For those who hadn’t been chosen to attend, it was just a bar crawl at the taxpayers’ expense. As far as I could tell, both sides were right. Looking at the attendee list, I was pleased to see a few names I recognized: much as I was loving my time in San Francisco, I was starting to miss the British cynicism of my friends back in the UK. I was half hoping that Robert’s name would be there, but his newest company—a site allowing people to recommend books, films and other things to their friends—was too young (“early stage” in business speak) to make the cut.
It was with no small measure of surprise then, that I opened the door of my hotel room on the morning Webmission began and found him standing there. He was wearing a set of plastic beads, plastic sunglasses and a bright pink baseball cap with the words “San Francisco” emblazoned across the peak.
“Rob! What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I was missing you, mate. And I wanted to meet this Eris girl you keep blogging about. I convinced Scott that it would be a sensible use of company funds for us to fly over to take part in Webmission.” Scott—Dr. Scott Rutherford—was Robert’s business partner, and basically the polar opposite of Rob.
A former particle physicist-turned-web programmer who also had a sideline as a professional DJ, Scott wouldn’t be seen dead in a set of plastic beads, or at least not since his Ibiza days. Scott was definitely the sensible one in the company. And yet somehow their partnership worked—Scott doing all of the technical work on building the site while Robert focused on what he called “big thinking and networking.” Which in this case apparently meant flying halfway around the world to get drunk with me in San Francisco.
It was by total coincidence that Robert had booked himself into the York Hotel: it was only when he checked in that he realized it was the place I’d been writing about on my blog. Receptionists never give out a guest’s room number, but Rob had switched on the accent and had quickly been able to get the information that had led him to my door. Kryptonite. It’d only been a couple of months since I’d last seen Robert, but, given the adventures I’d had since leaving London, it felt like a year. I gave him a hug.
“Let’s go and drink some wine in the sun,” I said. “Eris finishes work in a couple of hours. I’ll tell her to come and meet us.”
It really is amazing how much alcohol it’s possible to drink in a little under three hours, if you set your mind to it. And we did.
By the time Eris caught up with us, at a wine bar off Union Square, Robert and I had worked our way through the best part of four bottles of cheap pinot grigio, and a couple of beers. I’d told him all about Michael and me in Vegas with the toga girls; about the road trip, about South by Southwest and Dallas and New York. He was suitably jealous.
“I have to say, mate, this nomadic lifestyle sounds like it might be
the perfect way to live. My lease is up soon on my place in Leicester Square—I think I might give it a go.”
“You absolutely should. In fact, everyone should.” I explained how much I was paying at the York—well under my $100 budget—and how the favorable pound-to-dollar exchange rate—still hovering around the 1:2 ratio—meant that my food and drink budget was far, far smaller than back in London.
“These bottles of wine are costing us less than six pounds,” I said.
Robert looked at the small row of empties. “The amount you’re drinking, that’s fortunate,” he said. He was joking, but he had a point; I noticed that I was drinking twice as fast as him. I’d put it down to the fact that he’d just flown in from London and so was too tired to concentrate on hard drinking. But I had definitely been drunk more often lately, waking up not remembering the night before and, even with the exchange rate, discovering that I’d spent a fortune on booze.
I realized that I’d been basically living in “vacation mode”; the mode that Brits tend to go into when we leave the country for a fortnight in Spain. But this wasn’t a vacation; it was my everyday life. Just because I could do my entire week’s work—a couple of freelance columns and maybe a bit of time thinking about what my next book might be—in a day didn’t mean I could spend the rest of the time paralytic.
My liver was already a mess before I’d left London; God only knows what it must look like now. I glanced down at my nails—relieved to see there were still no little white lines—and, although it was hard to tell with the suntan, I’m pretty sure my skin hadn’t turned yellow.
The clouds parted and the California sunshine hit us again, glinting off my empty glass and Robert’s half-full one. I topped them both up, enjoying how the sun made the yellow liquid light up as if I was pouring out pure magic.
“So tell me about Eris,” said Rob.
“Oh, she’s delightful,” I said, “she’s given me the grand tour and
she’s moved into the York with me.”
“So you like her then?”
“Well …”
Of course I liked her—she was great: cute, smart, funny—all the stuff that girls you like are supposed to be. But the more time we were spending together, the more I realized that it was only ever going to be a fling. For a start, she’d just split up from her long-term boyfriend and wasn’t looking for anything serious, but more importantly she clearly wasn’t that into me.
A few nights earlier we’d had a huge fight after she disappeared with some guy at the end of a party and didn’t turn up back at the York until the next morning. “We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend,” she’d pointed out, quite reasonably.
But as well as denting my ego, it had also reinforced what this was: a bit of fun for both of us. Of course when I explained all of this to Robert, I was careful to make it clear that, while Eris was hugely into me—possibly even entertaining thoughts of marriage—I wasn’t going to be tied down by some girl.
“Well—yeah, she’s fun and all, but I’m not sure I fancy her enough for it to be a serious thing. You know, she’s cute—but there are some amazing women in California. Really amazing—you really have to see them …”
Robert wasn’t responding. He was just looking at the girl who had sat down next to me while I was busy explaining all the flaws with Eris, which meant that I wasn’t interested in getting serious with her. I think I’d just got to the part about preferring girls with bigger breasts when I realized something was amiss.
“You must be Eris,” said Robert, finally breaking the silence.
“You must be Robert,” said Eris. “And you,” she said, turning to me, “must be drunk.” I was absolutely trashed. The drunkenness hit me as if someone had emptied a cement mixer over me, starting from my head, and slowly trickling down over my entire body. I should have
reined it back, told her I was only joking, apologized—anything. But I didn’t.
My brain was going into alcoholic shutdown and the only thing I could think of doing was pressing on.
“Let me finish,” I slurred, and then continued to explain, to both Eris and Robert now, why she was far from being my ideal woman.
Looking back, it was ridiculous—Eris was amazing, and in a different set of circumstances—had she been looking for a relationship with anyone, let alone me, for example—I could probably have started to fall in love with her. More than any of that, though, spending the previous week with her had made me fall in love with San Francisco.
For that at least, she was one of the best things that had ever happened to me.
803
Waking up fully clothed in a bathtub wearing a pair of plastic sunglasses is better than waking up naked in a hotel corridor. That much we can all agree on. It is, however, still a far cry from waking up in a bed.
Through the bathroom door I could just make out the time on the television clock. Eight a.m. Not bad, I thought, until I realized that my last memory was from seven o’clock the previous evening where I’d knocked over a whole bottle of wine during what I think was a very public argument with Eris.
I scrambled out of the bath and called Robert’s room. He answered on the third or fourth ring. “Hello, darling” he said, correctly reasoning that I was the only person who could possibly be calling his hotel landline at eight in the morning.
“So, meeting Eris last night was wonderful,” he said. “Let’s go for breakfast.”
We sat in a booth at the Pinecrest Diner down the street from the hotel—a place where, thanks to Eris’s tour, I knew that in 1997 a cook had shot a waitress in a dispute over poached eggs. Sure enough, the menu now contains a prominent notice: “We regret that we are unable to serve poached eggs.” Probably wise.
Over scrambled eggs and crappy American bacon, Robert explained that my night had ended when—at about eight or nine o’clock—I’d finally finished lecturing Eris on why we could never be a couple, despite her making it clear that nothing could be further from her mind.
Robert had at last convinced me to go back to my hotel, while he spent the rest of the night trying to do damage limitation. “I think I convinced her that you weren’t normally such an asshole and that you were just very drunk.”
“I
was
very drunk.”
“I know, mate, but even by your standards you were impressive. Do you remember telling me—in front of her—that her breasts weren’t up to your standards?”
“Oh God, really? Where the fuck did that come from? I like her breasts!”
The old man in the booth behind us tutted loudly. I lowered my voice.
“So do I,” said Robert, barely able to conceal a smile.
“Exactly, so … wait … what do you mean ‘so do I’?”
“Well, after you left, she was really upset by what you said, so she asked for my opinion. Just took me to the corner of the bar and flashed me.” I choked on my scrambled eggs and then couldn’t stop laughing. Robert was right: Eris was brilliant.
“Now all I have to do is convince her ever to speak to me again.”
But making things up with Eris would have to wait. Robert had more news. The previous week back in London he’d been asked to arrange a networking event for a visiting American journalist who was
in town meeting dot-com entrepreneurs in her role as columnist for
BusinessWeek
. Robert had recognized her name, and a quick visit to my blog had confirmed where he’d heard it before. The journalist’s name was Sarah Lacy.
“She’s actually great fun,” said Robert. “In fact I think you’d like her. You and she have similar senses of humor.”
“Uh, I don’t think she’d agree with that if she saw what I wrote on my blog.”
“Oh, we talked about that,” said Rob.
“She doesn’t read stuff people say about her online anymore, but I told her—more or less—what you’d written. She said you sounded like a dick, but I vouched for you and said you guys should meet when she was back in San Francisco. I emailed her yesterday; she’s getting back to town tomorrow and is going to come to one of the Webmission events—a barbecue at some PR guy’s house.”
Part of me knew that meeting Sarah Lacy was a bad idea. What if she’d decided to look up my blog after Robert had spoken to her? I’d already pissed off one woman in the past twenty-four hours.
But, then again, after South by Southwest, I’d actually taken the time to read some of her
BusinessWeek
columns: they were insightful, funny and annoyingly well written, and from Robert’s description she definitely sounded like someone I’d like to meet. I’d just have to suck it up, go to the barbecue and hope she didn’t stab me with a steak knife.
804
“You Brits are actually far less offensive than people in the US.”
Saying that out loud was Sarah Lacy’s first mistake, given that she was talking to me and Robert. She’d arrived at the barbecue a few minutes after us, and Robert had immediately dragged me over to say hello.
I mumbled a few apologies about my South by Southwest post, which—to my relief, but also slight disappointment—she still hadn’t read, but she dismissed my pathetic ass-kissing, saying that the abuse she gets from US commentators was far worse than anything I might have said. Having read some of that abuse, I agreed with her.
Still, though, Robert had taken her comments about our inability to offend as a challenge. I forget the joke he decided to tell but I know the punch line was “it’s lucky your party trick isn’t a double-headed blowjob.”
I know this because Robert insisted I video the exchange on my digital camera, but by the time I’d figured out the video setting I was only in time to record the punch line and Lacy’s response. We were hoping for an on-camera “that’s inappropriate.” Instead all we got was loud laughter, and a concession that—OK—some Brits could be more offensive than Americans.
I liked Sarah Lacy. Her wedding ring—and constant references to her husband—had helped me to ignore the fact that, yes, she was astonishingly pretty and instead concentrate on how much we had in common when it came to work. She told me how “everyone” in London had insisted that we meet, on the grounds that “you’re apparently the British version of me.” But she also admitted that, from the other reviews she’d heard from my “friends,” she had been expecting someone far drunker.
“You should have seen me yesterday,” I said.
“Well, how about later this week? Robert told me you have a book out about London entrepreneurs, and my book about their San Francisco counterparts is out next month. Let’s get a drink one afternoon and compare notes.”
Back at my hotel—while I waited for Eris to come over so I could take her for the world’s most groveling apology dinner—I wrote an email to Hannah.
From: Paul
To: Hannah
I met Sarah Lacy today. She’s not a cunt. In fact she’s great. I feel like a traitor—I’m sorry.
The reply came back almost instantly.
From: Hannah
To: Paul
Oh, Paul, you haven’t fallen for her have you?
“No!” I replied, “I mean, only in so far as I fall for every American woman. But for once my crush is purely professional. She described me as the British version of herself, and I think she might have a point. I have a feeling we’re going to be friends.”