The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations

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For Robert and Sarah
.
I’m still alive
,
and it’s all your fault
.

What you probably don’t yet realize about Paul Carr is that he is a pathological fantasist with full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He is extremely charming, smart, disarming, but he is also a chronic liar who has carved a swathe of misery and confusion through a small corner of the UK New Media world.

 

 

The following is a true story
.

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.

The receptionist hands me back my debit card, having pre-authorized it for any incidentals I might incur during my stay. In other London hotels they take as much as two or three hundred pounds. But the Lanesborough—the most expensive hotel in the city—has just swiped a grand from my checking account, just in case. Given the cost of a room at the hotel, the pre-authorization wasn’t too outrageous. The standard—or “rack”—rate for my suite is a little over £800 a night. I do the mental math. £6000 a week. £312,000 a year. At the current exchange rate, that’s just shy of half a million dollars. Plus tax and gratuities, of course. No wonder the Lanesborough is one of the few hotels in the world where they don’t charge you extra for the in-room pornography.

Another thing they don’t charge for is your butler. Mine is called Marcus and he’s entirely at my disposal during my stay. If I need a copy of
The Times
or a pot of tea, Marcus will fetch it. If I should suddenly desire a Dalmatian puppy, painted green, Marcus will paint it. Marcus will do anything I ask him to do, providing it’s legal. He’ll also do lots of things that I haven’t asked him to; hence my disappearing bag.

Room 237. I slide my key into the electronic lock, and once the hotel’s elaborate security system is satisfied that I’m me—tick, tick, beep—the door swings open. I smile again. In the few minutes it took for the receptionist to electronically cut me a spare room key—it’s cheesy as hell, but girls love being given their own key—Marcus has
been hard at work. My clothes are hanging in the walk-in closet, except for a creased shirt that he’s taken to be pressed, ahead of tonight’s party. My razor and toothbrush have been removed from my overnight bag and placed on a little folded towel next to the sink. The book that was stuffed into the back pocket of my laptop bag is now on the table next to the gigantic bed with a bookmark placed where I’d folded down the corner of the page. My laptop is on the desk in the living room.

The living room. On the table sits an ice bucket and two half-bottles of champagne, compliments of the manager. Perfect. There’s an unexpected touch, too: a dark chocolate cake with a message piped in thick white icing. “
Happy 30th Birthday
.”

Aww. Sweet. I sit down in one of the two leather armchairs and tear open the envelope that had been waiting for me at reception, but, before I can remove the card inside, there’s a knock at the door.

I know it isn’t Marcus—I’d been careful to flip the Do Not Disturb switch as I walked through the door. After ten hours on a plane I need to get some sleep. In a few hours I’m heading to Adam Street—my club, just off the Strand—for my birthday party. It’s going to be a long night; especially if the girl I’ve invited to fly in from Italy shows up. She better had, given all the trouble Marcus is taking to press my shirt. That’s going to cost me a twenty-pound tip. Another knock.

“What?” I shout through the door.

“Open the fucking door, you dick.”

I do—and before it’s even fully open I’m grabbed by two enormous arms and pulled into a crushing bear hug.

“Happy birthday, darling!”

“Robert! Thank you so much,” I gasp. “Broken ribs. Really, you shouldn’t have.”

I force myself out of his grip. “How did you know which room I was in?”

“Your butler sent me up—but I wrote down your room number
wrong. I just nearly barged in on some Arab guy and what looked suspiciously like a hooker.” He paused. “More importantly—you have a fucking butler.” Another pause. “Congratulations. Your life is officially ridiculous.”

Robert Loch knows all about ridiculous. This is, after all, the man who the
Financial Times
—of all papers—once called “the Hugh Hefner of London” after he rented a penthouse in Leicester Square and spent a whole year sitting in his rooftop hot tub, seducing Brazilian models and Russian ballerinas while building his latest online business.

And yet, right now, as he looks around my room, at the antique furniture and the fully stocked bar and the television—full of free porn—rising from the top of the bureau at the touch of a button, there is no mistaking the look in Robert’s eyes. Envy. Envy for me—a loser who, less than two years earlier, had lost everything: my business, the love of my life and my home.

Me, who has been fired from every job I’ve ever had, including two where I was technically my own boss. Me, whose only marketable skill is an ability to humiliate myself in ever more creative and entertaining ways. And now here I am. My weekly outgoings aren’t any more than they were two years ago—probably less, adjusted for inflation—and yet now 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 a villa in the Spanish mountains, with more of the same across most of Europe. I arrived at the Lanesborough in a limousine from Heathrow airport, after flying in from San Francisco.

The previous evening I’d been out on a date with a pretty blonde journalist called Charlotte who wanted to profile me for some magazine or other. After dinner and drinks, we’d ended up back at my hotel with a girl we’d met in the bar. My real birthday celebration, though, is tonight at Adam Street, surrounded by nearly a hundred of my closest friends. Then, tomorrow morning, while those same friends drag
themselves bleary-eyed back to their desks and the forty-hour week that allows them to afford their exorbitant London rents, I’ll hop on the Eurostar to Paris where I plan to complete my entire week’s work in less than two hours, sitting in a cafe on the Champs-Élysées, eating foie gras and watching pretty French girls go by.

For me, this isn’t 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 it’s all because of my membership of a very unusual club. A club with no joining fees and where anyone is welcome—even losers like me. All I had to do was to make one simple, life-changing decision.

What follows is the story of how I made that decision. It’s a story of fast cars and Hollywood actresses; of Icelandic rock stars and six-thousand-mile booty calls. It’s a story of eight hundred female hairdressers dressed only in bed sheets. It’s a story of nights spent in prison cells; of jumping out of cars being driven by Spanish drug dealers and of trying to have sex with a girl knowing there’s a dead woman in my wardrobe. And, more than anything else, it’s a story of alcohol. Lots and lots and lots of delicious alcohol.