The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (31 page)

By the time we arrived at the party, and I saw the outside of the house decked in star-spangled banners, I’d made my decision. I was going to get a visa. And I was going to make San Francisco the place I called home.

My plane from Munich landed back in Gatwick at noon.

It was January 27, 2009, almost exactly a year since I’d given up my apartment in London and decided that I never wanted to live in one place again. Now I was determined that by the end of the following month I’d have a US visa.

I’d done hours and hours of research online, and by this point I knew almost everything there was to know about the various classes of visa available for people who want to move to the US, without actually becoming citizens.

I also knew from friends who already had visas that February was the perfect month to apply; far enough away from the tourist season, or any other peak travel times, that there wouldn’t be backlog. I should only have to wait a couple of weeks for an appointment at the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square, which was perfect as it would give me just enough time to fill in the lengthy application forms, get the specific sized passport photos they needed and generally prepare myself psychologically for the interview.

At the embassy they’d grill me about my reasons for wanting to be allowed to stay in the US for an extended period, and then they’d carry out various background checks to ensure that I wasn’t likely to overthrow the government or anything like that. Settling into my hotel—the Grafton on Tottenham Court Road, where I’d checked in for a one-month stay at $140 a night—wiping out all of the budget savings from my twenty-day stay at the Vertigo—I picked up the phone and dialed the US Embassy.

Calls to the embassy cost $2.40 per minute. God bless America.

After holding for ten minutes—$24—my call was answered by a man who sounded like he was in the North of England.

“American embassy,” he said, unconvincingly.

“Hello,” I said, “I’d like to arrange an appointment for a US visa.”

He asked me various questions about the class of visa I was applying for, and also reminded me of the standard application fee of $131, which was non-refundable even if they refused my application.

Once that was done, he tapped away at his keyboard to arrange a time for the interview. “When would you like the appointment?” he asked.

“As soon as possible,” I replied, praying that it would be less than four weeks.

“How about Friday morning?” he asked.

“Uh—this Friday?” It was Monday.

“Yes,” he said, “the computer says we have a spare appointment; maybe someone canceled. Or I can put you in for three weeks’ time.”

“Er … no … Friday will be fine,” I said.

And that was that. I had to report to the embassy at eight o’clock on Friday morning, carrying all my completed forms, my passport photos, my various references.

I couldn’t believe it—four days! That was brilliant!

Wait.

No.

It was fucking terrible. I hadn’t even printed out the paperwork, let alone filled it in. I didn’t have my reference letters, I didn’t even have my passport photo.

I immediately went into a flat spin of panic. First I fired off emails to my referees—subject line “
HELP
!”—asking if there was any chance of them writing their letters right away. Fortunately they were all based in London but I’d still have to spend a few hours traveling around collecting them.

The passport photo was another challenge. Annoyingly, American passport photos are a different size from those in Europe. Just slightly bigger, as if America is trying to make a point. As a result, you can’t get them from normal photo booths and instead have to go to a special studio a mile or so from the embassy where you join a steady line of would-be visa holders paying $20 a time to get their photographs taken.

The wall of the studio is amazing, lined with hundreds, no, thousands, of passport photos of their rich and famous clients. It’s like the photos of celebrated patrons you see in Italian restaurants, except,
these being passport photos, special care has been taken to capture each subject in his or her least flattering light. There was Sting, probably taken sometime in the seventies, looking like Carlos the Jackal. There was Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow, also looking like Carlos the Jackal.

One day it’ll be my tiny, contorted, terrifying face up there, I thought, as I took my place on the stool and remembered that you’re not allowed to smile.

I arrived back at my hotel, thoroughly pleased with myself. All my referees had managed to adjust to my ridiculous new timetable, I had my photos and now all I had to do was fill in a dozen or so forms.

The hotel has a business center with a printer so I took my laptop down to that and began printing, starting with the embassy’s checklist of things to make sure I have with me for my interview. As it came out of the printer, I started to glance down the list: referee letters, fine; photos, fine; four billion pages of application form; fine and then …

And then it felt as if every drop of blood had drained from my body.

I stood staring at the last item on the list for a few seconds, and then literally collapsed into the business center’s swivel chair. Had the chair not been there, I would have hit the floor. There, right at the bottom of the list, apparently less important than anything else, was the one thing I hadn’t thought of.

Except now it seemed obvious. Of
course
they’d need that. Three words. “ACPO police certificate.”

That was it. Game over, not just for my visa—but potentially for any further visits to America. ACPO stands for the Association of Chief Police Officers, the body responsible for (amongst other things) issuing certificates showing details of your entire criminal history. Or, rather, showing that you don’t have a criminal history and so are therefore suitable for entry to the US.

The fact that I didn’t have one of these certificates, and had no
idea how to obtain one, wasn’t what worried me. What worried me was what mine would certainly show when it arrived: two arrests, including one caution, for crimes that—technically at least—fell under the heading of fraud. There was no way on God’s earth that they’d allow a self-confessed fraudster into the country.

My brain wasn’t capable of processing the implications. If I took the certificate to the embassy and was refused a visa—which now seemed like an absolute certainty—then I’d also no longer be eligible to enter the country under the visa waiver scheme. One of the first boxes you tick on the visa waiver form is to say you’ve never been refused a visa.

But then it got even worse. As I started to Google for the immigration authorities’ attitude toward admitting fraudsters, I discovered to my horror that the fact that I had been arrested for a crime involving fraud—a so-called crime of “moral turpitude”—meant I almost certainly shouldn’t have even been using the visa waiver at all.

Had the Americans randomly stopped me at the airport and asked permission to check my UK police record
⁴⁷
I would have been deported for a visa violation and possibly banned from traveling to the US for anything up to ten years. Without realizing it, I’d been taking a huge risk every time I arrived on American soil—a risk that I couldn’t possibly continue to take. Whatever happened I had either to get a visa, or stay out of America forever.

The only glimmer of sunshine was that ACPO offered a forty-eight-hour delivery service for emergency certificates, at a cost of $180. I could still get it in time for my Friday appointment.

At least I’d know my fate sooner rather than later.

The two days between applying for my ACPO certificate and it arriving were the longest, most terrifying of my life.

Much of that comparison, of course, is tied to the fact that I’ve never been kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq, or been in a plane crash in the Andes. Only a pathetically middle-class
Guardian
columnist would describe waiting for paperwork as “terrifying.”

But it
was
terrifying, so, to calm my nerves, I scoured online immigration advice forums for any information that might give me a reason to be hopeful.

What I was looking for was just one example of someone who had a criminal record subsequently being approved for my type of visa. Unbelievably, there didn’t seem to be a single person who fit those criteria.

What I did find, though, was lots of advice for non-criminals as to how they should behave in a visa interview. The most important factor is preparedness—if you didn’t have all your paperwork in order, you ran the risk of being sent home and having to book a new appointment.

As I would be able to confirm a few days later, the US visa system is shockingly efficient. They process thousands of people every day and still don’t have much of a backlog. Much of this is down to their lack of tolerance of people who can’t read simple instructions: there just isn’t the demand in America for idiots who can’t read checklists.

Being calm and confident is also critical; for many people a visa is the most important document they’ll ever apply for—it can make or break careers, marriages and families. Tensions run high, but if you raise your voice at the interviewer, or give the impression that you’re lying, you’re screwed.

The most important advice, though, was to be completely honest. Every single site repeated that advice: answer every question you’re
asked by the interviewer with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There was no way of knowing how much background information the embassy could access on you—by applying for the visa you were agreeing to let them dig into your past as much as they liked—and, if you were caught in a lie, that would put paid to your chances of ever entering the US again, perhaps for life.

Until I’d read that, I was allowing myself one tiny hope: that somehow the same administrative screw-up that had meant the police outside Karen’s apartment had no record of me would mean that my ACPO certificate would come blank.

But now I realized that, even if it did, I still had to admit to the arrests or risk the end of my American dream. Lying to blag my way into a nightclub is one thing; lying to blag my way into a country is just idiotic.

I’d asked for the certificate to be sent to my hotel and I was expecting delivery by the end of Wednesday. Wednesday came and went, as did Thursday morning.

“No, sir, as I’ve told you, we’ll deliver any mail directly to your room.”

I think I was starting to irritate the concierge.

Finally, at just after five o’clock on Thursday evening—less than fifteen hours before my appointment—came a knock on the door and a man in a porter’s uniform clutching a legal-size white envelope with an ACPO logo stamped on it.

I couldn’t bear to open it. Since I’d left London—really since I’d decided to stop trying to be an entrepreneur and go back to writing—I’d been the author of my own destiny. Literally.

I’d been able to travel where I liked, do what I liked, drink as much as I liked, and—barring the odd night behind bars—my behavior had had zero consequences.

So what if I woke up naked in a hotel corridor, or shattered the
peace of an entire Spanish village, or turned up outside my ex’s house and nearly got arrested for the second time in a week? I could just check out of my hotel, get on a plane and head somewhere else. It was the perfect life without consequences. And it went further than that—I was paid, by the
Guardian
and by my publisher, to write about those travels, which meant I could choose which ones would be remembered, and how I’d like to remember them.

The night at Karen’s house, or a week staying in renovated residence halls? Struck from the public record. Never happened. The hairdressers and the Icelandic rock star and the glamorous book launch party? All there in black and white, tweaked and packed and edited to present me in my best light. The contents of the envelope were the precise opposite of all of that. Inside was a single piece of paper, written by a computer, and detailing only things I’d like to forget. I couldn’t edit it, tweak it or spin it in a positive way. And, unlike an inconsequential newspaper column, the consequences of the information this one piece of paper held couldn’t be more serious, for me at least. It had the power to ban me from the country and the city that I’d fallen in love with.

I sat on my hotel bed, holding the envelope, my hands shaking. I knew what it was going to say, and I knew the next morning that I was going to have to hand it to a man in a uniform at the American embassy who would use it to decide my future.

I finally pulled myself together enough, and stopped my hands shaking enough, to tear open the envelope.

Eight a.m., and the queue at the embassy already snaked along one side of Grosvenor Square.

There were people of all nationalities: I heard French and German and Arabic and what I’m pretty sure was Russian.

I heard British accents, too, and Australian and Canadian. All of us were there for the same reason, though: we all wanted to go to America.

The instructions from the embassy had been explicit and underlined, in bold. All I was allowed to bring with me was my paperwork, and a book or magazine for the inevitable five-hour wait inside. I’d heard stories of people being there for twelve hours or more.

I was in the middle of reading Al Franken’s
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
—a satirical indictment of the Bush administration—but on my way to the embassy I’d decided to throw it away lest it prejudice my case. Which was ridiculous, really, but that’s how paranoid I was about upsetting the Americans.

Instead I’d stopped at Borders on Oxford Street and bought a copy of Bill Bryson’s
Notes from a Big Country
. Everyone loves Bill Bryson, the man who does for modern-day Anglo-American relations what Roosevelt did in the 1940s. He’s like a bearded Lend-Lease.