrived, we were treated to a performance in the resort’s nightclub by the three remaining members of S Club 7, as well as 911 (pronounced ‘nine one one’ and not, as Milo Yiannopoulos, a stereotypically posh Telegraph journalist who was also on the trip, suggested, ‘nine-eleven’) and Lee Ryan, formerly of the boy band Blue. Ryan was the headliner, presumably after winning a game of rock-paper-scissors against the other acts. A man dressed as a fat, masked Captain America tried gamely to talk his way into the VIP area (a roped-off section of the main nightclub, guarded by an off-duty Redcoat) using the line ‘do you know who I am?’, which was almost as brilliant as Tinkerbell vs Peter Pan.
On the second day, we all went go-karting, an experience that ended with Robert nearly flipping his kart over thanks to some clumsy oversteering and me trying to undertake him on a hairpin bend. As we were leaving the track – heading towards an archery lesson that would see Robert being stabbed in the leg by Milo – we overheard a woman complaining that she had suffered whiplash. Clearly the daytime TV message was getting through to these people: where there’s blame there’s a claim. After that it was time to head for the high ropes course and the climbing wall, where a man dressed in a pink tutu and tights complained about having to wear a helmet because ‘it makes me look stupid’.
If all of these encounters had reinforced my prejudice about holiday camps, there was one area where my expectations were completely confounded.
Brought up on old episodes of Hi-de-Hi!, I knew exactly what to expect from Butlins: dated self-catering chalets with peeling wallpaper and TVs that you had to put 10p coins into every half-hour to keep them switched on. Having already written, in my head, a hilarious chapter about trying to sleep in the equivalent of a garden shed, I was actually disappointed when I realised that we’d be staying in a proper hotel within the camp. Worse still, my room was really, unironically, nice: far better than a lot of the rooms I’d had in four-and five-star hotels in London.
The PR person, hearing I was from the Guardian, had decided to pull some strings and I’d been upgraded to the best room in the resort. Leather sofas, a king-sized bed, a minibar and wine chiller – but better than all of that, a huge roof terrace with a telescope pointing out across the sea. This isn’t Hi-de-Hi! anymore, Toto.
Sure, some of the attempts to make Butlins ‘posh’ were laughably brilliant – the copies of the Daily Mail and the Sun in reception were on wooden sticks, like in upmarket members’ clubs (‘Oh, look, the Sun on a stick,’ said Milo from the Telegraph) and on arrival each member of our group received a pot of strawberry and champagne jam in a little bag. But all in all, every aspect of the accommodation surpassed my expectations by a considerable chalk.
‘In fact,’ I said to Robert, as we sat in the camp’s Burger King, on the last night, ‘if only the people who stayed here weren’t so predictably hideous, I could just about live here permanently.’
I gestured at the scene outside Burger King, which was situated in the main Big Top – a sort of poor-man’s Millennium Dome filled with fast food outlets and arcade games and shops selling scrunchies and pregnancy test kits (but not, as far as I could see, condoms. Know your audience). It reminded me of that scene in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Dr Gonzo and Raoul Duke are off their tits on ether, making everyone look grotesque and twisted and loud and terrifying. Except I wasn’t on ether – the people were just grotesque and twisted and loud and terrifying. One man was surfing on the roof of a ride-on Bob the Builder dumper truck, another was scaling the outside of the children’s climbing area – it was a bit like watching Street Crime
UK parkour.
‘I mean, look at them,’ I continued. ‘They can hardly walk – how can they live like this?’
Robert just looked at me. He didn’t smile.
‘You realise that’s how you look some nights?’ he said.
I laughed. He didn’t, just carried on talking.
‘I’m worried about you, mate – and coming from me that’s saying something. Everything I hear about you from San Francisco is about you being drunk. I don’t just mean from friends, but total strangers – how they saw you at a lunch event and you were already well on your way, or how you were still drunk at breakfast meetings. It used to be that you would turn into Drunk Paul when you drank too much, but that the rest of the time you’d be this nice guy who everyone liked. Like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. But I’m worried the analogy is getting a bit too accurate. I care about you, mate, and I don’t want you to end up poisoning yourself to death.’
The man on the Bob the Builder truck lost his footing and fell to the floor laughing.
‘Oh, come on,’ I said, ‘I’m not that bad. And at least I get paid to be an arsehole.’
‘Yeah, but that’s my point,’ said Robert, ‘that guy on the floor has a real job. He works all year and then come to Butlins for a weekend of acting like a twat. That’s just a normal Tuesday night for you. I know people love reading about it – I love reading about it, too – and you keep getting paid for it, but most of the people who are your biggest fans don’t know the real you; they don’t give a shit if you kill yourself.’
It was quite a speech, and one that hit its mark. My drinking was seriously out of control again, probably worse than it had ever been. But I was trapped again. I’d built a career – or at least the beginnings of one – as a drunken scapegoat. The guy who failed at business, and at relationships and at just about everything else, and then wrote about it so everyone could laugh and thank their lucky stars they weren’t me. If I stopped being that guy, then what? The first instalment of my new book advance had just hit my bank account. I might be killing myself, but I was being paid well to do it. What was I suppose to do? Call up my editor and say ‘sorry, I’ve decided to quit drinking – no more drunken adventures from me. Here’s your cheque back, I’m going to get a job in Starbucks.’?No. For better or worse, this was the career I’d decided on and I had to see it through. I was too far down the road.