The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (38 page)

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.

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

I mean, I do notice him—but in his smart gray 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 backup debit card, having just pre-authorized it for $2000 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.
⁵⁰

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 realize 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 realized 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 dick.”

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 Cote 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 organization 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 Cote 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 that 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 $1600.

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.

And whenever I get bored with San Francisco, I know I can just hop on a plane. Thanks to the secrets I’ve learned these past twenty-four months, I know I have my pick of fully staffed accommodation in every major city on earth, a fleet of luxury cars at my disposal night and day and year-round access to villas in the Spanish mountains, and across most of Europe.

For me, none of this is a break from the pressures of my normal, everyday life—a nice birthday treat before returning to the rat race. This is my normal, everyday life. And all I had to do to start living it was to make one simple, life-changing decision.

The golden rule of the blagger.

I had to decide when to stop.

L
as Vegas
,
Nevada
,
December 29
,
2011.

Two full years have passed in the time it took you to turn that last page. Two years since I made the decision to call time on a decade of drinking and madness and blagging and bullshitting and of being the worst possible kind of friend to people who, unlike me apparently, cared whether I lived or died.

Given all that’s occurred in those twenty-four months, it’s little wonder that my US publisher demanded, on pain of money, that I write a coda to the manuscript. A few thousand words to answer the questions I was forced to leave hanging in the original. Questions like: am I still off the booze or, like most people who write these kind of alcoholic-makes-good memoirs, did I gradually slip back into old habits once the publicity benefits of sobriety became less marked? And if, remarkably, I did stay dry, how had it affected my life and my relationships with those around me. Am I still living in hotels?

No sense in burying the lede: I’m still sober. As I write this, the counter of
ispauldrinkingagain.com
is ticking towards 800 days. The public self-shaming has worked, so far, and I haven’t had a drink in twenty-four months. Even today, the support of friends and strangers steadfastly refused to subside even though, honestly, I struggle to remember what all the fuss was about alcohol. Much of that is down to the clear and present benefits of sobriety. Six months after quitting, I’d dropped 42 pounds in weight and was walking ten miles a day. A lack of hangovers gives you that kind of energy, and time. And once you start to feel better, you’re driven to eat better and walk further and … well … not drinking is addictive too, it turns out. Two years sober and I’m in the best shape of my life, and I’ve never been so happy. I’ll get to a couple of the other reasons for that happiness in a moment. But before that, let’s tick off the hotel question. Four
years after giving up my London flat am I still living a nomadic life in hotels?

In hotels, yes. Nomadic, slightly less so.

I’m writing these words from the Plaza Hotel in Downtown Las Vegas. I love the Plaza, not just because it’s a nice hotel with large rooms available for $50 a night, but also because, like me, it figured out a way to profit from the thorough hiding dealt out to the hospitality industry by the global financial meltdown.

One way or another, every city in America was affected by the bursting of the housing bubble, but Vegas—a city where risk is encouraged, and frequently rewarded—felt those effects harder than most. Before the crash, house-flipping had become something of a local sport, with first-time buyers and existing homeowners snapping up new houses and condos as fast as they could be churned out across the limitless desert land surrounding the city. As house prices continued to rise, the buyers would “flip”—and flip again—their property, using the proceeds to buy more and more and more real estate, despite having no real idea who would ultimately live in all these houses. It seems remarkable now—or fitting, perhaps—that even the inveterate gamblers of Vegas didn’t realize that no lucky streak lasts forever. The bubble burst, the flips turned to flops and the entire town went broke. Get into a Vegas cab today and there’s roughly a one in three chance that the driver will be a former construction worker—lured here by the plentiful building jobs and, of course, the cheap housing. And now they’re trapped, paying off an underwater mortgage—or flat-out homeless. Commercial property suffered too, albeit on a grander and more tragi-comic scale. A couple of miles south of the Plaza lies the 75 percent completed shell of the Fontainebleau hotel. Even unfinished, it’s an impressive sight: a 69-story, 3,889-room tower of shimmering blue glass. But the cranes are no longer moving; the recruitment center across the street has stopped
hiring. For the time being, the Fontainebleau is destined to remain a $2.9 billion building site—the banks having refused to make good on the final chunk of loans needed to complete construction. Finally, three months ago, the Fontainebleau’s owners auctioned off all of the hotel’s unused fixtures and fittings. Seeing the opportunity, the Plaza bought all of the room furniture, paying pennies on the dollar. Which is why I’m sitting in the newly refurbished Plaza, on a $400-a-night chair, at a $400-a-night-desk, next to a $400-a-night bed, all for less than fifty bucks.

Why I’m in Vegas—particularly Downtown Vegas—is a slightly longer story: one that began as a direct result of the book you’re holding. Last May, I decided that it would be fun to spend an entire month here, staying a single night in each of the hotels that line the Strip.

“Ugh. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

It would be fair to say that Sarah didn’t share my enthusiasm for my trip. Moreover, it turns out her opinion was shared by the majority of my American friends. “You’re an idiot,” said another, when I explained my brilliant plan. “Are you fucking kidding me?” wondered a third.