The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (4 page)

Five minutes of tweaking and plucking and tuning later, he cranked up the volume on the amp, paused for some dramatic effect … and then … blaaaaaaaaaang … the first chord that my hat stand had ever played. I don’t know anything about music, but I know when I hear someone playing the shit out of a guitar. And Stuart played the shit out of the guitar.

“Wow,” I said when he was finished. “I didn’t know it could do that. Maybe I’ll hold onto it after all.” Stuart looked horrified. It
was
a trap!

“I’m kidding—I’m just glad someone is going to get some use out of it finally. Hey, you don’t by any chance want a free flat screen television do you?”

“What—for nothing?”

“Yeah. Help yourself, it’s by the door.”

I’m not sure if Stuart learned anything that day about the value of money, but I certainly did. After waving him and his mom off with the last of my possessions, I went to the kitchen drawer where I’d been keeping the proceeds. I slid the drawer from its runners, tipped the contents—a small pile of notes and a few coins—onto the worktop and started counting. Ten seconds later, I finished counting. My entire life was worth £540. I laughed.

I laughed partly because it was such a tragically small amount of money for almost everything that I’d spent nearly three decades acquiring. But I also laughed because £540 was precisely the cost—including tax and booking fees—of my plane ticket to New York. Fate had given my plan its stamp of approval. It was time to go.

W
ednesday, February 20, 2008
. Virgin Atlantic flight VS045 from Heathrow to JFK. I remember it vividly.

I arrived at the airport with less than an hour to spare, dropped off the suitcase containing my entire life, and headed toward security.

I’ve never understood the “arrive two hours before your flight” thing, especially if you’ve checked in online—but even so, given that my flight was due to take off at 2 p.m. and it was now half past one, I was cutting it a little fine.

Luckily there was only the merest hint of a line at security and, after the usual dicking around with shoes and belts and laptops, I was walking—maybe jogging slightly—down the jetway onto the plane.

“Paul!”

I almost never turn around when I hear my name shouted in public. The odds just aren’t in favor of reacting; nine times out of ten, you end up waving, through reflex, to a total stranger.

But then came a jab from behind; right in the spine. I reacted to that. It was my friend Zoe, out of breath, having clearly made it to the airport even later than I had.

“Hey! What are you doing here?” I asked idiotically, given that we were on a jetway, a few feet from the door of a plane, and Zoe was also dragging a suitcase.

“Well, obviously you’re flying to New York. But why?”

“Oh, just some interviews, publisher meeting—they’ve arranged a reading, I think; usual bullshit. You?”

“Long story. Sort of an extended working vacation.”

“Really?” asked Zoe. “You got the I or the O?”

For some reason, my friends love to talk about visas—partly, I
think, because they can never quite believe any country has been stupid enough to give them one. Zoe was traveling under the I Visa—granting “representatives of the foreign media” access to America for anything up to five years.

For reasons that probably have nothing to do with freedom of the press, journalists are the only people not eligible to enter the US for professional reasons under the Visa Waiver Program. Many have tried, hoping they could just lie their way through immigration; most succeed but several have ended up in handcuffs, a holding cell and then back on the next plane home.

If I was planning to do any reporting while in the US, I probably should have had an I Visa. The O Visa, on the other hand, is for “aliens of extraordinary ability.” Rock stars, actors, E.T.—people like that. I most definitely should not have had an O Visa.

“Nah, I’m just on the waiver. I’m not really going for work—more of a vacation. During which I might do some writing. For which I might get paid. But I’ll just brazen it out at immigration; pretend I’m not really a journalist. Which won’t be difficult, given that I’m not.”

Zoe isn’t really a journalist either. But she’s definitely a writer, and a successful one. A year or so earlier, her blog—a candid diary of her sex life—had been turned into a book:
Girl with a One Track Mind
. The UK edition had sold a zillion copies and now the US edition was doing well too.

As befits Zoe’s status as a hugely successful author, the words “Premium Economy” were printed on her boarding card, while I’d be sitting in economy. The memoirist feudal system, as illustrated by airline seating.

As we boarded the plane I glanced to the left, half expecting to see Dave Eggers enjoying a glass of champagne in Business Class.
¹¹
Realizing that Zoe was on my flight gave me a momentary twinge. The same twinge that I suppose minor celebrities have when they find they’re on the same plane as Bono or George Clooney. The realization that when—inevitably—the plane plunges into the sea or plummets nose-first into a field in Pennsylvania, they’ll just be a footnote in the coverage.

Does it work the same way for writers, I wondered. If we skid off the runway on landing and burst into flames, would the book industry trade press mourn Zoe’s death and forget about me?
¹²

As it turned out, we didn’t crash, giving me the full seven-hour flight to go over my plans, and to become increasingly excited about them. From the airport I’d take a cab to Manhattan, and the Pod Hotel on East 51st Street.

I really like staying at the Pod: not only is it centrally located but it’s inexpensive in the off-season and has flat screen TVs, iPod docks, rainhead showers and free Wi-Fi. And for all of those reasons it’s incredibly popular with young foreign travelers, making the place one giant pick-up joint.

With just a couple of emails to their reservations department, I’d managed to negotiate a double room for $89 a night. I’d decided to set my accommodation budget at $100: about equal to the amount I’d be paying to stay in London if I’d accepted the increase in rent.

I’d also agreed with myself that savings could be carried over, day to day, month to month, so each night I stayed at the Pod I was saving $11 that I could use for wherever I went next. After my month at the Pod, I planned to head south.

Although I’d visited America a dozen times or more, I’d only ever been to the coastal states—New York, California, Florida: the usual. Like an overgrown backpacker, I wanted to see the “real America” so, like that same backpacker, I’d bought a book at the airport bookshop called
USA by Rail
with the intention of plotting a journey that would take me to all of the places I’d seen in movies but never visited. Places like Utah, which I’ve always imagined is like a safari park filled with Mormons.

Flipping through
USA by Rail
, I was sucked straight into the dream. In the UK, traveling by train has lost all its romance—no one will write a love song about taking the 6:15 p.m. from Glasgow to London St. Pancras but in America the love affair lives on: the book listed routes with names like
Texas Eagle
,
California Zephyr
and
Empire Builder
.

My plan was to take the two-day
Crescent
service from New York Penn Station down to New Orleans, arriving in time for Mardi Gras at the beginning of March. I feel horrible admitting this, but at the back of my mind I figured that after Hurricane Katrina the city’s hotel prices had probably gone down a bit.

After New Orleans, I’d hop on the
Sunset Limited
service and head west to Los Angeles. March was off-season on the railroads too, so I’d booked a one-month rail pass for $470, which would allow me unlimited travel throughout the whole of the US, and some of Canada, for thirty days. I’d only have to spend five nights on the train rather than in a hotel before the pass paid for itself.

In fact, I’d become so intoxicated by the idea of seeing America by rail that, by the time I landed in New York, I’d planned a journey that lasted for the whole month of March. A huge circular route that would take me from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Salt Lake City (Mormons!) to Denver to Chicago to Pittsburgh to Washington, DC, and back to New York. Almost half that time would be spent on the train: a traveling hotel for less than $30 a night.

As we began our descent into JFK, passing low over Long Island and the tightly packed houses with backyard swimming pools that seem to cluster on the approach to every airport in America, I remember feeling happy, and strangely organized. Like a schoolboy beginning a fresh exercise book, I had neatly copied my two-month travel and accommodation plan onto the first page of a brand new Moleskine notebook.

As the year progressed, I was planning to use the book to plan each successive stage and to track how well I was keeping to my $100-a-day accommodation budget for the year. The numbers looked good: assuming I didn’t stray too far from my plan, February and March were going to come in well under budget, giving me plenty of flexibility for accommodation costs in April, May and into the peak season.

Which was good, as I was past the point of no return: the last thing I’d done before going through to departures was to drop the key to my apartment in the mail to my (former) landlady along with a letter, politely but firmly telling her where to stick her rent hike. Now I had no ties, no fixed abode, and no responsibilities beyond a nightly hotel budget and the travel plan scribbled in my little black notebook.

The final plan I’d made, in the cab to the hotel, was to cut down on drinking for a while. London had given my liver a thrashing. I’d read online that one of the signs of liver failure was a yellowing of the eyeballs and horizontal white lines across the fingernails. The fact that I’d looked up those symptoms in the first place, let alone that I was now checking for them every morning, suggested a month on the wagon might not be a bad thing.

Instead of boozing, I’d drink orange juice and eat salads and go for long walks around the city. I’d get healthy again. Oh yes, I remember that all very clearly. The airport, the flight, the planning, the cab, the plan to stop drinking. I remember checking into the hotel and putting my bag in my room. I remember having a shower and changing my
shirt. I remember deciding to head out for a walk to orientate myself—to get a feel for where the local dry-cleaners and restaurants and bars could be found. I remember—ah, here we go, yes—I remember finding an Irish pub that looked friendly—Something O’Something’s—there was a plastic leprechaun, I definitely remember that—and I remember noticing the pretty brunette with the ponytail, wearing a CUNY sweatshirt and sitting on her own.

She was reading
Down and Out in Paris and London
, which I remember I’d used as my opening line. “I’ve always found the Rough Guides to be more reliable than Orwell …” I shook my head, hoping it would hasten the return, if not of my memory then at least of the rest of my vision.

I had a dim recollection of a bottle of wine and a conversation about how she was studying Contemporary World Literature. I’m sure I found a way—after we’d drunk, I think, shots of sambuca—to mention that I was a soon-to-be-published author, but at the same time to shrug it off like it was no big deal. I’m pretty sure we left the Irish bar and went to another place down the street where her friends were celebrating—what?—something.

There was a bottle of champagne. But after that—nothing. I can’t remember how I got back to the Pod. And I have absolutely no idea what possible set of circumstances led to my being slumped on the floor, head leaning against the closed door of my room. I shook my head again and slowly I started to focus on how long my hotel room was. And narrow. Weird. And that’s when I realized the first of my two problems. I
was
slumped against my hotel room—I had that right—but, rather than being inside the room, I was outside, in the corridor. The second of my problems—and certainly the most pressing—was that I was stark fucking naked.

Think, think, think … how the hell had I got there? Were my clothes inside my room? And, if so, had I made it into the room, undressed, and for some reason walked outside again? And if not—oh God—had I walked naked through the hotel?

My brain simply wasn’t capable of processing all of these questions. All I knew is that I had to get back into my room before anyone saw me. I tried the door. Locked, obviously. I gave it a half-hearted shove with my shoulder and immediately fell back down to the floor, still drunk. “Hmm,” I thought, “maybe that explains the slumping.”

I had no other option: I’d have to go down to the lobby and ask someone to let me in. I looked up and down the corridor. When this happens in movies, there’s always some appropriately-comedic piece of bric-a-brac that can be pressed into service as a covering: a moose’s head, a vase, something like that. Not in real life.

The corridors in the Pod don’t have windows; there weren’t even any curtains. No windows also meant I had no way of figuring out what time it was. What if I’d been slumped there for hours? What if it was 10 a.m. and a nice family with young children was checking in and the first thing they saw was a naked Brit emerging drunkenly from the elevator into the lobby, not-so-proudly cupping his genitals in his hands? That’s no way to start a holiday. It is, however, a great way to start a lawsuit.

My only lucky break was that I’d been given a room right opposite the elevators. I pressed the call button and the door opened straight away, which was good—it meant less time in the corridor—but also potentially bad as it meant someone had arrived at my floor not long before. I prayed that person had been me. As the car made its way downwards I caught a glimpse of my pathetic reflection in the elevator’s mirrored walls. “Dear God, Paul, you’re a mess” I thought out loud.