The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (12 page)

But what started out as criticisms of Lacy’s professional abilities had quickly become highly abusive, personal attacks. The final straw came when I noticed one commenter on a popular blog had written that he wanted to rape her. This over an interview at a geek conference. Suddenly the jokes weren’t funny any more. I’d like to say that at this point I took the post down. Zoe was right: the truth is that much of what I wrote stemmed from jealousy—Zuckerberg was younger than me and worth more than a billion dollars; Lacy was a successful
BusinessWeek
journalist—attractive, wealthy and considerably better known that I was. And after today’s performance, she was only going to be more famous. Damn her.

But, then again, both Zuckerberg and Lacy were celebrities, of a sort. The rape threats were pretty extreme, but they must be used to this kind of stuff: people making jokes and silly threats online—it’s just the price of fame. Meanwhile, my inbox was full of messages from people congratulating me on my hilarious parody. People were stopping
me in the corridors of the convention center to tell me they thought I was “freakin’ awesome.”

They’d asked about my upcoming book, having read about it on my site, and said they were looking forward to reading more of my stuff. If I took down the blog post all of that attention would go away. Wasn’t I entitled to some fame too? In the end I decided on a compromise: I left the post up, but attached a note emphasizing that I thought Lacy was a great reporter who’d just had a bad gig and attacking those who were posting abusive comments about her:

I still felt like a coward and a hypocrite; wasn’t I one of those jealous
little fucks? But any further soul-searching would have to wait. Michael had just texted: he’d decided to fly into Austin from his meetings in San Francisco and was ready to party. Tonight would be one last hurrah after the road trip before he flew back to London and I continued on my travels.

By the time Michael and I arrived at Pure Volume—a huge white tent erected on wasteland opposite the convention center—it was nearly 2 a.m. The tent had an all-night license, with a free sponsored bar, and so every night, when all of the other bars in the city closed, all of the conference attendees headed there to keep drinking. The queue snaked around the block, and it didn’t seem to be moving.

“Fuck this,” I said to Michael and headed to the front of the line, press credentials in hand. The venue looked half empty, but the bouncer waved away my press pass.

“We’re full,” he said.

“But it’s dead in there,” I pointed out, not unreasonably.

“Sorry, guys—we need to leave room for the VIPs,” he replied. “We just had to turn away the DJ’s girlfriend.”

Presumably the DJ booth was full as well. But whether there really was a capacity problem or if, as seemed more likely, the sponsors wanted to keep the number of peasants inside low to save on the cost of free booze, we knew there was almost no chance of us getting in before daylight. It was time to figure out a plan B. We thanked the bouncer for his time and ever-so-casually sauntered away, waiting until we were out of sight before ducking down the alleyway behind the tent.

Our way was barred by another bouncer, standing guard over the
flap of canvas leading to the VIP area at the back of the makeshift venue. He too claimed that he couldn’t let anyone else in. “But the whole place is empty,” I argued. “Last night it was ten times more full and we still got in.” A harmless lie.

“I have to say I agree with you guys,” said the bouncer, “but I want to keep my job.” At least he was acknowledging the ridiculousness of the situation—but the simple fact remained that Michael and I weren’t famous enough to get into the VIP area. Clearly the bouncer hadn’t been one of the 100,000 people who had read my blog. I mean, that was a type of fame, wasn’t it?

Our fruitless negotiations were interrupted by the arrival of what appeared to be a Green Day tribute band—five or six nice middle-class boys with torn clothes and punk hair—led down the alleyway by a besuited promoter. He marched up to the bouncer as his teenage charges stood sullenly and patiently behind him like schoolchildren queuing to get into a museum.

“Hey, dude,” said the promoter to the bouncer, “these guys are with me—you’ve got to let them in; they’re like the freaking Rolling Stones or something.”

Michael and I looked the band up and down. Here’s a quick list of ways they were like the Rolling Stones … 1) They had feet.

And yet the promoter’s confidence—likening a group of children to the Rolling Stones as if the similarity were a statement of fact—had paid off; the band was whisked inside. The bouncer didn’t want to risk getting fired for refusing to let the “freaking Rolling Stones or something” in.

Well, if that’s how this has to work, I thought, so be it. The promoter was still outside the tent, making a call on his mobile. Presumably he needed to warn the band’s moms that their sons would be home late. Michael and I waited until he’d finished and made our approach.

“Excuse me,” I said, “who were those guys?”

“They’re called ‘October.’” We stared back blankly.

“You might not have heard of them—but they’re, like, huge—like the Goo Goo Dolls or something.”

“The Goo Goo Dolls? Cool! Actually, maybe you can help us—we’re journalists from the
Financial Times
in London, and we’re in town covering the best new bands at South by Southwest. Actually, this our last night in town,” I lied, three times—the bit about it being our last night was true.

Michael picked up the lie. It was like being back in Vegas—I secretly hoped there’d be call for a pun.

“If you can help us to get in and meet October, then I’m sure we could find a way to mention them in our article. I’ve heard they’re pretty good.”

“Like the freaking Rolling Stones or something,” I added, helpfully.

“Journalists?” His eyes widened. “Hey!” he shouted to the bouncer “these guys are from the London
Times
—they’re with me too.”

The VIP area was weird. An uneasy mix of music, film and interactive celebrities. You could tell the Internet-famous straight away; the Internet, as a medium, hadn’t been around long enough for any of its celebrities to figure out how to act cool.

The web kids looked like first-generation immigrants to planet fame. You could spot the old-media-famous easily enough too, because they actually had recognizable faces. I saw Moby standing at the bar talking to Mark Cuban—the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks who had made his fortune founding technology companies.

On the other side of the room, a guy who looked suspiciously like Will Ferrell was talking to a girl who I’m pretty sure was Kate Hudson. And tucked away far in the corner, the boys from October were playing
Guitar Hero
—and losing, badly. We’d been in the room three whole minutes, so of course Michael was already chatting up a girl. I
couldn’t place her at first, but then I realized she was Justine Ezarik—or “iJustine”—an Internet-famous spokesmodel who produced web-based promotional videos for companies that wanted to play up their geek cred.

Justine was clutching an old-fashioned lunch pail with the Junior Mints logo across the front, which was all the “in” Michael needed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the half-empty pack of Junior Mints he’d been carrying since Barstow and offered her one.

Michael’s latest business is an online puzzle company called Mind Candy. The name is a play on the phrase “eye candy” and has nothing—I can’t emphasize this enough—to do with actual confectionery of any sort. And yet as I walked past, I overheard a snippet of their conversation …

“So what do you, like, do?” asked Justine.

“I run a company called Mind Candy.”

“OhMiGod I
love
candy!”

“Well,”—offering a Junior Mint—“that’s what we make.”

Nice work, Michael—but he could have iJustine; I was far more interested in the girl I’d spotted standing by the bar, drinking from a very large plastic cup of what I would later confirm was neat vodka.

“Hannah!”

Hannah is Canadian, but she lives in London where she works as design director for a very successful website. We’d only met properly once before, and it would be fair to say that we hadn’t really got off on the right foot. Much of this had to do with my being very, very drunk and deciding that it would be hilarious to accuse her of being an American. Repeatedly. For about an hour.

After sixty minutes of my drunken bullshit, Hannah had responded in the only appropriate manner: by physically propelling me across the room into a table of drinks.

I’d liked Hannah immediately. In fact, I’d had a ridiculous crush on her from the moment she pushed me into that table. Who wouldn’t fall for
that
girl? The fact that she was astonishingly sexy, with bright red hair and lipstick to match, also helped.

What didn’t help was the fact that she had a long-term boyfriend—and that she thought I was a drunken asshole. And yet, tonight she didn’t seem particularly un-pleased to see me. In fact, she greeted me as if I were her best friend in the world.

“Paul! I was looking for you! I read your blog post about Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerberg. I had no idea you were so funny. Wow—that Lacy chick sounds like a
cunt
.”

“Actually, I feel terrible about that post. I’m sure Sarah Lacy is a lovely person and a damn fine journalist; I was just being jealous and stupid.”

That’s what I should have said. But Hannah—lovely, sexy Hannah—thought I was funny. In fact, I got the distinct feeling she was flirting with me. Holy shit—Hannah thinks I’m funny? Because of that horrible blog post?

“Yeah, total cunt.” I said. “So, how have you been?”

I
left Austin the following morning on Amtrak’s
Texas Eagle
service, having finally arranged to pick up my rail pass from the local ticket office. The pass was actually supposed to have expired a few days earlier, but when I explained that I was a journalist from London, researching a book about great American train journeys, the ticket agent had kindly agreed to postdate the ticket so that I could use it for the full thirty days.

Only two trains a day stop in Austin—one heading north towards Chicago and one heading back in the opposite direction. Miss your train and it’s a twenty-four-hour wait in a station that’s essentially a concrete shed next to a railroad track. So infrequent are the services—and so slow are the trains—that they haven’t even made the effort to build a proper platform: passengers just mill around next to—and sometimes on—the tracks. It’s more than a little freaky to watch a group of children picking out coins and other conductive debris from between what would, in the UK, be live rails.

The real difference between the railroads in the UK and the US, though, is with the trains themselves. My
USA by Rail
book had prepared me for them to be impressive, but when the
Texas Eagle
finally rumbled into view it was like the bit in
Jurassic Park
when Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern first see a dinosaur. The cars are huge double-decker beasts filled with what must surely be the largest train seats in the world. Even when occupied by Texans they still look big.

Sleeper cars are available but, given how much legroom there is, there’s really no need to spend the extra money; just bring a blanket and a pillow. One other feature of the seats, though, that I hadn’t expected: they’re almost all empty. And there’s a good reason—train journeys in
America are long. Really, insanely, long. I had decided finally to make my way back to New York, first traveling up the middle of the country to Chicago, before changing trains to head east back to Penn Station in Manhattan. The Austin–Chicago leg alone would take twenty-nine hours, and the man in the ticket office had warned me to add another three or four onto that for delays.

“The problem” he explained, “is that outside of the major metropolitan areas, there are no routes designed specifically for passengers.” Instead, Amtrak’s services run on freight lines, which means that freight services take priority. If a train loaded with coal or Mustangs needs to pass, the Amtrak service pulls into a siding and waits, even if that means having to reverse back along the tracks for a few miles first.

If I were trying to get somewhere in a hurry, Amtrak would be an enormously frustrating way to travel. But I wasn’t in a hurry. I still had almost two months left in the country under the visa waiver and no particular place to be, just a couple of freelance articles to write about ETech and South by Southwest, and maybe some adventures to have on the way to New York. With those goals, the train would be perfect: a moving office where the view from the window changes every second and I could get on and off at any time if the opportunity for adventure presented itself.