The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (6 page)

The important thing is you’re not asking for a discount, and you’re not asking for a freebie—you’re just enquiring as to what the rate for journalists is for those dates. Asking for a free room is always a bad idea as a) it marks you out as a blagger, and b) hotels tend to expect something in return. Although that can work, too: Zoe was once offered a free room in Manhattan in exchange for doing a book reading for hotel staff.

As far as I know, no hotel has ever actually checked my credentials with a newspaper. At most they might Google my name, find details of the various things I’d written and assume that all was on the level. It helped that I usually
was
on the level—but I’ve often thought that there’s no reason why non-journalists couldn’t pull off the same con, if they did it with enough confidence. Of course, I never told my friends that. No sense in killing the golden goose.
¹⁷

The hangover was raging with full force now, my second beer was finished and my laptop was warning me that it had less than 10 percent power left. It was time to make a final decision.

My best bet looked to be the Hotel QT, near Times Square: a boutique hotel, recently refurbished and a couple of steps up the ladder from the Pod. The TripAdvisor reviews were great and they were offering rooms for $139 a night. Oh, and they had a swimming pool in the lobby. Perfect; that’s who I’d call first.

I scribbled down the hotel’s reservations number in my notepad: I reckoned the laptop probably only had about five minutes of life left and I wanted to quickly check my email before it died. The UK is five hours ahead of New York so my inbox already contained a day’s worth of mail from back home.
¹⁸

I scanned quickly down the list—ignoring the usual crap from Amazon and the spammers offering to make me a fortune—and opened the only two that were from people I actually knew. The first was from Robert who wanted to know how New York was treating me. I’d reply to that one later, when I got to the hotel—the naked elevator story demanded more than 8 percent battery.

The second was from my friend Michael and bore the subject line “
Vegas baby
!”

I clicked it open.

Fun is the right word. Michael is one of my favorite people to party with. The founder of a string of multi-million-dollar businesses, he’s hugely successful by any metric you care to use. But he’s also the living embodiment of the phrase “work hard and play hard.”

A constant fixture on London’s lists of “most eligible bachelors,” he also has a way with the ladies that makes him the ideal wingman for adventures with the opposite sex.
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Michelle too is always good for adventures—she’s been friends with Michael and me for years and, as we’d both already had brief—very brief—romantic encounters with her, any odd sexual tension was long consigned to the past, allowing her to become an honorary guy for the purposes of wing-manship. Girls, we discovered, are less likely to be wary of men who are out with female friends.

Still, tempting as it was to join the two of them in Vegas, there was still no way I was “in.” The whole point of my grand experiment in nomadic living was not to spend any more money than I would in London, both in terms of accommodation and also general cost of living. Assuming I managed to stick to that budget, I’d easily be able to
pay my way with regular freelance gigs. I really couldn’t justify any additional expenditure—including a flight to Vegas—this early in the trip, unless I could find some way of offsetting it against a saving somewhere else.

Three percent battery.

I closed Michael’s email. He’d have to have fun without me. And that’s when I noticed a third email. A one-line message, sent via Facebook, from Michelle:
“Hey—come to Vegas—I’ve got a room
.
We’ll share
.
—Michelle xoxoxo
.
”

Two percent battery.

A free room for two nights: that would certainly go some way to offsetting the cost of the flight. But there were other considerations too, surely. I mean, I couldn’t just abandon my meticulously detailed travel plans on a whim and fly off to party in Vegas. That would be …

One percent …

What’s the word?

R
idiculous.

“Fifty-seven men are in court today in Saudi Arabia, arrested on charges of ‘public flirting’ in shopping malls around Mecca.”

The Fox News anchor tried to sound fair and balanced as he read the report, bless him. But it was a ridiculous story, and one that illustrated the gaping chasm—the gulf, even—between Western attitudes and those in the Middle East.

The arrest of fifty-seven people wasn’t funny—not really—but hearing about it on an enormous flat screen television in Michelle’s room at the Excalibur Hotel, Las Vegas, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. All of the oil money in Saudi Arabia couldn’t afford to build enough prisons to house all of the flirters—and drinkers, and gamblers—in this place.

A mecca of decadence and depravity, where even the check-in desks have gambling terminals built into them and drunken women on bachelorette weekends line every corridor, clutching two-foot tall plastic cups of alcoholic slush. Any one of the tiara-wearing, screeching, near-topless harpies I’d run into between reception and the fourth floor of the hotel would have eaten a Saudi flirter for breakfast.

The hotel itself was shaped like a piece of knock-off Disney merchandise. It was supposed to conjure up images of Camelot castle—all red and blue turrets and plastic knights holding injection-molded swords—and yet, for all the millions they’d obviously spent on branding the place as “the Excalibur,” they apparently hadn’t thought to spend $20 on a book about King Arthur’s legend. The hotel’s main restaurant was called “the Sherwood Forest” and the gift shop sold Robin Hood hats.

I should make clear at this point, that, even after receiving Michelle’s message back in New York, I was still planning to phone the Hotel QT and check in for the rest of the month. Really I was.

Then I’d decided to have just one more beer—for the road—and, while the bartender was pouring, I’d used the web browser on my BlackBerry to check the cost of flights to Vegas. JetBlue Airways was offering a special last-minute deal: a return flight for $120.

That meant if I shared Michelle’s hotel room I could fly to Vegas, stay for two days and then fly back to New York and still be under budget. If anything, it was fiscally irresponsible not to go. Four-beer logic.

My flight landed at a little after 1 a.m. Pacific Time—4 a.m. New York time—and I took a cab straight to the Excalibur, where Michelle was waiting.

She’d already been in town for six hours, having flown in from London, via Minneapolis—and yet, despite her jetlag and my hangover, we couldn’t help checking out the hotel casino before sleep. By 3:30 a.m., after dinner, a nightcap and a failed attempt to beat the slots, we finally made it to the room, where I’d flipped on the TV and started to unpack for the first time since leaving London.

All I wanted to do was sleep, but the rest of the hotel was still wide-awake, as if it were still the middle of the evening. Children still roamed the corridors, row upon row of bored-looking fat women pumped money into slots, and the bachelorette girls—those loud, loud girls—seemed like they were just getting started. Sure enough, at 7 a.m. we’d be awoken by them returning to their rooms—happy, drunk and singing Britney Spears’ “Toxic” at the top of their formidable lungs.

Michelle came out of the bathroom, dressed in a long t-shirt and what appeared to be bed socks, and climbed into one of the two double beds. I rescued the last shirt from the bottom of my bag—its creases now permanent—and laid it inside the wardrobe, on the one shelf that Michelle had left for me.

“So, how’s the sweepstake going?” she asked.

“What sweepstake?”

“Robert’s sweepstake … the one about you being …”

She stopped. “He hasn’t told you?”

“No, he hasn’t,” I said. “What sweepstake?”

“How long you’ll be able to stay in America before you either get arrested, married or seriously injured. Everybody we know in London is playing.”

“You’re kidding me. Even you?”

“It’s just for fun.”

“I’m sure it is. How long did you give me?”

“Oh, I said it would probably happen this weekend. I mean, seriously, you, in Las Vegas? Ha!”

Click
.

She reached over and turned out the bedside lamp. “Goodnight, honey.”

Unbelievable. OK, so I’d only been in the country for a day before ending up drunk and naked in a hotel corridor, but that—well—that was just a glitch. Getting it out of my system. And, anyway, compared to the animals I’d seen in the hotel lobby, I was a saint: a paragon of virtue, celibacy and self-preservation.

And yet, Sin City or no, after last night’s madness I was definitely going to calm down for a few days.

The next morning I felt much better—human, almost. Michelle and I had breakfast at the House of Blues bar and restaurant—pulled pork sandwiches, with orange juice with just a touch of champagne. Hell, it was almost lunchtime anyway.

Michael’s flight was due to arrive at noon, and it was now pushing 1 p.m. so we headed down the Strip to his hotel. He’d texted to say he was staying at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, so that’s where we sat, in the lobby, waiting.

A stunning waitress—all legs and breasts and hair, she could easily have been a model, or I suppose an off-duty stripper—came to take our obligatory drinks order.

One of the things you soon realize about Vegas is that there is no free seating; you sit, you drink, you pay. I ordered a Diet Coke. I really meant it this time: no drinking.

Twenty minutes passed. Half an hour. Where the hell was Michael? After forty-five minutes, I texted him. “Where the hell are you?”

The reply came in a few seconds: “THEhotel/Mandalay Bay/ Lobby, where you?”

“That’s where we are.”

“No, you’re not.”

I called the waitress over.

“Another round, sir? Something stronger?”

“No, thank you. I was just wondering—we were supposed to meet our friend in the hotel lobby—is this the only one?”

“Yes and no,” she said, “this is the only lobby in this hotel. But it’s not the only hotel in this building.”

“Um …”

“Is your friend staying at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, or the hotel at Mandalay Bay?”

I showed her Michael’s text, and she smiled—this happened all the time. She pointed us the way from the lobby of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and through to the totally separate lobby of THEhotel at Mandalay Bay where, sure enough, Michael was waiting.

“I hope there’s rum in that Coke, Mr. Carr. There’s a sweepstake, you know.”

Michael’s voice echoed around the lobby. He was sitting with his feet up on a leather stool, and he was dressed for Vegas. A bright blue shirt—three buttons undone and with a picture of a tiger sewn on the front—blue jeans, and shiny purple cowboy boots, complete with rhinestones. He also had a stack of brightly colored gaming chips in his hand. Had he brought them with him? Is that even allowed?

Hugs all around. “So what’s the plan?” asked Michael, dropping the chips into his pocket and clapping his hands for some imaginary camera, like croupiers do in films.

“Nikki’s getting in at seven” said Michelle. “She’s schmoozing some client in town so she’s going to buy us all dinner at Nobu and expense it.”

“Perfect,” said Michael.

“Then there’s a club at the Palms that my cab driver was talking about. Let’s see if we can talk our way into VIP there.”

“Perfect,” I said. I didn’t even think to ask who Nikki was until much later. All that mattered was she was one of Michelle’s friends who was buying us dinner on her corporate Amex. Another budget saving. “And sorry to mess up your precious sweepstake, but I’m not drinking tonight.”

They both laughed. As well they might.

Thirty-three hours later
.

I defy anyone to spend two days in Las Vegas and not come out broken—emotionally and physically. My liver felt like it had grown to at least four times its original size and I was pretty sure I’d put on about 200 pounds in weight. I couldn’t feel my legs properly.

The previous night we’d partied like rock stars, courtesy of our generous corporate sponsor: Nikki’s Amex card. Dinner at Nobu first, then a table at Body English at the Hard Rock replete with bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Premium Vodka.

The drinking was interrupted only by a live performance by someone called “Fat Man Scoop” whose spirited performance consisted mainly of entreaties to “make some motherfucking noise,” which is surely the worst kind of noise.

Michael and I had decided to leave the girls to their vodka and head out to another bar. And another. And another, before eventually arriving at the Palms, as recommended by Michael’s cab driver. Curiously, we didn’t see many people there who looked like cab drivers—but we did meet a group of girls who were in town to promote shoe insoles at a conference. “That’s a coincidence,” said Michael to the second prettiest of the girls,
²⁰
“my mother is a chiropodist.” For once, he was telling the truth.

“I don’t know what that means,” said the girl. Apparently chiropodists are called something else in America.
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