The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (10 page)

Michelle and I drove to the airport the next morning to return the Mustang.

As we headed to meet Michael at his hotel, I was literally bouncing on the back seat of the cab with excitement: not only were we renting the Challenger, but Michael had agreed to pay all of the costs, on the basis that I’d paid for the Mustang and he was the one obsessed with
Vanishing Point
. I’d happily agreed, especially given that Beverly Hills Luxury Car Rental was charging us a grand a day for two days, plus an additional full day’s rental for them to come to San Diego and collect it—plus a five grand deposit in case we trashed it.

“I get why Michael feels obliged to pay,” I said to Michelle as we neared the hotel, “I just can’t understand why he’s letting me drive. Who pays all that money and then lets someone else drive?”

It was only as we pulled up at the hotel and saw the beautiful hunk of purple steel, roof down and classic American rock pouring out of the retrofitted CD player that everything fell into place. There, sitting in the back seat next to a gigantic suitcase, was a pretty girl who couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one.

“Aha!” I said, “you must be Veronica.”

The fact that Michael hadn’t told us he had invited Veronica along on the next leg of the road trip didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was behind the wheel of a nearly forty-year-old classic car, with an engine
that purred like a grizzly bear receiving a hot stone massage. Veronica seemed like a nice girl—smart for her frighteningly young age, and really pretty—and as long as she and Michael were happy squashed in the back seat with all the luggage, then the more the merrier.

I glanced back as we pulled onto I-5. They seemed happy enough. One thing that did bother me, though, was that Veronica kept talking about things we were going to do “when we get back to LA.” I’d ignored it the first couple of times, assuming Michael and she had made plans, but when she referred to “the drive being even quicker on the way back,” my suspicion was confirmed. Michael had convinced this poor girl to drive down the coast with us—hundreds of miles from her home—without telling her it was a one-way trip.

How the hell was she going to get home? Christ, she probably still lived with her parents. I looked over at Michelle in the passenger seat. She looked back. We were obviously both thinking the same thing. Ah well, those logistics were Michael’s problem not ours.

A guy passing in his truck sounded his horn. He was pointing at the car, giving it—and us—a thumbs-up, “Nice,” he mouthed through the window.

“Thanks,” I mouthed in return.

Michelle turned up Huey Lewis and the News and we carried on south.

We decided to break the journey with a stopover in Laguna Beach, for no other reason than we’d all watched the reality show of the same name and it looked dreadful. All beach bunny bimbos and fake breasts and guys wearing backwards baseball caps and shell necklaces. “Douche central,” Veronica had called it.

Keen to avoid another Super 8 Motel fiasco, I’d actually taken the opportunity of a lunch stop to look up hotels in the area. There was a nice-sounding one on the main drag, according to TripAdvisor. I hadn’t had time to call and negotiate over the phone, so we’d have to try our luck at the desk. We rolled into town about four, and soon found the hotel, right by the sea, as advertised.

It certainly looked nice—easy access to the beach, a restaurant and bar, Wi-Fi. I left Michelle to park the car while I went in to sort the rooms. The board behind the reception desk advertised a rack rate of $125 per room. That wasn’t going to break the bank but still I decided to pull a variation of the upgrade trick, just for fun.

“I’m looking for three double rooms,” I said, sliding my passport across the desk. “Is $125 the best rate you can do?”

“I’m afraid so, sir,” replied the guy at reception. He looked even younger than Veronica. “We’re pretty slammed tonight.”

He took my passport and, despite the fact that I hadn’t actually confirmed that I wanted the rooms, he walked into the back office to Xerox it, while the registration cards began to print.

“I’m just going to need a credit card,” he said when he came back.

“Actually,” I said, “is there any chance I can see the rooms first?”

“You don’t want them?” said the receptionist, irritated by all the effort he’d put into the Xeroxing.

“Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we want them, I just want to look at them first.” The receptionist sighed; he was the only one on duty. He handed me the three keys and I promised to be right back once I’d checked out the rooms.

They were absolutely fine—not huge, but decently sized and beautifully decorated, with views over the beach. And for $125 a night. A bargain, really. I went back to reception and explained that, unfortunately, I’d have to leave them.

“But I’ve already printed the registration cards.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry to mess you around—it’s just that I’m a journalist and I’m writing a story about my road trip for my paper back in London.
The Times
,” I lied four times in quick succession.

The receptionist seemed to perk up at this. “
The London Times
? Serious?”

“For my sins,” I lied again.

“OK—I shouldn’t do this, but if you pay the $125 I could upgrade one of the rooms to our honeymoon suite. It has a Jacuzzi and a deck that leads to the beach. How would that be? Apart from that, I don’t think we have any other rooms.”

I made a big show of thinking about it. “That’s good enough for me.” He gave me a huge smile as he traded one of the double-room keys for the honeymoon suite.

“Enjoy your stay, and if you need anything at all during your stay, I’m Malcolm.”

“Thank you, Malcolm—I’ll remember that when I write my article.” I considered for a second taking the honeymoon suite for myself, but after Michael had dropped three grand on the car, I figured he’d earned his night of passion with Veronica. And not least because, presumably, he was going to dump her the next day when we got to San Diego.

Our night in Laguna Beach passed without incident. Except for the part where a ghost invited us to her wake.

We got to know a bit more about Veronica—as much as there is to know about a twenty-one-year-old—and we drank cocktails in a bar just a little way down the beach. At about midnight, Michael and his date headed off to bed, leaving Michelle and me to one last nightcap before we hit the sack ourselves. We still had a two-hour drive in the
morning, and then a full day’s conference to attend.

The
Guardian
was still keen on the idea of me writing something for them, a fact I’d used to blag a $1000 conference pass for free, plus a hefty discount on a hotel room. All I had to do was finish my drink, say goodnight to Michelle and walk the—I dunno—two hundred yards from the hotel bar to my room.

Michelle and I woke up at ten the next morning. I know this because she was lying beside me. We were both fully clothed—which was a good sign—but we were also both in the same room, which was less good. On the dressing table were two gigantic—and I mean gigantic—bottles, one half full of Captain Morgan rum and the other maybe a quarter full of Smirnoff.

The memory came back in chunks, but mostly in the right order. We’d been about to leave the bar—Michelle had gone to the toilet and I was paying our tab—when I looked up to find a skinny girl with a pointy face and terrifying bulging eyes staring right at me.

“You!” said the girl.

“Me?” I sought to clarify.

“You!” she confirmed, “I know who sent you.”

“Actually, I’m not from around here. I think you probably have me confused with …”

“Yes!” she said, “of course you’re English. She would have sent someone from England.”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

She put her face even closer to mine. I don’t think even the girl in the green dress had got this close. Things had got very weird, very quickly.

“Kos sent you to party with us.”

Michelle got back from the bathroom and picked up her coat from the chair behind me. “Don’t let me interrupt,” she said, somewhat misreading the situation. But the girl with the skinny face turned to Michelle.

“You!”

Here we go.

“You what, babe?”

“She sent you too …”

“Kos …” I explained to Michelle. A mistake: skinny-face girl took this as a confirmation and, grabbing Michelle in one arm and me in the other, began pulling us across the bar to where her friends had been standing watching.

Happily, her friends were slightly less mental and they were able to explain that they were in town for the funeral of their friend Kos who had died a few weeks earlier of a drug overdose.

“They drugged her. They put something in her coke,” explained one of the boys in the way that crazy people explain 9/11.

“They spiked her drink?” I said. “That’s sick. Did they catch who did it?”

“No,” said the boy, as if I were the one who was stoned, “not her Coke, her coke. And we don’t know who. She had enemies, dude.”

The others in the group nodded their agreement. They were all totally fucked. And now Michelle and I had been dragged into a weird drink-and-drug-fueled wake, apparently on the basis that one of the girls—Mel, the others called her—had received “like a total psychic feeling” that Kos had sent Michelle and me to get drunk with them. Still, who were we to argue with a dead girl? We’d seen the end of Carrie; we knew what happened to people who did that.

We spent the rest of the night back at the kids’ hotel room—a vast suite, paid for by someone’s dad apparently, with five or six bedrooms
and a kitchen full of catering size bottles of booze. One of the boys had a guitar on which he could only play covers of Semisonic songs and every so often one of the group would excuse herself to vomit over the balcony, onto the cars parked below. I prayed Michelle had closed the roof of the Challenger.

Still, the drink was free, the company was certainly entertaining and I knew that one day it would all make excellent fodder for an article.

Michelle and I had eventually left at about 5 a.m., but not before grabbing a bottle each for the road. And now we were waking up to a monstrous hangover and the guilt of having crashed some poor girl’s wake and stolen her friends’ booze.

“I can’t believe we did that,” said Michelle.

“It’s what Kos would have wanted,” I replied.

“That’s true,” said Michelle. “She must have known the risks when she invited us.”

The drive down to San Diego was exactly as painful as we deserved, and Michelle and I had to take turns with the driving while the other slept.

Michael and Veronica sat in the back again, but even through our hangovers we couldn’t help notice that their dynamic had changed overnight. Veronica was far more huggy and kissy than she had been the previous day while Michael was the precise opposite—polite, but distant. He spent the trip on his laptop, catching up with some work.

“Do you think they’ve had a fight,” I whispered to Michelle as we neared San Diego.

“No, babe,” she replied, like I was some kind of idiot, “I think they had sex.”

As agreed with the car rental company, we left the Challenger in the parking lot of the conference hotel: the Marriott in San Diego. The Marriott is a chain hotel with a rack rate of $250 a night, but I’d been able to swing a discount by sweet-talking Maureen, the conference PR coordinator, with promises of extensive coverage in some newspaper or other.

At the end of her email confirming the discount, and my free conference pass, she added a PS … “
Hope you enjoy the conference—can’t promise any girls in togas though
.”

In response to Rob’s constant emails demanding news, I’d started writing a blog about my travels, one of the first posts on which had included a photo of some of the hairdressers we’d met in Vegas, really only to make Rob sickeningly jealous. Clearly Maureen had been reading too. Michelle and I headed off to check into the hotel and collect our conference badges.

“I’ll catch up with you guys,” said Michael. He pointed at the Amtrak station that was directly across the street from the hotel, “I’m just going to walk Veronica to get a train.”

Wow. Had they talked about this last night, or were Michelle and I witnessing the world’s most casual and insensitive dumping?

“You don’t mind going back on your own, do you? It’s just that I’m going to be busy with this conference for a couple of days.”

Veronica just stared, first at Michael, then at Michelle and me.

“Uh, no … that’s fine.”

“Do you think he knew the station was opposite the hotel before
we got here?” Michelle asked as we walked on ahead.

“I have absolutely no idea,” I said, “but that was so horrible to watch it was almost brilliant.”

Michelle punched me on the arm, hard.

“God, I hate boys.”

For the duration of the two-day conference, I worked really hard, making careful notes during seminars with names like “How Technology Almost Lost the War in Iraq” and “Sexual Identity Online.” It was actually nice to have a couple of days off from hardcore boozing.

As we sat at the back of one panel, Michael introduced me to a new social networking site called Twitter that he’d apparently become addicted to. I didn’t get it: it seemed to be a bit like updating your Facebook status, but for the whole world rather than just your friends. I told him I’d give it a try.

Between sessions we lounged by the pool and I read a book called
The 4-Hour Workweek
, which I’d borrowed from Michael. It was well enough written, but the author—a guy called Timothy Ferriss—seemed to be arguing that the secret to a happy life was never replying to emails, selling herbal supplements on the Internet and then fucking off to Argentina to learn to dance. Fuck that, I thought; the secret to a happy life is getting drunk, going to the occasional conference and then writing about it for whoever pays the most.