The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (19 page)

The former was the result of a drive to the nearby town of Alora where we found a small kiosk selling ice cream and water-balloons. The latter was ten-pin bowling using empty cans and some oranges that we managed to cajole out of a kindly local farmer. Each game lasts for five rounds, or until the last orange has been smashed to Tropicana. Then
there was “Kate Nash or not Kate Nash”—a game where players listen to short (five- or six-second) clips from my iTunes library and have to determine whether the singer is London-based singer-songwriter Kate Nash or not Kate Nash. Robert was the undisputed champion of this, having zipped through Kate Nash, Remi Nicole, Kate Nash, Laura Marling, Kate Nash and Kate Nash before being tripped up by Colbie Caillat.

There was “Roof Ball”—a game involving getting a ball stuck on a roof. That was quite a short game. Finally there was “Road Frisbee”: All of the fun of Frisbee, all of the excitement of being hit by a car coming around a blind corner at high speed.

The games were fun, for sure, but as you will no doubt testify, they don’t make for fascinating reading. No, if I wanted to fulfill my obligations to Rebecca, I knew I had to accept reality, no matter how unpleasant. My only option was to spend every single day getting absolutely blind drunk in one of the two local bars—Alejo’s and Carpe Diem—in the hope that I would inevitably end up doing something stupid enough to write about.

The plan began well. On the first night Robert and I decided to see if we could drink so many beers that the empties would cover an entire table in Alejo’s bar. Even with the relatively strong euro, bottles of San Miguel were still less than a dollar each and by 3 p.m. we’d drunk at least a dozen each. At this point Alejo realized that we were likely to be his best customers that week and so started offering us even more beers on the house. For less than fifty dollars, between us we covered an entire table with beer bottles. It was only then that we remembered that the bar was halfway down the mountain, and our villa was right at the top. An amusing blog post about mud and fields and goats and a frighteningly deep leg wound soon followed.

Another night we decided to try our luck with the local women. And by local women, I mean the only two twenty-something-year-olds in the entire village. Every other woman was either under sixteen or
over sixty. “But don’t forget the age of consent is only fourteen here,” said Rob. He was joking. I hope.

Our efforts with the twenty-somethings were relatively unsuccessful. Robert wisely gave up after a couple of minutes when he realized that there was no hand gesture for “if I told you you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” Or, rather, no hand gesture that wouldn’t get him shot by an angry farmer dad.

I pressed on, though, realizing that I was at least fluent in the language of alcohol. Buying girls a drink is the same in any language, right? Unfortunately the girls had figured out another language that was universal: they knew the lyrics to hundreds of English pop songs and were able to repurpose them to explain their lack of enthusiasm for going up a mountain with a drunk Brit.

“Get back,” said the first girl, while the second sang the lyrics of Babylon Zoo’s “Spaceman,” to indicate that she wanted space, man. I had to admit, it was a rather neat pun.

The most exciting drunken adventure, though, came at the end of our second week, when Robert’s business partner Scott flew out to join us. The three of us spent an enjoyable afternoon getting to grips with the villa’s barbecue grill, thanking our lucky stars that there were no women to be amused by how inept we were at creating fire and grilling meat. Then we headed down to Alejo’s where Robert had become adept at ordering vodka and Red Bull by doing a passable impression of a drunken man pretending to be a bull.

Through trial and error, we’d realized that there were no actual licensing laws in Valle de Abdajalis. As long as we were happy spending our money, Alejo was happy to serve us. Generally we’d made it to about three o’clock in the morning before stumbling back up the mountain, but tonight Scott decided we should do a real test—how late could we continue drinking until Alejo insisted we call it a night? You could tell Scott was a scientist.

The experiment—which was actually closer to a battle of wills—began just before 9 p.m., and by 3 a.m. we were trashed. Beers had become mixed spirits, which had become straight spirits, which had become shots. I was wearing a cowboy hat and Scott was occupied at the far end of the bar helping Alejo cut a wooden butternut squash in half with a hacksaw, for some reason.

Robert had long moved on from vodka Red Bulls but was still doing his drunken bull impression, just for fun.

“I’m going to call it a night,” Robert slurred, after a few more rounds. “I can’t walk.”

“Moo …” he added.

“That’s not the point,” I replied as best I could. “The point is we’re experimenting.” The sound that came out of my mouth in no way resembled the word “experimenting.”

There was no convincing Robert of the importance of the experiment—him not being a scientist, and all—and so he headed off on his own, back up the mountain. And then there were two—well, three—Scott, me and Alejo, who had left Scott to finish cutting the wooden squash and was now rummaging about under the bar.

He emerged with a bottle of some kind of green liquid. It looked like toilet cleaner. Looking back now, there’s a very good chance it
was
toilet cleaner. Alejo took three shot glasses off his shelf and set them down on the bar, filling each to the brim with the green goop.

He drank the first himself and shuddered, before gesturing to the other two, and then to us. We did as we were told. Even after an entire night of drinking, I could feel the hit of the alcohol. It was like the end of level boss in a drinking game. But—ha!—we’d defeated it. Alejo put the bottle away and then put his hands together next to his face, miming sleep. Victory was ours! It was 5 a.m., and outside it was starting to get light.

We staggered—crawled, really—out of the bar and into the street. There was no way on earth we were going to make it up the
hill. According to Scott, who had to remind me of most of this the next day, I was lapsing in and out of consciousness.

“Where now?” I said.

“Home?” said Scott.

“Lightweight,” I said. Again, the word that came out of my mouth almost certainly didn’t sound like that.

Just then we noticed two men standing by a white car on the other side of the road. They looked like hit men. They looked at us, and we looked back, and then they spoke.

“Cocaine?”

Another universal language.

I don’t do drugs. I’m not just saying that because I’m writing these words in a book and it would be monumentally stupid for me to admit to using illegal drugs in print. If you’ve got this far and not realized how monumentally stupid I’m capable of being, then you haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve
done
drugs; it’s hard to live in London and not have at least once, but I don’t do drugs. Drink has always been my vice—and it’s served me perfectly well. The point is, even totally paralytic, I had no interest in buying cocaine from these people. I did have an interest, though, in getting a lift up the mountain in their car.

“Where?” I asked. They pointed vaguely up the mountain and said something that sounded like the Spanish for “at our house.”
³³

There is no universe in which going with them was a good idea, whatever lay in store for us at their house. But then again there is no universe in which being this drunk and having to climb half a mountain is a good idea.

“OK,” I said.

“This isn’t a good idea,” said Scott.

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

My half-formed plan, I think, was to get further up the mountain and then tell them we’d changed our mind and then get out and walk the rest of the way. It simply didn’t occur to me that two hit men drug dealers might have any problem with this plan.

We got into the car, Scott in the front and me in the back with the second hit man. There were no rear doors so I had to clamber in over the front seats. The drug dealer in the driver’s seat floored the accelerator and we began to race up the mountain.

We must have been doing at least seventy miles an hour, screeching around blind corners and narrowly avoiding spinning off the road to our deaths, when I decided it was a good time for Scott and me to get out.

“Stop the car!” I said, in English.

I wasn’t sure if the driver hadn’t understood my request or he didn’t care. Either way, he carried on driving, maybe even accelerating slightly.

“Stop!” I shouted, even louder this time. Scott was now shouting the same thing, but in actual Spanish. Still nothing.

Having dismissed all other possibilities, I came to the conclusion that we were being kidnapped. Not simply that we were going to be forced to buy drugs, but rather that Scott and I were being driven to a mountain-top dungeon where we’d be held against our will and forced to perform unspeakable acts, in a combination of English and broken Spanish.

Faced with this reality, there was only one sensible course of action. I reached forward between the two front seats and grabbed hold of the parking brake, pulling it up sharply with both hands. What happened next is exactly what you’d expect would happen next. The car jerked into a flat spin, gravel flying up as we slid, mercifully, away from the mountain edge—but towards a wall built of rocks.

The hit man behind the wheel reacted with all the speed of a man with a head full of cocaine, slamming on the footbrake and trying to steer into the spin. We eventually came to a rest in a ditch. Had we spun in the other direction, we’d have fallen at least a hundred feet straight down the mountain into some trees.

That’s when the shouting started, and the first punch—thrown by the hit man in the back—almost connected with the side of my face. The window on Scott’s passenger side was open and I decided to try to climb from the back, straight out through the window. Unfortunately Scott chose precisely that same moment to get the fuck out of the front of the car, swinging the door open.

The result of our uncoordinated actions was that I was left hanging out through the window, swinging on an open door. Still inside the car, Scott grabbed my legs and pushed me the rest of the way forward, where I fell face first onto the road.

The shouting continued as we started to run, scrambling over the ditch and down a small drop into a field. I landed awkwardly, twisting my ankle. Scott would tell me later that he carried me the rest of the way up the mountain back to the villa. Given the searing pain in my ankle for the next three days, and the fact that our clothes were covered in dirt and blood, I believed him.

“Still,” I said as I hobbled from my room the next morning, out onto the patio where Rob was soaking in the hot tub and Scott was trying to sleep off his hangover in the hammock, “you’ve got to admit, it’s a funny story.”

“Yeah,” said Scott, “it’s a funny story if you don’t remember it, and if you don’t speak any Spanish. I actually know what they were shouting at you. They were saying that they were going to come back with a knife and stab you.”

“Oh,” I said, making a note to include that detail when I wrote up the story for my blog.

It wasn’t long after what became known as “the drug dealer attempted murder night” that Robert and I decided we needed something other than all-day drinking to entertain us during the rest of our time up the mountain.

Since I arrived in Spain, barely a day had passed without an email conversation with Hannah, who, having split up from her boyfriend, was now throwing herself into a combination of work and drinking. As was only right and proper.

Perhaps it’s because I was spending my whole days getting drunk in a hammock, but I was worried about how hard she was working: spending long hours finishing an important new project. No matter what time she emailed—day or night—she seemed to be still in the office. One morning, on a whim, I sent her an email.

I mean, I knew she’d say no—that she was too busy—but I also knew there was no harm in planting seeds. A few minutes later she replied.

I stared at the email, assuming I was missing a “but.” But I wasn’t.

“Rob!” I shouted. “You will not fucking believe what just happened.”

Robert looked up from his laptop.

“From the way you’re squealing like a fucking girl, I’d say Hannah replied to your email and is coming out this weekend.” He paused. “You should invite Eris to come over the weekend after. You’re on a roll.”

I laughed. Flying from London is one thing but San Francisco is a bit of a way to fly for a weekend. I did email Eris, though.

“
Robert says you should come to Spain next week
.
x
”

An hour or so later, as California woke up and Eris arrived at her desk, she read my email and sent her reply. I stared at my screen again, trying to decide if I was misunderstanding the list of plane times. I wasn’t.

“Rob!”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“So let me get this straight,” Robert said, “this weekend, Hannah, the girl you have an enormous crush on but haven’t actually done anything with is flying out to see you.”

“Yes.”

“And then after she leaves, Eris, the girl who you have actually done stuff with, but decided you were cooling things off with because she lives in San Francisco, is flying out to see you.”