The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

by Paul Carr

  I booked a plane ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It cost me $90 return, which seemed quite reasonable for a trip that might save my life. Then I fired up Google and decided to do some research about what lay in store for me when I got there.

  What I discovered annoyed the hell out of me. For a start, Alcoholics Anonymous is incredibly – and pompously – religious. They’d clearly tried to tone down the explicitly-Christian aspect in modern times with lots of talk of ‘God as you understand him to be’ rather than just ‘God’, but there was still no getting away from the idea that the only way one could quit the sauce was by asking for divine assistance. In fact, not only did members have to ask God to help them stop drinking, but according to the organisation’s ‘twelve steps’ they had to ‘turn [their] entire lives over to His care, get closer to Him through prayer or meditation in the hope that [they] could have Him remove [their] shortcomings’.

  In short, Alcoholics Anonymous is a place where alcoholics can hide from their friends and plead with a deity that may or may not exist to magically cure them of their addiction. It’s the antithesis of personal responsibility and accountability. Put another way, going to Alcoholics Anonymous would be little more than a formalised, religious extension of what I was already doing – except that instead of promising close friends like Robert and Sarah that I was going to get my shit together and quit drinking, I’d be promising a roomful of strangers.

  And then I had to ask for help from a deity who – it should be noted – hands the stuff out every Sunday. Hell, if the New Testament is to be believed, this is a God – as I understand him – who taught his son how to turn water into wine. You might as well pray to Oliver Reed for help.

  If the thought of Robert and Sarah being disappointed in me hadn’t been enough, then would my new self-righteous AA buddies have any more success? Of course they wouldn’t.

  1705

  I was trying to talk myself out of seeking professional help. I knew that. But I also knew that I was serious about giving up. One of the reasons I’ve always been so good at getting away with things is that I’ve always obeyed the golden rule of the blagger: know when it’s time to stop. Recognise when you really have reached your last chance; and don’t push it an inch further.

  AA wasn’t going to work for me, I knew that. I’d end up going to the meetings and then going for a beer afterwards, knowing that I’d get away with it. If I was going to quit then I had to acknowledge the two things that were keeping me drinking. The first was ego: I was still acting like a gonzo wannabe and I still hadn’t shaken the idea that ‘my readers’ expected me to drink. The second was opportunity: by only telling a very small number of people that I was quitting, I could still get away with drinking as long as they didn’t find out.

  Somewhere deep inside my brain, a synapse fired. Tzzziz.

  I opened up my email programme and began to write an email. In the subject line, I wrote three words: ‘I’m quitting drinking’. I clicked BCC and added everyone from my address book: friends, professional contacts; everyone I might possibly run into in the coming weeks and months.

  My plan was to write an email telling everyone I knew about my decision to quit, and the reasons behind it. I’d ask for their help: if you see me drinking, I’d say, please stop me.

  But then I stopped. Who was I kidding? All I was doing was expanding the list of people I couldn’t drink around. Even if I sent the email, and even if I recruited all of my friends to watch over me, there was still a whole world of strangers out there; a planetful of bars where I’d never get caught. Thanks to my years of creating a persona of drunkenness, there was always the chance that I’d run into someone – particularly in a town as small as San Francisco where it seems like everyone reads TechCrunch – who would offer to buy me a drink. In my own little world at least, I was famous for my inability to say no.

  And that’s when it hit me.

  A ridiculous idea.

  That settled it.

  Chapter 1800

  Going Public

  The half-finished email was still glaring out from my laptop screen. I read it back and laughed. Even though it was only a few minutes old, it now seemed ridiculously naïve; full of jokes and half-excuses. My ego simply wouldn’t let me look pathetic in the eyes of even my friends, let alone people I only knew tangentially.

  Being honest about my inability to stop drinking went against the whole character I had spent years building; the hard-drinking, doesn’t give a fuck, never apologises, never explains asshole. The asshole who wrote my column for the Guardian, and the asshole who in two months was supposed to file a book on how to be just like him. Robert called him Drunk Paul, Sarah thought his problems went far deeper than drinking and I … well, I don’t know what I thought. Apart from this …

  That asshole had to die. It was him or me.

  I got up from my chair and walked laps of the room, thinking through the consequences of what I was about to do. Then I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. An hour passed; maybe longer. Finally, I managed to summon up the kind of courage that would normally take me a couple of beers and a shot of rum. I closed the email window and opened a fresh browser window. I typed in the address of my blog and clicked the button to write a new entry. It started with a title …

  ‘The trouble with drink, the trouble with me’

  And then a quote that seemed apt …

  ‘The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol’ – Mignon McLaughlin

  Then I wrote …

  I mulled for a ridiculous amount of time over whether I should post this. Not because it’s hopelessly self-indulgent – that’s never stopped me before – or because it’s too personal – ditto – but rather because there’s so much weirdness and angst and back-story that I would really need a whole self-indulgent book to tell it all. Lucky I’m writing one, I guess.

  Getting straight to the point: a few days ago I decided to stop drinking. Or, rather, I decided to stop properly. Completely.

  It was actually back in July – during my month-long London visit – that I realised I needed to take a break from the ridiculously Bukowskian cycle I’d got myself (back) into. And – with a few dramatic exceptions – I was doing ok. But then, as someone pointed out after my last binge, in recent weeks those dramatic exceptions had started to move closer together – to the point where they were inevitably going to collide. Almost-quitting is just not something I’m capable of. It’s all, or it’s nothing.

  One complicating factor (in my head at least) is that I’ve forged a career – and a respectable income – from drinking too much, doing idiotic things and writing about them. My last book floated on a sea of booze, and if you were to ask anyone who knows me to give you three keywords about me, drink would certainly be one of them. Barely a week goes past without a PR person trying to bribe me with a bottle of good rum (really, it’s got weird now – and each thinks they’re the first to think of it); and the look of disappointment on people’s faces when I say I’m not drinking is heart-breaking. Last week I was at a party where someone said – and I swear this is true – ‘of course you’ll have a drink … you’re Paul Carr’.

  Jesus.

  But the thing is, there’s a line between doing entertainingly idiotic things under the influence and doing irreversibly damaging things. And what sells the most books and makes people read blog posts – losing loves, getting arrested, being fired, inching towards cirrhosis of the liver – is not actually that much fun when it’s you doing it. The truth is there are people in my life who I would rather trade every single funny anecdote I have just to avoid hurting them again. Or in certain cases, just to speak to them again. When you get to that point the decision isn’t the difficult part. The difficult part is the execution.

  To be honest, drinking for me became a habit – a prop – rather than a necessity; I’m perfectly capable of doing dumb things stone cold sober, and it’s not like I
need a fucking confidence boost. I also never – ever – write while drunk. But having a drink in my hand – and another, and another – is also one of those habits that has proved incredibly hard to break. Hence the decision to write this post.

  I figure by making the statement – I’m not drinking – I don’t really have anywhere to hide. Maybe people who have read this and who see me drinking will look as disappointed as those who previously were disappointed that I wasn’t.

  I’ve been lucky enough to get advice on quitting from some really good friends in the past week or so, including one friend who has been sober for seven months despite previously writing a drink-fuelled memoir of her own. No doubt some of the advice will work, and some of it won’t. But I’m going to try it all. I might write a follow-up post on the subject, or there might be more in the book, or I might just get on with it. It’s too early to tell. All I know is that it’s my 30th birthday in a couple of months, and I really hope I’ll be spending it sober. And alive. And with friends. Those are decent enough goals for now.

  And to those worried that a non-drinking me means fewer hilarious fuck-ups, don’t be. The only difference is I’ll be able to remember them in the morning.

  God help me.

  …

  I clicked the ‘Publish’ button and the post immediately appeared on the front page of my site. From there it was automatically sent out to the 20,000 or so people who had registered to be notified whenever I posted something new. Just to make sure, I posted a link on Twitter and sent it out to the thousands of people who follow me there. As often happens on Twitter, people started reposting – ‘retweeting’ – the link to their own followers. The first was Michael Arrington, who appended his own message to the retweet …

  ‘We’re here for you, dude.’

  By the end of the day, more than 100,000 people had read the post. By the end of the week, it was closer to a quarter of a million. I had nowhere left to hide.

  Epilogue

  I don’t notice the man in the grey suit taking my bag.

  I mean, I do notice him – but in his smart grey Savile Row suit and his patent leather shoes, he looks just like any other hotel guest. I’m dimly aware of him gliding past me as I’m signing the guest register but, by the time I turn around, he’s gone. And, with him, my bag.

  A professional.

  I smile.

  December 2009. It’s the day before my thirtieth birthday and I’ve flown into London on my way to speak at the LeWeb conference in Paris. The receptionist at the Lanesborough hands me back my back-up debit card, having just pre-authorised it for £1000 in incidentals; just in case I feel the urge to have a green-painted Dalmatian puppy delivered to my room.

  The room itself, though, is free: a birthday present from the head of the PR agency I consulted for last year. The Lanesborough is one of her clients and they’re charging her their top-secret media rate. Every hotel has one.

  Walking into room 237, I smile again. Marcus, the butler, has unpacked my bags and almost everything is exactly where I’d normally put it, right down to the razor on the little towel by the sink. The only difference is that, instead of turning on the shower to remove the creases from my shirts, he’s sent them to be pressed. That works too.

  I head into the living room. On the table, next to a chocolate birthday cake and a card from the hotel’s head of PR, sits an ice bucket and two half-bottles of champagne, with the compliments of the manager. Perfect. It’s been two months since I last had a drink and I’m not planning on starting again *. Instead, I take out my phone and snap a picture with the built-in camera. Later I’ll post it on my blog with a note about how the Lanesborough was determined to tempt me to drink, but I’d resisted. Another small victory for my ego.

  Ah, yes, my ego: the cause of and – as it turned out – solution to my drinking problem. Since my blog post about quitting went live, it has been read by well over a quarter of a million people. Some of those people – just over a hundred at last count – have emailed me to wish me luck, or to share their own struggles with booze. But most readers remain anonymous, which suits me just fine. Whenever I walk into a bar, anywhere in the world, I have no way of knowing if one of them is watching. But if they are, and they catch me drinking, they’ll know I’ve failed – something my ego can’t possibly allow. Where once my obsessive need to maintain an image made me think I had to keep drinking, now that same obsession demands that I keep quitting.

  More importantly, it turns out that American girls are big on the whole ‘reformed drunk’ thing. A few minutes after I posted my blog link, a girl called Amelia from Los Angeles sent me a message – ‘That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever read’ – and suggested I look her up next time I’m in town. In the days and weeks that followed, several similar messages followed – including one from Jenny, the girl who is flying into town for my birthday party tonight. I still don’t quite understand why being a recovering alcoholic attracts women but, as rewards for sobriety go, it’s hard to fault.

  As I’m putting my phone away, I notice that Sarah posted a message on Twitter: ‘Massive happy birthday to my best friend Paul. Wish I could have been in London with you tonight.’ Given that Sarah is one of the two people responsible for saving my life, I wish she could be here too, but I’ll forgive her absence just this once: she’s in Chile, researching another chapter of her next book. And, anyway, after Paris, I’m heading to her hometown of Memphis where she and Geoff have planned a couple of days of gorging on local food and seeing the sights. Sights including the city’s famous Peabody Hotel, with its family of trained ducks which swim around a fountain in the lobby all day, before being led back along a special red carpet to their very own mini hotel on the roof. Even ducks are starting to realise the benefits of living permanently in hotels.

  I’m looking forward to seeing Sarah and Geoff, just like I’m looking forward to seeing all of my friends – Hannah, Michael, Michelle, Zoe and a few dozen others – who will be at Adam Street tonight for my birthday party. I’ve finally become a bona fide member, and it didn’t cost me a penny: the club’s way of saying thank you for the flurry of prospective members who joined their waiting list after reading about Adam Street in my last book.

  For a long time, I really believed that alcohol was the common factor in every fun adventure I’d had. Since quitting, though, I’ve realised that the real common factor was my friends – Michael and Michelle in Vegas, Scott in Spain, Zoe in Austin, Eris in San Francisco and, of course …

  ‘Open the fucking door, you twat.’

  I let Robert in and show him around my room with its crystal decanter minibar, hydraulic television and free pornography. There’s no mistaking the look in his eyes: envy. ‘Your life is officially ridiculous,’ he says. But his jealousy only goes so far – after all, he’s enjoying an equally ridiculous existence.

  His next stop after London is a luxury villa in the mountains overlooking the Côte d’Azur. It has all the facilities he’s come to demand from his temporary homes – swimming pool, bar, amazing view – but as an added treat this place is set in the middle of a private twenty-acre forest. ‘I’ve always fancied my own forest,’ he said. The villa is far too big for just him, but that’s not a problem. He’s just launched his latest business: the YesAndClub – an organisation for people who don’t let practicalities get in the way of a good idea. The business has a mission statement that’s amusingly close to that of the Kings of the Road Club, and its first event just happens to be a two-week retreat in the mountains overlooking the Côte d’Azur. The attendance fees from members will cover the villa’s rental costs twice over, and, of course, attendees are expected to keep the fridge stocked with food and drink.

  Whether I’ll be able to join Robert in France will depend on how quickly I can finish writing this book. My deadline is now less than a month away, but I’ve been making good progress since I threw away my first draft and decided instead to tell the whole story of the past two years, not just the part t
hat suited my image. I have no idea what my publisher will think when he reads the resulting manuscript – between the arrest and near-arrest, the slumming it in Easy Hotels, the near-death experiences and the painful hangovers, it’s not exactly the feel-good blagger’s guide he had in mind.

  And yet, and yet … somehow it still satisfies all the criteria of a successful lifestyle guide. The past two years sound great on paper – a story of luxury hotels, pretty girls, fast cars and drunken adventures. It was all perfectly affordable too; at the end of my first year of travel I added up all my hotel bills and found that I had actually come in under budget. In fact, I’d saved about £800. But, like all good lifestyle guides, it wasn’t sustainable. Not even for me.

  Through trial and error, though, I’ve managed to figure out which aspects of life as a high-class nomad are sustainable. And the surprising answer is that, without a crippling drink problem, almost all of them are. My income may have taken a sharp upward turn now that I’m actually taking my work seriously, but my monthly outgoings are still about the same as they were two years ago – possibly less, adjusted for inflation. This despite the fact that, through a combination of rate-blagging and a ridiculous spiral of long-stay upgrades, I now keep a permanent suite at an amazing hotel a few blocks from San Francisco’s Union Square. A suite that’s costing me just a shade over $75 a night.